Wire's Pink Flag (6 page)

Wire’s perceived ability provoked disapproval. When the
Raxy London WC2 (Jan-Apr 77
) compilation came out in June 1977, the quality of their contributions (“Lowdown” and “12XU”) prompted charges they’d been reworked in the studio. (One source of suspicion was the paucity of applause. This in itself suggests they didn’t meet the audience’s expectations, but it also reflects the sparseness of that audience.) Wire stood out, though, not because they were technically adept but because they played with discipline, regardless of their limitations. “We always wanted to be absolutely perfect, like a machine,” maintains Gilbert. “We
had a good work ethic: the only way you can create new things is to work at it.”

Robert Grey, Watford School of Art, late 1976. Courtesy Slim Smith.

Newman is more explicit: “Most of the punk bands couldn’t stand Wire because our mere presence made them look tacky. Just because you have limited means, you don’t have to be shambling. I never got that as an aesthetic. Why would you make records that sounded like bumbling? For me, it doesn’t matter how basic it is, it’s that it’s cleanly executed. So it was just logical to do it like that:
to do our best
. They thought we were too professional or practiced—we weren’t. It was just that we knew more about economy.” The
NME’s
Phil McNeill reports an audience member at one late-’77 gig disparaging Wire as “posers” and “smooth twats,” a sentiment with which the journalist agreed, albeit in positive terms: “The band
is
smooth compared to, say, the Pistols or the Clash…there was none of the raggedness which seems almost a vital ingredient of the punk vision. Wire respect their compositions above all else, and adhere strictly to structure.”

Punk bands were throwing themselves around, spitting and deliberately being scruffy and obnoxious; Wire were like this group of accountants, who just stood there and challenged you and played very hard, sharp, fast, short and sometimes very witty songs. You could tell there was an intelligence that was missing in a lot of the other bands.

Russell Mills

Wire’s anti-rock stance was pronounced in their early performances: “Static and monochrome” is artist Russell Mills’s characterisation. Their gigs also made an impression on Jon Savage: “They obviously had a clear idea about visual presentation. They were very stylised.” Steven Severin, too, was taken with Wire’s singular presence: “They were more Kraftwerk than Slaughter & the Dogs. That appealed to me immediately.” Jon Wozencroft expands: “It was lighting and posture, the way they held themselves and the way they occupied the stage, like a space. It was like a Samuel Beckett space for them. It wasn’t a question of being rock-ish or using the body language of their instruments. It was very clipped and performative. It was a kind of performance art.” Newman confirms that much thought went into their presentation: “When Wire started, we had this thing of not moving at all onstage because the whole idea was to be as
un-rock
as possible. We didn’t want to look like a bunch of rockers.” Gilbert agrees: “We didn’t want our things to look like anybody else’s.”

In contrast with punk’s multicoloured sartorial assault, Wire were predominantly black-and-white. Lewis recalls that the “conceptual angle of what [the performance] should look like” included vetting the colour and style of their clothing. In 1977, he notes, “We were down to ‘it’s black, white and pink’” (quoting “It’s So Obvious”). “Plain, dark clothing evolved because we didn’t want any distractions,” explains Gilbert. “We didn’t want people thinking we were a rock band.” They also shunned stereotypical
punk gear, favouring more theatrical touches. Newman, for example, occasionally went barefoot and sported a surgical smock. Gilbert describes this as “an escaped mental patient look.” Still, Gilbert himself admits to some misguided style choices: “I had this ridiculous affectation of wearing ballet shoes onstage. With pink bed socks.” That said, Wire knew where to draw the line: they were briefly managed by Roxy Club founder Andy Czezowski, but, as Newman points out, “He got sacked because he wanted to buy us pink leather trousers.”

Unsurprisingly, early audiences expecting punk rock were sometimes confused. Wire spurned what were, notwithstanding a confrontational attitude and new habits like spitting, the tired norms of rock performance. In addition to avoiding unnecessary musical and physical gesture, Wire didn’t drink or smoke onstage and weren’t shambolic. They were mostly affectless and uncommunicative: they didn’t banter or encourage audience participation. Gilbert was well aware that Wire didn’t please everyone: “It’s their Friday night. They go out to see a punk band, jump about, scream and spit—that was the orthodoxy of the time. People coming on as if they’d come to mend the fridge wasn’t what audiences were looking for.”

The idea wasn’t to try and win a crowd over. It was, “We’re here, we’re doing this, fuck off.”

Bruce Gilbert

Wire’s choice of set material also bucked expectations, often focusing on new, unrecorded tracks. Despite punk’s resistance to music biz ideology, the bulk of Wire’s early audiences came to hear the records they’d bought and were unhappy when presented with new songs instead of familiar numbers. Gilbert also remembers the band experimenting with song sequences, intentionally breaking audience members’ relationship with the music’s flow,
frustrating their enjoyment: “Sometimes we’d do anti-sequences where it would be a total bloody disappointment at the end: no pay-off of any description.”

A more extreme example of this distancing technique and the denial of identificatory pleasure was the performance of their shortest, fastest songs, which made it almost impossible to execute punk’s
dance
, the pogo: the songs ended almost as soon as they’d begun. Wire enjoyed this. “When we saw the reaction, it was very amusing,” says Gilbert. “I don’t think it was deliberate, but it was delicious to observe.” For Blur’s Graham Coxon, this facet of Wire’s performances is central to their anti-rock identity: “They’re not a rock band. They’ve always been contrary. They refused to rock: they gave you a bar or two and then disjointed it and made it fall to bits just when you were nodding your head. Those songs are for listening to—they’re not for headbanging.”

Predictably, responses weren’t always positive. “The abiding memory is bewilderment or outright hostility,” says Gilbert. “We didn’t look like other punk bands, so we couldn’t be a punk band, which was fine by us. Yet we were playing very fast, noisy, loud stuff. The audiences often got very, very confused. Confused to the point where they started throwing bottles and glasses of beer. The waste!”

Wire did develop a fan base, but it differed from the standard punk crowd. “It emerged bit by bit,” recalls Gilbert. “Girls didn’t come to our gigs; only serious boys in dark clothes.” Russell Mills noticed that Wire fans were “generally better behaved than most punk audiences.”

Wire were unashamedly English and brought the baggage with them onto the records.

Graham Coxon

If Wire’s disavowal of rock ’n’ roll and their detachment separated them from the punk crowd, these traits were also at the heart of their particular Britishness.

Robert Poss locates Wire’s cultural specificity: “The American in me feels Wire is quite British. There’s no embrace of Americana like some UK bands.” However, that Britishness didn’t hinge simply on the
lack
of American rock motifs but on the
presence
of an understated, removed sensibility. This was attractive to Graham Coxon. “It’s a contrariness. They’re almost embarrassed to rock. They’re far too clever for their own good. You don’t get American groups doing that. R.E.M. tried, but they had to cover a Wire song [‘Strange’] to get it right, and then they didn’t. There’s a strange egocentricity when Americans become modest. You think, ‘Where’s the catch? There must be some payback for them somewhere.’ But with Wire and that English thing, it’s a staunch contrariness.” Electronic experimentalist Christian Fennesz comments, “I always thought they developed an ability to keep a distance from their own musical material, without losing passion at a performance. I found this extremely interesting—a very rare quality you normally don’t find in music.” Russell Mills saw that sense of distance, above all, in Wire’s working methods: “They were so reserved, incredibly judgemental—a very English thing—very phlegmatic and focused. They had a very trainspotter-y mentality.”

This specifically
English
Britishness had little in common with that of Wire’s punk contemporaries. On Wire’s records, there are none of mainstream UK punk’s slogans and signposts, no local colour, no obvious socio-political context. Rather, there’s a deeper, more sophisticated cultural identity, residing chiefly in the playfulness and idiosyncrasy of their music and lyrics. Coxon underscores the latter: “Their songs had a strange attention to detail and an eccentricity. They’d sing about odd things, like Reuters—it wasn’t the subject matter of pop music. Blur tried to
write about things like that, too. We were pretty heavily influenced by Wire, particularly just before
Parklife
. So during
Leisure, Modern Life Is Rubbish
and on the B-sides you can really hear it. That was when it was the most fun, when we were trying to be like Wire.”

I was on tour once, and we were incredibly hung over, and we played three albums in a row—
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Here Come the Warm Jets and Chairs Missing
—and it was a continuous thread between them. To me it was dizzying.

Roger Miller

Most of all, Wire’s rejection of punk’s lingering affinities with rock ’n’ roll allied them with tendencies in British art rock. That lineage was obvious to some contemporaries: “I think they’re in the tradition of people like Soft Machine and maybe early Pink Floyd,” ventures Sex Pistol Glen Matlock. A heterogeneous form, art rock covered everything from prog’s edgier extremes to glam’s smarter manifestations. It was characterised by musical experimentation—in territories ranging from jazz to the avant-garde—and some form of conceptual orientation, sometimes expressed in terms of a concept-driven image. It was unified by a dismissal of clichéd American rock expectations (although it often gravitated to black American jazz).

When the mythology of punk derided preceding and contemporaneous British music as moribund, it was in fact ignoring a rich vein of art rock: intriguing work by the likes of Roxy Music, Bowie, Eno, Fripp and King Crimson, Henry Cow, Van der Graaf Generator and Peter Hammill, Peter Gabriel, Bill Nelson, John Cale and Robert Wyatt. Crucially, in looking beyond the limits of US rock ’n’ roll, such musicians displayed a strong European cultural sensibility. This was absent from punk, with its Little England mentality and its rock ’n’ roll core. (Indeed, just
as most mainstream punk overlooked innovative musical history at home, it was also apparently unaware of revolutionary sounds made across the Channel in, say, Germany in the early and mid-’70s: NEU!, Faust, Kraftwerk and Can, among others, had produced inventive, adventurous work, but few punks immediately acknowledged them.)

Moving Wire from punk’s narrow confines into the context of art rock affords a more interesting perspective on their cultural identity. Wire shared the European sensibility that was a key characteristic of British art rock, embodying a strain of Britishness defined by its links to the Continent. Early Roxy Music constructed one version of this. Wire’s Europeanness is best understood as an alternative to Roxy’s Pop Art-influenced aesthetic (in which Europeanness actually coexisted with a highly stylised, ironic Americanism). Ferry, Eno et al. assembled a camp, retro-futurist Continentalism, blending jet-set glitz and decadent glamour with almost pre-war nostalgia; if Roxy Music oozed excess, Wire’s vision was astringent, stark and even more modern—a black-and-white sensibility without a shred of glamour, rooted in Cold War Europe. Wire were ’70s Warsaw or East Berlin to Roxy’s Saint-Tropez or ’30s Berlin. Bruce Gilbert underlines this dimension, situating Wire as European rather than strictly English, precisely in their measured restraint. For him, Wire’s Europeanness rests in “this idea of it not being showbiz but quite serious in some ways—a serious activity: not singing in an American accent is a
good
thing; the subject matter not being about excess. I feel that’s a European approach to culture.” Filmmaker Richard Jobson (ex-Skids) also recognises this: “Wire felt English, but European English; the Clash were just English. Of all the bands of that period, they were absolutely, clearly the most European—but with an English flavour. They had an otherness about them; you get a sense from the music that they were familiar with the new landscape of Europe.”

In addition to some obtuse lyrics, there was an experimentalist spirit that distinguished
Pink Flag
. It wasn’t unfiltered anger, rebellion, social commentary or nihilism. It was brainy and energetic and sardonic and smart—and if being smart wasn’t cool, too fucking bad.

Robert Poss

What Gilbert calls Wire’s “provocative but slightly removed” attitude pissed off punks, who considered it suspiciously arty and intellectual; of course, punk’s anti-intellectualism, ironically, was as English as Wire’s detachment.