40 years of the Wire magazine: ‘Music deserves intelligent treatment. If that’s elitist, so be it’

“We were the last resort for a lot of music because nobody else would touch it,” says Tony Herrington, publisher of the Wire magazine. He also once said: “Most people would take the mickey out of some bloke making music by bowing away at the femur of a mountain goat, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.”

For 40 years – it is celebrating this anniversary with a series of events in July – the Wire has been covering bold, strange, noisy, genre-busting experimental music, in a crisp, sharply designed magazine.

It champions outsider artists and movements with profound reverence. Recent , the Argentine psych outfit Reynols, being a prime example. “Frontman Miguel Tomasín has Down’s syndrome and he’s front and centre,” says Herrington. “You don’t find people with Down’s syndrome on the cover of music magazines. But they’re there because they are one of the most interesting groups to have emerged over the last 25 years.”