Wire's Pink Flag
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Lewis’s comically brief recollections of fellow musicians illustrate that lack of kinship. He once politely asked Rat Scabies to extinguish a discarded cigarette for him, only to be accused of trying to “out-punk” the Damned’s drummer. His interaction with the Clash was equally substantive. Before a gig, Joe Strummer looked up from a Bruce Lee biography to ask Lewis if he’d heard of the martial artist. Lewis said yes, and Strummer continued reading. Newman has similar memories: “One of the Clash may have said hello to me, and once George Gill told Rat Scabies to get on his bike.” Ironically, Scabies recalls Wire fondly: “They used to come down and see us play at the Hope & Anchor and tell us they were better than we were, in a very obnoxious, drunken manner—but we loved Wire, so we didn’t mind.”
Wire, Watford School of Art, late 1976.
Courtesy Slim Smith.
(During the anti-monarchist days of 1977, Wire would certainly have been ostracised by London’s punk elite, had it been known that Newman once met the Queen. In mitigation, he notes that the occasion was an official visit to his school, attendance was mandatory and he was mistakenly introduced to Her Majesty as Paul Newman.)
Age also contributed to Wire’s isolation in punk’s superficial milieu, inevitably colouring perceptions: in 1977 Gilbert was 31, Grey 26, Lewis 24, Newman 23—and in a youth subculture privileging image, street cred and rebelliousness, a couple of years’ difference can be crucial. “They were a bit older,” Savage points out. “They weren’t completely adolescent, and they weren’t pathetic.” Trouser Press’s Ira Robbins remembers getting “a sense of maturity” from the band: “Wire seemed like adults. They weren’t just kids spewing invective. They were intellectuals making a very informed statement that just happened to sound like kids spewing invective.”
They were a punk group. I suppose you might call them avant-garde, but still it was catchy stuff. They were trying hard to go somewhere else, and they went somewhere else very quickly.
Graham Coxon
Above all, musical differences set Wire apart, as they defied punk’s ostensible Year Zero edict. “I never stopped being into what I’d always been into,” insists Newman. “I didn’t do the punk thing of you have to destroy your record collection.” Likewise, Lewis emphasises “an incredible love of certain things that we wanted to keep” in the band’s early work. Nonetheless, Wire were happy to line up particular genres against the wall, such as pub rock and R&B, styles they felt should have been obvious targets for punk’s purge.
“Punk was initially the sort of thing we’d have liked to be in because it was taking the place of pub rock and R&B,” says Grey. Gilbert adds, “It seemed to offer a way of destroying everything that had gone before; music seemed to be in a rut in this country—we’re talking about pub rock.” Gilbert favourably contrasts early punk’s laboratory-like environment with the banal rituals of live music at the time, precisely because it had “a very different atmosphere from a pub-rock gig.” Although Grey had been part of the pub scene with the Snakes, and Wire’s original five-piece incarnation had more traditional leanings, the bandmembers quickly became allergic to this strain of rock orthodoxy, with its stereotypical gestures, its Americanisms, its paradoxical insistence on authenticity, its formulae and its guitar solos.
It was the very sins of pub rock that Wire identified in the Class of ’77’s purportedly new sound, and they soon developed a vexed relationship with the rock aspect of punk rock. “What was wrong with a lot of punk rock was the rock gesture,” explains Newman: “It was like ’50s rock songs speeded up. It’s really obvious: there wasn’t such a difference between your Dr. Feelgood and your Eddie and the Hot Rods and your Clash and your Pistols.” In spite of its radical posture, punk’s analysis was hardly rigorous and its revolution was generally limited. It took aim at easy targets—fatuous pop; dinorockers of the ELP genus—and left unchallenged or even reproduced other retrograde, irrelevant music.
Pink Flag represents British punk rock trying to climb out of a hole, and the hole, as perceived by Wire, seems to be punk rock itself.
Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone, February 1978
Orthodox punk proclaimed its Britishness yet simultaneously resurrected some hoary transatlantic musical clichés, at worst just rehashing rock ’n’ roll Chuck Berry-style. When UK punk drew on later American music, it was sometimes garage rock, the Stooges or the MC5, but mainly the Ramones and New York Dolls, who played fairly conventional rock ’n’ roll, albeit speeded up or dressed up. As to homegrown inspirations, while British punk preserved glam’s energy and colour, it had most in common with glam’s least interesting manifestations: rock critics habitually cite T.Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople, but Slade’s football-terrace chant dominated punk by mid-1977.
Wire, too, looked to America, despite their animosity towards rock ’n’ roll nostalgia; but they focused primarily on the present and on New York-based artists like Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, as well as Boston’s Modern Lovers. “It was very stimulating,” says Bruce Gilbert. “It sounded like art rather than pub rock.” They also fed on an older New York influence, the Velvet Underground—whose conceptual side British punks mostly ignored.
Wire did share the universal admiration for the Ramones. Instead of emulating their overall sound, however, Wire experimented with its basic devices and structural components. There were clearly elements of the Ramonic template in early Wire, but pared down even further and framed with a unique layer of abstraction, especially in the lyrics. “Pink Flag had all the minimalist tendencies of the Ramones: really short songs, no guitar solos, brutal delivery, every song at approximately the same volume,” observes Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller. “But what they had that the Ramones didn’t was an intellectual grid to apply to their music. The lyrics were astounding.” The Banshees’ Steven Severin puts it another way: “The overriding thing on Pink Flag is that they sound like an art-school version of the Ramones: a version that hadn’t been lobotomised.”
While UK punks tried—and usually failed—to match the Ramones’ pace, Wire were more ambitious. For Lewis, the gauntlet had been thrown down: “I remember seeing the Ramones and going, ‘If they can play that fast, then we can play faster.’” Even so, the Ramones weren’t the only instigators in terms of speed. Acceleration “was on the cultural agenda,” says Newman: “The Ramones were a given by the time Wire started. I remember being mightily impressed by Spiral Scratch.” (Howard Devoto’s vocals on “Friends of Mine” have much in common with the style Newman developed, cramming words together to near-incomprehensible effect.)
To Wire, it was principally the enduring, Americanised rock ’n’ roll core that signalled punk’s failure. Rhetoric aside, hegemonic punk was another blues-based form reconstituting rock-as-usual. “The whole idea around punk was that it was supposed to be new,” says Newman. “Where in 1977 it was failing in its promise was that it didn’t deliver anything new. Elements of punk were starting to look awfully like rock ’n’ roll, and that was the one thing I was totally convinced about: it didn’t matter what I was doing, it shouldn’t be rock ’n’ roll.” According to Newman, punk itself ultimately offered something to work against: “I sat in my room in Leavesden Road in Watford and thought music needed reinventing, and that was where all the stuff that came to be Pink Flag came from—a desire to reduce it all: how could people say that they were new and still sound like the Rolling Stones?” Gilbert shared this disillusionment. “In my naïvety I thought, ‘Well, sometimes these things start off having a bit of a formula but then go into much more experimental areas.’ Of course, punk ended up going the opposite way.”
Colin Newman, Watford School of Art, late 1976. Courtesy Slim Smith.
It’s worth noting that a side effect of Wire’s efforts to eradicate all traces of rock ’n’ roll, coupled with their rigour and austerity, was that their music sounded even more white than most punk. This might seem ironic, given Gilbert’s formative obsession with the blues; the differe
nce is that punk left largely intact rock’s rendering of the blues, but Gilbert’s guitar style took what he considered its essence, the fundamental properties he enjoyed—tone and simple repetition—and pursued them to abstraction.
Wire worked harder and had a better idea of what they were doing.
Jon Savage
To the extent that Wire eschewed rock traditionalism and embodied punk’s professed values of renovation and originality, they were deemed un-punk. Jon Savage stresses Wire’s uniqueness, their commitment to an unfashionable adventurousness: “Most punk rock groups tended to find just one mode and stick to it. It was all pretty much the Ramonic thrash or else refried Mod in the case of the Jam. There’s a variety of styles and approaches on Pink Flag. It was a good mixture: they could do art, they could do rock and they could do pop. They didn’t give too much away and didn’t ally themselves with any fashionable cause or politics—they didn’t link themselves to that particular time, whereas a lot of punk stuff sounds like a rather bad teenage diary.”
Wire’s perceived ability provoked disapproval. When the Raxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77) compilation came out in June 1977, the quality of their contributions (“Lowdown” and “12XU”) prompted charges they’d been reworked in the studio. (One source of suspicion was the paucity of applause. This in itself suggests they didn’t meet the audience’s expectations, but it also reflects the sparseness of that audience.) Wire stood out, though, not because they were technically adept but because they played with discipline, regardless of their limitations. “We always wanted to be absolutely perfect, like a machine,” maintains Gilbert. “We had a good work ethic: the only way you can create new things is to work at it.”
Robert Grey, Watford School of Art, late 1976. Courtesy Slim Smith.
Newman is more explicit: “Most of the punk bands couldn’t stand Wire because our mere presence made them look tacky. Just because you have limited means, you don’t have to be shambling. I never got that as an aesthetic. Why would you make records that sounded like bumbling? For me, it doesn’t matter how basic it is, it’s that it’s cleanly executed. So it was just logical to do it like that: to do our best. They thought we were too professional or practiced—we weren’t. It was just that we knew more about economy.” The NME’s Phil McNeill reports an audience member at one late-’77 gig disparaging Wire as “posers” and “smooth twats,” a sentiment with which the journalist agreed, albeit in positive terms: “The band is smooth compared to, say, the Pistols or the Clash…there was none of the raggedness which seems almost a vital ingredient of the punk vision. Wire respect their compositions above all else, and adhere strictly to structure.”
Punk bands were throwing themselves around, spitting and deliberately being scruffy and obnoxious; Wire were like this group of accountants, who just stood there and challenged you and played very hard, sharp, fast, short and sometimes very witty songs. You could tell there was an intelligence that was missing in a lot of the other bands.
Russell Mills
Wire’s anti-rock stance was pronounced in their early performances: “Static and monochrome” is artist Russell Mills’s characterisation. Their gigs also made an impression on Jon Savage: “They obviously had a clear idea about visual presentation. They were very stylised.” Steven Severin, too, was taken with Wire’s singular presence: “They were more Kraftwerk than Slaughter & the Dogs. That appealed to me immediately.” Jon Wozencroft expands: “It was lighting and posture, the way they held themselves and the way they occupied the stage, like a space. It was like a Samuel Beckett space for them. It wasn’t a question of being rock-ish or using the body language of their instruments. It was very clipped and performative. It was a kind of performance art.” Newman confirms that much thought went into their presentation: “When Wire started, we had this thing of not moving at all onstage because the whole idea was to be as un-rock as possible. We didn’t want to look like a bunch of rockers.” Gilbert agrees: “We didn’t want our things to look like anybody else’s.”
In contrast with punk’s multicoloured sartorial assault, Wire were predominantly black-and-white. Lewis recalls that the “conceptual angle of what [the performance] should look like” included vetting the colour and style of their clothing. In 1977, he notes, “We were down to ‘it’s black, white and pink’” (quoting “It’s So Obvious”). “Plain, dark clothing evolved because we didn’t want any distractions,” explains Gilbert. “We didn’t want people thinking we were a rock band.” They also shunned stereotypical punk gear, favouring more theatrical touches. Newman, for example, occasionally went barefoot and sported a surgical smock. Gilbert describes this as “an escaped mental patient look.” Still, Gilbert himself admits to some misguided style choices: “I had this ridiculous affectation of wearing ballet shoes onstage. With pink bed socks.” That said, Wire knew where to draw the line: they were briefly managed by Roxy Club founder Andy Czezowski, but, as Newman points out, “He got sacked because he wanted to buy us pink leather trousers.”
Unsurprisingly, early audiences expecting punk rock were sometimes confused. Wire spurned what were, notwithstanding a confrontational attitude and new habits like spitting, the tired norms of rock performance. In addition to avoiding unnecessary musical and physical gesture, Wire didn’t drink or smoke onstage and weren’t shambolic. They were mostly affectless and uncommunicative: they didn’t banter or encourage audience participation. Gilbert was well aware that Wire didn’t please everyone: “It’s their Friday night. They go out to see a punk band, jump about, scream and spit—that was the orthodoxy of the time. People coming on as if they’d come to mend the fridge wasn’t what audiences were looking for.”
The idea wasn’t to try and win a crowd over. It was, “We’re here, we’re doing this, fuck off.”
Bruce Gilbert
Wire’s choice of set material also bucked expectations, often focusing on new, unrecorded tracks. Despite punk’s resistance to music biz ideology, the bulk of Wire’s early audiences came to hear the records they’d bought and were unhappy when presented with new songs instead of familiar numbers. Gilbert also remembers the band experimenting with song sequences, intentionally breaking audience members’ relationship with the music’s flow, frustrating their enjoyment: “Sometimes we’d do anti-sequences where it would be a total bloody disappointment at the end: no pay-off of any description.”
A more extreme example of this distancing technique and the denial of identificatory pleasure was the performance of their shortest, fastest songs, which made it almost impossible to execute punk’s dance, the pogo: the songs ended almost as soon as they’d begun. Wire enjoyed this. “When we saw the reaction, it was very amusing,” says Gilbert. “I don’t think it was deliberate, but it was delicious to observe.” For Blur’s Graham Coxon, this facet of Wire’s performances is central to their anti-rock identity: “They’re not a rock band. They’ve always been contrary. They refused to rock: they gave you a bar or two and then disjointed it and made it fall to bits just when you were nodding your head. Those songs are for listening to—they’re not for headbanging.”
Predictably, responses weren’t always positive. “The abiding memory is bewilderment or outright hostility,” says Gilbert. “We didn’t look like other punk bands, so we couldn’t be a punk band, which was fine by us. Yet we were playing very fast, noisy, loud stuff. The audiences often got very, very confused. Confused to the point where they started throwing bottles and glasses of beer. The waste!”
Wire did develop a fan base, but it differed from the standard punk crowd. “It emerged bit by bit,” recalls Gilbert. “Girls didn’t come to our gigs; only serious boys in dark clothes.” Russell Mills noticed that Wire fans were “generally better behaved than most punk audiences.”
Wire were unashamedly English and brought the baggage with them onto the records.
Graham Coxon
If Wire’s disavowal of rock ’n’ roll and their detachment separated them from the punk crowd, these traits were
also at the heart of their particular Britishness.
Robert Poss locates Wire’s cultural specificity: “The American in me feels Wire is quite British. There’s no embrace of Americana like some UK bands.” However, that Britishness didn’t hinge simply on the lack of American rock motifs but on the presence of an understated, removed sensibility. This was attractive to Graham Coxon. “It’s a contrariness. They’re almost embarrassed to rock. They’re far too clever for their own good. You don’t get American groups doing that. R.E.M. tried, but they had to cover a Wire song [‘Strange’] to get it right, and then they didn’t. There’s a strange egocentricity when Americans become modest. You think, ‘Where’s the catch? There must be some payback for them somewhere.’ But with Wire and that English thing, it’s a staunch contrariness.” Electronic experimentalist Christian Fennesz comments, “I always thought they developed an ability to keep a distance from their own musical material, without losing passion at a performance. I found this extremely interesting—a very rare quality you normally don’t find in music.” Russell Mills saw that sense of distance, above all, in Wire’s working methods: “They were so reserved, incredibly judgemental—a very English thing—very phlegmatic and focused. They had a very trainspotter-y mentality.”
This specifically English Britishness had little in common with that of Wire’s punk contemporaries. On Wire’s records, there are none of mainstream UK punk’s slogans and signposts, no local colour, no obvious socio-political context. Rather, there’s a deeper, more sophisticated cultural identity, residing chiefly in the playfulness and idiosyncrasy of their music and lyrics. Coxon underscores the latter: “Their songs had a strange attention to detail and an eccentricity. They’d sing about odd things, like Reuters—it wasn’t the subject matter of pop music. Blur tried to write about things like that, too. We were pretty heavily influenced by Wire, particularly just before Parklife. So during Leisure, Modern Life Is Rubbish and on the B-sides you can really hear it. That was when it was the most fun, when we were trying to be like Wire.”