Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  Gilbert’s lesser role on these numbers also hinted at some early creative differences. “Bruce thought they were too wet,” says Newman, and the guitarist agrees: “With my hard hat on, I suppose I’d think that.” He accepts the songs’ merits but is ironic in his appraisal: “I think they’re—dare I use the word—beautiful, in comparison to the other tracks on the album? I can appreciate them on that level, but I always felt like it was another band.” Although these numbers didn’t fit with Gilbert’s idea of Wire, Robert Poss, a subsequent Gilbert collaborator and someone not averse to noisy experimentation, rates them amongst his Pink Flag favourites: “The ‘Fragile’-’Mannequin’ sequence always moves me, a bit the way certain Tom Verlaine songs do.”

  Gilbert had reservations regarding “Mannequin” because it was slated to be a single. If it were successful, he felt it would radically change how he saw the band developing. “I remember being vaguely embarrassed and nervous about it—thinking, ‘If this is a hit, the company will be pressuring us to do more.’ I certainly had no intention of being in a band for the rest of my life. Yes, you’ll get the house in the country. You’ll get this, that and the other, but, actually, if you want to do something else, people will always go, ‘You’re that bloke we saw on Top of the Pops!’ It sounds a bit pretentious and silly, but that’s the way I thought about it.”

  “Mannequin” is the clearest example on Pink Flag of Wire’s penchant for pitting the tone of the lyrics against the sound of the music. The words are aggressively negative. ‘“Mannequin’ was a very direct put-down of a friend’s boyfriend, somebody quite vicious,” explains Lewis: “You’re a waste of space, no natural grace, you’re so bloody thin.” And it doesn’t get any better: “You’re an energy void, a black hole to avoid, no style, no heart.” Despite expending this vitriol, the speaker amusingly assures his subject that the motivation for this depiction is “not animosity.” Lewis remembers the target of his spleen: “The person wouldn’t possibly have dreamt it could have been about him. That’s the kind of individual you’re dealing with here.”

  “Mannequin” is vocally inventive, with its arresting harmonies and interwoven melodic lines. Nonetheless, Newman is again unhappy with the handling of his voice. Above all, he disagrees with Thorne’s decision to enlist Gryphon’s Dave Oberlé to provide the train-whistle backing vocals. “I really don’t like Dave Oberlé’s ooohs. I would have preferred not to have that higher harmony. It just sounds a bit weird. I felt strange about having another person in to sing on it. Mike wouldn’t allow Graham and I to do the ooohs, because we weren’t good-enough singers.” Lewis differs: “Mike was absolutely right: I remember us trying!” The May 25 demo supports Lewis’s assertion since their attempted harmonies are dodgy. As elsewhere, Thorne doesn’t recall making decisions based on his judgement of their vocal skills: “I don’t remember competence being an issue. Dave, a very accurate singer, created a character in contrast to Colin and Graham’s earthy delivery. (They don’t play flute, either.)”

  Regardless of Newman’s belief that Thorne had reservations about his and Lewis’s abilities, the producer often gave priority to performances that felt right but weren’t expertly executed, over technically perfect performances. There’s an instance of this on “Fragile,” in Grey’s contribution, which Thorne values precisely because it was unorthodox: “There are examples in ‘Fragile’ of what technicians might deem a mistake, or a wrong direction. A conventional drummer might have been a little upset to play the patterns Robert was doing, but he was consistent. They really work, and they throw you off balance in a constructive way. It didn’t have to be ‘right,’ it just had to feel good. The best musicians take mistakes in their stride and incorporate them in what they do next.”

  “Different to Me”

  It’s like the trombone syndrome: certain words just don’t sound right.

  Graham Lewis

  “Different to Me” is unique in being the only original Wire song with lyrics entirely by a non-bandmember—in this case, Annette Green.

  Just as most punk bands had a song about TV, they usually had one about the urban experience. Punk was, at the outset, a metropolitan phenomenon and city life a popular topic. “Different to Me” is part of that dystopian tradition. While the phrase “the cancer in this city, has got to be terminal” sounds overdone, a rare instance of Wire emulating a punk style, elsewhere the tone is noticeably more introspective. Although the song revives the punk chestnuts of boredom and alienation, it doesn’t present an objectively observed social-realist landscape; instead, it projects feelings and obsessions onto the surroundings.

  “Different to Me” displays what would become a Wire signature, the inclusion of words uncommon in rock. Examples abound on Wire’s first three albums alone: “correspondent,” “relegation,” “becalmed,” “Plimsoll Line,” “prehensile,” “servile,” “gentile,” “inference,” “anaesthetised,” “denuded,” “silverfish,” “serpentine,” “filament,” “amphibious,” “calibrate,” “anatomical,” Nouvel Observateur, “precipitous,” noblesse oblige and “cartologist.” “Different to Me” contributes “sprat” and “mackerel,” hardly staples of the rock lexicon.

  These words, however, weren’t easy to incorporate. Newman sings, “I’d rather be a sprat than a mackerel,” with Lewis repeating the second fish’s name sotto voce. “I remember the mackerel taking a long time. It turned into an epic,” says Newman drily, referring to Lewis’s difficulties performing the word. “It generated amusement, and after a while it became totally ridiculous, trying to get the right mackerel,” recalls Lewis. “The longer it went on, the funnier it got. Once the hysteria breaks out, recording takes a lot longer than it needs to. It took an hour-and-a-half, spending a pound a minute doing take after take. In the end, we got the right one.” He blames Thorne: “When Mike would get the giggles, it was impossible; after that, everyone just cracked up every time.” Newman notes that despite all that effort, “You have to strain to hear it.” Lewis counters, “That’s why it was so difficult to do.” (On the May 25 demo, Wire land the mackerel in one take.)

  The mackerel line might have been a source of near-endless amusement for Wire, but others consider it one of the band’s most profound statements. Roger Miller, for instance: “‘I’d rather be a sprat than a mackerel, you can slip through the net’—to me, that’s a great line. It’s like something from Chuang Tzu: there’s different ways to avoid the traps and pitfalls that society has set up for you. Couple that with ‘no-no-no-no-no-no Mr Suit’ and it gave me something to hang on to.”

  “Champs”

  Everybody felt that it was about the punk time, but the actual inspiration was an interview with James Hunt.

  Graham Lewis

  The handclaps on “Champs” join other elements of Pink Flag highlighting Wire’s departure from 1977’s generic punk sound: the fire escape and the flute on “Strange”; the maracas on “Lowdown”; the güiro on “Three Girl Rhumba”; Oberlé’s harmonies and even a tambourine on “Mannequin.”

  Although there had clearly been a long tradition of rock and pop handclaps, “Champs” was the first UK punk number to feature them so prominently, occupying much of the number’s 1’46”. “I can’t remember whose idea it was,” says Thorne. “When things are working well, someone will come up with an idea and then someone else will bounce off it. So at the end, several people can have had a hand in it.” Lewis particularly enjoyed recording the clapping: “I remember it being really fun because I never realised how difficult it was to do. It was quite a long process. Our hands were red at the end of the day.”

  “Champs” is in the mould of “Start to Move,” “Brazil” and “It’s So Obvious,” again capturing the punk period’s excitement but expressing a restless need to charge ahead. While many songs by Wire’s contemporaries tended to dawdle, sounding comfortable and settled in 1977 (as “It’s So Obvious” emphasised), Wire were committed to moving forward as quickly as possible. The speed and bre
vity of these songs conveys that.

  There’s an intense, feverish quality to “Champs,” largely stemming from Grey’s insistent snare and the breathless urgency of the repeated expressions of ambition and desire (“the pace the pace”; “want more, want more”). That desire blurs with compulsion and obsession, something that’s accentuated with language stripped down to prioritise recurrent sounds over words themselves (“The speed, the need, the need to seed”). With its dromo-logical emphasis, this track could also be a suitably revved-up ode to punk’s drug of choice, and the rapid handclapping enhances the amphetamine rush. However, the song also blends its allusion to a pharmaceutical state with a literal experience of speed, drawn from a rather un-punk milieu: Lewis was thinking about Formula One driver James Hunt’s reflections on a racing colleague’s death. It blurs two very different worlds, with one meaning playing off the other. “’Champs’ has really good ambiguity,” says Lewis.

  “Feeling Called Love”

  It’s such a stupid song. I was amazed it made it onto the record. I didn’t think “Feeling Called Love” or “Mr Suit” were at all serious. How can they be on a record with something like “Reuters”?

  Colin Newman

  First cropping up on Garvey’s 1976 tape, “Feeling Called Love” is one of Newman’s earliest Wire songs. It’s Wire at their most direct and their most arch, the title neatly summarising that duality: it’s not a single word, love; rather, the title frames the word as a concept, categorising it as a “feeling” and emphasising its identity as a linguistic function (“called”). The title suggests that the topic is observed at a remove, not experienced directly. That tension between the thematic content and its mode of expression runs throughout.

  Lyrically, “Feeling Called Love” belongs to Newman’s romantically inspired Pink Flag suite: “They’re all about the same thing. It sounds tragically, tragically mundane: I got kicked out by my girlfriend and ended up in Wire, and the story between then and Pink Flag was me trying to figure out who I was going to be in a relationship with.” But whereas “Three Girl Rhumba” and the “love song in reverse” “Mr Suit” give little indication of their origins in Newman’s love life, “Feeling Called Love” is unambiguous: “It’s a very positive lyric. I was surprised such a thing existed.”

  Despite the heartfelt sentiments, Newman explains that the song was also “completely tongue-in-cheek.” He communicates this with some mock-dramatic and self-mocking phrasing, putting space between him and his subject matter: “I was actually in love with somebody, but you know British people still have a problem with love. You wouldn’t want to admit it in the pub to your mates. You’d say I’m in luuuurve—you’d make something out of it. It’s more like that.” The irony is also evident as Newman throws in some rockist gestures: an uh-huh and a “now” stretched into na-na-na-na-na. As the song swells towards its conclusion, rather sweet rock ‘n’ roll harmonies rise up, only to be nipped in the bud as the track promptly ends. Newman’s tendency to build distance into his delivery is a key to his individuality as a vocalist, an aspect of a broader rejection of “rock singer” conventions that gave him one of UK punk’s unique voices. In its 1977 context, his style was as distinctive as that of Lydon or Devoto, the era’s most memorable vocalists. Graham Coxon, for one, was fascinated by Newman’s “strange, demented voice,” which he found both unnerving and attractive.

  The music on “Feeling Called Love” mirrors that detachment of Newman’s vocals. Mostly, it’s a pastiche of despised rock ’n’ roll cliché, channelling “Louie Louie” via “Wild Thing.” To Newman, “It’s every three-chord rock song you’ve ever heard.” The opening has a perfunctory, here-we-go feel as the bass self-consciously leads off in an almost hackneyed, ascending fashion. It telegraphs the fact that guitars will join in, as they do, with an almost tired, going-through-the-motions lilt.

  “12XU”

  Colin did slightly overdose on the Southern Comfort—in the interests of lubricating his vocal chords, I’m sure… but he did get pretty pissed when he was supposed to be singing.

  Robert Grey

  Pink Flag’s closing number is Wire’s most iconic. The brief, spoken preface is another memorable example of their interest in framing. It was decided that Newman would introduce the song and that his comments would appear on the record. On the Roxy album, his intro had been, “This one’s dedicated to Lou Pineda… and it’s called…’12XU’!” Various accounts of the dedicatee’s identity have circulated over the years. According to Lewis, “This was not a guy. This was Luke and Ada, who ran the Italian greasy spoon we used when rehearsing in Stockwell. We used to chat. They were encouraging. They were virtually the only people who knew Wire existed, outside of family and friends.”

  But history is a series of competing narratives, and, during interviews for this book, bandmembers’ recollections of events and details regularly diverged. Here Newman’s version differs slightly. “There was a guy who ran the café near where we used to rehearse in Stockwell who spotted that we were obviously a band by the way we looked and behaved and used to semi-joke that he’d be our manager and make us ‘the next Beatles.’ Of course, he’d never heard a note, in fact virtually no one had heard a note. His name was Lou Panetta, but I got it wrong and called him Lou Pineda. People thought we were thanking ‘Lupin Ada,’ but we weren’t that poetic.”

  On Pink Flag Newman partially reiterates his Roxy intro, stating, “All right… ‘ere it is…again…and it’s called… ‘12XU’!” In doing so, he questions the song’s frame: a spoken introduction—which would traditionally be considered separate from the song and, generally, wouldn’t appear on a studio recording—becomes part of the recorded document. Additionally, like the “un-deux-trois-quatre” on “Surgeon’s Girl,” the opening of “12XU” played with the one-two-three-four convention. Here, though, the self-censoring phrase (from “one-two-fuck-you!”) was intended as a genuine count-in: “It’s a subverted one-two-three-four,” says Newman, “so I’m doing an introduction and a count-in.”

  The word again nods back to the Roxy recording, further manipulating the frame. Again broadens the concept of the track: it’s not merely a finished object created and performed solely for this record (and to be faithfully replicated in subsequent live performances). Rather, there’s a sense in which the instance of “12XU” on Pink Flag is part of a process—not a definitive version, but a performance with potentially multiple iterations. Thus, the track’s frame expands beyond Pink Flag.

  However, the again wasn’t intended as a reference to the earlier version. It was a wry indication of the number of takes attempted in the studio: Newman’s barely concealed snigger and his sarcastic stress on the “again” convey this. “The reason it was again was because it was about the 95th take,” he recalls. Throughout, Newman was enclosed in the vocal booth. “He did very well in the booth, his new environment,” says Thorne. “We’d noticed that a voice sounds clearer immediately after taking a sip of water, and he liked to get a little bit loose, so he also had his Southern Comfort with his water there. He’d emerge every so often—very frequently, in fact—for pees. At the end of the session he’d come out bleary-eyed. The results were great: strong and spontaneous.”

  Newman remembers some frustration with his bandmates’ inability to nail the song: “I was sitting in my little booth, boozed-up on Southern Comfort, thinking, ‘Why don’t they get on with it? It hasn’t even got any proper chords in it—it can’t be that hard!’” Grey responds: “We were searching for maximum expression to accompany you.” Newman’s not so sure now about the wisdom of imbibing during the recording: “By the end of the day I’d be completely pissed. It wasn’t a good idea.”

  Thorne has vivid memories of the session. “‘12XU’ is a real white-knuckle ride. It was marvellous. The new version had to be just so precise, to improve on the Roxy version (a pretty good performance in itself). I remember sitting at the desk and just focusing on nothing but—because if there was a mistak
e made, then I would have had to stop them immediately, because so much energy was being expended. None to waste. If I heard a mistake, I quickly had to judge if it was going to affect the final result, then make an executive decision: shall I let them go on the off-chance that this works in an unexpected way, or should I just stop them and conserve energy? I think it was five or six takes of this intensity before they got it (spectacularly). They didn’t stop. It’s clinically precise but had to complement the original feeling of people hanging on for dear life. That’s a feeling you strive for in music, that things might fall apart at any moment but, marvellously, when you hit the heights, they don’t.”

  In contrast with Thorne’s satisfaction, Newman is somewhat disappointed with the results. “It’s not the best rendition of the song. It’s a bit shaky. Rhythmically, it’s not as strong as it could be.”

  Possible imperfections aside, “12XU” is the fullest realisation of Wire’s reductionist aesthetic. In under two minutes it achieves an impressive dynamic range, simultaneously quiet and loud, compressive and expansive, taut and explosive, highly controlled and almost out-of-control. Newman describes it as a response to the problem, “How can you get to something which doesn’t have any rock in it, something that just doesn’t have any chords?” With “12XU” the solution involves paring down as many elements of the song as possible, yet leaving the idea of the song intact. It’s as if the track’s materiality is excised, but the central idea preserved. This process of pushing formal properties to their limits, yet retaining the original idea of the object, encapsulates Gilbert’s abstractionist tendencies. It’s not surprising that this should be another of his favourites—like “Pink Flag,” it “feels like Wire. It has an abstract quality: organised chunks of sound. It has that simplicity.”