Wire's Pink Flag (5 page)

They aren’t a punk rock band. … Wire stand alone in the class of ’77.

Phil McNeill, NME, 1977

Wire’s similarities to the other new groups gigging around London in 1977 were superficial: they witnessed punk’s foundational moments; they had short hair and straight trousers; they played venues where punk bands performed; their songs were short, fast and noisy; they played the usual instruments, not entirely competently, and they had an intimidating live presence. They even briefly had punk aliases: Newman was Klive Nice (in contrast with Johnny Rotten), Lewis was Hornsey Transfer (a more abstruse pseudonym referencing his art-school background, nomadism and love of football). However, Wire’s differences were more striking, as journalists noted almost immediately. “No Pun(k)s Please, We’re Wire” proclaimed their first
NME
cover in December 1977. Wire weren’t like the other punks: they shared some of the vocabulary but spoke another language.

Also, Wire didn’t join any cliques. “They were always outside of everybody,” remarks writer Jon Savage. “They weren’t matey with the main players. They weren’t keyed into the groups around the Clash and the Sex Pistols, the punk inner circle. They were always quite separate.” Looking back,
ex-Sounds
journalist Pete Silverton paints a depressing picture, specifically of the Sex Pistols’ orbit: “The snobbish attitude within punk was extraordinary—and it changed day to day. It was like a medieval court at
which Johnny Rotten presided, where people were in and out on the whim of the king. It was pathetically antithetical to its supposed ideology. For a supposedly egalitarian, revolutionary movement, punk made more judgements on smaller points of etiquette and trouser finish than the Court of Versailles.” This environment held no interest for Wire.

When we started the Sex Pistols, we said we wanted loads of bands like us, but we didn’t mean
exactly
like us. A lot of bands were like poor carbon copies of us, but I always preferred people like Wire because they were taking the attitude and doing something different with it.

Glen Matlock

Wire stood apart, a self-contained unit. As Graham Lewis told
Melody Maker’s
Ian Birch in December 1977, “We felt an affinity but we weren’t part of the social scene.” Looking back, Grey agrees: “Although we were playing in a punk arena, we did try to separate ourselves from the rest of the bands.” Cally Callomon noticed Wire’s insular nature, his abiding memory of the band encapsulating their self-reliance: “They travelled around in a Land Rover pulling a trailer. They weren’t part of the scene. They didn’t
hang out
. They didn’t make friends. They came across almost like a straight-edge group. I think people found that quite hostile.” Keith Cameron’s summation of Wire for a 2006
Mojo
retrospective is more succinct: “No guitar solos, no clichés, no mates.”

Lewis’s comically brief recollections of fellow musicians illustrate that lack of kinship. He once politely asked Rat Scabies to extinguish a discarded cigarette for him, only to be accused of trying to “out-punk” the Damned’s drummer. His interaction with the Clash was equally substantive. Before a gig, Joe Strummer looked up from a Bruce Lee biography to ask Lewis if he’d heard of the martial artist. Lewis said yes, and Strummer
continued reading. Newman has similar memories: “One of the Clash may have said hello to me, and once George Gill told Rat Scabies to get on his bike.” Ironically, Scabies recalls Wire fondly: “They used to come down and see us play at the Hope & Anchor and tell us they were better than we were, in a very obnoxious, drunken manner—but we loved Wire, so we didn’t mind.”

Wire, Watford School of Art, late 1976.
Courtesy Slim Smith.

(During the anti-monarchist days of 1977, Wire would certainly have been ostracised by London’s punk elite, had it been known that Newman once met the Queen. In mitigation, he notes that the occasion was an official visit to his school, attendance was mandatory and he was mistakenly introduced to Her Majesty as
Paul
Newman.)

Age also contributed to Wire’s isolation in punk’s superficial milieu, inevitably colouring perceptions: in 1977 Gilbert was 31, Grey 26, Lewis 24, Newman 23—and in a youth subculture privileging image, street cred and rebelliousness, a couple of years’ difference can be crucial. “They were a bit older,” Savage
points out. “They weren’t completely adolescent, and they weren’t pathetic.”
Trouser Press’s
Ira Robbins remembers getting “a sense of maturity” from the band: “Wire seemed like adults. They weren’t just kids spewing invective. They were intellectuals making a very informed statement that just happened to sound like kids spewing invective.”

They were a punk group. I suppose you might call them avant-garde, but still it was catchy stuff. They were trying hard to go somewhere else, and they went somewhere else very quickly.

Graham Coxon

Above all, musical differences set Wire apart, as they defied punk’s ostensible Year Zero edict. “I never stopped being into what I’d always been into,” insists Newman. “I didn’t do the punk thing of
you have to destroy your record collection.”
Likewise, Lewis emphasises “an incredible love of certain things that we wanted to keep” in the band’s early work. Nonetheless, Wire were happy to line up particular genres against the wall, such as pub rock and R&B, styles they felt should have been obvious targets for punk’s purge.

“Punk was initially the sort of thing we’d have liked to be in because it was taking the place of pub rock and R&B,” says Grey. Gilbert adds, “It seemed to offer a way of destroying everything that had gone before; music seemed to be in a rut in this country—we’re talking about pub rock.” Gilbert favourably contrasts early punk’s laboratory-like environment with the banal rituals of live music at the time, precisely because it had “a very different atmosphere from a pub-rock gig.” Although Grey had been part of the pub scene with the Snakes, and Wire’s original five-piece incarnation had more traditional leanings, the bandmembers quickly became allergic to this strain of rock orthodoxy, with its stereotypical gestures, its Americanisms, its paradoxical insistence
on authenticity, its formulae and its guitar solos.

It was the very sins of pub rock that Wire identified in the Class of ’77’s purportedly new sound, and they soon developed a vexed relationship with the
rock
aspect of punk rock. “What was wrong with a lot of punk rock was the rock gesture,” explains Newman: “It was like ’50s rock songs speeded up. It’s really obvious: there wasn’t such a difference between your Dr. Feelgood and your Eddie and the Hot Rods and your Clash and your Pistols.” In spite of its radical posture, punk’s analysis was hardly rigorous and its revolution was generally limited. It took aim at easy targets—fatuous pop; dinorockers of the ELP genus—and left unchallenged or even reproduced other retrograde, irrelevant music.

Pink Flag
represents British punk rock trying to climb out of a hole, and the hole, as perceived by Wire, seems to be punk rock itself.

Greil Marcus,
Rolling Stone
, February 1978

Orthodox punk proclaimed its Britishness yet simultaneously resurrected some hoary transatlantic musical clichés, at worst just rehashing rock ’n’ roll Chuck Berry-style. When UK punk drew on later American music, it was sometimes garage rock, the Stooges or the MC5, but mainly the Ramones and New York Dolls, who played fairly conventional rock ’n’ roll, albeit speeded up or dressed up. As to homegrown inspirations, while British punk preserved glam’s energy and colour, it had most in common with glam’s least interesting manifestations: rock critics habitually cite T.Rex, Bowie, Roxy Music and Mott the Hoople, but Slade’s football-terrace chant dominated punk by mid-1977.

Wire, too, looked to America, despite their animosity towards rock ’n’ roll nostalgia; but they focused primarily on the present and on New York-based artists like Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith, as well as Boston’s Modern Lovers. “It was
very stimulating,” says Bruce Gilbert. “It sounded like art rather than pub rock.” They also fed on an older New York influence, the Velvet Underground—whose conceptual side British punks mostly ignored.

Wire did share the universal admiration for the Ramones. Instead of emulating their overall sound, however, Wire experimented with its basic devices and structural components. There were clearly elements of the Ramonic template in early Wire, but pared down even further and framed with a unique layer of abstraction, especially in the lyrics.
“Pink Flag
had all the minimalist tendencies of the Ramones: really short songs, no guitar solos, brutal delivery, every song at approximately the same volume,” observes Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller. “But what they had that the Ramones didn’t was an intellectual grid to apply to their music. The lyrics were astounding.” The Banshees’ Steven Severin puts it another way: “The overriding thing on
Pink Flag
is that they sound like an art-school version of the Ramones: a version that hadn’t been lobotomised.”

While UK punks tried—and usually failed—to match the Ramones’ pace, Wire were more ambitious. For Lewis, the gauntlet had been thrown down: “I remember seeing the Ramones and going, ‘If they can play that fast, then we can play faster.’” Even so, the Ramones weren’t the only instigators in terms of speed. Acceleration “was on the cultural agenda,” says Newman: “The Ramones were a given by the time Wire started. I remember being mightily impressed by
Spiral Scratch.”
(Howard Devoto’s vocals on “Friends of Mine” have much in common with the style Newman developed, cramming words together to near-incomprehensible effect.)

To Wire, it was principally the enduring, Americanised rock ’n’ roll core that signalled punk’s failure. Rhetoric aside, hegemonic punk was another blues-based form reconstituting rock-as-usual. “The whole idea around punk was that it was supposed
to be new,” says Newman. “Where in 1977 it was failing in its promise was that it didn’t deliver anything new. Elements of punk were starting to look awfully like rock ’n’ roll, and that was the one thing I was totally convinced about: it didn’t matter what I was doing, it shouldn’t be rock ’n’ roll.” According to Newman, punk itself ultimately offered something to work against: “I sat in my room in Leavesden Road in Watford and thought music needed reinventing, and that was where all the stuff that came to be
Pink Flag
came from—a desire to reduce it all: how could people say that they were new and still sound like the Rolling Stones?” Gilbert shared this disillusionment. “In my naïvety I thought, ‘Well, sometimes these things start off having a bit of a formula but then go into much more experimental areas.’ Of course, punk ended up going the opposite way.”

Colin Newman, Watford School of Art, late 1976. Courtesy Slim Smith.

It’s worth noting that a side effect of Wire’s efforts to eradicate all traces of rock ’n’ roll, coupled with their rigour and austerity,
was that their music sounded even more
white
than most punk. This might seem ironic, given Gilbert’s formative obsession with the blues; the difference is that punk left largely intact rock’s rendering of the blues, but Gilbert’s guitar style took what he considered its essence, the fundamental properties he enjoyed—tone and simple repetition—and pursued them to abstraction.

Wire worked harder and had a better idea of what they were doing.

Jon Savage

To the extent that Wire eschewed rock traditionalism and embodied punk’s professed values of renovation and originality, they were deemed un-punk. Jon Savage stresses Wire’s uniqueness, their commitment to an unfashionable adventurousness: “Most punk rock groups tended to find just one mode and stick to it. It was all pretty much the Ramonic thrash or else refried Mod in the case of the Jam. There’s a variety of styles and approaches on
Pink Flag
. It was a good mixture: they could do art, they could do rock and they could do pop. They didn’t give too much away and didn’t ally themselves with any fashionable cause or politics—they didn’t link themselves to that particular time, whereas a lot of punk stuff sounds like a rather bad teenage diary.”