Wire's Pink Flag (10 page)

Barry Jones

Wire’s metamorphosis didn’t go unnoticed. When they’d debuted at the Roxy in January 1977 (supporting the Jam), the club’s co-manager, Barry Jones, was underwhelmed: “I remember them before George Gill left. They were
terrible
, really messy.” Jones heard a radically improved Wire on the Stockwell rehearsal tape, justifying his decision to include them on the bill for April 1—but their performance that night (recorded for the
Roxy
album) astounded him: “I walked into the mobile and Mike Thorne had the sound going and they were playing ‘Lowdown.’ I was like, Who
is
this?’ I didn’t even recognise it as them. They blew me away that night. You drop that one guy who’s not letting things gel and you’re off. They changed overnight.”

Mike Thorne was also impressed. He was an EMI house producer whose background included a Physics degree from Oxford and studies in piano composition at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, plus stints as an editor at
Studio Sound
and as a journalist. His initial studio experience was of an un-punk variety: he’d worked as a tape op on Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple sessions and had produced prog-folk band Gryphon. But
Thorne was also instrumental in bringing the Sex Pistols to EMI and recorded demos with them in December 1976. Drawn by punk’s irreverent energy and its promise of newness, he’d thrown himself into the scene.

Instead of ligging with his A&R peers at the Speakeasy, he ventured elsewhere to see bands and convinced EMI to make a live document of the Roxy, then the only specifically punk club. He first encountered Wire there: “I recorded Wire on their first outing as a four-piece. I never saw them as a five-piece, but Barry astutely told them to go away and practice:
‘Come back when you’ve put it all together.’
They were very solid indeed, playing to about 20 people. Nevertheless, everybody was engaged, and during their set someone shouted, ‘That’s better! Now: louder and faster.’ Even on the rough mixes it was clear that they had a very powerful presence.” Thorne was particularly excited by their minimalist leanings: “I hate listening to music with gratuitous fat on it, with unnecessary decorative gestures. That, of course, fell right in line with the sensibilities of these four people.”

We came up with some simple rules. For instance, the way you started and stopped things: we understood that that was one thing we could be good at.

Graham Lewis

With Gill’s departure, Newman concentrated on vocals. “When we started with the new material, they wanted me to sing rather than play guitar because they thought I was more impressive as a frontman, but I said, ‘I’m not writing songs in major keys just so that Bruce can have it easy to play.’” Gilbert had been using an open tuning; Newman wanted him to learn “minors and sevenths and stuff like that,” which he quickly did.

Slimmed down from three guitars to one, Wire could work on the previously obscured basic mechanics of their music. “Because
there was a fairly large amount of space,” explains Lewis, “we were able to hear when things weren’t accurate. Accuracy became very important, in order to realise what we understood was the sound of the group, which was very much an on-off dynamic—about stopping and starting together and being in tune. Being able to execute things accurately.” For Jon Savage this distinguished Wire: “A lot of the punk groups at the Roxy were completely hopeless—they couldn’t even stop and start at the same time.”

A concern for the basics was imperative in practical terms, but it also accentuates how Wire were developing a more sophisticated sensibility. Crucial in that regard is Lewis’s comment on their prowess at “stopping and starting,” something Graham Coxon also identifies as a signature of early Wire: “The way they began and ended was always important. They weren’t just tossed off. They’re meant to be like that. They’re not just half-baked ideas.” This emphasis might seem redundant, a mere necessity for any band learning to play together; more importantly, though, it’s an example of Wire’s awareness of
framing
and the role of frames. This is a clear indication of the band’s conceptual inclination, a tendency to approach rock from a fine-art perspective. Put simply, the beginning and ending, with their familiar patterns, are the song’s fundamental framing devices. Given Wire’s aesthetic sense, it’s not surprising that they zeroed in on these and experimented with their possibilities—manipulating their works’ margins, examining novel possibilities for beginning songs and rejecting such predictable ways of ending as rocking out or fading out.

I remember being struck by the brevity: they basically did just begin and finish
.

Robin Rimbaud

Pink Flag’s
attention to framing is striking, especially on several very short tracks in which the frame itself—the start and finish—
appears to be the primary focus. For instance, the 28-second “Field Day for the Sundays” is so brief that it’s hardly started before it’s over. Wire also explore where the song’s boundaries lie. “Surgeon’s Girl” is a good example with its “
un-deux-trois-quatre”
count-in. On studio recordings, a count is left in as a signifier of authenticity: it supposedly lays bare the mechanism of the performing and recording processes, clearly marking the song’s margins and foregrounding the artist’s central role by underscoring the moment at which that role starts. Including the count here disturbs the arbitrary construction of an inside and an outside—that is, what is and what isn’t part of the performance. The track doesn’t begin with the count, which comes seven seconds in, after Gilbert’s guitar intro. Its inclusion
after
the introduction stresses that this clichéd signifier of rock authenticity and artistic purity is always just another artificial aspect of the performance. Having the count-in in French highlights this. (“Realising
one-two-three-four
was
verboten,”
says Lewis, “I came up with the comedy count of
un-deux-trois-quatre.”
)

“Reuters” and “Pink Flag” also underline the porous nature of where the song begins and ends, subverting the conventions of starting and finishing even more conspicuously. The opening of “Reuters” extends for 30 seconds with its building bass and guitar figures: these are unmistakable introductory motifs, creating an air of anticipation before the song kicks in. The track starts to wind down at around two minutes with the “rape” chant, petering out for another minute. The introduction and conclusion therefore account for more than 1’30” of the song. This expands the frame inwards so it comprises half the track. Similarly, “Pink Flag” commences with 25 seconds of drum rolls and false starts before the guitar crashes in. It builds to the repeated line “how many dead or alive” after 1’30”, and by 2’00” the song begins to give the unmistakable impression of winding down. However, that closing feel persists for another 90-plus seconds with a series
of false endings—rising to a frantic climax at 2’48”, then continuing for another minute, with more false endings during the last 45 seconds. Over half the song is actually the frame. These expansive intros and outros are also an example of Wire’s awareness of space, deviating from the punk norm: rather than cram songs from start to finish with all their constitutive elements firing simultaneously, they probe different spatial possibilities.

In a different vein, “The Commercial” emphasises the framing of the album itself. This brief instrumental is coded as something more than one of the record’s 21 tracks. Its title, its throwaway breeziness and its placement as if
between
the original two sides (at the start of side two) suggest this number has a different function: it’s an interval, occupying a place on the record and outside it.

Wire used those art-school tricks that are in our DNA: chance, using process rather than product, throwing yourself into the experiment and seeing what happens rather than aiming for something that’s already known.

Russell Mills

The exploitation of accidents and random contingencies in the writing and recording process—facets commonly deemed extraneous—is another aspect of Wire’s playful framing. “106 Beats That” is
Pink Flag’s
best-known illustration. The chord structure and words were each intended to follow arbitrarily imposed patterns, but the experiment foundered: Newman’s chords went awry and Lewis miscounted his syllables. Instead of scrapping the song, they used these unforeseen results as constitutive components.

At times, the accidents Wire assimilated arose in the process of translation, when Newman showed guitar parts to Gilbert. This occasionally led to their minimalism-by-necessity, Gilbert explains: “Colin would demonstrate the song and I’d have to find
a way of playing it—sometimes chords got missed out because I didn’t have the ability to play them. So everything often got very simplified because of my lack of ability.”

Wire’s incorporation of elements traditionally kept outside the frame also extended to their live sets, which made audiences rethink their expectations of the “concert.” In addition to challenging standard rock conventions, the band integrated other media and genres, expanding the performance beyond a regular gig. There was a certain
theatricality
about Wire’s use of lighting—theatrical in the sense of stark Modernist drama, not rock theatricality—and about the band’s tightly controlled movements. (“Wire were statues,” remembers Nick Garvey.) There were also Brechtian undertones. Newman sometimes kept his hand in his pocket throughout, his head cocked. This was akin to Brecht’s
Gestus
, intended to convey a character’s alienated relation to his/her social milieu. In this context, it essentially parodied the punk rocker’s posture as guttersnipe outcast.

Wire intensified their reframing of live performance in November 1979 with
People in a Room
, a four-night stand at London’s Jeannetta Cochrane Theatre. Typical rock concerts aren’t titled; the naming immediately raises questions about the event’s identity. Mixing performance art, painting, video, dance and avant-garde noise, individual pieces by each bandmember preceded Wire’s set: Grey, for instance, did an action painting, and Newman, in Glenn Branca mode, led a 15-piece minimalist guitar orchestra. Another gig, at the Electric Ballroom in February 1980, upped the ante as Wire interrupted and fragmented their performance with Brechtian devices and Dadaist antics.

If Wire wanted to compel audiences to rethink what they were seeing, they only half-succeeded with some: “I didn’t get Wire, to be honest,” says New Order’s Peter Hook, “although when they had 15 guitarists it was pretty funny!”

The Ex-Lion Tamers were the best readymade we ever had
.

Graham Lewis

These performances might have seemed to manipulate the frame as much as was possible, but on their 1987 US tour Wire went further, with a conceptually brilliant, simple manoeuvre. They brought along a support band called the Ex-Lion Tamers. Featuring Jim DeRogatis on drums, they weren’t just a Wire-influenced group, as their name might imply: they had formed solely to play
Pink Flag
in toto. The singer even said “Side Two” before “The Commercial.” DeRogatis had interviewed Lewis and Newman earlier in 1987 and mentioned his band. Realising this was an entertaining way to wind up those expecting older material, they enlisted the Ex-Lion Tamers for the tour—in support of the aptly named album
The Ideal Copy
. This was Wire in classic Dadaist mode. The Ex-Lion Tamers’ appropriation of Wire’s work was Duchampian—their
Pink Flag
was a musical equivalent of
Fountain
. For Wire, the Ex-Lion Tamers were the perfect readymade, appropriated by them and incorporated into their own larger project.

All these examples dramatise Wire’s relentless interrogation of the work of art—constantly asking
what it
is,
when
it is,
where
it begins and ends and making audiences ask themselves the same questions. Wire engage in an ongoing negotiation of the frame, obliging listeners and viewers to be aware of an unsettling of boundaries, to view all facets of the band’s work not as discrete items, but as ingredients in the “living sculpture.”

When we heard what we actually sounded like, it was a bit shaky and even a bit slow.

Bruce Gilbert

A series of studio recordings from spring and summer 1977 chronicles the run-up to
Pink Flag
. The strength of the
Roxy
tracks, with Thorne’s enthusiastic backing, piqued EMI’s interest, and on May 4, Wire entered the label’s Manchester Square demo studio to record “The Commercial,” “Mr Suit” and “Pink Flag.” Hearing their work captured professionally made an impression. “It was such an expansion of the world,” says Grey. For Gilbert, the tapes emphasised how much more work lay ahead. “Although we aspired to being very fast, accurate and minimal, it was all a bit clanky.” He also remembers that these recordings highlighted the change in Wire since Gill’s departure and, despite their weaknesses, underscored the potential of the band’s sound. These tracks showed “what was possible when we actually played properly. We could be very, very tight and very, very sharp. It
made it more abstract, trying to do it that sharply, with clean lines like a hard-edged painting: there were no unnecessary painterly gestures, no unnecessary musical gestures.”

Two more sessions on May 25 and August 12 at Riverside Studio in Chiswick chart Wire’s evolution. The August 12 performances are tighter, the band displaying confidence and proficiency gained from intensive practice. These two sets of recordings document an additional ten tracks: “Reuters,” “Different to Me,” “Ex-Lion Tamer,” “Mannequin,” “Champs,” “Start to Move,” “106 Beats That,” “Fragile,” “Surgeon’s Girl” and “Field Day for the Sundays.” So by early August,
Pink Flag’s
21 songs existed and were being honed—the last of Gill’s numbers and some of the others’ earliest efforts having been retired.

Although these demos attest to a growing competence, the songs often sound slow compared to the
Pink Flag
versions. If the Ramones had prompted Wire to accelerate and the Buzzcocks egged them on, the Riverside tapes reveal that they weren’t quite up to speed yet. Wire’s leap in acceleration on
Pink Flag
is due to the improvement of the rhythm section. Given the foundational nature of Lewis’s and Grey’s roles early on, they had been under particular pressure. Predictably, their initial limitations led to frustration and strained relations. “We did have the odd disagreement,” remarks Grey. “If Graham said my timing was wrong, I’d blame him or his bass-playing—you had to say something. When there’s a bit of pressure, people can get upset about things going wrong and criticism becomes somewhat intense.”