Wire's Pink Flag (7 page)

Wire reflected on their music and self-presentation in ways that suggested a consciousness of it as something more than simple rock. This was another factor setting them apart. “What always struck me,” remembers The The’s Matt Johnson, “was that a huge amount of thought had gone into what they were doing. They made demands of themselves and, consequently, made demands of the audience. Which is exactly how it should be.” Wire didn’t conceal their artistic predilections or their intellect. To many, thoughtfulness and artiness were synonymous and merited mistrust (although many of UK punk’s originators attended art school). This was typical of an anti-intellectualism permeating English culture. Paradoxically, punk, which denounced many of the ideologies and institutions of traditional Englishness, also embodied its worst strains. As Robin Rimbaud notes, “People in this country are uncomfortable with the idea of being cerebral and thinking. That’s been the
pleasurable failing
of Wire. They were seen as too intellectual. When you look at
Pink Flag’s
artwork, it’s a thoughtful sleeve. The titles are playing with the idea of what a song could be; these are quite arty titles. And it can be to your detriment to be a little too clever.”

A lot of early punk rock was
me-me-me
subject matter, and Wire’s subject matter always seemed more difficult to discern.
There was more room for interpretation. With a lot of bands the music was intended to make you think of the artist in a certain way—bands like the Stranglers and the Damned were trying to create a persona using their music. I didn’t get that impression from Wire at all.

Steve Albini

Like their song titles, Wire’s lyrics announced a distinctive intellectual identity. Their reproduction on the inner sleeve indicates the weight Wire gave them (few punk albums included lyric sheets). “The lyrics were important,” Newman asserts. “They weren’t just
I-love-you-baby
rock ’n’ roll. We were important. We were up there with the greats. They had lyrics on their records, so we thought we should too.” Printing the words emphasised that these were more than throwaway rock lyrics, that they were an integral part of the whole. Lewis intended them to be read and not just heard, yet he distinguishes his words from both lyrics and poetry, calling them
texts
. The format of their reproduction on the original
Pink Flag
release—in block form, without line-breaks—accentuates the difference and makes them part of the design aesthetic. According to Lewis, “It undermined the idea that it was poetry.”

Not everyone appreciated Wire’s lyrics. Reviewing
Pink Flag
, Greil Marcus found them unremarkable and of their moment: “Most punk themes are touched on: war, TV, sex-hatred, antigirlness, Gray Flannel Suitism, yellow journalism, the basically degrading but somehow liberating quality of modern life.” These themes are present, but, generally, Wire’s treatment of them differs from their contemporaries’. To Roger Miller the contrast was apparent: “The way they delivered this stuff wasn’t just
fuck you
—there was more behind it. There was lots of thinking. It was like they were holding this object, which was the world, and looking at it from different angles.” Bandmate Peter Prescott also highlights Wire’s introspection: “They didn’t write about something
that happened yesterday; they wrote about something happening in their heads at any given point.” Richard Jobson puts it most concisely: “Wire created a world; the Clash were just a reflection of the world.” In other words, Wire weren’t concerned with literal representations of the everyday. Concludes Guided by Voices’ Robert Pollard, “It’s a world that’s obviously theirs. The titles and the way the songs are delivered are like a stamp. The best bands do that. It stands the test of time.”

Wire’s lyrics mapped unique subjective landscapes, but they broke with the tradition of the rock song as authentic self-expression—the model derived from literary Romanticism that still dominated even punk. This didn’t go unnoticed in 1977. In
Melody Maker’s Pink Flag
review, Chris Brazier observed, “What really sets the band apart is their lyrics—intelligent, ambitious, often weird, occasionally bewildering and obscure as they are.” Similarly, the
NME’s
McNeill remarked, “They write songs so indirect as to be almost incomprehensible.” Most journalists at the time went no further than this, noting the words’ difficulty and obscurity. They thus overlooked an important aspect of Wire, a vital ingredient of their songs’ strong feeling of otherness and an element dramatising the band’s process-oriented approach. Wire’s songs reject the basic terms of conventional narrative and even of representation: reality isn’t a straightforward, objectively comprehensible matter; and language, the tool with which reality is represented, is unstable and unpredictable.

They’re like clues from a cryptic crossword, which I’ve never had the slightest inclination to decipher because I don’t think that’s the point. It’s the way the words sound that counts, and they sound right.

Steven Severin

Wire’s language doesn’t look outwards but turns in on itself.
Often fragmented, elliptical and impressionistic, the songs don’t convey reality so much as the complexity of language, with all its slippage, play and ambiguity. For Lewis, these aspects create “the possibility for the listener to be part of the process.” Many critics in 1977 appeared unequipped to deal with this delight in language’s open-endedness, instead getting bogged down with expectations of meaning, message and closure.

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

Fellow artists have been more receptive. To Robert Pollard, the lyrics show “that you can make a statement without making one—with just the title, or the colouring of the words or the phrasing, the choice of words.” Graham Coxon is equally enthusiastic about lyrics that are “almost like crossword puzzles.” While this feature led some critics to dismiss
Pink Flag
as sterile, opaque or, as Lester Bangs declared more broadly in the
Village Voice
, “one of the deadest things ever recorded,” Coxon found the words “affecting.” He continues, “I can see Wire’s lyrics as
poetry. Some are lyrics, but some veer towards a strange Cockney beat poetry.” Like Severin, Coxon revels in the pleasures of Wire’s texts: “I wouldn’t bother trying to work them out; I just enjoyed them as words, for the rhythm of the words, the imagery and the sound of the voice.” Robin Rimbaud echoes this: “I never knew what the lyrics were about. It was always quite abstract, but on
Pink Flag
there were things that really appealed to me about the
use
of words, the restriction, the repetition.”

They were operating from a higher level of intelligence than the regular punk rock mindset
.

Henry Rollins

Not surprisingly, in the moronic heat of punk, this facet of Wire didn’t go over well. As Russell Mills comments, “They were dealing with informed, intelligent ideas; most punk bands were just about energy and letting things out.” By demonstrating intelligence in attempting something new—a goal surely aligned with punk’s mission—Wire only invited distrust. Early Wire associate Nick Garvey epitomises this attitude: “It was a bit too art school for me. It was too clever by half.”

Nevertheless, Wire’s brainier disposition won them unlikely allies. Rat Scabies recognised what they were doing as genuinely punk: “Wire were deceptively intelligent. They sounded unique, and that was what punk was all about. That’s why I always thought of Wire as a punk band—because they had their own ideas and their own way of doing things, which was the whole point of punk.” Captain Sensible agrees: “Punk rapidly became a mundane formula, and Wire’s experimental approach was much more to my liking. For me
that
is punk—doing your own thing, throwing out the rule book, which Wire certainly did.” In the same vein, Glen Matlock reflects, “It was all a bit more clever somehow. I think they were perceived as a little bit outside of the scene because what
they were doing was more cerebral, not
let’s go and rock and get our hands dirty
. What I got from Wire was that they were an out-and-out art-school band—and I don’t think that’s a terrible thing.”

“A bit stuck-up, maybe? Art school?” Robert Grey speculates on how others saw Wire. “I don’t think people at the Roxy knew that was where most of Wire came from. Maybe they sensed it. That made us a bit harder to accept.” Bruce Gilbert goes further: “I got the impression that some of the musicians we came into contact with thought we had no right to be there. We weren’t ‘rock’—we were stuck-up artists, or something.” Lewis concurs: “We weren’t part of the scene that was
Sex
, McLaren, the Bromley Contingent. We probably had a reputation for being arrogant because we kept ourselves to ourselves. Our friends were people who were
artists.”

At almost every level, the wariness towards Wire signalled the contrast between punk’s ideals and its practices. Above all, Wire’s thoughtful artiness highlighted the musically conservative tendency that came to typify punk. Despite its talk of change, punk reinstated rock’s most simplistic values. Considering that one of Joe Strummer’s life-changing pre-Clash moments was seeing Springsteen perform, perhaps this isn’t surprising.

Wire were a marriage of punk and art rock. The ideas informing their work were very art-based: to strip a song down to its minimal components, to make it as short as possible. To load it with cultural, literary, economic references. That wasn’t really punk, but that’s why they were interesting—they were trying to take it somewhere else.

Russell Mills

In defence of punk, it admittedly
was
an expression of popular, mass culture and wasn’t intended to travel far beyond its immediate context. Longevity was never on its agenda: it was of the
moment and disposable. As Rotten sang, “We’re the flowers in the dustbin.” Wire, by contrast, were concerned with lasting value and with transcending punk’s moment. Consequently, they straddled two cultural zones: rock and the more rarefied world of art. Richard Jobson identifies this duality: “Wire gave themselves an aesthetic purity and, at the same time, dipped into that thing which isn’t pure, pop culture, and managed to mix it up—never more successfully than on
Pink Flag.”

Notwithstanding their broader artistic perspective, Wire were inevitably implicated in commercial music-making’s systems and processes (they signed to not just a major label, but the world’s biggest, EMI—specifically, its Harvest imprint); even so, their awareness of rock’s potential for artistic experimentation enabled them to create a resistant space.

Harvest was geared towards artier, progressive variants of rock: Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Syd Barrett, Kevin Ayers, Be Bop Deluxe and the Pretty Things, among others, had been on their books. To Harvest boss Nick Mobbs, signing Wire made sense: “Rather arbitrarily, some ‘punk’ acts ended up on Harvest, but Wire had more reason than any to be on what had been founded originally as a ‘progressive’ music label. I doubt the marketing people saw this subtlety, and I expect Wire were perceived as just another punk band. Wire’s attraction, to me, was that they could outrace and outshout any punk band, but had many other tricks up their sleeves involving atmosphere, humour, intelligence, menace and, yes,
art
. They were original; the only comparisons I could think of at the time were with the Velvet Underground and early Pink Floyd.”

Wire differed from most bands with arty leanings, who tended to stress the rock element of art rock and whose dominant frame of reference was popular music. As Simon Reynolds notes of ’60s British rock (in his essay “Ono, Eno, Arto”), many musicians were art-school educated, yet few translated that artistic training
to the construction of their music. Art rock may have gestured or alluded to high art, but the incorporation of actual
creative strategies
from the fine arts was rare. Moreover, many art-rock musicians inadvertently preserved the aura of untouchability and privilege surrounding high culture by trying just a little too hard to prove their work’s artistic value.

There were some credible moves towards thinking about rock as art. Former art student David Bowie brought innovations from other aesthetic areas to his work, in presentation and image and in his use of cut-ups, although the frame for his music was always rock. When Pete Townshend, another product of art education, used extra-musical ideas—appropriating Gustav Metzger’s concept of Auto-Destructive art—his guitar-sacrifices weren’t merely spectacles; they added a distinctive
sonic
ingredient to the Who’s performances. But beyond that, his band’s work betrayed familiar anxieties about its cultural worth: Townshend’s rock operas suggest his upward ambitions.

(There were also rare examples of bands ignoring completely the rock-art divide, by taking a Pop Art stance. Fine Art graduate Bryan Ferry brought practices learned from Richard Hamilton to Roxy Music’s pastiche collage. The Who’s most interesting moment was their playful Pop Art-inspired blend of songs, fake ads and jingles on
The Who Sell Out
, which showed none of Townshend’s cultural insecurities.)