Wire's Pink Flag (19 page)

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 brevity 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.

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.

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 mistake 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.”

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.”