Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  I was on tour once, and we were incredibly hung over, and we played three albums in a row—The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Here Come the Warm Jets and Chairs Missing—and it was a continuous thread between them. To me it was dizzying.

  Roger Miller

  Most of all, Wire’s rejection of punk’s lingering affinities with rock ’n’ roll allied them with tendencies in British art rock. That lineage was obvious to some contemporaries: “I think they’re in the tradition of people like Soft Machine and maybe early Pink Floyd,” ventures Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. A heterogeneous form, art rock covered everything from prog’s edgier extremes to glam’s smarter manifestations. It was characterised by musical experimentation—in territories ranging from jazz to the avant-garde—and some form of conceptual orientation, sometimes expressed in terms of a concept-driven image. It was unified by a dismissal of clichéd American rock expectations (although it often gravitated to black American jazz).

  When the mythology of punk derided preceding and contemporaneous British music as moribund, it was in fact ignoring a rich vein of art rock: intriguing work by the likes of Roxy Music, Bowie, Eno, Fripp and King Crimson, Henry Cow, Van der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill, Peter Gabriel, Bill Nelson, John Cale and Robert Wyatt. Crucially, in looking beyond the limits of US rock ’n’ roll, such musicians displayed a strong European cultural sensibility. This was absent from punk, with its Little England mentality and its rock ’n’ roll core. (Indeed, just as most mainstream punk overlooked innovative musical history at home, it was also apparently unaware of revolutionary sounds made across the Channel in, say, Germany in the early and mid-’70s: NEU!, Faust, Kraftwerk and Can, among others, had produced inventive, adventurous work, but few punks immediately acknowledged them.)

  Moving Wire from punk’s narrow confines into the context of art rock affords a more interesting perspective on their cultural identity. Wire shared the European sensibility that was a key characteristic of British art rock, embodying a strain of Britishness defined by its links to the Continent. Early Roxy Music constructed one version of this. Wire’s Europeanness is best understood as an alternative to Roxy’s Pop Art-influenced aesthetic (in which Europeanness actually coexisted with a highly stylised, ironic Americanism). Ferry, Eno et al. assembled a camp, retro-futurist Continentalism, blending jet-set glitz and decadent glamour with almost pre-war nostalgia; if Roxy Music oozed excess, Wire’s vision was astringent, stark and even more modern—a black-and-white sensibility without a shred of glamour, rooted in Cold War Europe. Wire were ’70s Warsaw or East Berlin to Roxy’s Saint-Tropez or ’30s Berlin. Bruce Gilbert underlines this dimension, situating Wire as European rather than strictly English, precisely in their measured restraint. For him, Wire’s Europeanness rests in “this idea of it not being showbiz but quite serious in some ways—a serious activity: not singing in an American accent is a good thing; the subject matter not being about excess. I feel that’s a European approach to culture.” Filmmaker Richard Jobson (ex-Skids) also recognises this: “Wire felt English, but European English; the Clash were just English. Of all the bands of that period, they were absolutely, clearly the most European—but with an English flavour. They had an otherness about them; you get a sense from the music that they were familiar with the new landscape of Europe.”

  In addition to some obtuse lyrics, there was an experimentalist spirit that distinguished Pink Flag. It wasn’t unfiltered anger, rebellion, social commentary or nihilism. It was brainy and energetic and sardonic and smart—and if being smart wasn’t cool, too fucking bad.

  Robert Poss

  What Gilbert calls Wire’s “provocative but slightly removed” attitude pissed off punks, who considered it suspiciously arty and intellectual; of course, punk’s anti-intellectualism, ironically, was as English as Wire’s detachment.

  Wire reflected on their music and self-presentation in ways that suggested a consciousness of it as something more than simple rock. This was another factor setting them apart. “What always struck me,” remembers The The’s Matt Johnson, “was that a huge amount of thought had gone into what they were doing. They made demands of themselves and, consequently, made demands of the audience. Which is exactly how it should be.” Wire didn’t conceal their artistic predilections or their intellect. To many, thoughtfulness and artiness were synonymous and merited mistrust (although many of UK punk’s originators attended art school). This was typical of an anti-intellectualism permeating English culture. Paradoxically, punk, which denounced many of the ideologies and institutions of traditional Englishness, also embodied its worst strains. As Robin Rimbaud notes, “People in this country are uncomfortable with the idea of being cerebral and thinking. That’s been the pleasurable failing of Wire. They were seen as too intellectual. When you look at Pink Flag’s artwork, it’s a thoughtful sleeve. The titles are playing with the idea of what a song could be; these are quite arty titles. And it can be to your detriment to be a little too clever.”

  A lot of early punk rock was me-me-me subject matter, and Wire’s subject matter always seemed more difficult to discern. There was more room for interpretation. With a lot of bands the music was intended to make you think of the artist in a certain way—bands like the Stranglers and the Damned were trying to create a persona using their music. I didn’t get that impression from Wire at all.

  Steve Albini

  Like their song titles, Wire’s lyrics announced a distinctive intellectual identity. Their reproduction on the inner sleeve indicates the weight Wire gave them (few punk albums included lyric sheets). “The lyrics were important,” Newman asserts. “They weren’t just I-love-you-baby rock ’n’ roll. We were important. We were up there with the greats. They had lyrics on their records, so we thought we should too.” Printing the words emphasised that these were more than throwaway rock lyrics, that they were an integral part of the whole. Lewis intended them to be read and not just heard, yet he distinguishes his words from both lyrics and poetry, calling them texts. The format of their reproduction on the original Pink Flag release—in block form, without line-breaks—accentuates the difference and makes them part of the design aesthetic. According to Lewis, “It undermined the idea that it was poetry.”

  Not everyone appreciated Wire’s lyrics. Reviewing Pink Flag, Greil Marcus found them unremarkable and of their moment: “Most punk themes are touched on: war, TV, sex-hatred, antigirlness, Gray Flannel Suitism, yellow journalism, the basically degrading but somehow liberating quality of modern life.” These themes are present, but, generally, Wire’s treatment of them differs from their contemporaries’. To Roger Miller the contrast was apparent: “The way they delivered this stuff wasn’t just fuck you—there was more behind it. There was lots of thinking. It was like they were holding this object, which was the world, and looking at it from different angles.” Bandmate Peter Prescott also highlights Wire’s introspection: “They didn’t write about something that happened yesterday; they wrote about something happening in their heads at any given point.” Richard Jobson puts it most concisely: “Wire created a world; the Clash were just a reflection of the world.” In other words, Wire weren’t concerned with literal representations of the everyday. Concludes Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, “It’s a world that’s obviously theirs. The titles and the way the songs are delivered are like a stamp. The best bands do that. It stands the test of time.”

  Wire’s lyrics mapped unique subjective landscapes, but they broke with the tradition of the rock song as authentic self-expression—the model derived from literary Romanticism that still dominated even punk. This didn’t go unnoticed in 1977. In Melody Maker’s Pink Flag review, Chris Brazier observed, “What really sets the band apart is their lyrics—intelligent, ambitious, often weird, occasionally bewildering and obscure as they are.” Similarly, the NME’s McNeill remarked, “They write songs so indirect as to be almost incomprehensible.” Most journalists at the time went no further than this, noting the words’ difficulty and obscurity. They thu
s overlooked an important aspect of Wire, a vital ingredient of their songs’ strong feeling of otherness and an element dramatising the band’s process-oriented approach. Wire’s songs reject the basic terms of conventional narrative and even of representation: reality isn’t a straightforward, objectively comprehensible matter; and language, the tool with which reality is represented, is unstable and unpredictable.

  They’re like clues from a cryptic crossword, which I’ve never had the slightest inclination to decipher because I don’t think that’s the point. It’s the way the words sound that counts, and they sound right.

  Steven Severin

  Wire’s language doesn’t look outwards but turns in on itself. Often fragmented, elliptical and impressionistic, the songs don’t convey reality so much as the complexity of language, with all its slippage, play and ambiguity. For Lewis, these aspects create “the possibility for the listener to be part of the process.” Many critics in 1977 appeared unequipped to deal with this delight in language’s open-endedness, instead getting bogged down with expectations of meaning, message and closure.

  Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, Watford School of Art, late 1976. Courtesy Slim Smith.

  Fellow artists have been more receptive. To Robert Pollard, the lyrics show “that you can make a statement without making one—with just the title, or the colouring of the words or the phrasing, the choice of words.” Graham Coxon is equally enthusiastic about lyrics that are “almost like crossword puzzles.” While this feature led some critics to dismiss Pink Flag as sterile, opaque or, as Lester Bangs declared more broadly in the Village Voice, “one of the deadest things ever recorded,” Coxon found the words “affecting.” He continues, “I can see Wire’s lyrics as poetry. Some are lyrics, but some veer towards a strange Cockney beat poetry.” Like Severin, Coxon revels in the pleasures of Wire’s texts: “I wouldn’t bother trying to work them out; I just enjoyed them as words, for the rhythm of the words, the imagery and the sound of the voice.” Robin Rimbaud echoes this: “I never knew what the lyrics were about. It was always quite abstract, but on Pink Flag there were things that really appealed to me about the use of words, the restriction, the repetition.”

  They were operating from a higher level of intelligence than the regular punk rock mindset.

  Henry Rollins

  Not surprisingly, in the moronic heat of punk, this facet of Wire didn’t go over well. As Russell Mills comments, “They were dealing with informed, intelligent ideas; most punk bands were just about energy and letting things out.” By demonstrating intelligence in attempting something new—a goal surely aligned with punk’s mission—Wire only invited distrust. Early Wire associate Nick Garvey epitomises this attitude: “It was a bit too art school for me. It was too clever by half.”

  Nevertheless, Wire’s brainier disposition won them unlikely allies. Rat Scabies recognised what they were doing as genuinely punk: “Wire were deceptively intelligent. They sounded unique, and that was what punk was all about. That’s why I always thought of Wire as a punk band—because they had their own ideas and their own way of doing things, which was the whole point of punk.” Captain Sensible agrees: “Punk rapidly became a mundane formula, and Wire’s experimental approach was much more to my liking. For me that is punk—doing your own thing, throwing out the rule book, which Wire certainly did.” In the same vein, Glen Matlock reflects, “It was all a bit more clever somehow. I think they were perceived as a little bit outside of the scene because what they were doing was more cerebral, not let’s go and rock and get our hands dirty. What I got from Wire was that they were an out-and-out art-school band—and I don’t think that’s a terrible thing.”

  “A bit stuck-up, maybe? Art school?” Robert Grey speculates on how others saw Wire. “I don’t think people at the Roxy knew that was where most of Wire came from. Maybe they sensed it. That made us a bit harder to accept.” Bruce Gilbert goes further: “I got the impression that some of the musicians we came into contact with thought we had no right to be there. We weren’t ‘rock’—we were stuck-up artists, or something.” Lewis concurs: “We weren’t part of the scene that was Sex, McLaren, the Bromley Contingent. We probably had a reputation for being arrogant because we kept ourselves to ourselves. Our friends were people who were artists.”

  At almost every level, the wariness towards Wire signalled the contrast between punk’s ideals and its practices. Above all, Wire’s thoughtful artiness highlighted the musically conservative tendency that came to typify punk. Despite its talk of change, punk reinstated rock’s most simplistic values. Considering that one of Joe Strummer’s life-changing pre-Clash moments was seeing Springsteen perform, perhaps this isn’t surprising.

  Wire were a marriage of punk and art rock. The ideas informing their work were very art-based: to strip a song down to its minimal components, to make it as short as possible. To load it with cultural, literary, economic references. That wasn’t really punk, but that’s why they were interesting—they were trying to take it somewhere else.

  Russell Mills

  In defence of punk, it admittedly was an expression of popular, mass culture and wasn’t intended to travel far beyond its immediate context. Longevity was never on its agenda: it was of the moment and disposable. As Rotten sang, “We’re the flowers in the dustbin.” Wire, by contrast, were concerned with lasting value and with transcending punk’s moment. Consequently, they straddled two cultural zones: rock and the more rarefied world of art. Richard Jobson identifies this duality: “Wire gave themselves an aesthetic purity and, at the same time, dipped into that thing which isn’t pure, pop culture, and managed to mix it up—never more successfully than on Pink Flag.”

  Notwithstanding their broader artistic perspective, Wire were inevitably implicated in commercial music-making’s systems and processes (they signed to not just a major label, but the world’s biggest, EMI—specifically, its Harvest imprint); even so, their awareness of rock’s potential for artistic experimentation enabled them to create a resistant space.

  Harvest was geared towards artier, progressive variants of rock: Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Be Bop Deluxe and the Pretty Things, among others, had been on their books. To Harvest boss Nick Mobbs, signing Wire made sense: “Rather arbitrarily, some ‘punk’ acts ended up on Harvest, but Wire had more reason than any to be on what had been founded originally as a ‘progressive’ music label. I doubt the marketing people saw this subtlety, and I expect Wire were perceived as just another punk band. Wire’s attraction, to me, was that they could outrace and outshout any punk band, but had many other tricks up their sleeves involving atmosphere, humour, intelligence, menace and, yes, art. They were original; the only comparisons I could think of at the time were with the Velvet Underground and early Pink Floyd.”

  Wire differed from most bands with arty leanings, who tended to stress the rock element of art rock and whose dominant frame of reference was popular music. As Simon Reynolds notes of ’60s British rock (in his essay “Ono, Eno, Arto”), many musicians were art-school educated, yet few translated that artistic training to the construction of their music. Art rock may have gestured or alluded to high art, but the incorporation of actual creative strategies from the fine arts was rare. Moreover, many art-rock musicians inadvertently preserved the aura of untouchability and privilege surrounding high culture by trying just a little too hard to prove their work’s artistic value.

  There were some credible moves towards thinking about rock as art. Former art student David Bowie brought innovations from other aesthetic areas to his work, in presentation and image and in his use of cut-ups, although the frame for his music was always rock. When Pete Townshend, another product of art education, used extra-musical ideas—appropriating Gustav Metzger’s concept of Auto-Destructive art—his guitar-sacrifices weren’t merely spectacles; they added a distinctive sonic ingredient to the Who’s performances. But beyond that, his band’s work betrayed familiar anxieties about its cultural worth: Townshend’s
rock operas suggest his upward ambitions.

  (There were also rare examples of bands ignoring completely the rock-art divide, by taking a Pop Art stance. Fine Art graduate Bryan Ferry brought practices learned from Richard Hamilton to Roxy Music’s pastiche collage. The Who’s most interesting moment was their playful Pop Art-inspired blend of songs, fake ads and jingles on The Who Sell Out, which showed none of Townshend’s cultural insecurities.)

  They’re still the art world’s favourite punk band.

  Jon Savage

  In general, however, British art rock preserved the hierarchical distinction between popular music and art by attempting to make rock that rose above its genre and laid claim to the status of art. Only a handful of British artists approached that distinction from the opposite direction: dispensing with the almost ubiquitous anxious need to make a case for rock as high culture, these musicians created popular music with a high-art mindset.

  Making music with an emphasis on concept and working processes, Eno is one of those who have consistently disrupted the established hierarchy of mass culture and high art. Wire were similarly inclined. They came at the intersection of art and rock from the perspective of art: operating within rock, Wire manipulated and rearranged its vocabulary and grammar, using it against itself to remove cliché and to discover new possibilities. Instead of simply the matising or evoking other arts—putting them at the service of rock—they often built their creative process around extra-musical conceptual strategies. They put rock at the service of art, using rock as a medium for greater artistic exploration.

  Wire’s fine-art starting point can be heard in how they treat their songs’ components. Although this became more apparent on Chairs Missing and 154, Pink Flag’s largely harsh, noisy surfaces belie a meticulous painterly or sculptural aesthetic, frequently prioritising texture and structure over melody or the song’s overall movement towards closure. Given Wire’s relatively shaky skills in 1977, their work sometimes suggests non-musicians comfortable primarily in the plastic arts, making music but thinking about it through a fine-art lens. In places, they paint and sculpt in bold sweeps: Gilbert’s weighty, droning guitar strokes; the primitivist noise chunks on “12XU”; Grey’s endlessly reproduced beats. Elsewhere, it’s all about detail and precision: Lewis’s ornate bass-lick punctuation or the numerous intro and outro devices with which Wire inventively framed their tracks. These few examples are symptomatic of a band reimagining the song-based form through other media.