Certain music magazines do more than just chronicle the ins and outs of bands and fans. In their pages they capture the mood of a particular era. Thus Rolling Stone was more than just a San Francisco rock magazine, and so London's The Wire is more than just a magazine about modern music.
Originally founded in 1982, the magazine didn't find its bailiwick until the early '90s. As the boundaries between genres began gently collapsing and smaller specialized labels started to thrive, new varieties of music that were unclassifiable and played at the interstices of genres came to the fore. The Wire has become the champion of post-rock, new electronica or whatever guise groundbreaking music has taken.
"The current editorial position is to view the magazine as a hub for non-mainstream music," explained publisher and editor in chief Tony Herrington in a phone interview from London. "There is a commonality regardless of the genre."