Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  “Mr Suit”

  “Mr Suit” is one of the very best punk fuck you songs.

  Jon Savage

  The Newman-penned “Mr Suit” is among the album’s more conventionally structured numbers, with verses and choruses, albeit highly condensed. Newman’s at his belligerent best, and there’s definitely something in his delivery presaging US hardcore’s vocal style. “Mr Suit” is Wire’s “White Riot.” Like the Clash song, it’s a rather moronic shout-along; unlike the Clash song, it’s funny.

  Unusually for Pink Flag’s tracks, the word “I” is prominent, starting three of the opening verse’s four phrases: “I’m tired of being told what to think, I’m tired of being told what to do, I’m tired of f[uckin]g phonies, that’s right I’m tired of you.” By the second verse, although apoplectic, Newman still manages one of punk’s funnier rhymes: “You can take your f[uckin]g money, and shove it up your arse, ’cos you think you understand, well it’s a f[uckin]g farce.”

  The song has many elements popularly ascribed to punk: it’s angry, alienated, energetic and confrontational and, within its own parameters, rejects societal norms and materialistic definitions of success. It stresses boredom—the singer’s “tired of” his well-dressed antagonist. The denunciation of this “phony” ties in with punk’s paradoxical demand for authenticity, and the song reduces everything to binary terms, to a stereotypically punk conflict between us and them. With the possible exception of the “arse”/“farce” couplet, “Mr Suit” could have been by any of Wire’s comic-strip contemporaries. It’s also the only Pink Flag track prefaced with a standard one-two-three-four count. (The Manchester Square demo is even more straightforwardly punk. Delivered at a relative trudge, almost like a football-terrace sing-along, it’s introduced by Newman’s barked, thinly disguised count-in, MIS-TER-SUIT-YEAH!)

  Surely “Mr Suit” was Wire in comedy mode, mocking the ’77 zeitgeist? Apparently not. “It was the most punk of the tracks,” says Lewis. “It has an obviousness to it.” It might then seem strange that “Mr Suit” made it onto Pink Flag. Wire shunned anything with the odour of familiarity and, above all, were adept at avoiding clichés, especially those emerging from punk. After Gill’s departure, they’d periodically expunged material no longer deemed appropriate to their mission, but “Mr Suit” survived. Newman regards it with both embarrassment and amusement: “It’s not the strongest track on the album,” he ventures euphemistically. “I wasn’t 100% sure why we needed to have it on the record. I think Mike wanted it on because he had this idea of the stereo chorus with ping-pong vocals.” Whether or not Thorne instigated its inclusion, he’s fond of that aspect: “The backing vocals—the ‘no-no-no-no-no-no Mr Suit’—were quite entertaining to get together. You had to try singing on the off-beat.” Ultimately, while Newman concedes, “It’s a bit rubbish, really,” Lewis begs to differ: “I thought the rhythm section were rather good!”

  In 1977, several critics dismissed the track precisely because it rehashed what had already become cartoon punk. ‘“Mr Suit’ is an irritatingly conventional punk rant,” moaned Melody Maker’s Chris Brazier, who had no sense of humour. Record Mirror’s Barry Cain complained, “Christ, surely we ain’t endured the summer of ’77 to suffer such shit lyrics.” Still, the humour wasn’t lost on Wire. Gilbert comments: “Sometimes songs would emerge that made us laugh because they were so absurd. They might be verging on punk orthodoxy, but they amused us.” Grey, too, saw the funny side: “I just liked playing ‘Mr Suit,’ but it was a bit of a joke.” The track works best when taken in that spirit.

  Lewis explains the song’s staying-power, compared with similarly inclined tunes from ’77 that we now laugh at, not with. “I don’t know that Colin meant to parody anything, but I think it became parodic.” Perhaps Wire’s in-built detachment gives the song a parodic edge, although Newman had nothing of the sort in mind. His subject was an individual who’d incurred his wrath: “It was about someone Wire ended up working with later on. The reason I was pissed off was because girl #1 in ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ was impressed by him, and I felt, ‘How can you be so impressed with someone just because they’ve got a suit on?’ So it’s actually a love song in reverse.”

  Another comedic element, in hindsight, is EMI’s censoring of Pink Flag’s original inner sleeve: the word “fucking” is written as “f*****g,” to protect the sensitive punk record buyer. (The “fuck” in “Field Day for the Sundays” met the same fate. The “arse,” though, went untouched.) This seems almost quaint now, and, as a document, the printed lyrics enhance the parodic air—as if the band had deliberately suppressed the words, coyly drawing attention to the song’s shocking nature. Parody or not, the track bestowed on Thorne a badge of punk honour: “The album was released in Australia with a Not Suitable for Children sticker. The line ‘You can take your fucking money and shove it up your arse’ provoked disapprobation in Australia of all places. I was very pleased.”

  The track remains one of Jon Savage’s favourites: “Except for the wonderful ‘Mr Suit,’ Wire didn’t really do fuck you songs. It’s very entertaining; it still makes me laugh. You could easily take ‘Mr Suit’ as a very angry song, but it’s howlingly funny.”

  Despite its simplistic, superficial quality, “Mr Suit” features a vocal part that both encapsulates the song’s identity and mocks it: after the second chorus, there’s some imbecilic mumbling, as if mimicking the song’s brainlessness. “It was Mike, Graham and myself,” remembers Newman. “Mike was into us making our own sound effects (hence the ‘radio’ on ‘Reuters’). The stupid voices on ‘Mr Suit’ end up being just another layer subverting any seriousness it might have had once.”

  Like several Pink Flag tracks, “Mr Suit” enjoys a warped relationship with musical forebears: Newman calls it “a charming folk ditty,” joking that it has roots in a compressed and accelerated skiffle rhythm. His unlikely model is Lonnie Donegan’s “Cumberland Gap.” Lewis, however, reckons it owes more to the Skiffle King’s version of “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Over Night).”

  “Strange”

  One was keen for the music to have a menacing aspect to fit pretty literally to the words.

  Bruce Gilbert

  Somewhere between “Roadrunner” at walking pace and “Sister Ray,” “Strange” originated with Bruce Gilbert, who generated the words and riff. This track foregrounds his gravitation towards the uncanny and his desire to push material to the point where it becomes transformed beyond recognition.

  According to Gilbert, “Strange” is a song about “paranoia.” It builds incrementally, out of an almost halting, faltering riff, to showcase his characteristically dense major-chord style, its heavy, brutal tone rendered all the more potent by the layering of guitar tracks. Written at home on an acoustic guitar, “the first and only time,” Gilbert recalls, “the riff was something I had floating about. It happened very quickly. Obviously, its origins lay somewhere in the Velvet Underground.”

  Part of the track’s charm for Thorne was the feel of things coalescing naturally: “There are double-tracked guitars all the way. There are a lot of rough edges, and very deliberately so: the way we are. Just the way it picks up at the start—thunk, thunk—that was the live guitar that Bruce laid down before Robert picked up; then Bruce, for the second—overdubbed—guitar, just joined in and felt his way. You get the sense of two people picking their way towards a confluence rather than just precisely-produced heavy-metal guitar. When you get that sort of coincidence, starting apart yet coming together, it becomes very exciting. It’s the tension. It’s perfect in ‘Strange.’”

  Thorne outlines the technical side of Gilbert’s performance: “This was more difficult to play than it sounds. The guitars were overdriven, probably as much as any I’ve ever recorded. To get distortion you raise the preamp gain (and take down the output level) so that you overdrive the input to the second stage.” Inevitably, this increased the possibility of error, something Thorne embraced: “At t
hese settings it’s very hard to control, because if you lose your grip on a chord, other noises will be amplified massively. There are a few little squeaks in there: the sound of the string escaping from the finger. That’s the price you pay for that big, creamy sound, although such a lapse from perfection is agreeably human. It’s so turgid. It’s lovely.”

  The track is fleshed out with some of the record’s most unusual textures. An unnerving high-pitched tone comes in at 1’30”, initially repeating until 2’00”. This again highlights Thorne’s eagerness to incorporate “errors” originating beyond the frame of the conscious creative process. He demystifies the sound: “It’s just a ping on the guitar. Originally, it sounded a little bland and ordinary, so I thought, ‘Why don’t we make a really long tape-delay loop?’ which ended up being several feet long. It was stretched between two tape machines and wound around a number of other things, including a door handle. The wobble in it was because of its length—it kept snagging, and would go doiinnng. That was quite charming.”

  The weirdness is heightened by a flute section beginning at 2’33”. “I was very suspicious when Mike suggested having a flute,” remembers Gilbert, reservations shared by Lewis, who felt rock flute was a crime “we could get burned for,” belonging in “the land of Jethro Tull.” To Gilbert, though, “It became clear that Mike was familiar with avant-garde stuff and that he was interested in using it quite differently. I thought that was great.”

  Thorne explains: “It was for, I think, 12 alto flute lines played flutter-tongue and scored a semitone apart. It’s known as a tone cluster. Kate Lukas—my flute teacher—came and played. As well as being a professor at the Guildhall, she was playing in new music ensembles around London at the time: edgy art music. The challenge for her was getting it to sound like a cluster, maintaining the same tone and strength consistently through all 12 lines so that it comes out just sounding like one big coherent blob. It’s a tribute to her skill that it comes out sounding solid as one sound, as opposed to a bunch of flutes—which is what it would have been if I’d played it.”

  Lukas’s flute and the renewed eerie looping tone combine at 2’50”, joined at around 3’25” by a cascade of tapping as Gilbert’s guitar decays. This outro is one of the more eccentric framing devices, originating on the margins of the studio. Thorne was the instigator: “The banging at the end is my hammering on the fire escape with drumsticks. It was at the end of a long day of very intense recording. I went and banged on the fire escape’s wood frame, having found some sonorous places to hit, and then we took, I think, three ‘performances.’ I played all the way through to the end of the 24-track master, which had been cut to leader tape. The very last hit is where the leader tape closed down recording. It was the perfect accident, that closing rhythm. They told me afterwards that they thought I’d really lost it. I think I had some justification at the time that’s remembered less well than the gesture itself. Somebody trying to get out, maybe.” Listening to the recording, Wire’s percussion expert Grey notes, “The last hit is on a fire extinguisher.”

  This willingness to accommodate ludic components thrown up by the recording environment underscores Wire’s affinity with Eno’s working methods. As Russell Mills observes, “A link between Eno and Wire is using the studio as an instrument—just playing with stuff, seeing what happens. That goes back to art school and Dada, taking one thing and putting it next to a disparate thing and seeing a third narrative appear. They did that instinctively.”

  “The words came very quickly,” recalls Gilbert. “There were a couple of extra verses, but it seemed that I was overcomplicating it.” His lyrics are no less oblique than Lewis’s, but whereas Lewis tends towards ellipsis and discontinuity, juxtaposing jarring images and ideas, Gilbert achieves the odd and unexpected by different means. “Strange” contains a more substantive narrative, and the lyric is relatively seamless, albeit highly reduced. There’s the essence of a story, and the words make literal sense, but crucially, the ultimate referent is absent: it’s unclear what’s happening or has happened. It’s simply implied by the response of the song’s character, who doesn’t, or can’t, understand the mysterious events on a rational level. “There’s something strange going on tonight, something going on that’s not quite right, Joey’s nervous and the lights are bright, there’s something going on that’s not quite right. There’s something going down that wasn’t here before.” This embodies Gilbert’s pursuit of otherness, the words revisiting his childhood experience of narrative. In this case, it’s deeply menacing, with the threat of death itself present.

  “Strange” is quintessential Wire: rather than mirror the world, it creates a world. We’re inside Joey’s head. (Gilbert chose “Joey” as a universal name.) The song is an interior landscape, a psychodrama: the tension and uncanniness of the music and the paranoia of the lyrics all reflect Joey’s perceptions. Wire’s world is generally perceived by a fractured consciousness as its narrators aren’t reliable, omniscient or stable; unconscious processes are as significant as conscious processes, as Newman’s “Surgeon’s Girl” attests. “Strange” also privileges the unconscious—emphasising things felt to be awry by the protagonist, who can’t rationally articulate what these feelings mean. While punk’s consciousness was essentially Romantic, Wire’s aesthetic was already post-punk. Punk’s voices were fixed, recognisable selves, engaged in an antagonistic relationship with the world. Notwithstanding numbers like “Fragile,” Wire’s perspective is more complex and fragmented—a postmodern consciousness.

  “Strange” also contains another instance of Newman improvising lyrics for structural purposes, interjecting “Be Brave! Be Brave!” at 1’42”. There’s a thematic logic: ‘“Joey’s nervous’ so he’s got to be brave,” Newman explains. At the same time, it’s functional. “It also counts as a one-two-three-four into the next section.”

  “Fragile”

  Newman: It’s very Bob Dylan, very Ian Hunter.

  Lewis: I always thought it was a bit more like a Rod solo record.

  Newman: It’s not as good as “You Wear It Well.”

  Lewis: But better than “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?”

  Wire’s decision-making process was often perverse. They tended to opt for courses of action that bucked expectations; paradoxically, the most expected options (and therefore the least expected for Wire) sometimes turned out to be what Wire pursued. The sequencing of “Fragile” after “Strange” is a case in point. Placing the record’s most delicate, melodic, straightforward song after the weighty, riffcentric otherness of “Strange” would be an obvious thing for Wire to do. So they did. It works perfectly.

  Newman remembers “Fragile” being a topic of conversation between Wire and the late Tony Wilson: “The first thing he ever said to the band was, ‘Can you play “Fragile” for an old hippie?’ To which there was only one answer, of course, which was fuck off!” Wilson’s backhanded compliment was on the mark: the track’s clean, jangly guitars gave it a retro flavour. Newman believes “it was the closest we came to a trad rock song.”

  Musically, “Fragile” holds to rock orthodoxy, and its lyrics follow suit, as the title’s appropriation of a prominent word in the chorus suggests. On “Brazil,” Lewis twists a worn-out theme, but “Fragile” is an uncomplicated, standard expression of unrequited love and vulnerability. The language stays well within the tradition of nineteenth-century literary modes. This is evident in the modest example of synaesthesia as Lewis’s lyric blurs sensory perceptions, connecting feelings and colours (“Filter emotions of green, cowardice gives blue”). Beyond this specific trope, a broader Romantic tone dominates. The words address the senses and emotions rather than reason and intellect, and the lyrical voice is tormented by his/her muse. There’s a rather conventional opposition between “I” and “you,” the “you” inflicting pain and the “I” suffering. Alongside many of the other tracks, the lyrics are uncompelling because they’re rather maudlin and self-dramatising. Obviousness of this kind is unbe
coming of Wire. Even so, this is an excellent pop song—one, like “Mannequin,” that anticipated a vein of ’80s melodic indie rock.

  Recognising the heartfelt nature of Lewis’s words, Newman was unusually hands-off: “I sometimes took liberties with Graham’s texts, but it was absolutely important on ‘Fragile’ that I didn’t. He’s laying himself bare, and you don’t trample on that.”

  “Mannequin”

  I was never very keen on “Mannequin” and “Fragile,” although I could appreciate the prettiness of them, their attractiveness.

  Bruce Gilbert

  “Mannequin”—which Newman feels owes something to the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Shake Some Action”—forms a diptych with “Fragile.” Aside from their melodic and rhythmic likeness, their similarity derives from what they conspicuously lack: Gilbert’s dense guitar sound. “I’m sure I played the guitar on ‘Fragile’ and probably ‘Mannequin,’” says Newman. “Bruce likes the heavier kind of thing. He likes to get a big, belting tone. ‘Fragile’ and ‘Mannequin’ had to have a more conventional quality, a lighter tone. If it had been all distorted guitars, it would’ve sounded a bit stupid.” Gilbert agrees: “I ended up doing the big, loud songs, with what you might call powerchords—just enforcing the chord without strumming.”

  There’s no definitive answer to who played what on these numbers since recollections are uncertain. However, comparing the demos and the completed tracks supports the notion that Gilbert was involved at first but ceded primary guitar duties to Newman. The May and August recordings of these numbers bear Gilbert’s fingerprints: the tone is thicker and heavier, and they lack the lightness-of-touch characterising the final versions.

  Whereas “Fragile” and “Mannequin” called for Newman’s sound, proficiency was also an issue. Gilbert acknowledges, “We rarely played ‘Fragile.’ I don’t think we could do it justice, or I couldn’t play it. I think I had several attempts, but I just couldn’t do it justice—that’s probably more like it. Colin had to play both of them in the end because I just couldn’t get my head around it, or at least not efficiently enough for it to be convincing. I might have put some crash chords on ‘Mannequin’ or done a very basic rhythm track, but that’s another one with too many minor chords.”