Wire's Pink Flag (13 page)

The musical structure reinforces the effect of detachment. A more conventional way of starting “Reuters,” as the album’s first track, might have been to cut immediately to the chase, with Gilbert’s crashing guitar. However, the 30-second beginning section is crucial. The hesitant Morse-code guitar, bass and drum patterns create uneasy expectation in the build-up to the dramatic entry of Grey’s bottom-heavy snare and what Thorne calls Gilbert’s “cheese grater” sound. “I was getting quite adventurous,” recalls Thorne. “These were the early days of the effects units, and the opening, pealing guitar, the first you hear, was double-tracked. Then, on the mix, I took these into an MXR Phase 100, then out into a common connection, then into an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress and finally to the two sides of the stereo: this gave that sheer sheet of sound. It doesn’t sound like a double-tracked guitar. This was my physics background, getting very theoretical, but it turned out very nicely indeed: it’s a very distinct sound, and it certainly wakes you up when it kicks off the album.”

Amid Gilbert’s initial layered guitar tracks, Newman and Lewis still notice a glitch. To casual listeners it sounds like part of the song’s dark, tense ambience. “The first chord is wrong,” remarks Newman. “There’s a mishit string or something like
that.” Lewis counters, “That’s why it’s so interesting. There’s a few places where it’s slightly discordant. I don’t think Mike would have let it go if he hadn’t thought it was deliberate.” Indeed, Thorne enjoys the disunity between the guitar tracks: “When the double tracks—the heavy crash guitars—are on each side, the sort of variation between the two of them gives such an unsettling excitement: the struggle to get it right, to converge. It’s so different from the heavy-metal precision where the riff is just being played efficiently.” Newman’s still unconvinced about the opening chord: “It wasn’t on purpose. I don’t see it as a good mistake. I just think it’s wrong.” He also faults the mixing: “I find it very weird. The way the snare drum comes in with reverb suddenly halfway through sounds out of scale with the rest of the track. I would’ve mixed it differently. My criticality doesn’t stop just because of the passage of time!”

Wire got a lot of mileage out of Britt Ekland and Rod
.

Colin Newman

At 28 seconds, “Field Day for the Sundays” comes almost as punctuation between “Reuters” and “Three Girl Rhumba.”

The back-to-back placement of “Reuters” and “Field Day for the Sundays” exemplifies
Pink Flag’s
attention to track sequencing, here stressing Wire’s capacity for extremes. One of the record’s lengthier numbers (one of only three to break the three-minute barrier) gets juxtaposed with the shortest: “It’s a complete contrast with ‘Reuters,’ which was huge, dramatic and expansive,” says Thorne. “This is claustrophobic and in-your-face.”

Critics often describe
Pink Flag’s
shorter songs as
sketches
, but that implies they’re incomplete or wanting. Notwithstanding the absence of a standard verse-chorus structure in “Field Day for
the Sundays,” as Thorne says, “It does sound complete in and of itself.” The track epitomises Wire’s mastery of economy and their ability to achieve more than their minimal means might seem to allow. In under 30 seconds, they craft a tune with a strong, if fleeting, melody and even a sing-along quality, yet without the basic components of conventional song structure. And within that compressed framework, there’s time for a sequence of stops, the song breaking at four, eight and 23 seconds with proto-math rock precision.

Wire often account for the brevity of their early numbers by citing the edict, “When the words run out, it stops.” Nevertheless, they didn’t always obey this. For one thing, Newman’s sung versions often deviated significantly from the written lyrics as he substituted words or repeated phrases. Additionally, text and song lengths didn’t always correspond: “Reuters” has 73 words on the 1977 inner sleeve, and it lasts 3’03”; “Field Day for the Sundays” has 80 words and lasts 28 seconds. “None of these things are hard and fast rules,” concedes Newman, “but it’s a good line for an interview.” This track is the maximum expression of Newman’s knack for squeezing lyrics into small spaces: as sung, it works out to 2.86 words per second. Newman also proposes another, more intriguing reason for the brevity: “If it was any longer, you’d see it for what it is. It’s like a folk tune, almost, the way the chords go around, the way the melody works. It’s got this English quality, but it’s concealed because it’s over so quickly and because it comes after this stark opening track.”

Despite their sonic differences, “Reuters” and “Field Day for the Sundays” are thematically linked. “They’re both about media, but one’s a long way away and one’s very much at home,” Lewis comments. “Field Day for the Sundays” responds to UK tabloid culture, especially its appetite for salacious, peccadillo-exposing stories: “I had in mind the likes of Rod Stewart. The greatest, most dreadful mistake he made was when he picked up with
Britt Ekland, and she turned him into a total wanker—which he embraced with such passion.” For Lewis, the song’s form is appropriate to its content: “If you’re going to talk about something that can be grasped by two headlines, the lyrics have to be like that: short and punchy. It’s not exactly the editorial page of the
Guardian.”

“Field Day for the Sundays” foregrounds a classic Wire-ism that recurs on
Pink Flag:
the tendency to create a tonal contrast between a song’s words and sound. “It was something that amused us,” explains Gilbert. “The nastier the words, the prettier the music. The words were often the antithesis of the flavour of the music. It sets off a sort of friction, a
frisson
.” Here, as Newman observes, “You’ve got this quite cheerful-sounding thing, but it’s saying something negative.”

Lyrically, “Field Day for the Sundays”—like “Mr Suit”—is one of
Pink Flag’s
anomalous tracks since it’s of its time, recognisably punk. Punks made a spectacle of themselves, appropriating consumer culture’s trash and making it a prominent aspect of their style. They seized on dismissive mainstream attitudes towards punk, constructing their identities and rhetoric from those negative perceptions. Perversely, punks wanted to be precisely what others didn’t want to be; their aesthetic reinforced that notion. “Field Day for the Sundays” likewise appropriates the negative with gusto, as if it were empowering. The song doesn’t warn against making oneself tabloid fodder, but enthusiastically welcomes the prospect. “It’s not ‘if you do this you’ll end up
being
,’” Newman points out. “It’s
I want to be
. It’s
bring it on
. It’s very punk as an attitude.”

But the track’s irony isn’t empty: it does imply criticism. While the lyrics appear to ironically endorse consumerism and bad taste, that embrace isn’t wholly pleasurable: there’s a tension between wanting it and finding it unappetising. Punk embraced bad taste wholeheartedly amid its rejection of hierarchised cultural norms,
yet although the song’s speaker apparently revels in the mass-culture world of the tabloids, the lurid exposé leaves “a bad taste”; similarly, the infamous Page Three is “so lacking in taste.” There are two perspectives and two voices. The written register of the phrase “so lacking in taste” is detached and almost effete, contrasting with the bolshy opening, “I wanna be a field day for the Sundays, so they can f[uc]k up my life.” Wire often disrupt high and low culture divisions, but here the distinction is reinscribed. The song’s subtle critical perspective hinges on taste, which is inevitably linked to class; in turn, class is inevitably connected to a traditionally rigid view of the demarcations between high culture and mass culture.

It’s a true story. People are really shocked by that because it’s very un-Wire
.

Colin Newman

After two disparate tracks, “Three Girl Rhumba” again changes the record’s direction, slowing the pace but also injecting rhythmic quirkiness. The distinctive guitar pattern is one of the album’s memorable sounds, punctuated by Lewis’s melodic, economical bass lick. “God knows where the riff came from,” wonders Newman, although on reflection he believes some of the idiosyncrasy of
Pink Flag’s
guitar parts stems from the way they were written. “A lot of these riffs come from playing on acoustic guitar—they’re not electric guitar riffs. With an acoustic guitar, the sound’s the same whatever you do. So, to make it work, what you play has got to be interesting.”

Grey’s drumming picks up the guitar’s rhythm, reinforcing the slight Latin feel, whence the
rhumba
. In Newman’s view, Grey plays two separate roles here: “One of Rob’s strengths is that he
defined the idea of having the drums as the spine. If you go back to the early ’70s and prog rock, the drums played along with the music, whereas in the classic Wire track, the drums provide the central spine, around which the track hangs. ‘Three Girl Rhumba’ has an element of him providing the backbone, but the swing in the rhythm is going along with the guitar.” Grey is characteristically modest: “It just seemed like something that fitted. I wasn’t consciously doing anything. The guitar has a rhythm in it. It’s not a normal rock rhythm, is it?” The song also includes some very un-punk percussion. Presumably to enhance the
sabor latino
, Grey plays a
güiro
, although it’s all but inaudible, buried beneath the final “go under.”

When asked which
Pink Flag
songs he wrote the lyrics for, Newman responds, “all the stupid ones,” but his words here are far from stupid. This track serves as a commentary on meaning, perhaps a statement on his ambivalence about lyrics, cautioning against pursuing definitive interpretations: “Think of a number, divide it by 2, something is nothing, nothing is nothing…think of a number, don’t think of an answer. Open your eyes, think of a number, don’t get swept under, a number’s a number. A chance encounter, you want to avoid, the inevitable, so you do, the impossible.” Suggesting a parody of quantum physics or mathematical uncertainty, the words advocate surrendering to chance and resisting cause-and-effect (
not
thinking of an answer,
avoiding
the inevitable,
doing
the impossible). Instead of rationalising the raw material of experience through a priori knowledge systems that secure final answers, the lyrics take pleasure in open-ended possibilities and free-floating signifiers. “Don’t get swept under, a number’s a number,” Newman sings, as if urging listeners to stay on the surface of things, to go with the flow and not plumb the depths, to be alive to randomness: thus, the “impossible” becomes possible. Newman’s assessment 30 years later ironically
echoes the track’s focus on the pleasures of surface and play: “It’s not the deepest song.”

Newman explains the track’s inspiration: “It’s a love song. It’s completely true. There were three girls and there really was a choice and I ended up with the one who was ‘the impossible’: there was one I kind of wanted to be with, but it wasn’t going to happen; there was another who wanted to be with me, and I didn’t want to be with her; and then suddenly Annette entered the picture. She was so impressive and amazing and I succeeded. It was like pulling off the impossible.”

“Three Girl Rhumba” is among Wire’s best-known songs, thanks to Elastica’s 1994 appropriation of the riff for their hit “Connection.” Newman first learned of “Connection” when Elastica performed it on
Top of the Pops
. Unbeknownst to Wire, their music publisher, Carlin, had approved the borrowing after consultation with a musicologist provided by Elastica’s publisher, EMI. Newman remembers being bewildered and angered by music press reports that Elastica had his blessing. Gilbert took “Connection” in a different spirit: “I thought it was amusing and flattering. I thought it was fascinating.”

Subsequently, Budweiser and Garnier hair products sound-tracked US television commercials with “Connection,” while Channel 4’s
Trigger Happy TV
used it as theme music. In 2004, “Three Girl Rhumba” itself featured in a European H&M commercial (many assuming it was a cover of “Connection”). There was another twist: in 1994 Thorne had in fact been approached to produce Elastica’s debut album. “I wouldn’t have been responsive unless they’d been doing something innovative rather than novel. They had a nice attitude, but it seemed to me that they had to grow into something more than just a flattering imitation of Wire’s songs and style.”

“Ex-Lion Tamer” is probably my favourite song on
Pink Flag
. Lyrically, sonically and the arrangement—it’s just such a beautiful song
.

Ian MacKaye

On one level, “Ex-Lion Tamer” is a de rigueur anti-TV punk song. However, Wire’s juxtaposition of television-serial cliché and images of consumer culture produces something more thoughtful than the average punk rant—an almost poignant, poetic view of alienation.

The structure is idiosyncratic. There appears to be a clear verse-chorus demarcation, but the choruses prove more extensive and complex than the verses; in turn, the verses sound more like choruses. Just as Wire shift the priority accorded to frame and contents, here they invert the verse-chorus hierarchy. Generally, choruses are secondary, tending only to reinforce the verses’ content; choruses repeat and reiterate but contain little that moves the song forward. “Ex-Lion Tamer” disrupts the chorus’s role as purely a framing device within the song.

The verses of “Ex-Lion Tamer” are similar in content and organisation. They begin with the same phrase (“There’s great danger”) and have identical components, each including an heroic figure (the Lone Ranger; Batman), an item of their trademark gear (silver bullets; cape) and their respective sidekicks (Tonto; Robin), whose departures close each verse. Atypically, the chorus generates the bulk of the track’s meaning, establishing a parallel between consumer culture and the banal narrative of television serials. The lines “Next week will solve your problems” and “stay glued to your TV set” underscore the viewers’ ideological interpellation by the programme’s narrative—an imaginary resolution of the real contradictions of their own existence. Nevertheless, in
then showing the viewer alone with his/her symbols of consumer culture (milk bottles; fish fingers), the lyrics highlight the isolated, alienated reality of the situation. As with the formulaic television storyline, which smoothes over the contradictory conditions of real life and gives the illusion of fulfilment and completion, so it is with these standardised, unvaried, mechanically reproduced food products. The endlessly duplicated fish fingers are “all in a line,” the milk bottles “stand empty.”