Saluting of one of the most satisfying combinations of melody and gibberish, “Kidney Bingos”, the single from Wire’s 1988 album A Bell Is A Cup… Until It Is Struck.

In a 1988 interview with McGill University radio station CKUT, Colin Newman offered these thoughts on the song:

“There’s always been a very strong pop element in Wire. In a thing like ‘Kidney Bingos’ … there’s a kind of rhythm. Bruce had a guitar rhythm, and we’d been playing it more or less like that for a year or so. It was just kind of a ‘da-dur-da-dur-da-dur’ … and not so much in the way of a tune. We were going to record it like that, and I started playing a set of guitar chords over the top of it and suddenly it transformed into a pop song. It seemed almost a piece of pastiche, and quite funny, but we decided it sounded quite good, so we just went for it, basically. The history of Wire is peppered with songs which had been regarded as being extremely pop, at the time. In retrospect, maybe they don’t sound that way, because people are always redefining what is pop and what isn’t pop. I think you’ll find the album – ‘Kidney Bingos’ is the most obvious pop song on the album, but it is I think a lot more harmonically cogent than The Ideal Copy.”

Interview with Colin Newman of WIRE circa 1988 via CKUT Time Capsule