The variant of minimalism here is different from that on “Field Day for the Sundays,” which is the product of miniaturisation; “12XU” is the product of abstraction. This is most striking in the song’s idiosyncratic guitar part, which has a curiously disembodied presence. It’s trimmed to a concise chukka chukka chukka—the paradigmatic Wire rhythm. This tense ghost riff is punctuated with a menacing, lurching ERR-ERR—not even chords but down- and upstrokes on open strings, “a real anti-music gesture,” enthuses Newman.
The lyrics undergo a similar process: there’s no fleshed-out narrative, only the song’s remains—a handful of words, elliptical and truncated but highly evocative. And if there’s a chorus, it’s a chorus without words, a volatile Ramones-style riff. Newman is explicit about the template: “This idea of going chukka chukka chukka—clipping the thing to the basic rhythm of it—then exploding into a punk rock parody on the chorus was very obviously meant to be like the Ramones.” (According to Lewis, however, the chorus is just the shouted phrase “one-two-X-U.”)
Although there were few words, they were actually a collaborative effort. “It was in a pub,” says Gilbert. “Quite a lot of things happened like that where a notebook was passed backwards and forwards: a lot of editing and eventually ending up with something more streamlined with contributions from Graham and me.” According to Lewis, “Bruce wrote the ‘kissing a man’ part, mine was ‘Saw you in a mag,’ ‘I got you in a corner (cottage)’ and ‘12XU.’” Newman remembers contributing “life’s a drag, give me a fag,” but it was promptly suppressed. “I think that subject was covered better in ‘Lowdown,’” jokes Lewis. Says Newman in his defence, “I was very, very unfiltered. I didn’t give a fuck about words. I’d sing any old crap.”
The queer coding of “12XU” is intriguing. It stems from the association between “saw you in a mag, kissing a man” and “got you in a cottage” (surely rock’s first use of that word as gay slang), which in turn resonate with the proud iconography of the album’s title and cover art, as well as the title’s phallic connotations. If the punk era in the UK had ushered in changes in terms of gender, sexuality wasn’t on the agenda. By 1978 Tom Robinson had recorded “(Sing If You’re) Glad to Be Gay,” but “12XU” is another matter. “12XU” presents a queer perspective in a simultaneously explicit and elusive lyrical fashion; the celebratory, transgressive nature of this perspective comes across boldly in the music with its interplay of tension and explosive, ecstatic release. “It has subterranean vogue. It’s voyeuristic and exhibitionistic at the same time,” Lewis remarks with pleasure. “It’s pretty damn potent!”
In spite of its opaque, compressed lyrics, “12XU” communicated a straightforward-enough message to Ian MacKaye, who covered it with Minor Threat: “’12XU’ is pretty direct! I interpreted that lyric as saying, ‘You’re out—you broke my heart, you made me angry, you’re out!’ I thought it was so great, being 18 or 19 and struggling with social interactions and romantic situations and having that sense of outrage when you felt betrayed by somebody.” MacKaye’s recollections also suggest that one Minor Threat fan grasped the gay connotations, albeit through a distorted process of cultural translation. “There was this kid who used to write to me. He was like a militant tough guy, and when he heard our version, he wrote me and said he thought it was so cool that I was singing about fag-bashing. I couldn’t understand what he was talking about. What he had heard was the line ‘smoking a fag,’ and he thought it meant ‘kill a gay person,’ and I was so appalled that he or anyone else would interpret that because it was something I would never, ever, ever do.”
Not making “12XU” the A-side of Wire’s first single strikes Lewis as a lost opportunity. “We were stupid to put out ‘Mannequin.’ It should have been ‘12XU’ We weren’t as smart as we thought.” Newman isn’t so sure: “It could have been more of a millstone around our necks.” Indeed, the track did become a burden: fans appropriated it as a punk anthem, reducing Wire’s diverse musical identity to an association with one song. Newman remembers, “You can almost chart the decline of ‘12XU’ in Wire’s set with the decline of punk in general. It became a self-parody because it was taken up by the punks. That was Wire for them—a classic punk song. After mid-’77, you couldn’t take ‘12XU’ seriously. It was a comedy number.” The band eventually dropped “12XU”: “There was a point when Wire hated ‘12XU’ and everything it stood for,” says Newman. Gilbert’s assessment is less harsh: “We never stopped enjoying it, but I think it became a bit of a cliché that people would be shouting for it all the way through a concert. It was a bit annoying, really.” Worse still, Newman recalls it attracting the wrong sort of people: “Sham 69 fans used to come just to hear ‘12XU.’”
Despite the track’s unwelcome appropriation and Wire’s resulting ambivalence towards it, the band delights in its iconic status. “It’s just so totally fuck-off cool,” raves Lewis, and “extremely funny,” adds Newman. The playful side of “12XU” led to its resurrection for Wire’s 1980 Electric Ballroom performance, immortalised on Document and Eyewitness. That album’s infamous version underlines the notion that “12XU” is a work-in-progress, approaching complete abstraction: although Wire played it, the record preserves only Newman’s introduction, the anticipatory chukka-chukka section and the final shouted title phrase, omitting most of the song and instead including a spoken snippet by associate Adrian Garston saying, “I don’t need to go to the Arctic to know it’s cold.” This implies it’s enough to have the idea of the artwork. That’s true of “12XU,” since the song (with which listeners are already familiar) has been reduced to a series of easily recalled ideas that are activated by the introduction alone. This destabilising combination of verbal commentary and art object has a long avant-garde history stretching from Duchamp to Magritte to Barbara Kruger to Damien Hirst. The Document and Eyewitness version transposed that idea to rock, impressing Robin Rimbaud: “The song’s introduced, but it doesn’t actually exist. I liked the fact that here was somebody playing with the presentation of the music.”
“12XU” is all about Wire’s “ensemble skills,” in Newman’s view. “’12XU’ isn’t about individual skills. How the group plays together is what creates the dynamic.” To him, the simple reproducibility of “12XU” epitomises Pink Flag’s practical user-friendliness. “It’s very readable. It’s not one of those records you listen to and think, ‘God, how did they do that?’” (Robert Pollard appreciated this transparency: “You can do it without being technically a great player.”) Lewis is especially proud of the album’s legacy as a basic blueprint enabling others to do it themselves. Crucially for him, it didn’t present itself as something to be duplicated but provided a general model for making music with limited means: “The best thing is when people say it changed their life. It’s fantastic to have made something that’s of use—not a glorification of itself. It became a useful thing.” Grey agrees: “People started groups on the strength of hearing early Wire. That’s a very encouraging, flattering thing, if people felt so strongly about it that it made them want to start playing. That’s a great compliment.”
7
Sooner Than Later the End Will Arrive
The writing of Pink Flag is still an issue. How do you do a band? Do you just split everything between the members at all times or is it skewed towards what one or two people do? There are different ways of looking at it.
Colin Newman
When a high-profile, commercially successful act covers a lesser-known artist’s song, or when that song runs in a television advertisement, the stakes are raised for the original writer. The author’s identity matters in terms of both simple kudos and financial reward. “Three Girl Rhumba” dramatised this in ways that had repercussions for Wire.
Although the group was well-remunerated by H&M and benefited somewhat from “Connection,” the consensus was that the sum agreed by Carlin for Elastica’s appropriation was unsatisfactory. “Carlin didn’t seem particularly bothered,” comments Bruc
e Gilbert.
The life of “Three Girl Rhumba” after Pink Flag appears to have been a factor prompting a rethink of the songwriting credits for the Wire 1977–1979 boxed set issued in 2006. For Pink Flag’s 1977 release, the credits had been divided equally. “A decision was taken that everyone could be signed to the publishing company, and we could credit everything four ways,” Newman explains. Gilbert recalls, “We carved Pink Flag out from months of rehearsing. We made the songs, and it seemed the fairest way of doing it.” By contrast, the writers’ names were specified on Wire’s next two albums. “Myself and Graham, who had also written most of the words, felt that we were under-credited,” says Newman. “That’s why we changed the writing credits on Chairs Missing and 154 on the original vinyl.” For the 2006 boxed set, Pink Flag’s four-way split was also revised along individual lines, and the bandmembers’ contributions were identified in slightly unconventional language: the division of labour was represented not with “music” and “words,” but with “melody” and “words.” Pink Flag’s new credits attributed “melody” to Newman for all tracks except “The Commercial”; he shares that credit with Gilbert on “Straight Line” and “Strange.” (Newman had intended to lay claim only to “vocal melody,” but during the boxed set’s preparation someone removed the word “vocal.”)
Thirty years after Pink Flag’s release, some comment on this rearrangement is an appropriate postscript because it concerns Wire’s creative process on that album and, indeed, the very nature of Wire. The matter of the credits was also the final straw for Bruce Gilbert, consolidating his 2007 decision not to “reengage” with Wire, having originally tendered his resignation and “removed myself” in 2004: “That came after I definitely decided I wouldn’t be involved anymore—but you can say it was a last nail in the coffin.”
“The other two records, OK,” concedes Gilbert, “but Pink Flag was carved out by the four of us—and it should always be expressed in that way. It wouldn’t have been that way without everybody’s concentrated input. Technically, you could go on forever talking about words, melody, riffs, editing of words or whatever. I was philosophically opposed to changing the credits because I thought that first record was the product of intense cooperation. I was very disappointed.”
As Newman recounts it, by 2006, “The original publishing split on Pink Flag seemed unfair to me, especially “Three Girl Rhumba,’ which had just been used in the H&M ad. The band got a pile of money, and that’s my words and my tune.” This had been a source of protracted dissatisfaction for Newman: “I felt for a long time very under-credited in terms of what I’d contributed. I didn’t play much guitar on Pink Flag, but they were all my parts. Bruce did bring something to it. For instance, the intro of ‘Reuters,’ the way the chords come crashing in or the way he played it. He very much added his own flair, but it was all specifically written.”
Newman accepts that it’s perhaps impossible to know whether listeners distinguish between the song as written and the song’s performance by a band. Still, he feels it’s important that he wrote whatever made the listening experience possible, regardless of how listeners derive their pleasure: “There are arguments that say it’s a band playing, and the dynamic of it certainly is very much about the band and how the band interprets the material. The band has a sound, but there’s a thing that gives the sound structure, and that’s called a song”.
Gilbert, however, reiterates the case for group authorship, emphasising that Pink Flag was a collective enterprise: “I think Colin felt it was some sort of weird injustice, that he wasn’t given recognition, because he generated quite a lot of the things—along with Graham, of course, initially. I don’t think he saw my point of view, which was that it’s symbolic. I guess he turned up some chords—a ‘vocal melody’ as he calls it—but, actually, it was hard-fought stuff. It had to be created and it could only be created by the four of us—we were unsophisticated musicians.”
While Gilbert underscores cooperative effort and rejects Newman’s position that the writing of the music basically is the song, he sometimes privileges the lyrics, subtly undermining his own assertion that collaboration was the essence of Pink Flag. For him, the words were, to a great extent, the heart of the songs, and the music followed from them: “Colin would have a drawer full of Graham’s proposed lyrics—texts—and the song was structured around the structure of the text. The content wasn’t something that particularly worried Colin. The text was the skeleton of the song; the music was filled in between the lines, like a colouring book.”
Newman dismisses this: “It’s a fallacy. I never wrote to the lyrics. I always wrote the tune first and got the lyrics afterwards. Always, because it’s a logical way for me to work. Getting the lyrics and stuffing them in—that’s where that style comes from. It wouldn’t have worked the other way around. They’d have been way more smooth if I’d started with the lyrics and tried to work around them. The lyrics were incredibly important, of course. We had words like no other band.”
Ultimately, Gilbert and Newman’s disagreement about Pink Flag’s genesis leads back to framing; it encapsulates the competing aesthetics running throughout the band’s work.
For Newman, the question of credit highlights a tension regarding the location of Wire’s creative core and the definition of its “work.” He believes his bandmates’ emphasis on extra-musical or performative elements denigrated his input: “I felt undervalued for many years. I’m the youngest, I’m writing a lot of the tunes and I’m the frontman, and so, naturally, I’d get a lot of attention. In any band that would cause friction because other people would think they deserve it as much or they think, ‘Why should he get all the attention? We’ve come with these fantastic concepts for the band that he hasn’t come with.’ Bruce’s line was always, ‘It’s all about the noise,’ which to someone who’s basically the songwriter seems like a big put-down.” The opposition of “tunes” versus “concepts” and “songs” versus “noise” is symptomatic of Newman’s and Gilbert’s diametrically opposed positions, both of which claim to identify the essence of Wire’s art.
The modified credits focus attention on the song as an end product of creative endeavour; they privilege the song as a discrete unit. Gilbert, conversely, doesn’t frame Wire’s work in terms of individual songs, seeing the band’s aesthetic practice as an open-ended, process-centred performance: to him Wire itself is the work of art, the “living sculpture.” This perspective prompts both frustration and genuine admiration on Newman’s part: “Bruce can come up with incredible leaps of the imagination. He really is an artist. He may think that the art isn’t even in the music, but when you’re talking about Pink Flag, 99.9% of people aren’t going to get what he’s on about. They’re going to understand that it’s a set of songs played by a band, that it’s an interesting punk rock record.”
Ken Thomas comments, “Bruce was always the guy. He understood what he was doing. Just playing one chord over and over—to him it was a piece of art.” Nevertheless, to emphasise Gilbert’s broader conceptualisation of Wire isn’t to suggest Newman is a philistine. As Thomas also notes, “Colin’s as arty as all of them, but he’s more down-to-earth.” Moreover, throughout Wire’s existence Newman has always stressed the band’s fine-art leanings. “Wire were two things at once,” he told Uncut in 2006, “a rock band and an art object.” However, there seems to be a fundamental difference between the ways he and Gilbert now frame Wire. Whereas Gilbert considers Wire a greater art project, which operates in rock and elsewhere, Newman now appears to espouse a more traditional view that assumes Wire is primarily a band, albeit a band whose refined sensibilities enable it to slip into the art world. “Why is Wire the art world’s favourite band?” asks Newman. “It’s not because it’s constructed like an art project.” He recognises the intersections with the world of art, but insists that Wire’s strength is being a rock band. “And it’s to some extent a pop group as well. That’s the nature of it. It can be art when we stand onstage and play be
cause of where we’re coming from.”
Appropriately for Wire, there’s no narrative closure, no definitive version of the band’s identity. One way of looking at the reworking of Pink Fla’s credits and Gilbert’s departure is that the “rock band” side of Wire’s personality has triumphed. Disagreements over credits are clichés as old as rock itself, and Wire’s implication in such a storyline situates them within that tradition. Nevertheless, it could also be argued that Gilbert’s withdrawal is a perverse way of reasserting Wire’s identity as a continuing, unpredictable process, a conceptual project belonging more to the realm of high culture.
Either way, Gilbert’s irritation is obvious with respect to the Pink Flag reissue in the 2006 boxed set, which features not only the new credits but also an essay by Newman making the case for the album’s status: “How does one describe reading somebody saying they invented everything, did everything? You think, ‘Well, I don’t buy that,’ I suppose history consists of people rewriting it. But one could get a bit upset about how this is now set in stone.” More playfully, Gilbert can see the credits and Newman’s accompanying booklet commentary as another unforeseen factor that keeps Wire an ever-evolving art object: “My absurdist head says, Well, that’s a hole Colin’s going to have to dig himself out of at some point.’ I have to say, I thought he’d dig a great big hole for himself. Schadenfreude took over.”
Wire's Pink Flag Page 15
