The Wire (magazine)

The Wire (cover title Wire) is a British avant garde music magazine, founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray. The magazine initially concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music, but branched out in the early 1990s to various types of experimental music. Since then it has covered hip hop, modern classical, free improvisation, post-rock, and various forms of electronic music.

Richard Cook succeeded Anthony Wood as editor, and was himself succeeded in June 1992 by Mark Sinker. Sinker was removed as editor in early 1994, though he continued as a contributor for some years. Since then, the magazine has been edited successively by Tony Herrington, Rob Young, Chris Bohn, and Derek Walmsley.

A series of new music compilation CDs called The Wire Tapper has been given away with the magazine since 1998. The magazine has used the strapline "Adventures in Modern Music" since 1994; on 14 December 2011 The Wire's staff announced on Twitter that the magazine's old strapline "Adventures In Modern Music" had been replaced by "Adventures In Sound And Music". In addition to the Wire Tapper CDs, subscribers receive label, country and festival samplers.

Apart from the numerous album reviews every month, the magazine has features such as "The Invisible Jukebox", an interview conducted by way of unknown tracks being played to an artist, and "The Primer", an in-depth article on a genre or act. It also features the avant music scene of a particular city every issue. In addition to its musical focus, the magazine likes to investigate cover art and mixed media artistic works.

Owned for many years by Naim Attallah's Namara Group, it was bought out by its six full-time members of staff in 2001 and is now published independently.

Since January 2003 The Wire has been presenting a weekly radio program on the London community radio station Resonance FM, which uses the magazine's strapline as its title and is hosted in turns by members of The Wire's staff.