Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  Despite their sonic differences, “Reuters” and “Field Day for the Sundays” are thematically linked. “They’re both about media, but one’s a long way away and one’s very much at home,” Lewis comments. “Field Day for the Sundays” responds to UK tabloid culture, especially its appetite for salacious, peccadillo-exposing stories: “I had in mind the likes of Rod Stewart. The greatest, most dreadful mistake he made was when he picked up with Britt Ekland, and she turned him into a total wanker—which he embraced with such passion.” For Lewis, the song’s form is appropriate to its content: “If you’re going to talk about something that can be grasped by two headlines, the lyrics have to be like that: short and punchy. It’s not exactly the editorial page of the Guardian.”

  “Field Day for the Sundays” foregrounds a classic Wire-ism that recurs on Pink Flag: the tendency to create a tonal contrast between a song’s words and sound. “It was something that amused us,” explains Gilbert. “The nastier the words, the prettier the music. The words were often the antithesis of the flavour of the music. It sets off a sort of friction, a frisson.” Here, as Newman observes, “You’ve got this quite cheerful-sounding thing, but it’s saying something negative.”

  Lyrically, “Field Day for the Sundays”—like “Mr Suit”—is one of Pink Flag’s anomalous tracks since it’s of its time, recognisably punk. Punks made a spectacle of themselves, appropriating consumer culture’s trash and making it a prominent aspect of their style. They seized on dismissive mainstream attitudes towards punk, constructing their identities and rhetoric from those negative perceptions. Perversely, punks wanted to be precisely what others didn’t want to be; their aesthetic reinforced that notion. “Field Day for the Sundays” likewise appropriates the negative with gusto, as if it were empowering. The song doesn’t warn against making oneself tabloid fodder, but enthusiastically welcomes the prospect. “It’s not ‘if you do this you’ll end up being,’” Newman points out. “It’s I want to be. It’s bring it on. It’s very punk as an attitude.”

  But the track’s irony isn’t empty: it does imply criticism. While the lyrics appear to ironically endorse consumerism and bad taste, that embrace isn’t wholly pleasurable: there’s a tension between wanting it and finding it unappetising. Punk embraced bad taste wholeheartedly amid its rejection of hierarchised cultural norms, yet although the song’s speaker apparently revels in the mass-culture world of the tabloids, the lurid exposé leaves “a bad taste”; similarly, the infamous Page Three is “so lacking in taste.” There are two perspectives and two voices. The written register of the phrase “so lacking in taste” is detached and almost effete, contrasting with the bolshy opening, “I wanna be a field day for the Sundays, so they can f[uc]k up my life.” Wire often disrupt high and low culture divisions, but here the distinction is reinscribed. The song’s subtle critical perspective hinges on taste, which is inevitably linked to class; in turn, class is inevitably connected to a traditionally rigid view of the demarcations between high culture and mass culture.

  “Three Girl Rhumba”

  It’s a true story. People are really shocked by that because it’s very un-Wire.

  Colin Newman

  After two disparate tracks, “Three Girl Rhumba” again changes the record’s direction, slowing the pace but also injecting rhythmic quirkiness. The distinctive guitar pattern is one of the album’s memorable sounds, punctuated by Lewis’s melodic, economical bass lick. “God knows where the riff came from,” wonders Newman, although on reflection he believes some of the idiosyncrasy of Pink Flag’s guitar parts stems from the way they were written. “A lot of these riffs come from playing on acoustic guitar—they’re not electric guitar riffs. With an acoustic guitar, the sound’s the same whatever you do. So, to make it work, what you play has got to be interesting.”

  Grey’s drumming picks up the guitar’s rhythm, reinforcing the slight Latin feel, whence the rhumba. In Newman’s view, Grey plays two separate roles here: “One of Rob’s strengths is that he defined the idea of having the drums as the spine. If you go back to the early ’70s and prog rock, the drums played along with the music, whereas in the classic Wire track, the drums provide the central spine, around which the track hangs. ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ has an element of him providing the backbone, but the swing in the rhythm is going along with the guitar.” Grey is characteristically modest: “It just seemed like something that fitted. I wasn’t consciously doing anything. The guitar has a rhythm in it. It’s not a normal rock rhythm, is it?” The song also includes some very un-punk percussion. Presumably to enhance the sabor latino, Grey plays a güiro, although it’s all but inaudible, buried beneath the final “go under.”

  When asked which Pink Flag songs he wrote the lyrics for, Newman responds, “all the stupid ones,” but his words here are far from stupid. This track serves as a commentary on meaning, perhaps a statement on his ambivalence about lyrics, cautioning against pursuing definitive interpretations: “Think of a number, divide it by 2, something is nothing, nothing is nothing…think of a number, don’t think of an answer. Open your eyes, think of a number, don’t get swept under, a number’s a number. A chance encounter, you want to avoid, the inevitable, so you do, the impossible.” Suggesting a parody of quantum physics or mathematical uncertainty, the words advocate surrendering to chance and resisting cause-and-effect (not thinking of an answer, avoiding the inevitable, doing the impossible). Instead of rationalising the raw material of experience through a priori knowledge systems that secure final answers, the lyrics take pleasure in open-ended possibilities and free-floating signifiers. “Don’t get swept under, a number’s a number,” Newman sings, as if urging listeners to stay on the surface of things, to go with the flow and not plumb the depths, to be alive to randomness: thus, the “impossible” becomes possible. Newman’s assessment 30 years later ironically echoes the track’s focus on the pleasures of surface and play: “It’s not the deepest song.”

  Newman explains the track’s inspiration: “It’s a love song. It’s completely true. There were three girls and there really was a choice and I ended up with the one who was ‘the impossible’: there was one I kind of wanted to be with, but it wasn’t going to happen; there was another who wanted to be with me, and I didn’t want to be with her; and then suddenly Annette entered the picture. She was so impressive and amazing and I succeeded. It was like pulling off the impossible.”

  “Three Girl Rhumba” is among Wire’s best-known songs, thanks to Elastica’s 1994 appropriation of the riff for their hit “Connection.” Newman first learned of “Connection” when Elastica performed it on Top of the Pops. Unbeknownst to Wire, their music publisher, Carlin, had approved the borrowing after consultation with a musicologist provided by Elastica’s publisher, EMI. Newman remembers being bewildered and angered by music press reports that Elastica had his blessing. Gilbert took “Connection” in a different spirit: “I thought it was amusing and flattering. I thought it was fascinating.”

  Subsequently, Budweiser and Garnier hair products sound-tracked US television commercials with “Connection,” while Channel 4’s Trigger Happy TV used it as theme music. In 2004, “Three Girl Rhumba” itself featured in a European H&M commercial (many assuming it was a cover of “Connection”). There was another twist: in 1994 Thorne had in fact been approached to produce Elastica’s debut album. “I wouldn’t have been responsive unless they’d been doing something innovative rather than novel. They had a nice attitude, but it seemed to me that they had to grow into something more than just a flattering imitation of Wire’s songs and style.”

  “Ex-Lion Tamer”

  “Ex-Lion Tamer” is probably my favourite song on Pink Flag. Lyrically, sonically and the arrangement—it’s just such a beautiful song.

  Ian MacKaye

  On one level, “Ex-Lion Tamer” is a de rigueur anti-TV punk song. However, Wire’s juxtaposition of television-serial cliché and images of consumer culture produces something more thoughtful than the average punk ran
t—an almost poignant, poetic view of alienation.

  The structure is idiosyncratic. There appears to be a clear verse-chorus demarcation, but the choruses prove more extensive and complex than the verses; in turn, the verses sound more like choruses. Just as Wire shift the priority accorded to frame and contents, here they invert the verse-chorus hierarchy. Generally, choruses are secondary, tending only to reinforce the verses’ content; choruses repeat and reiterate but contain little that moves the song forward. “Ex-Lion Tamer” disrupts the chorus’s role as purely a framing device within the song.

  The verses of “Ex-Lion Tamer” are similar in content and organisation. They begin with the same phrase (“There’s great danger”) and have identical components, each including an heroic figure (the Lone Ranger; Batman), an item of their trademark gear (silver bullets; cape) and their respective sidekicks (Tonto; Robin), whose departures close each verse. Atypically, the chorus generates the bulk of the track’s meaning, establishing a parallel between consumer culture and the banal narrative of television serials. The lines “Next week will solve your problems” and “stay glued to your TV set” underscore the viewers’ ideological interpellation by the programme’s narrative—an imaginary resolution of the real contradictions of their own existence. Nevertheless, in then showing the viewer alone with his/her symbols of consumer culture (milk bottles; fish fingers), the lyrics highlight the isolated, alienated reality of the situation. As with the formulaic television storyline, which smoothes over the contradictory conditions of real life and gives the illusion of fulfilment and completion, so it is with these standardised, unvaried, mechanically reproduced food products. The endlessly duplicated fish fingers are “all in a line,” the milk bottles “stand empty.”

  Despite Wire’s “no Americanisms” rule, by alluding to The Lone Ranger and Batman, they leave unchallenged the antiquated rock ‘n’ roll idea that the pop-culture imagination is exclusively American. Moreover, the programmes mentioned in “Ex-Lion Tamer” are pure kitsch, so they actually work against the song’s more serious implications. Newman is underwhelmed by Lewis’s subject matter: “I always thought the Lone Ranger was crap when I was a kid. I didn’t identify with him, I didn’t identify with Tonto, I didn’t identify with the horse. They were all rubbish.” If “Ex-Lion Tamer” displays an American orientation thematically and also linguistically (“Tonto’s split the scene”), in the plodding May 25 demo there’s even a transatlantic drawl to Newman’s nasal pronunciation of line. By Pink Flag, this had been Cockneyfied as loin.

  The title words are absent from the song itself, which has travelled far from its origins. Newman initially wrote a lyric featuring a lion tamer. “Graham took one look, said, ‘This is rubbish’ and rewrote it. There was a lion tamer involved somewhere.” According to Lewis, “That was the thing I thought was most memorable, but totally irrelevant in the end. I rewrote it and, by the end, it was called ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’ because even the lion tamer had disappeared.”

  Although he’s not certain, Newman thinks the phrase “the milk bottles stand empty” may have survived from his first draft. If that’s true, it was a good idea to keep it since several other artists have singled it out for praise. “My favourite lyric on the whole record is ‘milk bottles stand empty,’” Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye enthuses. “It’s such an incredible image. It’s indelible in my mind.” MacKaye’s in good company. “There’s some absolutely beautiful poetry in ‘Ex-Lion Tamer,’” says Graham Coxon. “I love the line ‘the milk bottles stand empty.’ I also love the way he delivers the word “bottles’—he makes a big thing of the syllables.”

  Like “Reuters,” “Ex-Lion Tamer” contains a chant, this time featuring Thorne: “I really enjoy the Blank Generation ‘TV’ chant at the end. The ‘TV’s were all of us except Robert, gathered around the microphone going ‘TV,’ as blankly and disinterestedly as possible.” The track again shows a degree of vocal sophistication unusual for the time: for instance, the call-and-response structure in which Lewis echoes “danger,” “bullets” and “justice.” Says Lewis, “I thought the responses seemed perfectly natural to emphasise certain words. It’s a punctuation thing.”

  In retrospect, Newman has some dissatisfaction with his vocals, particularly Thorne’s double-tracking of them. “Mike was absolutely petrified of me singing. I don’t think he totally believed I could sing in tune. He did all the multitracking because he didn’t think my voice was strong enough. I guess there was a general opinion that if Graham and I were to sing together too much, our inadequacies would be doubled; if we both sang out of tune, it would sound even worse. There was a sense that this album was a rescue job: we could just about play it, so it was a question of getting the best out of limited facility. That’s one of the reasons I have some annoyance with Mike because I think he could have believed a bit more in my ability to deliver a vocal and in the band’s ability to come up with a coherent picture. He used a lot of science around getting a result It seemed to take forever to get the backing tracks, and it wasn’t easy.”

  Conversely, Lewis believes the double-tracking was legitimate. “We were learning to play. We can’t say we were averse to it because, for instance, that’s what Eno had been doing. It’s the same thing. He’s not a singer, he’s writing songs, and what you’ve got to do is get a result, and the result’s what’s important. That way, you get the development of those textures, which is really good.” Ken Thomas doesn’t recall any suggestion of Newman’s inadequacy: “No, I thought he was a brilliant vocalist. The way he put those lyrics over was very, very special.” As for Thorne, he considers the double-tracking simply one of the many creative decisions taken to give the recording a unique dimension: “It seemed to me (us?) that the quality of the vocals should be otherworldly, not in the same sonic space as the track—and therefore more startling.”

  “Lowdown”

  There’s a lot of tenderness, even though he’s shouting, “the smell of you.”

  Graham Coxon

  When “Lowdown” appeared on the Roxy compilation, detractors considered its crawling pace decidedly un-punk. But compare it with some of that record’s faster tracks, by the likes of Slaughter & the Dogs and Eater, and there’s little argument as to whose work has aged better.

  “Lowdown” remains a favourite of Thorne’s: “It has the towering authority that came across on the Roxy tapes. If it derives from anywhere, it might be from the Velvets, but Wire certainly took things a stage further, even at that point.” In Thorne’s view, much of that Velvets vibe stems from Grey’s drumming: “This is where Robert’s at his best. He’s caught that obsessively-focused, junked-out feel, just ploughing straight ahead, oblivious to everything else. Of course, such solid power doesn’t always come from chemical additives.”

  Colin Newman’s customised 1977 Pink Flag white label. Courtesy Colin Newman.

  It’s not only Thorne who rates the track. “‘Lowdown’ was probably my favourite Wire song. It might still be,” says Steve Albini. “It was out of place at the time. It seemed like an odd kind of music for a band like that to play. I liked all their fast, energetic stuff, but ‘Lowdown’ seemed wilful rather than automatic. A lot of the faster stuff seemed like it might have been spontaneous, but ‘Lowdown’ seemed like a bigger and weirder idea.” Henry Rollins sees part of the song’s effect as intrinsic but also thinks its placement increases its power: “The tracks that stood out to me were ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’ and ‘Lowdown.’ They sequence well together, and they’re very stark but impactful, basically how the entire record is.”

  Gilbert describes “Lowdown” as “a heavy object” and considers it one of Pink Flag’s more significant tracks, a distillation of Wire’s aesthetic. Newman agrees: “It’s big, serious and meaningful, and it sounds heavy; the structure of it builds up. It’s a piece of classic Wire. It’s got all the elements: insistent guitar; deep, throbbing bass; insistent rhythm.” “Lowdown” forms a trilogy with “Reuters” and the title track, each of them taut, mi
nimalist exercises steeped in dread and menace. The lyrics resonate with the music’s numbed, repetitive drone. Grey’s unwavering beat and Gilbert’s circular riffing lock the song into an unchanging present moment, and the words depict a regimented quotidian existence in which detail and difference become barely perceptible (“another cigarette, another day, from A to B, again avoiding C, D and E”) and the only future prospect is death (“relegation, the big E”).

  Although the music is bleak and aspects of the lyrics complement that sound, the track also displays Wire’s penchant for contrasting the feel of the music with the mood of the words. Lyrically, it’s partially optimistic, something that’s often overlooked. As Lewis told the NME in December 1977, “Everybody put a really doomy slant on it, but…it was a hopeful song when I wrote it.” Today, he still stresses this: “It’s about trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Indeed, some facets of the words struggle against the music’s hypnotic inertia. Whereas the music appears to preclude forward motion, the lyrics offer the possibilities of imagination, movement and progression: “The time is too short but never too long, to reach ahead, to project the image, which will in time become a concrete dream.” As the music reaches a rare level of intensity, suggesting a surge of energy, the words emphasise “rising to the surface.” Lewis ponders the big existential questions but does so playfully with an extended metaphor interweaving music and football (“E is where you play the blues, avoiding a death, is to win the game to avoid relegation, the big E”).