The Wire is a British avant garde music magazine. It was founded in 1982 by jazz promoter Anthony Wood and journalist Chrissie Murray, and concentrated on contemporary jazz and improvised music. From about 1990 it branched out into covering left-field rock and "post-rock" (a term coined in the pages of The Wire), hip-hop, modern classical and various forms of electronic music. It continues to cover all of these and other forms of experimental music.
A series of CDs called The Wire Tapper has been compiled by Anne Hilde Neset and occasionally other staff of The Wire and given away with the magazine since 1997. It has used the strapline "Adventures in Modern Music" since 1994.
Owned for many years by Naim Atullah's Namara Group, it was bought out by its six full-time members of staff in 2001 and is now published independently.
