Wire's Pink Flag (16 page)

“Pink Flag” was a relatively early piece, coming into being soon after the April Roxy performances. Although the core components are in place in the May demo, it lacks the final version’s distinctive framing apparatus; it begins in medias res without the tension-building lead-in, and whereas the conclusion of the
Pink Flag
version layers the vocals to create an unsettling cacophony, the demo ends amid shouty loose ends.

For Newman, “Pink Flag” is Wire’s most direct assault on rock: “The ultimate destruction of rock ‘n’ roll is to destroy it with itself and that’s to take out the
‘n’ roll
part. ‘Johnny B. Goode’ stands for everything wrong with ’50s rock ‘n’ roll: the cheerfulness and the neatness of the tune. So the basic idea for ‘Pink Flag’ was ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with one chord, repeating, and what it needed to go with it was a big, multitracked fuck-off wall of guitars.”

In Gilbert’s opinion, “Pink Flag” was the record’s keystone: “It has a sort of majesty, and we all felt it was the mission statement.”
To him, it’s one of two tracks (the other being “12XU”) that best encapsulate Wire’s aesthetic: “It’s because of its incredible simplicity,” he explains. “Obviously there’s a bit of a chorus going on, but essentially it’s one chord. This is a
possible music
. Again, it’s this abstract thing: what’s the least you can do and it still be music?” Newman adds, “It’s a signature Wire thing. Absolutely brutal repetition of
one thing
. If you repeat something enough and make it hard and heavy enough, then it should be convincing. That’s the philosophy behind it.” Lewis agrees: “It had everything Wire wanted to be. For the time, it was way out. Nobody was doing that.” Not surprisingly, “Pink Flag” came to occupy an important place in Wire’s creative history, resurrected in performance in the ’00s for experimentation and exploration. “It’s always been the laboratory,” says Gilbert. “It’s a very simple thing which lent itself to straying from the original.”

For Thorne, this was also a momentous track, largely due to its visceral power. ‘“Pink Flag’ is a really scary song, a favourite for me, for when in a smash-your-head-against-a-brick-wall mood.” He sheds light on the recording: “Robert was wound up because, without him, it couldn’t work at all. His was the backbone. His responsibility was all the changes, the intro, the acceleration in the middle and the big crashes at the end. We set everything up and went to dinner. We knew it was a big deal. We knew it was probably the most intense track. It didn’t take very long. Well, you can’t play that too often! Robert didn’t eat any dinner.”

Ken Thomas also recalls this session: “The one thing I’ll always remember was ‘Pink Flag.’ It was a big song and—this is typical of Mike—they were all building themselves up to put everything into it, and he said, ‘
Let’s go out for a meal!
’ So we went out for a curry—and came back and did that song. I remember thinking, ‘Why are we doing this? Everyone’s going to be falling asleep!’”

Thorne especially likes Lewis’s characteristically spare, melodic bass: “There’s one of the few bass overdubs. When the ‘how
many dead or alive’ starts, you hear Graham’s bass in the background doing a lovely, creative melodic lick. He always played it onstage, but when he did the master backing track he dropped it. I grumbled to him because it really seemed to be a signature, and so he overdubbed it back in.”

There was some debate as to whether the title track should conclude the album, but since “12XU” was the obvious closer, “Pink Flag” was placed at the end of side one. Lewis was convinced: “What it says is ‘
Turn this over!
’ It asks, ‘
What’s next
?’” The closing seconds heighten that anticipation: there’s neither an abrupt end nor a fade, only the natural decay of the ringing guitars after the tumultuous climax. Lewis credits Thorne: “That’s a fantastic detail. Mike was really good at that. He’d say, ‘At the end, let it ring. Keep the length of the sustain. No going off for a fag, just shut up and finish your chord and leave it. These things can be useful.’”

Befitting the wide-screen sonic drama, the words are ominous and atmospheric, hinting at significant goings-on. The tone is epic, with a compelling sense of historical import owing to a series of chronological markers: a time (18.05), a year (1955) and dates (“4th of the 3rd”; “12th of the 3rd”). Some mass mobilisation appears to be underway. Mentions of a bugle-call and the “red slave trade” seem to situate events in a pre-twentieth century context, enhancing the historical gravitas and Romantic aura. (On the demo Newman has presumably misread Lewis’s lyrics and sings, “in 1805” instead of “at 18.05,” locating the action in the early nineteenth century.) The insistence on precision, design and structure is almost comically excessive. In addition to the year, dates and time, there are references to orders, plans, provisions and the synchronisation of watches. “I was very interested in the effect you got as soon as you dated something,” says Lewis, again indicating a fascination with numerical detail. Despite the semblance of absolute specificity, though, there are no firm referents:
the actual frame for the events is absent, and consequently they remain vague and intangible.

All this rigorous military detail and precision in the service of chaos evokes the kind of world Borges created, where the illusion of meaningful order is undone by an anarchic, unknowable reality in which the individual is lost. Lewis stresses this with an economical use of the first-person pronoun—its limited presence here is key to the chaotic, menacing atmosphere. The first word is “I,” but it appears in a disempowered, passive construction: “I was sold.” The “I” then vanishes as the track enacts a loss of agency, both lyrically and musically, with the subject who at first promised to be the song’s organising consciousness quickly consumed—like Borges’s would-be omniscient narrators—by forces beyond his/her control. (This removal of narrative agency might be rooted in the text’s unconscious origins: its imagery in fact came to Lewis in a dream.) With the eclipse of the song’s first-person consciousness, the verb constructions become predominantly passive (“stores were gathered”; “plans were laid”; “orders given”; “books were cooked”). The disempowerment of the enslaved narrator is intensified by the conflict’s escalating tenor (“The pink flag was screaming, bugle boys sucked and blew”). The personification of the flag underscores the narrator’s displacement and loss of agency. This consumption of the self in the pandemonium increases as the music rises to its climax while the coherence of language and of Newman’s voice itself gives way. Just as his voice was fragmented and dehumanised at the frenzied end of “Surgeon’s Girl,” here too, the climax precipitates the vocals’ breakdown into a tangle of shouted, barely distinguishable words.

This feeling of a narrative overwhelming its supposed creator is dramatised above all by the manic chorus (“how many dead or alive[?]”). This insistent refrain creates the impression that the speaker urgently needs to know something and is desperate for an answer; however, he’s not actually asking a logically coherent
question. The structure of language itself is inadequate and lacking before the chaos of reality.

For Gilbert, this track bears a strong resemblance to “Reuters” in their shared sonic heft and indictment of global politics: “Like ‘Reuters,’ there’s an accusatorial thing about it. It’s another telegram from an appalling world.”

Lewis: Pay attention
.

Newman: We’re Wire
.

Lewis: This is “The Commercial.”

“The Commercial” served as an early set-opener, sometimes prefaced by the Lewis-Newman two-hander above. Built around Lewis’s bassline, it may be British punk’s first original instrumental. Lewis envisaged it as music for an imaginary television advertisement: “They didn’t have rock music in advertising back then. It’s an alternative idea to the crap they did have.”

Although a minor piece on
Pink Flag
, “The Commercial” is a provocative instance of Wire’s manipulation of frames, raising questions regarding the album itself: it’s on the record, but, at the same time, it might not actually be a track. One clue lies in the name. It’s the only title whose first word is a definite article, something that emphasises its identity, suggesting it’s a functional device, an intermission and not part of the suite of songs. The choice of the American “commercial” further isolates this title: in 1977, “advert” would have been more idiomatic in British English. In that historical context, the Americanised title underlined its connection with consumerism, something resonating in the music: as a simple, jingle-like instrumental it has a generic feel embodying the mass appeal associated with consumer culture. The length—49 seconds—also approximates the average length
of British television adverts at the time (40 seconds).

The track’s original placement at the start of side two reinforces its practical identity, neatly dividing the album. There was some discussion about starting the record with the track, duplicating its placement in the live set. In retrospect, it might have been more logical to end side one with the number—but regardless, it raises questions as to what
is
part of the album and what
isn’t
, by occupying a liminal place. (The introduction of the track in concert also exploited its name and function, rendering ambiguous the point where the set really started: with “The Commercial” or with the second song?)

It’s not baroque
.

Colin Newman

Another sub-50 second piece, “Straight Line” is the first of two tracks composed primarily by Gilbert: both riff and words are his; Newman “had to come up with the vocal melody.” “It started almost as a poem about the one-dimensionality of a period in my life,” explains Gilbert. “When you’re a bit depressed or worried about something, things can get one-dimensional: a combination of having a desire to do something but being in a depressed state, like being on a road you can’t get off because you can’t see anything either side.”

As with several numbers on
Pink Flag
, its apparent lack of structural complexity belies formal idiosyncrasies. The song is in keeping with its title: apart from minimal chord changes, it’s one-dimensional and to the point. There’s nothing extraneous. Indeed, two repeated phrases account for over half the sung lyrics and over half the track’s duration. The first of these, “am I moving in a straight line,” is a another example of Newman seizing
on a line and repeating it—it’s written once but sung four times. Although he commonly did this to develop a chorus, the chorus here lies in the second reiterated phrase, “oh it’s unlust and the one dimensional boy,” written and sung four times.

This number further twists the relationship between verse and chorus that “Ex-Lion Tamer” had disrupted. “Straight Line” asks and answers the question: is it possible to have a chorus in a song with only one verse? Wire’s peculiar tactic is to eliminate the verses that would customarily come between choruses and instead merely to reproduce the chorus. Despite the absence of multiple verses, “oh it’s unlust and the one dimensional boy” is unmistakably a chorus. Newman tears through the repeated “am I moving in a straight line,” and the accompaniment doesn’t signpost a chorus—there’s no variation, no hooks—but the music takes a pronounced turn for “oh it’s unlust….” Chord changes make the line immediately catchy, and the song swells, emphasising the moment’s importance; the layering of Newman’s vocals and Lewis’s backing imparts an
all-together-now
feel. “Ex-Lion Tamer” inverted the verse-chorus structure, so that one became the other; “Straight Line” almost eschews verses altogether. This manoeuvre epitomises what Newman calls “the Wire method”: to “go for the shortest route between two points—the quickest, most direct way.”

It was almost like rolling dice, to see what the next chord was, which made it incredibly difficult to play
.

Bruce Gilbert

Several numbers incorporate elements arising randomly in the material’s development or recording, but “106 Beats That” engages most explicitly in a process-based approach. The song
started from conceptual premises and shows how obstacles encountered in the making of a track may become central to its structure and identity. As Newman points out, “The experimentation here is part and parcel of doing the piece.” He concludes, paradoxically, “’106 Beats That’ is a failed process on both musical and lyrical levels and a perfect piece of music—probably the best track on
Pink Flag.”

If ever a song sounded as if it were inspired by one of Eno’s arbitrary “Oblique Strategies,” this is it. Newman happened upon the idea for the music while riding an excruciatingly slow train: “I wanted to do this thing where the chord pattern corresponded to the stations between Watford and London, and I had some kind of system of counting.” Unbeknownst to Newman, Lewis had also undertaken a project, aiming to write a lyric with exactly 100 syllables: “I remember finishing early one morning feeling that I’d accomplished the task. Then, when I added the beats up, I discovered it was 106.” (In the original printed lyrics, there are in fact 107 syllables.)

Newman’s experiment also went off the rails. “I had to change it because the chords didn’t quite fit. It has the maddest, most impossible chord sequence. When I ran out of changes, I just stuck on the last chord and went through the rest of the words. I thought it was really funny to have something with all those intricate changes all the way through it. Then, all of a sudden, you get to the end bit and hammer down on one chord. That slightly lopsided structure appealed to me. So, in both cases it came out wrong and didn’t work according to the formula.”

This disparity between the convoluted, illogical chord sequence and the repeated closing E chord foregrounds another of Wire’s sonic signatures: unlike the slow build of numbers like “Lowdown,” “106 Beats That” demonstrates a command of tension and release, even where brevity might seem to preclude any significant dynamic range.