Wire's Pink Flag Read online

  Pink Flag

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  We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Continuum’s “33 1/3” series of books—Pitchfork

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  For a complete list of books in the series, see the back of this book.

  Pink Flag

  Wilson Neate

  2008

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

  80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038

  The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

  The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

  www.continuumbooks.com

  33third.blogspot.com

  Copyright © 2008 by Wilson Neate

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers or their agents.

  Cover art reprinted courtesy SonyBMG Music Entertainment

  Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer waste recycled paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Neate, Wilson.

  Pink flag / Wilson Neate.

  p. cm. — (33 1/3)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4411-7573-1

  1. Wire (Musical group).

  Pink flag. I. Title. II. Series.

  ML421.W58N43 2008

  782.42166092’2--dc22

  2008045097

  Contents

  How Many Seen or Heard

  Foreword: The Fragile Memories of a Schoolboy by Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner

  1. This Is Your Correspondent

  2. Pay Attention: We’re Wire

  3. This Is 77: Wire and Punk

  4. Think of a Number, Divide It by 2: Framing Wire’s Minimalism

  5. Plans Were Laid: Making Pink Flag

  6. God Those R.P.M.: Pink Flag Track by Track

  7. Sooner Than Later the End Will Arrive

  How Many Seen or Heard

  I’m indebted to Bruce Gilbert, Robert Grey, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman and Mike Thorne, who all submitted to repeated, extensive and often laborious interrogations over a period of several months, bearing up with good humour and patience. While this book wouldn’t have been possible without their cooperation, it inevitably reflects my own interpretations and perspective, which don’t necessarily correspond with theirs (which, in turn, often didn’t correspond with each other’s). During my research, I also had the opportunity to listen to Pink Flag both with the bandmembers (in London) and with their producer (in New York City). These were memorable and enormously informative experiences.

  Thanks to George Gill for an email that doubled as a cryptic account of his brief tenure in Wire and an invitation to go away and leave him alone.

  I’m grateful to the following interviewees and correspondents for sharing their thoughts on Wire and punk. In some cases, spatial considerations have meant that their words didn’t make the final cut: Steve Albini; Hugo Burnham; Cally Callomon; Graham Coxon; Andy Czezowski; Jim DeRogatis; David Dragon; Norm Fasey; Christian Fennesz; Nick Garvey; Jason Gross; Page Hamilton; Robert Hampson; Peter Hook; Richard Jobson; Matt Johnson; Barry Jones; Ian MacKaye; Glen Matlock; Ross Millard; Roger Miller; Russell Mills; Nick Mobbs; Pamla Motown; Dave Oberlé; Robert Pollard; Robert Poss; Peter Prescott; Robin Rimbaud; Ira Robbins; Henry Rollins; Jon Savage; Rat Scabies; Captain Sensible; Steven Severin; Pete Silverton; Desmond Simmons; Slim Smith; John Talley-Jones; Ken Thomas; Mike Watt; Jon Wozencroft.

  Simon Reynolds’s ideas about punk, art rock and Wire, set forth in the excellent Rip It Up and Start Again, have helped crystallise my own.

  Various friends assisted in different ways. Throughout the writing process, I profited from discussions with Michael Lang; his incisive comments on a late-stage draught were also extremely valuable. Peter Fydler (who has shared my unhealthy Wire obsession for several decades) supplied important research materials. He and Alison Burton were, as ever, generous hosts in London in May—June 2007. Nick Groom helped with some crucial sociolinguistic details. Charlie Snow provided expert information on ’70s British television adverts. Fellow metallurgist Robert Vodicka hooked me up with a couple of interviewees.

  Extra special thanks: Slim for the stills from his early film of Wire; Colin for the photos of his Pink Flag white label and for access to his press archive; Mike for his Advision sketch and for putting me in touch with several interview subjects; Jim for his dossier of Ex-Lion Tamers memorabilia and Robin for his foreword.

  This book is for Nicola, without whose love and support it would never have been written.

  Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are taken from original interviews and communications conducted specifically for this book.

  All lyrics are quoted as they appear printed on the inner sleeve of the 1977 release of Pink Flag. The lyrics reproduced with the 2006 Wire 1977–1979 boxed set differ both in format and in some details.

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Reuters

  Field Day For The Sundays

  Three Girl Rhumba

  Ex-Lion Tamer

  Start To Move

  Brazil

  It’s So Obvious

  Surgeon’s Girl

  Pink Flag

  Straight Line

  106 Beats That

  Mr Suit

  Strange

  Fragile

  Mannequin

  Champs

  Words and Music by Bruce Gilbert, Colin Newman, Graham Lewis and Robert Gotobed

  © 1978 Carlin Music Corp. - International Copyright Secured.

  - All Rights Reserved. - Used by Permission.

  “Different To Me” Words and Music by Annette Green

  © 1978 Carlin Music Corp. - International Copyright Secured.

  - All Rights Reserved. - Used by Permission.

  “Lowdown” Words and Music by Robert Gotobed, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman and Bruce Gilbert

  © 1977, Reproduced by permission of EMI Virgin Music Ltd, London W8 5SW

  “12XU” Words and Music by Robert Gotobed, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman and Bruce Gilbert

  © 1977, Reproduced by permission of EMI Virgin Music Ltd, London W8 5SW

  Foreword: The Fragile Memories of a Schoolboy

  Robin R
imbaud aka Scanner

  It’s been proposed that everyone has a photographic memory, only some don’t have film. Our memories are forged from the real, the lived, the imagined and the projected, and trying to define the lines of truth and verisimilitude in our personal histories can prove to be a genuine challenge. Where and when certain moments occurred tends to slip into a blurry Photoshopped archive, channelled over time into new memories and experiences, and we learn to join the dots between each other’s histories to form a succession of Proustian reminiscences that become our own. I’ve kept a diary since I was 12 years old and never missed capturing a single day since then, so I can recall with some accuracy that in December 1977 when Pink Flag hit the record stores, I was evidently more excited about purchasing Houdini on Magic, enjoyed playing volleyball, failed to buy trousers with my mother and was sick all over the carpet on Christmas Day. When Tennessee Williams wrote that “in memory everything seems to happen to music,” I find a resonance with this suite of songs. It took a couple more years for them to filter into my head, since Chairs Missing corresponded more with my angst-driven teenage experiences. Yet to this day I feel certain that I must have nodded my fluffy mullet hair to “12XU” on John Peel at the time without acknowledging the source. Studying at an all-boys British grammar school in the 1970s brought with it many clichés, amongst them the music we listened to. I was drawn to outsiders, those who played with the system, and I recognised a very British approach to the sensibility of Wire, with their playfulness, their brevity and surly surreal lyrics. In between bouts of King Crimson, the Virgin Prunes, the Fall, Klaus Schulze and Throbbing Gristle, Wire offered a unique voice that spoke of something other, something unattainable, a lineage that intrigued and fascinated me. Some years later, having befriended the group members and somehow mischievously formed another art-rock band with the singer with Black Hair, I’m honoured to have them in my life and to share my enthusiasm for a music that has shape-shifted over the years but continues to tell a story of the past and the future.

  1

  This Is Your Correspondent

  You’ve set yourself a bit of a task. Obviously, you want to make it as balanced and accurate as possible, but there’s something very attractive about creating a total fiction of history—the absurdity value. The definitive story is impossible.

  Bruce Gilbert

  I was 12 in 1977, growing up far from London. Thanks to the tabloids, I’d heard all about the civilisation-threatening phenomenon of punk rock, but it wasn’t easy to hear what it actually sounded like. Although by mid-year punk was making inroads into the British singles chart, it received scant airplay: John Peel was the only DJ giving it national exposure, but his programme aired from 10 until 12 on weeknights, a problem for me as I’d fall asleep after 20 minutes. Fortunately, I discovered another option on Saturday evenings—Stuart Henry’s Street Heat on Radio Luxembourg. I listened religiously, adjusting my transistor aerial endlessly in a vain attempt to improve the abysmal reception.

  I first heard Wire on Street Heat in early 1978. It was their second single, the jagged, woozy “I Am the Fly” (which would appear on Pink Flag’s follow-up, Chairs Missing). It was unlike anything I’d encountered.

  By then, I had some familiarity with punk: I had singles by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers, Generation X, the Adverts and the Jam. To my ears, it was all fresh and exciting. Feeling adventurous, I bought Television’s “Prove It.” I’d read that they were American punk, but apart from the vocals, it didn’t sound very punk to me; I immediately sold it and got a proper punk record, the Cortinas’ “Fascist Dictator.” I’d attended my first gig, the Jam at the Bristol Locarno in December 1977, and I was given the Clash’s debut LP for Christmas.

  As for Wire, I’d come across their name in the music papers in late 1977: it was austere, minimal and monochromatic—very different from all the vivid, colourful punk names. I’d also seen the cover of their first single, “Mannequin,” in Sounds, and I was struck by its strangeness. It was a harshly lit Polaroid of a naked dummy, its face disconcertingly human and its chest adorned with a heart-shaped appliqué, standing in a squalid room by a bed containing a silhouetted form. The effect was alien and sinister.

  So I heard “I Am the Fly.”

  While punk stripped things down, rejecting musicianship and polish, it still relied on a well-thumbed set of blueprints, churning out fairly standard, riffcentric rock. “I Am the Fly,” however, was devoid of customary rock gestures. The guitars were barely recognisable as guitars, alternating between grinding, abrasive metallic textures and tinny, off-kilter carousel patterns. And in contrast with the punk records I’d heard, this was weirdly leaden and stodgy, simultaneously wonky and robotic, all its sonic components sticking out awkwardly. The ponderous bass-throb and the rudimentary, rigid beat suggested some undocumented hybrid of glam and Oom-pah music. There were even handclaps. The vocals managed to be menacing and moronic. The singer whined Rotten-style, turning into a Dalek on the silly sing-along chorus. I had no idea what he was on about. (’The song was actually about punk’s demise, I’d later learn.)

  It seemed designed to annoy, instantly. With its simplistic, repetitive structure and its dumb karaoke aspect, it might have been a perverse pop song. This wasn’t a record you’d want to buy or even listen to, really. The erratic reception on my radio rendered it all the more irritating and uncanny. I assumed the track’s odd noisiness was a result of that—until, inexplicably, I bought the single.

  I didn’t know what to make of the song. I couldn’t find a frame of reference in my limited musical knowledge. But I understood why Stuart Henry played it: it was born of the same attitude and spirit I loved in punk. Other than that, it was a unique, perplexing musical proposition.

  I knew Wire had released an album, Pink Flag, in November 1977, and I duly bought it. It was nothing like “I Am the Fly.” It could have been by a different band. Like “I Am the Fly,” though, it was by a band that was both of its time and beyond it. It somehow combined punk and its other: it was immediate, urgent and visceral but also controlled, detached, complex and intelligent. The punk groups I knew threw all their cards on the table immediately and left you little to mull over, after their two minutes were up. Rather than go in one ear and out the other, Pink Flag’s tracks lodged in my brain: they had an obliqueness that gave them traction and durability. The punk albums I’d heard were transparent, exhaustible collections of individual songs; Pink Flag was something greater—a constructed, multifaceted whole, a largely opaque, inexhaustible work that never fully revealed itself.

  A lot of great albums came out in 1977, but Pink Flag is one of a handful—alongside Low, “Heroes”, Before and After Science—that remain objects of fascination to me.

  2

  Pay Attention: We’re Wire

  Bruce Gilbert (Blue Eyes)

  Bruce plays from an extremely deep musical place, pulling that much sound out of a guitar with muscle and heart and soul. It’s not a technical thing; it’s a musical thing. It can’t be taught. You can practice scales, arpeggios and chord substitutions all you want, but if you don’t have what he has, then you’re not gonna have it.

  Page Hamilton

  “I hate using the word band.” Bruce Gilbert is uneasy with rock vernacular. Words like record and song also fall ironically from his lips. His preference for terms like project, piece, work and object epitomises his view of Wire as a broader aesthetic venture. Characterising Wire, he invokes the idea of the living sculpture, albeit in a wider sense than that developed by artists like Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George: each manifestation of the band, from recordings to cover art to performance, forms part of a greater artistic continuum. “I always thought Wire was a living, breathing, noisy sculpture. It sounds pretentious, but it was the only way I could look at it with any self-respect because I thought being in a band was naff. It seemed slightly peculiar. It was an art project as far as I was concerned. We were determined to make objects—I always
call them objects—which were the songs, albums, seeing how far we could go.”

  Born in Watford in 1946, Gilbert inherited his mother’s passion for books, film and music, but his relationship with these media was unconventional. “My mother was obsessed with film, and I was exposed to all sorts of things I shouldn’t have seen. From the age of four, I was taken to films that were ridiculously adult, for the time at least.” Just as Gilbert’s exposure to cinema saw him encounter material he’d have found difficult to grasp, his introduction to fiction followed a similar pattern: “I was a manic reader when I was very young. I ploughed through my mother’s collection, reading books that were far too old for me.” It’s not hard to imagine how these first cultural forays might have impacted Gilbert’s young consciousness. His experience of narrative would have been alienating, as plots and characters’ psychologies would be barely comprehensible. This introduction, via cinema and literature, to an unfamiliar, disorienting world in which events perhaps appeared arbitrary resonates in Gilbert’s subsequent work.

  Although Gilbert’s mother, a former jazz singer, made music part of his early life, his appreciation of it was far from traditional. Rather than hear a song as a unified amalgam of rhythm, melody and lyrics, he listened idiosyncratically, singling out aspects. These discrete aural objects of his attention were often elements that struck him as extraordinary: Gilbert didn’t listen to them as musical components of a compositional whole but as sounds with autonomous value. Later, Gilbert would find in the blues everything that fascinated him: repetition, noise, otherness and also imperfection: “It was a sort of dissonance. A lot of blues records are just slightly out of tune, which made them sound exciting and raw. Also, the backbeat, the very simple rhythms and the repetitiveness—all that attracted me. And, of course, some of the singers had these incredible voices, as if they’d come from another planet”