Wire deconstructed punk to it's essence and reassembled it into twenty-one minimalist bursts of banner brilliance on this incendiary art rock exhibition. The band formed in 1976 at Watford Art College as Overload with guitarists Colin Newman, George Gill, and Bruce Gilbert; bassist Graham Lewis and drummer Robert Gotobed. Within a year, they had lost Gill, and met up with Mike Thorne from EMI who put a couple of their songs on a live punk compilation 'The Roxy London WC2'. He went on to produce 'Pink Flag' at Advision studio in London. Thorne recalls: "Despite their attitude, I knew that the group would suffer debut nerves in the recording studio. Everyone does. The first day was thrown away in the interests of settling in comfortably and getting the sound. Assisted over the day by a prodigious amount of home-grown, Wire played all 21 tracks, and felt at home. Bruce admitted later to coming round out of the haze at some point and realizing that the album had been completely finished without him...Some of the songs stretched them to their technical limit. 12XU, remade after its appearance on 'The Roxy' album took several takes to get, hanging on by the fingertips, and it shows wonderfully. Both Colin's introduction and his vocal are live. Lou Pinada, the owner of the café near their Thorne Road rehearsal space and dedicatee of the song, would have been proud. Singing songs with that intensity, going for a live take every time (all vocals are the live original except for Strange and parts of Lowdown) is a real testament to their latent competence. Colin applied himself heroically, taking a sip of water before every take after he had found out that it brightens up your voice timbre. Lots of visits to the toilet. Southern Comfort was also applied medicinally, and he would emerge with bloodshot eyes to scare us at the end of a particularly intense day."
The sessions featured Bruce Gilbert on guitar; Robert Gotobed on drums; Graham Lewis on bass guitar; and Colin Newman on vocals and guitar with Kate Lukas on flute and Dave Oberlé on back-up vocals. 'Pink Flag' never charted; but it was praised by critics and established Wire as a daring new force in the world of punk. The songs make unexpected twists and turns and often end abruptly rather than repeat any musical ideas. This approach makes the songs much more concise, a suite of twenty-one songs in thirty-six minutes. Their music started a post-punk revolution.
Newman considers: "On one level you want the work to speak for itself, but on another level what makes it art as opposed to just pop music is that fact that there is some mediation, there is some discussion of ideas, there is something to say about it besides, 'Yeah, we got drunk and did it.' There is some consciousness in the work and there is some intent, even if sometimes things come out very different than how you intend them to. It’s a working process. There’s thought, there’s intent, so, of course, there’s something to say about it ... It’s a weird thing, it’s like ... I mean, it’s hard to even know what kind of reputation Wire even have, I mean, even if anybody thinks we’re any good or whatever, but you know, there’s the one thing that’s sort of informed us and haunted us all of our working lives, is this album, 'Pink Flag'. It’s this record we recorded when we first started, which was fundamentally all the songs that we had, and that style kind of came as a result of actually having...through somebody else’s band, but we kicked him out and got rid of all of his binge, and then made everything shorter, you see. So that sort of stripping down and brevity ... everything is kind of a reaction against other things, so this was a reaction against the material that there was, but if you think back to the mid-70s — actually, a lot of it was very ... a lot of stuff around was very formal. A lot of punk rock wasn’t very new, it was just old rock. So a lot of it was dressed up—and it’s easy to say this in hindsight, but you sort of had to be there. To see why anybody get very excited about—there was a feeling to do something else, somehow it felt like ... less is more. Now I think that’s the whole sort of axis ... when you look back on 'Pink Flag' the album, you say, ‘well, actually, as an album, some of it sounds quite good, some of just sounds like old music’—and that doesn’t particularly inspire me...We’re coming to this with a history, and that is a bunch of stuff that people know. And the most famous—or infamous—of it is the album 'Pink Flag'. It can be an incredible cross to bear...On one level you say, ‘oh that’s really, really nice, somebody is still writing about a record that was made God knows who many years ago, and if anybody remembers it, or thinks it’s any good,’ because frankly it’s not a record that sold in many, many copies, and most people don’t know it—‘it’s some kind of obscure band from England that did this sort of arty punk rock,’ where most of them don’t even know what normal arty punk rock is. So, what kind of relevance does that have to peoples’ lives? Or, you can look at it from the other side—‘well, why the fuck isn’t he writing about the new album?’ You know, the truth is, those sort of things follow around—if you star in a soap opera, you’re always going to be that character even after you’ve left it. So you have to deal with it, and say, ‘that was me, I was there, here’s what I thought was good about it, here’s what was bad from it, and let me try to relate it to the world.’ Or, you can run away from it, and that doesn’t really work—we all tried that. So in the end, you sort of embrace it...That’s a very stark aesthetic what you have on the front cover of that album. It’s a flagpole with a drawn-on pink flag. There’s nothing going on there. You know, it’s not punk design, there are no safety pins in evidence, it’s not taken apart and put together in a very obvious manner, it’s just incredibly stark. And in a way, that’s sort of a symbol of Wire—it’s sort of fantastic. I mean, the pink flag. It means absolutely nothing. It’s like somewhere between ‘surrender’ and Communism—in color. What does it mean? It appears to mean as a symbol, it’s totally totemic; you look at it and you say, ‘that’s a fucking strong image,’ but it doesn’t really mean anything. But I mean, maybe that’s what Wire is like. Maybe when you listen to Wire, you get a sense of, ‘fucking hell, that’s so amazing! That’s so deep! ... But what’s it about? I haven’t got a fucking clue.”
http://www.pinkflag.com/
'Pink Flag'
full album:
All tracks written by Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman, and Robert Gotobed, except as indicated.
Side one
1. "Reuters" 3:03
2. "Field Day for the Sundays" 0:28
3. "Three Girl Rhumba" 1:23
4. "Ex Lion Tamer" 2:19
5. "Lowdown" 2:26
6. "Start to Move" 1:13
7. "Brazil" 0:41
8. "It's So Obvious" 0:53
9. "Surgeon's Girl" 1:17
10. "Pink Flag" 3:47
Side two
11. "The Commercial" 0:49
12. "Straight Line" 0:44
13. "106 Beats That" 1:12
14. "Mr. Suit" 1:25
15. "Strange" 3:58
16. "Fragile" 1:18
17. "Mannequin" 2:37
18. "Different to Me" Annette Green 0:43
19. "Champs" 1:46
20. "Feeling Called Love" 1:22
21. "12 X U" 1:55
live at the Roxy:
1. The Commercial - 0:01
2. Mary is a Dyke - 1:00
3. Too True - 2:07
4. Just Don't Care - 3:15
5. Strange - 4:36
6. Brazil - 7:07
7. It's So Obvious - 7:53
8. Three Girl Rhumba - 8:49
9. TV - 10:18
10. Straight Line - 11:46
11. Lowdown - 12:40
12. Feeling Called Love - 15:03
13. NYC - 16:24
14. After Midnight - 17:36
15. 12XU - 19:05
16. Mr Suit - 21:08
17. Glad All Over - 22:57
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