Excepting a few covers and some novice efforts by the other bandmembers (“TV” and “Feeling Called Love,” for instance), Gill wrote much of the material. Often so generic that the songs could have been covers, the titles alone indicate Gill’s proclivities: “Outside the Law,” “Gimme Your Love,” “Midnight Train.” Others were more noteworthy: “It’s a Bitch,” according to Newman, “was mainly George shouting, ‘it’s a bitch’ and then losing it”; “Bad Night at the Lion” was inspired by a pub band who’d earned Gill’s scorn by being so crap and “Mary Is a Dyke” was a somewhat tactless number concerning Gill’s apparently lesbian aunt. Newman sheepishly admits some involvement in writing the music, adding, “I’m in no rush to claim it.” Gilbert offers a generous view of Gill’s songwriting: “From time to time, he had a way with words.”
There weren’t any short, snappy songs like we had later. They wouldn’t have been allowed by George because he couldn’t have done them.
Robert Grey
In addition to writing most of the songs, Gill dominated their performance, leaving little room for the others. Lewis remembers, “He played a Telecaster, and there were what one would call ‘solos,’ which ran through everything.” Gilbert derived a perverse pleasure from the overkill: “It was a wall of noise. Three rhythm guitars churning away, with exactly the same solo for every song.” Nick Garvey paints the most evocative picture of the Gill-centric sound: “It was scruffy, messy and clangy; a bit of a thrash. They’d do a song very fast and loud, and George just shouted, ‘FUCK over the top of it, for the duration.” In August 1976 Garvey made the band’s first significant recordings at his Stockwell house, using a Teac 4-track: “What I remember most is that none of them seemed to know what they were doing. I’m sure they did know; I just didn’t recognise it.”
Two early covers were “Roadrunner” and an amphetamine-paced version of J.J. Cale’s “After Midnight.” Newman saw the latter as a jab at Gill and an omen of his demise: “George actually did like J.J. Cale. In 1976, to say you liked J.J. Cale was close to admitting you were responsible for Auschwitz. It was the most heinous crime possible. A horrible, polite funkiness was what we wanted to do away with, in whatever way we could—and actually doing ‘After Midnight’ was a way of taking the piss out of George, a way of saying, ‘How could you possibly imagine that was any good?’”
Predictably, Gill had little truck with the music that interested his bandmates. “Roadrunner” aside, Newman remembers him finding the Modern Lovers “too weird”; Patti Smith, he conceded, was “okay for a girl.” Desmond Simmons recalls Gill even dismissing the Ramones because they were “using distortion” (of all things) and “weren’t pure enough.” And despite the others’ initial excitement at British punk, Gill was unmoved, assuring Slim Smith it was a fad: “George just wasn’t getting it—at some point during 1976 he told me that punk would be over by Christmas.”
What Gill lacked in historical foresight, he made up for in spirited performances. Grey describes Wire’s first-ever gig at the Nashville Rooms, distinguished by Gill’s theatrics and his strained relationship with the audience: “George became very animated. He shouted at someone sitting near the stage, ‘What are you looking at? Go back to your beer.’ George had this aggressive approach. At one point he threw his guitar back into the dressing room, off the stage. I can’t imagine anyone doing such a strange thing now.” Lewis adds, “I remember some guy going, ‘You’re fucking crap!’ and George said, ‘You get back in your beer, cunt.’ That was something George was superb at. And then he proceeded to thrash all the strings off his guitar.”
Gill’s increasingly tenuous position found expression at gigs, where he was often more offstage than on. At Carey Place, Watford, in February 1977, the writing was on the wall: “Wire were playing, and George was evidently not happy with the way things were going,” recalls Slim Smith. “He got angry during one song, took his guitar off, threw it across the stage and stormed off. This was his band, they should have fallen apart without him, but they didn’t They played on, the sound becoming more stripped-down and spare without George’s guitar—and they sounded good.”
A way forward was revealed when Gill was briefly hospitalised (having broken his leg whilst allegedly trying to purloin some musical equipment). Just as Gill’s original presence was oddly vital, offering Wire a model of what they didn’t want to be, his absence was inspirational. With his tireless soloing removed, the others started to hear themselves, to recognise the possibilities. They found their way out of what Gilbert calls the frenetic, overcrowded “safari park for rhythm guitarists” and onto cleaner, clearer sonic terrain, with hints of abstraction. “We found that his absence made us sound much better,” says Gilbert. “A neater approach, more accurate in terms of arrangements. A very stripped-down sound.” Although they were still playing Gill’s songs, Newman noticed a dramatic change: “Suddenly there was a focus because we had to organise the material in a way that we could do it—and without George screaming and playing solos all the way through, it all got shorter and sharper.”
With the arrangements streamlined, Gill no longer had a role. “Suddenly there was no space for him,” Newman remembers. “I think that was why he was ending up not onstage—because he realised there was no place for him.” During Gill’s temporary absence, therefore, it became evident that for Wire to explore the newer territory they had glimpsed, Gill would have to leave. According to Gilbert, “Making it progress was very difficult with the main generator of ideas playing in a very traditional way.” Still, Gill was the chief songwriter, as Gilbert points out. If they dumped him, they’d have to create their own material.
A breakthrough came when Lewis showed Newman some lyrics he’d written and Newman began working on a tune. This would become “Lowdown.” Also during Gill’s layoff, “12XU,” ‘Three Girl Rhumba” and others had arrived and were rehearsed alongside the reconfigured Gill numbers. Lewis recalls Gill, leg in plaster, struggling manfully through rehearsals: “There were many new pieces and George found this difficult and pressurising, labouring to work out where his playing could fit in and how to learn the detailed and disciplined arrangements.” His last stand was at the Roxy on February 24, 1977, leg still in a cast.
Wire has always made the most of limited means.
Colin Newman
Now a four-piece, Wire began a series of purges in the lead-up to Pink Flag, jettisoning Gill’s songs and writing more material to rebuild their live set. Several numbers received a stay of execution: “Mary Is a Dyke” and the cover of “After Midnight,” along with early non-Gill compositions “TV” and “Feeling Called Love.” A tape made in March at the band’s Stockwell rehearsal space featured these tracks (except “TV”) and new numbers: “Too True,” “The Commercial,” “Just Don’t Care,” “Strange,” “Brazil,” “It’s So Obvious,” “Three Girl Rhumba,” “Lowdown,” “12XU” and “Mr Suit.” Altogether, this became essentially Wire’s Roxy set for April 1 and 2, which included ten tracks that would appear on Pink Flag (“The Commercial,” “Strange,” “Brazil,” “It’s So Obvious,” “Three Girl Rhumba,” “Straight Line,” “Lowdown,” “Feeling Called Love,” “12XU” and “Mr Suit”).
Wire’s sound underwent a transformation due to three factors: their innate minimalism, meagre abilities and a desire to play as well as possible notwithstanding those abilities. This intersection of accident and design was key to Wire’s uniqueness on the punk landscape. Critics would talk about Pink Flag’s knowing deconstruction of rock, but that’s not the whole story, as Desmond Simmons observes: “Wire weren’t deliberately deconstructing music, just doing what they could.” Although Newman has frequently described his songwriting on the album as a conscious effort to take rock apart, he also notes, “The level of skill was pretty much shared, and it was a matter of making the most of what you had. That’s a classic Wire characteristic.”
The difference was phenomenal, for them to lose that instrument and gain a direction.
Barry Jones
Wire’s metamorphosis didn’t go unnoticed. When they’d debuted at the Roxy in January 1977 (supporting the Jam), the club’s co-manager, Barry Jones, was underwhelmed: “I remember them before George Gill left. They were terrible, really messy.” Jones heard a radically improved Wire on the Stockwell rehearsal tape, justifying his decision to include them on the bill for April 1—but their performance that night (recorded for the Roxy album) astounded him: “I walked into the mobile and Mike Thorne had the sound going and they were playing ‘Lowdown.’ I was like, Who is this?’ I didn’t even recognise it as them. They blew me away that night. You drop that one guy who’s not letting things gel and you’re off. They changed overnight.”
Mike Thorne was also impressed. He was an EMI house producer whose background included a Physics degree from Oxford and studies in piano composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, plus stints as an editor at Studio Sound and as a journalist. His initial studio experience was of an un-punk variety: he’d worked as a tape op on Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple sessions and had produced prog-folk band Gryphon. But Thorne was also instrumental in bringing the Sex Pistols to EMI and recorded demos with them in December 1976. Drawn by punk’s irreverent energy and its promise of newness, he’d thrown himself into the scene.
Instead of ligging with his A&R peers at the Speakeasy, he ventured elsewhere to see bands and convinced EMI to make a live document of the Roxy, then the only specifically punk club. He first encountered Wire there: “I recorded Wire on their first outing as a four-piece. I never saw them as a five-piece, but Barry astutely told them to go away and practice: ‘Come back when you’ve put it all together.’ They were very solid indeed, playing to about 20 people. Nevertheless, everybody was engaged, and during their set someone shouted, ‘That’s better! Now: louder and faster.’ Even on the rough mixes it was clear that they had a very powerful presence.” Thorne was particularly excited by their minimalist leanings: “I hate listening to music with gratuitous fat on it, with unnecessary decorative gestures. That, of course, fell right in line with the sensibilities of these four people.”
We came up with some simple rules. For instance, the way you started and stopped things: we understood that that was one thing we could be good at.
Graham Lewis
With Gill’s departure, Newman concentrated on vocals. “When we started with the new material, they wanted me to sing rather than play guitar because they thought I was more impressive as a frontman, but I said, ‘I’m not writing songs in major keys just so that Bruce can have it easy to play.’” Gilbert had been using an open tuning; Newman wanted him to learn “minors and sevenths and stuff like that,” which he quickly did.
Slimmed down from three guitars to one, Wire could work on the previously obscured basic mechanics of their music. “Because there was a fairly large amount of space,” explains Lewis, “we were able to hear when things weren’t accurate. Accuracy became very important, in order to realise what we understood was the sound of the group, which was very much an on-off dynamic—about stopping and starting together and being in tune. Being able to execute things accurately.” For Jon Savage this distinguished Wire: “A lot of the punk groups at the Roxy were completely hopeless—they couldn’t even stop and start at the same time.”
A concern for the basics was imperative in practical terms, but it also accentuates how Wire were developing a more sophisticated sensibility. Crucial in that regard is Lewis’s comment on their prowess at “stopping and starting,” something Graham Coxon also identifies as a signature of early Wire: “The way they began and ended was always important. They weren’t just tossed off. They’re meant to be like that. They’re not just half-baked ideas.” This emphasis might seem redundant, a mere necessity for any band learning to play together; more importantly, though, it’s an example of Wire’s awareness of framing and the role of frames. This is a clear indication of the band’s conceptual inclination, a tendency to approach rock from a fine-art perspective. Put simply, the beginning and ending, with their familiar patterns, are the song’s fundamental framing devices. Given Wire’s aesthetic sense, it’s not surprising that they zeroed in on these and experimented with their possibilities—manipulating their works’ margins, examining novel possibilities for beginning songs and rejecting such predictable ways of ending as rocking out or fading out.
I remember being struck by the brevity: they basically did just begin and finish.
Robin Rimbaud
Pink Flag’s attention to framing is striking, especially on several very short tracks in which the frame itself—the start and finish— appears to be the primary focus. For instance, the 28-second “Field Day for the Sundays” is so brief that it’s hardly started before it’s over. Wire also explore where the song’s boundaries lie. “Surgeon’s Girl” is a good example with its “un-deux-trois-quatre” count-in. On studio recordings, a count is left in as a signifier of authenticity: it supposedly lays bare the mechanism of the performing and recording processes, clearly marking the song’s margins and foregrounding the artist’s central role by underscoring the moment at which that role starts. Including the count here disturbs the arbitrary construction of an inside and an outside—that is, what is and what isn’t part of the performance. The track doesn’t begin with the count, which comes seven seconds in, after Gilbert’s guitar intro. Its inclusion after the introduction stresses that this clichéd signifier of rock authenticity and artistic purity is always just another artificial aspect of the performance. Having the count-in in French highlights this. (“Realising one-two-three-four was verboten,” says Lewis, “I came up with the comedy count of un-deux-trois-quatre.”)
“Reuters” and “Pink Flag” also underline the porous nature of where the song begins and ends, subverting the conventions of starting and finishing even more conspicuously. The opening of “Reuters” extends for 30 seconds with its building bass and guitar figures: these are unmistakable introductory motifs, creating an air of anticipation before the song kicks in. The track starts to wind down at around two minutes with the “rape” chant, petering out for another minute. The introduction and conclusion therefore account for more than 1’30” of the song. This expands the frame inwards so it comprises half the track. Similarly, “Pink Flag” commences with 25 seconds of drum rolls and false starts before the guitar crashes in. It builds to the repeated line “how many dead or alive” after 1’30”, and by 2’00” the song begins to give the unmistakable impression of winding down. However, that closing feel persists for another 90-plus seconds with a series of false endings—rising to a frantic climax at 2’48”, then continuing for another minute, with more false endings during the last 45 seconds. Over half the song is actually the frame. These expansive intros and outros are also an example of Wire’s awareness of space, deviating from the punk norm: rather than cram songs from start to finish with all their constitutive elements firing simultaneously, they probe different spatial possibilities.
In a different vein, “The Commercial” emphasises the framing of the album itself. This brief instrumental is coded as something more than one of the record’s 21 tracks. Its title, its throwaway breeziness and its placement as if between the original two sides (at the start of side two) suggest this number has a different function: it’s an interval, occupying a place on the record and outside it.
Wire used those art-school tricks that are in our DNA: chance, using process rather than product, throwing yourself into the experiment and seeing what happens rather than aiming for something that’s already known.
Russell Mills
The exploitation of accidents and random contingencies in the writing and recording process—facets commonly deemed extraneous—is another aspect of Wire’s playful framing. “106 Beats That” is Pink Flag’s best-known illustration. The chord structure and words were each intended to follow arbitrarily imposed patterns, but the experiment foundered: Newman’s chords went awry and Lewis miscou
nted his syllables. Instead of scrapping the song, they used these unforeseen results as constitutive components.
At times, the accidents Wire assimilated arose in the process of translation, when Newman showed guitar parts to Gilbert. This occasionally led to their minimalism-by-necessity, Gilbert explains: “Colin would demonstrate the song and I’d have to find a way of playing it—sometimes chords got missed out because I didn’t have the ability to play them. So everything often got very simplified because of my lack of ability.”
Wire’s incorporation of elements traditionally kept outside the frame also extended to their live sets, which made audiences rethink their expectations of the “concert.” In addition to challenging standard rock conventions, the band integrated other media and genres, expanding the performance beyond a regular gig. There was a certain theatricality about Wire’s use of lighting—theatrical in the sense of stark Modernist drama, not rock theatricality—and about the band’s tightly controlled movements. (“Wire were statues,” remembers Nick Garvey.) There were also Brechtian undertones. Newman sometimes kept his hand in his pocket throughout, his head cocked. This was akin to Brecht’s Gestus, intended to convey a character’s alienated relation to his/her social milieu. In this context, it essentially parodied the punk rocker’s posture as guttersnipe outcast.
Wire intensified their reframing of live performance in November 1979 with People in a Room, a four-night stand at London’s Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre. Typical rock concerts aren’t titled; the naming immediately raises questions about the event’s identity. Mixing performance art, painting, video, dance and avant-garde noise, individual pieces by each bandmember preceded Wire’s set: Grey, for instance, did an action painting, and Newman, in Glenn Branca mode, led a 15-piece minimalist guitar orchestra. Another gig, at the Electric Ballroom in February 1980, upped the ante as Wire interrupted and fragmented their performance with Brechtian devices and Dadaist antics.
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