Wire progressed very quickly, but most punk bands never changed.
Robert Pollard
So not only were Wire too arty for punk, but their particular practice was more truly experimental than that of many art-rock bands. This experimentalism also played out in Wire’s rejection of artistic personality. They didn’t establish a stable identity or a familiar sound. In under 22 months between 1977 and 1979, their drive for originality yielded three divergent albums, each itself multifaceted.
Of course, there were precedents; rock history’s artier side had seen numerous performers with restless creative identities. Bowie in the ’70s offers an obvious example of the thoroughly postmodern pop star with his multiple artistic personalities. Paradoxically, though, his changing persona was his identity; Bowie was always Bowie, regardless of the character he played. He was the supreme Romantic auteur, the individual creative genius, overseeing successive characters who, in turn, fitted within desirable and highly marketable Romantic rock-star typologies. Onstage and off, Bowie enacted rock’s myths and clichéd storylines. Experimentation aside, he was never at odds with the context of pop music itself as Wire often were.
They always seemed prepared to burn their bridges and alienate their audience—absolutely not afraid to shoot themselves in the foot commercially. That was one of the main points of punk, surely? To head off in whatever direction held the most appeal at any given moment rather than worrying about what the audience or the record company may think of you or want from you.
Matt Johnson
Wire flouted the expectations of their chosen medium. They didn’t market themselves in terms of the customary rock image, they didn’t appear on the front covers of their records, they released singles grudgingly, they barely interacted with audiences, their early interviews were occasionally elliptical and strangulated: they didn’t cultivate a personality so much as an absence of personality. As McNeill wrote in the NME in December 1977, “They’ve got absolutely nothing going for them except their music. No image, no charisma, no mystique, no following, no gimmicks, and virtually no press.” The music itself was the character, its identity more radical than Bowie’s serial selves.
If journalists like McNeill accepted the absence of a conventional authorial identity, others were less enthusiastic. In his Pink Flag review, Greil Marcus commented, “Satisfying on some formal level, it’s never moving; the band doesn’t dramatize itself right off the album, as great rockers always do. You hear cleverness, wit, irony, but not personality.” Marcus faults Wire for privileging surface and play over deeper authenticity. He’s right that Pink Flag lacks an identifiable affective core that might unite its 21 tracks (a discrete “personality” functioning as a consistent marker of identity). However, his seeing the absence as negative says less about Wire’s music and more about his discomfort with their postmodern aesthetic.
Even those lauding this aspect regularly failed to grasp Wire’s transformations from record to record. This is evident in the commonplace assertion that Wire continually reinvented themselves. Although intended to characterise the band’s dynamic, adventurous spirit, “self-reinvention” still assumes a self that can be reinvented. That model, with its associations of continuity and certainty, was anathema to Wire, who were interested not in the illusory stability of the self but in the discontinuous, uncertain realm of the other.
Not only did Wire never look back, they rarely paused to contemplate themselves in the present. Rather than allow their image to settle into focus, they moved relentlessly forward, as if seeking to make the band and its sound unrecognisable, even to itself. At its most vital, between 1977 and 1979, Wire’s music was an exploration of instability and ambiguity, documenting an ongoing state of becoming other and encountering otherness.
4
Think of a Number, Divide It by 2: Framing Wire’s Minimalism
They understood minimalism. There’s not a lot on Pink Flag yet it doesn’t lack anything. I can’t think of anything I’d want to add. To me, it’s a perfect album.
Henry Rollins
It’s always reduction, and that’s what appealed to me about Wire in particular: it’s about always withdrawing.
Robin Rimbaud
Wire’s aesthetic was built on subtraction, a consistent withdrawal of superfluous elements. “The reduction of ideas, the reduction of things down to the minimal framework—it just seemed completely natural,” explains Colin Newman. “By closing down possibilities, you very often open up possibilities. You have infinite possibilities of simplicity and subtlety within a frame.” Natural minimalists, Wire pursued a negative sensibility, defining themselves in terms of what they were not. Their creative choices and strategies were motivated by a desire not for familiarity—an identity based on similarities with other artists—but for otherness and difference.
“The only things we could agree on were the things we didn’t like,” observes Bruce Gilbert. “That’s what held it together and made life much simpler.” Recalling some unofficial Wire rules, Graham Lewis summarises this negative self-definition: “No solos; no decoration; when the words run out, it stops; we don’t chorus out; no rocking out; keep it to the point; no Americanisms.” This preference for shunning the familiar and paring down their work was evident from the start of Wire’s four-piece incarnation. If they were a “living sculpture,” it was a sculpture whose logical conclusion was perhaps its own disappearance as they chipped away at it. Robin Rimbaud noticed this: “It’s as if they wrote songs and thought: ‘How much can we take away to make this as simple as possible?’”
Most of all, Wire strove to avoid reproducing characteristics identified with punk. “We challenged the orthodoxies of the time,” reiterates Gilbert. “We were all reading from the same page in terms of rejecting things that were clichéd and knowing we were right.” The disciplined, purposeful artistic decisions taken to emphasise Wire’s difference weren’t expressed as a manifesto, but subsequent listeners inferred them from the music. The Futureheads’ Ross Millard, for instance: “I get the sense that, even if it wasn’t specifically written, there was some sort of policy, some rules to what they were doing. That’s fascinating. When you’re making music as an artistic expression, then you’ve got to come up with something a bit more interesting.” He continues, “If Wire influenced us, it’s above all in that sense of purpose, that there’s no bullshit, no solos, no flabbiness to the music, it’s all about economy and immediacy.”
Wire’s style failed to make a noticeable impression on British rock until the ’90s, but its effects were felt sooner in San Pedro, California, as Mike Watt and D. Boon took a page from the band’s slim book. According to Watt, the Minutemen’s pursuit of a similarly lean sound saw them ostracised by their own punk community: “People always said, ‘You’re not a punk band,’ and it’s all because of the debt we owe Wire. We wanted to channel our ideas into very strict shorthand and have no filler, and this is what we get from them—you distil a song to the bare nada. We took that ethic right to the tune and boiled it all down. We have to acknowledge Wire for that simple idea, what Wire did with format. It seems like a simple idea, but, you know, the bicycle’s only a couple of hundred years old, even though the chariot’s thousands of years old. They had two wheels for a long time, but they never thought of putting one in front of the other. That’s what Wire did. A simple, elegant idea—but nobody had stumbled onto that shit before.”
How can you take rock music seriously? So much of it’s rubbish.
Colin Newman
Beyond punk, Wire endeavoured to evade categorisation as a rock band and avoided positioning themselves in an obvious lineage. Of course, no group escapes its progenitors completely, and other bands’ work inevitably informed Wire’s. Nevertheless, they resisted replicating what they enjoyed, often ruthlessly: “Everything you heard would make some impression, but if something started to sound familiar then that would be stamped out,” remembers Grey. “There was always a feeling to try to avoid rock c
lichés. That was a working method we had.”
When Wire’s work did develop in relation to other music, that relationship wasn’t about imitation but, rather, abstraction. Their aim wasn’t to incorporate another artist’s sound but, frequently, to pursue an idea it suggested. Such ideas served as creative foils for subversion or transformation: Newman often describes the minimal chord structure of “Pink Flag” as a bare-bones version of his rock ’n’ roll nemesis, “Johnny B. Goode”; “Brazil” was a love song that lyrically skewered the love song. Other tracks likewise followed a paradoxical logic: in the Martin Hannett “faster, but slower” tradition, “Lowdown” was a funk number drained of funkiness. These reimaginings were partially satirical; Newman comments, “There’s an element in Pink Flag of taking the piss out of rock music.”
With a bigger drum kit, you’re doing more and the group becomes more of a rock group, which isn’t what I would want.
Robert Grey
Wire’s minimalism and their orientation towards difference were also crucial to distancing their live performances from both punk and traditional rock. Their minimisation of movement, interaction and lighting, as well as the suppression of familiar numbers, colourful attire, drinking and smoking, can all be read not only as attempts to eradicate gestures conventionally associated with rock concerts, but also as negations of personality and image—usually to the fore onstage. In that environment, Grey’s kit epitomised Wire’s subtractive bent: if it was sparse in 1977, he continued to simplify it in the ’80s, ditching tom-toms and cymbals and retaining just a snare, bass drum and hi-hat. “As groups get better known, the drum kit gets bigger,” he explains; “I thought I’d take the opposite route. I was interested to see what you could do with less. Also, it’s less of a rock drum kit if you take those things away. Wire work within the area of rock, but the less of a rock group we are, the happier I’d feel. The large drum kit is another rock cliché.” To break associations with rock even more, he meticulously concealed the chrome on his kit with satin-finish paint: “Chrome and sparkle look dramatic under lights, but I’m against all that.”
Their artwork wasn’t about them. The iconography was so distilled. It had a Brutalist nature. It felt like art. Everyone else had a smash-and-grab attitude, the smell of revolution or irreverence. But Wire’s sleeves were about absolute reverence. It was iconic. It had an architectural feel.
Richard Jobson
Rock’s ideology has always been most explicit in band names and on record covers since they’re inextricably linked with image construction. Wire wore their spartan aesthetic on their record sleeves, and the name Wire itself was unmistakably minimalist. Band names encapsulate rock’s core values: for instance, a dominant strain of rock has always been tied, at some level, to Romantic notions of creativity, self-expression, individuality, the artist standing in opposition to society—think of the litany of outlaw, masculine names, from the Rolling Stones to the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Many punk names bought into that same Romantic narrative: the Damned, the Unwanted, the Outcasts, for example, connoted alienation and outsiderness. Alternately, some channelled the postmodern zeitgeist: the Adverts, the Cortinas, X-Ray Spex were readymades recycled from contemporary consumer culture; other found-names derived from the language of the UK’s economic and political crises (999; the Clash; Social Security; Dole Q).
Romantic or postmodern, such names referenced specific, often vivid concepts or phenomena—generally preceded by “the.” Wire had a different quality. It was atypical for the period in its lack of obvious connotations, its lack of association with a particular image. Wire is generic, its metallic referent connoting, if anything, the absence of identity. It signals Wire’s self-contained nature: it returns the focus inwards, towards their music, reflecting their pared-down, hard-edged, industrious ethos.
Record sleeves express rock’s ideology more graphically than band names, and British punk’s artwork abounded in none-too-subtle signifiers of youth, rebellion and alienation. Wire’s artwork didn’t construct a rock image. Their early single and album sleeves displayed no connections to popular music or youth culture; in fact, they abandoned realism altogether. Whereas punk sleeves were all about disposable materiality, Wire’s first three album covers were timeless objects in themselves. Mysterious, clean, austere and spacious, giving little indication they were the jackets of rock records, they have more in common with fine art than with conventional album art. Pink Flag and Chairs Missing evoked abstract proscenia, while 154 suggested Modernist canvases by Kandinsky, Malevich or Mondrian.
Unsurprisingly, the bandmembers were absent from the front covers, featuring only in a limited, idiosyncratic fashion. On the back of Pink Flag, for instance, the individual black-and-white photos were a compromise with EMI, who insisted the band appear on the sleeve. In the captions, Wire subversively reduced all biographical information to names, roles and a single, generic physical characteristic identifying each individual: height (Grey), weight (Lewis), eye colour (Gilbert), hair colour (Newman). That these traits weren’t discernible in the photos—except perhaps for Grey’s lanky frame—further undermined rock’s cult of personality.
Given that Wire were concept-oriented, it’s maybe logical that the idea for Pink Flag’s cover image came first. Equally typically, its genesis was unusual: Gilbert and Lewis had each independently chanced upon the same idea. “Before we recorded,” recounts Lewis, “I met Bruce one day. I opened my notebook and I had a very simple drawing: a stick with a flag on it. Bruce opened his notebook and he had a stick with a flag on it, and we both went, ‘That looks like a good idea!’” The pair often played with each other’s ideas, especially when writing lyrics, as Gilbert recalls: “Graham and I got into a process of alternating lines of a song or a piece or a text as Graham would call it. It was almost like a game of ‘Consequences,’ sitting in the pub with a notebook going backwards and forwards.”
The band stumbled on the real counterpart to that doodled manifestation of the collective unconscious. “We’d played in Plymouth and went up to the Hoe and saw this flagpole,” says Gilbert. “That was it. It was obvious. So we made a trip back a couple of days later and had it photographed by Annette Green.” (Green—Newman’s future first wife—taught at Watford and had studied at the Royal College of Art, coinciding with Zandra Rhodes and David Hockney. In the ’60s, she’d photographed the likes of John Lennon, her work appearing in Vogue and other high-profile venues.) For the album cover, EMI’s David Dragon painted in the flag and airbrushed the sky pale blue: “Bruce and Graham came with a clear, precise idea of how they wanted the sleeve art to be. The way they gave thought to the effect of Pink Flag as a whole, not just as a collection of individual songs, came from a sensibility, an awareness, that went beyond the music. We talked in great detail about how the flag should appear as flat colour with no pretence of looking photo-realistic, about the addition of colour in the sky and the black border, which was to resemble the frame around a photo negative. The title wasn’t to appear on the cover, just the band name. The cover is stark and enigmatic. It doesn’t scream and shout, ‘PUNK.’ It doesn’t try too hard. It sidesteps the crowd and says ‘WIRE—we’re different.’”
Beyond the minimalism of Wire’s music and artwork, the overarching impetus towards subtraction extended to the band’s structure as, over time, they eliminated components: in 1990, Grey temporarily withdrew when Wire moved into a new electronic environment. Then they shrank the name, eliminating a letter to become WIR. This dynamic even manifests itself in the way bandmembers discuss their relationship with the group. Characterising his 2004 decision to leave Wire, Gilbert doesn’t employ rock’s standard terminology of quitting the band; rather, he emphasises, “I removed myself.”
George did this song called “It’s a Bitch” that was basically a rant. It was entirely formless and chugged around on two chords.
Colin Newman
Long before Grey’s departure ended one phase of Wire and Gilbert’s self-subt
raction concluded another, the band had to subtract one member in order to become Wire. In removing George Gill, they discovered their unique sound and approach.
Wire’s earliest incarnation provided fertile ground for Gilbert, Grey, Lewis and Newman to enact their natural minimalism. Co-founder Gill embodied the rock excess they most despised, offering a musical paradigm to subvert. As Newman says, “A lot of early Wire was about reacting to the George version of the band, because George was much more rockist, much more chaotic; it was a lot of noise, shouting and attitude around a very traditional rock core.” His dismissal in March 1977 is the primal scene of the band’s subtractive tendency.
Gill was Keith Richards played by a Yorkshireman, a blunt, acerbic blues-rock purist, with no time for what Newman calls “soft Southern bastards” (himself included): “George came with this I’m from Sheffield, I’m hard sort of thing, and I was the archetypal trendy, soft Southern bastard.” To Gilbert, “George was a fantastic character. A sort of troubadour figure, a heavy rock drinker. He was very chaotic at times.” Unfortunately, booze didn’t bring out his best side, as flatmate Slim Smith remembers: “Colin and I were both a bit scared of George. He was the college’s main rabble-rouser, always causing trouble in class and drinking heavily, which occasionally resulted in getting into fights.” Gilbert goes further, commenting that Gill often “looked like he was about to break into a fight with himself.” Grey notes, diplomatically, “He was a rather strange boy.”
Wire's Pink Flag Page 6
