Is there much debate to be had on the greatest pop recording of the 20th century? While my bias on this subject matter is shared by many, that doesn’t make Wilson Neate’s job of writing about Wire’s Pink Flag for the 33 1/3 series any less difficult. Not only is the album a perfect document of British punk by being the genre’s most savage critique — Neate deems it rock music’s equivalent to Duchamp’s Fountain — but within 22 months of Pink Flag’s release Wire would mutate their sound into deep, deep ambivalence over two more albums.
Since then, much like Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, Wire have been their own best archivists, often as precise, merciless and demanding as the music they make. With 28-second proto-hardcore songs equally inspired by the Ramones and Steve Reich, love songs done as drone dirges, and political allegories as Borgesian riddles, it’s still Pink Flag, despite the band’s continued relevancy, that garners the most attention. Call it the curse of historical happenstance. Pink Flag was more beside punk, than post- or part of it.
Neate has approached the subject matter with Wire-worthy detachment. Eschewing the florid horridness of most rock writing, he’s come back with an unembellished report and interviews with all suspects present. It’s everything you could possibly want to know about Pink Flag, though I was hoping Neate’s book would have the shortest page count of the series by design. (That honour still belongs to the 144-page treatise on Steely Dan’s Aja.)
His central thesis is that, while Wire went to art school (save for savant-genius drummer Robert Grey), they didn’t, unlike almost every other art-school band, take the easy, fun parts of art and apply them to well-worn rock clichés. They made art with rock instruments. Interested more in art’s penchant for auto-critique, simplicity and constraints, guitarist Colin Newman says of his early idea for a band, “Terry Riley to John Cale and John Cale to Eno. For me, that link was obvious.” Of course, history isn’t quite that circumscribed and other band members reveal that minimalism was their way around technical limitations. Despite its austere perfections, contestations like that abound around Pink Flag. To this day, opinion is divided over producer Mike Thorne’s sophisticated gloss. That gloss may be over-present on Wire’s later album 154, but on Pink Flag it facilitates an equilibrium between aggression and precision.
The Yankee habit of seeing irony as undemocratic still pervades criticism (see Greil Marcus’ boneheaded dismissal of Pink Flag) but Wire proves that irony can have affective depth, especially through its underrated lyrical ambiguity. Contrasting the band’s memories of songwriting against interpretations from fans like Mission of Burma’s Roger Miller, Neate conveys the layers in a song like “Ex–Lion Tamer,” which is, on its face, a 1977-standard issue rant about media, but one that also embodies alienation-as-excitation. That’s a complex aesthetic goal.
Wire’s strength in its early years was its British reticence: only enough information as needed was ever revealed. But Neate also finds the hidden dimension of humour in the music. As Colin Newman sums up, “Something I love about Wire is how moronic it is. Wire is fantastically moronic, but in such an intelligent way.”