Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  The tension between lyrics and music here may have been accidental. Newman’s rendering of Lewis’s words often produced unexpected, unintended results, and “Lowdown” offers an amusing example. Newman misinterpreted Lewis’s text: “I thought the words meant ‘that’s the low down,’ like ‘I’m feeling low down’—that’s how I interpreted it, so that’s why it’s all really doomy. I didn’t understand it as ‘I’m giving you the lowdown,’ which I might have taken differently.” Nevertheless, Newman also says the dark, heavy tone was already in place in the tune, which he conceived as an exercise in deconstructed funk: “There’s an opposition already set up. ‘Lowdown’ was like, OK let’s take politely funky music and turn it on its head. If you speed it up, it’s a classic funk riff. Slow it down and it’s grinding and evil and nasty.”

  If Newman misinterpreted Lewis’s lyrics, he also failed to read them in their entirety: “It misses two verses because I never turned the piece of paper over.” Rather than reject this unwittingly abbreviated version, Wire allowed the error to stand—demonstrating their willingness to embrace accidents. That inclination towards the random is also evident in Newman’s construction of a minimalist refrain by arbitrarily selecting a phrase for repetition, a technique he used throughout Pink Flag: “Graham was amazed that I’d put everything in the wrong place and managed to get a chorus out of what he hadn’t intended.” It wasn’t uncommon for Newman to alter Lewis’s texts: “I think Graham felt I was taking liberties [with his words], and then, with hindsight, he realised that, actually, that was another artistic contribution. People would say, ‘Oh, the lyrics are like cut-ups,’ and sometimes they’d appear like cut-ups because of the way I was phrasing them and putting them together—I wasn’t paying much attention to what they actually meant, because I didn’t really care that much what they meant.”

  Lewis views Newman’s adaptation and delivery of words Newman himself didn’t write as one source of the sense of distance in Wire’s work: “It gave things an interesting voice, which felt more separate and objective. It gave things an interesting swerve…a cold-bloodedness. Being removed and slightly apart, it makes the listener ask, ‘Does the singer even know what he’s on about?’”

  Graham Coxon ventures a curious reading of “Lowdown,” identifying an affective depth often overlooked in Wire. Newman’s vocals, according to Coxon, contribute an “emotional, feminine” nuance rare in punk: “Colin delivered it even with that voice of his. You see a vulnerability in this insane anger or desperation. There weren’t an awful lot of groups avoiding cynicism to reveal themselves as emotional people and to have what might be perceived as poofy sentiments—a bit jessie, not really masculine.”

  “Lowdown” still makes Thorne chuckle: “It was always hard to contain the laughter when Colin would go, ‘That’s the lowdown,’ as Graham would be winding him up. At the end of the track it collapsed into laughter, so we had to overdub that last line—you hear a different vocal sound on the ‘that’s the lowdown’ that closes the piece. It’s a very heavy, very brutal piece, but it didn’t stop us having a real laugh while we were making it.”

  During “Lowdown,” Thorne also played timekeeper for one of Newman’s rare guitar parts: “Colin played the solo. The structure isn’t 4s and 4s and 4s; it just went the way it did on the backing track, intuitively. I have a painful physical memory: I had to cue him on his overdub, and I was counting the bars, both of us hanging on for dear life with the irregular structure. I remember having to mimic exaggerated downstrokes to cue him. I woke up the following morning with a painful shoulder because it took quite a while. Since Colin was playing the actual guitar, he must have been even more sore than I was.”

  “There’s loads of detail around counting in Wire,” says Newman. “Where I say, ‘that’s the lowdown’ in the middle is the one-two-three-four count to bring everyone back in for the second half.” However, he now also hears a structural flaw: “There are two bars where we’re not doing anything. I wonder why we left them in.” Grey has reservations regarding part of his own performance—the shaker sound halfway through. “Maracas! Shoot the producer, that’s all I can say,” he laughs. “That’s the only thing that makes Pink Flag sound a bit naff! Mike wanted a different percussion sound on just about every track.”

  “Start to Move”

  There’s the danger of a bit of naked emotion coming through.

  Mike Thorne

  Lewis connects “Start to Move” to spring 1977, when things started coming together for Wire: “It’s about the feeling you get when your life’s changing and yet the lives of people you’ve been close to aren’t changing.” The lyrics evoke a youthful embrace of movement, energy and excitement. A playful tone creeps in as the words veer from sense to nonsense, linked by association: “Start to move, time at hand, bird in hand, no bush but trees thicken, which now, rooster or chicken.” Although “rooster or chicken” picks up on the “bird in hand” phrase, meaning is subordinate to the pleasure of the rhyme.

  In contrast with the energetic, upbeat music, the lyrics’ overall flavour is bittersweet and perhaps even melancholy, as they negotiate transformation and development. The last line highlights a tension between moving ahead and abandoning the familiar (“Please believe me, I still do care, please believe me, I’m just not there”). The song’s conflicted perspective also shows in the jarring images of decay and stagnation (“Leave the past, feel the wrench, smell the stench, was good, but flesh soon rots”). This implies a need to break ties in order to grow, while also alluding to Wire’s relentless pursuit of the new.

  Notwithstanding Newman’s belief that Thorne underestimated his and Lewis’s voices, the producer cites “Start to Move” as an example of their combined vocal strength: “They had nicely contrasting voices, so when they sang together, Graham’s deep, warm voice complemented Colin’s fairly reedy, harder sound.”

  “Brazil”

  It was called “Brazil” because of the rhythm, because it’s like Sérgio Mendes—but the connection with Sérgio Mendes is pretty slim.

  Colin Newman

  When you ask artists to choose a favourite track by their band, it would be reasonable to expect each to select something showcasing his/her own talent. Grey’s pick of Pink Flag’s 21 tracks is the 41-second “Brazil.” Typically, he chooses it not because of the prominence of his role, but because it captures his sense of Wire’s identity: “I like the sound. I like the rhythm of it. It motors. I like the arrangement. It’s short. It’s snappy. It’s humorous. I like the marching at the end where it’s just snare drums and ‘leftrightleftrightleftright, salute.’ It reminds me very much of the ’70s and playing it in the set. It sounds like Wire.”

  As with many Wire songs, the title is less than straightforward. “It hasn’t got a lot of samba in it,” explains Grey, “but at the time we thought, ‘This is very Latin, very Brazilian.’ It was a bit of a joke to call it ‘Brazil.’” Although Wire’s humour stayed mainly offstage, early performances of “Brazil” involved a comic element, as Newman remembers: “I used to have some maracas, and I’d frantically shake them and throw them away after about two seconds.” Lewis attributes the idea to Gilbert: “A typical Gilbert absurdity. It’s called ‘Brazil’—well, in that case, let’s have some maracas. Let’s push it off the cliff.”

  “Brazil” is a quintessential Wire miniature, without superfluous gestures. “It just has very bare bones all the way through,” says Thorne. Newman expands on its frugal economy: “There’s not a wasted bar. Everything’s edited to the bone. It does the thing it does: it starts, does the little intro, does the vocal, does the vocal changes and then stops. There’s no spare bits.” Lewis concurs: “There was no development of the baroque.”

  The structure is unusual. Wire delighted in repetition, but on “Brazil,” just when the listener expects repetition, there isn’t any: the nine-second lead-in is reprised at the conclusion of the first lyric section (“nothing left at all”), raising expectations of a s
econd verse. Instead, the song simply moves on to the quirky outro (“leftrightleftrightleftright, salute”). Even in its highly reduced form, this is another track that plays with the frame—here in the distinctive closing section. “It’s a good example of making beginnings and endings special,” remarks Lewis, “the way the words make a really good arrangement.” Originally, this ending was purely functional. Often on Pink Flag, devices remain intact that served to structure the piece and enable the band to play it. As Lewis observes, “It was us developing our way of signposting what it was that we were doing, in order to get that precision. It was built-in, but it wasn’t obvious. You didn’t go, ‘Right, one-two-three-four stop!’” For Newman, this signposting was vital: “We’d come from being pretty free-form with George to these highly structured pieces. If I wasn’t playing guitar, it had to be right, otherwise I wouldn’t know where to sing. There had to be a firm structure, and that then became in-built.”

  Despite the tendency for Wire’s lyrics and music to be at odds, “Brazil” provides an example of how that tension can be resolved. Against the grain of the cheery, buoyant rhythm, the lyrics are snide and mocking, but eventually it’s as if the words give up signifying altogether, surrendering themselves to the bouncy, tick-tock sound. The section, “I’m right…there’s nothing left at all” is whittled down to left and right, which combine to mirror the music’s closing section.

  While the Ramonic influence chiefly concerned speed, “Brazil” is the track Newman and Lewis consider closest to the Ramones in broader terms. “This is the one that sounds most like the Ramones,” says Lewis. “It’s a love song that’s very much of that tradition but twisted so that it doesn’t quite add up.” Whereas the Ramones’ love songs were, at heart, conventional, Wire’s were generally arch. Lewis’s lyrics rush through a series of romantic platitudes—“It’s true darling, I’ll walk you home, I’ll be your date forever, I love you girl”—culminating in a grandiose but meaningless declaration of commitment: “I love you, until they split the atom” (the atom was split in the 1930s). The song swiftly moves on to recycle the cliché of lovers whose world ceases to exist when they’re apart (“when you’re gone”—or as Newman actually sings it, “when I’m gone”—“there’s nothing left at all”). At this point the track, reflecting that notion, marches itself out of existence with its “leftrightleftrightleftright” conclusion.

  For Newman, the track’s brevity marks it as uniquely Wire: “It’s got a riff intro, going down to two chords for the verse and that one held chord for the chorus: had it been longer, it could have been a Ramones piece. But our motorik is very different, as is the way the words have to fit into that. It would have sounded stupid if it had gone on and done another verse and another chorus.”

  “It’s So Obvious”

  I was sick and tired of what was passing as new, innovative music.

  Graham Lewis

  “Reuters” and “Field Day for the Sundays” were juxtaposed for contrast, but “It’s So Obvious” was sequenced after “Start to Move” and “Brazil” because of their kinship. “Those pieces belong together,” Thorne says. “It’s stuff like that that we talked about in my front room in Stockwell.” “Start to Move” and “It’s So Obvious” are cut from similar sonic cloth and also share a thematic thread, responding to punk’s cultural upheaval. “If ‘Start to Move’ has a melancholy feeling about things changing inevitably,” notes Lewis, ‘“It’s So Obvious’ is the getting on with it and actually enjoying what’s going on. It’s about the excitement.” However, Wire’s “getting on with it” and embracing change meant rejecting punk orthodoxy. This song captures those impulses. “It’s incredibly positive,” Newman proclaims.

  Boredom was one of the longest and most common words in British punk’s restricted vocabulary. The Adverts sang about “Bored Teenagers”; the Buzzcocks’ “Boredom” philosophised about ennui and the Clash gave things a cultural-political slant on “I’m So Bored with the USA.” Wire—ever the contrarians—sang about being bored with punk. “It’s So Obvious” gets at the overkill and ubiquity of the Spirit of 1977 (“it’s here, it’s there”) and articulates the idea that punk, despite its scorched-earth policy regarding the past, was getting stuck in the present and unable to move forward, not making good on its promises.

  Although “It’s So Obvious” targets banality and cliché, it’s framed with an ironic, hackneyed count-in, as Grey taps out one…two…one-two-three-four—something that could easily have been edited out in the final version.

  The lines “just think there’s more to come, hum hum hum hum, it’s so obvious” indicate boredom with punk’s growing uniformity and dearth of ideas. By rhyming “17+3 score” with “it must be more,” Lewis isn’t just devising a clever couplet that illustrates a recurring numerical fixation in his writing—this stubbornly convoluted way of saying ’77 distinguishes Wire from their contemporaries, signalling their attempt to find more possibilities in 1977. This formulation of the date embodies Wire’s creative process: it’s one of their original, if somewhat abstruse, reworkings of familiar ideas.

  Another subtle self-reference occurs when the lyrics express disappointment at the lack of imagination with which punk manipulated surface and spectacle. “It’s not just the colour, it must be more,” sings Newman and, for Wire, less is more. “It’s black, white and pink,” he later adds, alluding to the band itself. As Newman recalls, “The idea for our signature colours was that we should be black, white and pink because red was the colour of other punk bands.” Ultimately, whereas punk celebrates 1977, Wire “can’t wait for 78.” They’re also unprecedentedly direct at the conclusion, issuing an unlikely exhortation, urging listeners to think beyond punk’s limited 1977 mindset: “don’t just watch, hours happen, get in there kid, and snap them.”

  “Surgeon’s Girl”

  That was as fast as punk ever got.

  Mike Thorne

  Newman is typically noncommittal about his lyrics for “Surgeon’s Girl”: “I just do word association and stuff comes out, and it doesn’t normally make that much sense. If you want to find meaning, you’re perfectly welcome to, but there’s no attempt to give any. It’s sheer absurdity.” It doesn’t follow, however, that Wire’s lyrics aren’t worth analysing—but rather than pursue definitive readings of songs, it’s more fruitful to observe the processes by which Wire’s language works, the ways it constructs possible meanings.

  “Surgeon’s Girl” is a genuine surrealist exercise. From the start, it transports listeners to a bizarre parallel universe (“a surgeon’s world”). That world’s components are recognisable but connected in a seemingly illogical way as the song surges forward like a tongue-twister or a children’s rhyme: “Sitting in a surgeon’s world, as sturgeons will, a surgeon’s girl with me. Standing on a river bed, where weeds can be, I’m on my knee, to you.” (“Sturgeons” becomes “surgeons” in later reprints of the lyrics.) The apparently nonsensical flow of language and the arrangement of familiar elements in unfamiliar configurations suggests a dream. Dreams and their representation in language, far from being illogical, follow their own strict logic. The phrase “as sturgeons will” lightheartedly emphasises this, implying that this environment has its own norms and expected behaviours.

  The logic of the unconscious governs connections here: the song arises from Newman’s “associations”—his approximation of the free play of the unconscious. Words and ideas are linked not by common sense or the desire to convey specific meanings, but by associative relationships and phonetic similarities. The step from “surgeon” to “sturgeon” is a matter of one letter, and the monosyllabic “world”/“will”/“girl” echo each other aurally. In this dreamworld aquatic tropes and images of fluidity (“sturgeon,” “river bed,” “weeds,” “tuna fish”) are pervasive; “Surgeon’s Girl” seems to take up psychoanalytical theory’s connection of the unconscious with water imagery.

  For Newman, “Surgeon’s Girl” is “Pink Floyd, fast,” evo
king Syd Barrett-era work in its verbal surrealism and its other psychedelic touches. Like Barrett’s most memorable words, here Newman’s oscillate between oneiric whimsy and psychic unease. That darker tendency comes in the chorus, with the fevered repetition of “I’ve seen you and you see me”: a fragmentation of the self is suggested by the kaleidoscopic overdubbing of Newman’s vocals, out of sync, splitting him into different voices repeating the same lines. These voices blur self and other (“me” and “you”) as the words dissolve into babble. The culmination of the chorus, and the song, marks the self’s complete dissolution with Newman shouting, “can’t see me.” The warped Floydian psychedelia of the lyrics and the fragmented vocals is also audible in an eccentric ingredient contributed by Grey—his busy, rolling tom-toms. “It’s very psychedelic” says Lewis, although Newman isn’t certain the sound has travelled well: “I’m not sure now if the overdubbed tom-toms work 100%.”

  The minimal chorus (“I’ve seen you and you see me”) is one of Newman’s randomly constructed refrains: “I’m just picking out a line and repeating it ad nauseam until it’s meaningless.” This near-accidental chorus sums up his view of the song: “The correct response is laughter. The song’s funny in itself, not because it’s about something that’s funny: it’s a band playing as fast as they can, with some bloke shouting the same line over and over again.” Speed is indeed central to the effect. Two versions recorded in August at Riverside Studio are far slower, almost with a jolly bounce, but over the next month the pace increased considerably. Along with “12XU,” “Surgeon’s Girl” is Wire achieving terminal velocity. “It’s curious that when you go back to the Ramones’ recordings from the ’70s, you’ll find them slow, almost leaden in comparison,” says Thorne. “At these tempi, the group was hanging on for dear life.”