Wire's Pink Flag (14 page)

Despite Wire’s “no Americanisms” rule, by alluding to
The Lone Ranger
and
Batman
, they leave unchallenged the antiquated rock ‘n’ roll idea that the pop-culture imagination is exclusively American. Moreover, the programmes mentioned in “Ex-Lion Tamer” are pure kitsch, so they actually work against the song’s more serious implications. Newman is underwhelmed by Lewis’s subject matter: “I always thought the Lone Ranger was crap when I was a kid. I didn’t identify with him, I didn’t identify with Tonto, I didn’t identify with the horse. They were all rubbish.” If “Ex-Lion Tamer” displays an American orientation thematically and also linguistically (“Tonto’s
split the scene”
), in the plodding May 25 demo there’s even a transatlantic drawl to Newman’s nasal pronunciation of
line
. By
Pink Flag
, this had been Cockneyfied as
loin
.

The title words are absent from the song itself, which has travelled far from its origins. Newman initially wrote a lyric featuring a lion tamer. “Graham took one look, said, ‘This is rubbish’ and rewrote it. There was a lion tamer involved somewhere.” According to Lewis, “That was the thing I thought was most memorable, but totally irrelevant in the end. I rewrote it and, by the end, it was called ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’ because even the lion tamer had disappeared.”

Although he’s not certain, Newman thinks the phrase “the milk bottles stand empty” may have survived from his first draft. If that’s true, it was a good idea to keep it since several other
artists have singled it out for praise. “My favourite lyric on the whole record is ‘milk bottles stand empty,’” Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye enthuses. “It’s such an incredible image. It’s indelible in my mind.” MacKaye’s in good company. “There’s some absolutely beautiful poetry in ‘Ex-Lion Tamer,’” says Graham Coxon. “I love the line ‘the milk bottles stand empty.’ I also love the way he delivers the word “bottles’—he makes a big thing of the syllables.”

Like “Reuters,” “Ex-Lion Tamer” contains a chant, this time featuring Thorne: “I really enjoy the Blank Generation ‘TV’ chant at the end. The ‘TV’s were all of us except Robert, gathered around the microphone going ‘TV,’ as blankly and disinterestedly as possible.” The track again shows a degree of vocal sophistication unusual for the time: for instance, the call-and-response structure in which Lewis echoes “danger,” “bullets” and “justice.” Says Lewis, “I thought the responses seemed perfectly natural to emphasise certain words. It’s a punctuation thing.”

In retrospect, Newman has some dissatisfaction with his vocals, particularly Thorne’s double-tracking of them. “Mike was absolutely petrified of me singing. I don’t think he totally believed I could sing in tune. He did all the multitracking because he didn’t think my voice was strong enough. I guess there was a general opinion that if Graham and I were to sing together too much, our inadequacies would be doubled; if we both sang out of tune, it would sound even worse. There was a sense that this album was a rescue job: we could just about play it, so it was a question of getting the best out of limited facility. That’s one of the reasons I have some annoyance with Mike because I think he could have believed a bit more in my ability to deliver a vocal and in the band’s ability to come up with a coherent picture. He used a lot of science around getting a result It seemed to take forever to get the backing tracks, and it wasn’t easy.”

Conversely, Lewis believes the double-tracking was legitimate. “We
were
learning to play. We can’t say we were averse to it because,
for instance, that’s what Eno had been doing. It’s the same thing. He’s not a singer, he’s writing songs, and what you’ve got to do is get a result, and the result’s what’s important. That way, you get the development of those textures, which is really good.” Ken Thomas doesn’t recall any suggestion of Newman’s inadequacy: “No, I thought he was a brilliant vocalist. The way he put those lyrics over was very, very special.” As for Thorne, he considers the double-tracking simply one of the many creative decisions taken to give the recording a unique dimension: “It seemed to me (us?) that the quality of the vocals should be otherworldly, not in the same sonic space as the track—and therefore more startling.”

There’s a lot of tenderness, even though he’s shouting, “the smell of you
.”

Graham Coxon

When “Lowdown” appeared on the
Roxy
compilation, detractors considered its crawling pace decidedly un-punk. But compare it with some of that record’s faster tracks, by the likes of Slaughter & the Dogs and Eater, and there’s little argument as to whose work has aged better.

“Lowdown” remains a favourite of Thorne’s: “It has the towering authority that came across on the
Roxy
tapes. If it derives from anywhere, it might be from the Velvets, but Wire certainly took things a stage further, even at that point.” In Thorne’s view, much of that Velvets vibe stems from Grey’s drumming: “This is where Robert’s at his best. He’s caught that obsessively-focused, junked-out feel, just ploughing straight ahead, oblivious to everything else. Of course, such solid power doesn’t always come from chemical additives.”

Colin Newman’s customised 1977
Pink Flag
white label. Courtesy Colin Newman.

It’s not only Thorne who rates the track. “‘Lowdown’ was probably my favourite Wire song. It might still be,” says Steve Albini. “It was out of place at the time. It seemed like an odd kind of music for a band like that to play. I liked all their fast, energetic
stuff, but ‘Lowdown’ seemed wilful rather than automatic. A lot of the faster stuff seemed like it might have been spontaneous, but ‘Lowdown’ seemed like a bigger and weirder idea.” Henry Rollins sees part of the song’s effect as intrinsic but also thinks its placement increases its power: “The tracks that stood out to me were ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’ and ‘Lowdown.’ They sequence well together, and they’re very stark but impactful, basically how the entire record is.”

Gilbert describes “Lowdown” as “a heavy object” and considers it one of
Pink Flag’s
more significant tracks, a distillation of Wire’s aesthetic. Newman agrees: “It’s big, serious and meaningful, and it sounds heavy; the structure of it builds up. It’s a piece of classic Wire. It’s got all the elements: insistent guitar; deep, throbbing bass; insistent rhythm.” “Lowdown” forms a trilogy with “Reuters” and the title track, each of them taut, minimalist exercises steeped in dread and menace. The lyrics resonate with the music’s numbed, repetitive drone. Grey’s unwavering beat and Gilbert’s circular riffing lock the song into an unchanging present moment, and the words depict a regimented quotidian existence in which detail and difference become barely perceptible (“another cigarette, another day, from A to B, again avoiding C, D and E”) and the only future prospect is death (“relegation, the big E”).

Although the music is bleak and aspects of the lyrics complement that sound, the track also displays Wire’s penchant for contrasting the feel of the music with the mood of the words. Lyrically, it’s partially optimistic, something that’s often overlooked. As Lewis told the
NME
in December 1977, “Everybody put a really doomy slant on it, but…it was a
hopeful
song when I wrote it.” Today, he still stresses this: “It’s about trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Indeed, some facets of the words struggle against the music’s hypnotic inertia. Whereas the music appears to preclude forward motion, the lyrics offer the possibilities of imagination, movement and progression: “The time is too short but never too long, to reach
ahead, to project the image, which will in time become a concrete dream.” As the music reaches a rare level of intensity, suggesting a surge of energy, the words emphasise “rising to the surface.” Lewis ponders the big existential questions but does so playfully with an extended metaphor interweaving music and football (“E is where you play the blues, avoiding a death, is to win the game to avoid relegation, the big E”).

The tension between lyrics and music here may have been accidental. Newman’s rendering of Lewis’s words often produced unexpected, unintended results, and “Lowdown” offers an amusing example. Newman misinterpreted Lewis’s text: “I thought the words meant ‘that’s the
low down
,’ like ‘I’m feeling low down’—that’s how I interpreted it, so that’s why it’s all really doomy. I didn’t understand it as ‘I’m giving you the
lowdown
,’ which I might have taken differently.” Nevertheless, Newman also says the dark, heavy tone was already in place in the tune, which he conceived as an exercise in deconstructed funk: “There’s an opposition already set up. ‘Lowdown’ was like, OK let’s take politely funky music and turn it on its head. If you speed it up, it’s a classic funk riff. Slow it down and it’s grinding and evil and nasty.”

If Newman misinterpreted Lewis’s lyrics, he also failed to read them in their entirety: “It misses two verses because I never turned the piece of paper over.” Rather than reject this unwittingly abbreviated version, Wire allowed the error to stand—demonstrating their willingness to embrace accidents. That inclination towards the random is also evident in Newman’s construction of a minimalist refrain by arbitrarily selecting a phrase for repetition, a technique he used throughout
Pink Flag:
“Graham was amazed that I’d put everything in the wrong place and managed to get a chorus out of what he hadn’t intended.” It wasn’t uncommon for Newman to alter Lewis’s texts: “I think Graham felt I was taking liberties [with his words], and then, with hindsight, he realised that, actually, that was another artistic contribution. People would say, ‘Oh, the lyrics
are like cut-ups,’ and sometimes they’d appear like cut-ups because of the way I was phrasing them and putting them together—I wasn’t paying much attention to what they actually meant, because I didn’t really care that much what they meant.”

Lewis views Newman’s adaptation and delivery of words Newman himself didn’t write as one source of the sense of distance in Wire’s work: “It gave things an interesting voice, which felt more separate and objective. It gave things an interesting swerve…a cold-bloodedness. Being removed and slightly apart, it makes the listener ask, ‘Does the singer even know what he’s on about?’”

Graham Coxon ventures a curious reading of “Lowdown,” identifying an affective depth often overlooked in Wire. Newman’s vocals, according to Coxon, contribute an “emotional, feminine” nuance rare in punk: “Colin delivered it even with that voice of his. You see a vulnerability in this insane anger or desperation. There weren’t an awful lot of groups avoiding cynicism to reveal themselves as emotional people and to have what might be perceived as poofy sentiments—a bit
jessie
, not really masculine.”

“Lowdown” still makes Thorne chuckle: “It was always hard to contain the laughter when Colin would go, ‘That’s the lowdown,’ as Graham would be winding him up. At the end of the track it collapsed into laughter, so we had to overdub that last line—you hear a different vocal sound on the ‘that’s the lowdown’ that closes the piece. It’s a very heavy, very brutal piece, but it didn’t stop us having a real laugh while we were making it.”

During “Lowdown,” Thorne also played timekeeper for one of Newman’s rare guitar parts: “Colin played the solo. The structure isn’t 4s and 4s and 4s; it just went the way it did on the backing track, intuitively. I have a painful physical memory: I had to cue him on his overdub, and I was counting the bars, both of us hanging on for dear life with the irregular structure. I remember having to mimic exaggerated downstrokes to cue him. I woke up
the following morning with a painful shoulder because it took quite a while. Since Colin was playing the actual guitar, he must have been even more sore than I was.”

“There’s loads of detail around counting in Wire,” says Newman. “Where I say, ‘
that’s the lowdown
’ in the middle is the
one-two-three-four
count to bring everyone back in for the second half.” However, he now also hears a structural flaw: “There are two bars where we’re not doing anything. I wonder why we left them in.” Grey has reservations regarding part of his own performance—the shaker sound halfway through. “Maracas! Shoot the producer, that’s all I can say,” he laughs. “That’s the only thing that makes
Pink Flag
sound a bit naff! Mike wanted a different percussion sound on just about every track.”

There’s the danger of a bit of naked emotion coming through
.

Mike Thorne

Lewis connects “Start to Move” to spring 1977, when things started coming together for Wire: “It’s about the feeling you get when your life’s changing and yet the lives of people you’ve been close to aren’t changing.” The lyrics evoke a youthful embrace of movement, energy and excitement. A playful tone creeps in as the words veer from sense to nonsense, linked by association: “Start to move, time at hand, bird in hand, no bush but trees thicken, which now, rooster or chicken.” Although “rooster or chicken” picks up on the “bird in hand” phrase, meaning is subordinate to the pleasure of the rhyme.