Album : Pink Flag Artist : Wire Label : Harvest/EMI Release Date : December 1977 Producer : Mike Thorne

You know, the great minds of IOP sit down from time to time and talk out ideas for the site, and at the first such meeting, my brilliant self pipes up that we should have an album spotlight, like for essential classics. Aaaannnnddd, I open my big mouth again, as I’ve been known to do, and I say I’ll go first. I’m gonna do Wire’s Pink Flag. Sure, why not? But I didn’t stop to think about how hard this nut is to crack; an album as great as this can sometimes defy explanation.  

For people that don't know anything about the depth of the development of Punk Rock, you can imagine that they'd assume the entire genre revolves around the lunkheaded dropouts just smart enough to learn four chords. But thanks to the influence of The Velvet Underground, punk has a solid base in the high-brow avant garde arts of Warhol's 60's. After a while, with bands like post-No Wave Sonic Youth and post-hardcore Fugazi, some corners of punk rock itself had become an avant-garde art form and a genre full of its own stylistic trends and accepted mores.  

One of the major bridges between those 60's and those 80's/90's was British foursome Wire, a groundbreaking group of art school punks whose first three albums, made in as many years, exhibit such an incredible learning curve that the term punk only really applies to Pink Flag, the 1977 debut. They say what do you get the man that has everything? Well I say what do you get the album that’s invented everything, and barely ever gets noticed for it? Obviously, I’m exaggerating a bit, but Pink Flag sounded like nothing that came before it, and influenced so much that came after it, it might take years to count all their offspring.  

Pink Flag is one of the greatest punk albums, one of the greatest debut albums, and therefore one of the greatest rock albums of all-time. It's routinely regarded as a 5-star classic by all the usual suspects, and still, despite all this, it remains unbelievably underrated. It belongs in the same breath with debuts by The Clash and Ramones, if it’s not unfathomably actually better than both, not to mention being leaps and bounds beyond anything other sacred cows (*cough cough Sex Pistols*) ever thought of. But where the Ramones were pop music as pop art, and The Clash was street correspondence as rallying cry, Wire was a product of higher learning, stripped of any excess, and distilled to its purest power, closer at least in spirit to Patti Smith or Talking Heads than anything else.  

We've all been exposed to so many kinds of music, and there's such a broad quilt of influence from band to band, it's hard to believe that Wire didn't really sound like anyone else. Sure there are bits of DNA from the Ramones, but it’s an unfair advantage to the boys from Queens, that anything simple and fast is copying them. Wire bare only a passing similarity to all the punk that came before; it’s like they learned the basics of their instruments, but forgot to really learn any songwriting, instead just making it up like they thought it was supposed to sound. When you can go from Colin Newman intoning “How many dead are alive?” over the terrifying dissonance of the title track, and early signpost for Post Punk, and then move to the sweet pop of “Fragile”, where Newman struggles to pick up the pieces with “You eat my energy, give me more rope, nail in the wall, let me hang my heart”, you know the band has a wealth of ideas.  

“Fragile” is 78 seconds, and that’s average for songs on Pink Flag. What initially seem like unfinished songs are actually short bursts of bottled lightning, stacked with those sharp ideas throughout. Thirteen of the album's 21 songs clock in under 90 seconds, brilliant buzzsaw pop and proto-hardcore - in the barking "Mr. Suit" you can hear early hints of California bands like the Descendents – coupled with political critiques, surrealism, and black humor. The tone of many of the songs reveals a band already done with the status quo of the Jubilee year; so consuming was the success of the Pistols in the UK that many bands didn't take the time to create anything unique, thinking that passion was going to be enough. Wire say bollocks to that, opening the album with the slow, harrowing wartime epic "Reuters", a monster of a song, crying “This is your correspondent, running out of tape, gunfire’s increasing, looting, burning, rape!!” lumbering, growling, tearing down everything in its path. It sounded nothing like what the other punks had thought of, but neither does track 2: "Field Day for the Sundays" is just 28 seconds of jangling pop, but never does its tale of tabloid journalism (in 1977!!) seem incomplete. And so it goes down the line, from the jagged number theory of “Three Girl Rhumba” (which Elastica used to launch their career), to “Ex-Lion Tamer”, a flawless ode to classic TV action heroes (and the album’s best tune), to pondering post-modern time and space in the bluesy “Lowdown”, the band blows you away song after song. You start to realize that the only thing these guys had in common with the other UK punks bands was their limited chops, and in that too, Wire excelled; they wrote and revised their songs to fit their skills perfectly, making drummer Robert Gotobed sound far more precise than maybe he was (“Start To Move”, “Champs”), and making the marriage of Bruce Gilbert's full-bodied rapid-fire guitar and Graham Lewis's melodic basslines sound authoritative when they were still grunts.  

Looking back at the landscape of the UK punks from 1976 through 1978, it’s amazing that there isn’t more rapturous press or performance video left behind of Wire laying waste to the rest of the movement, but it simply seems that Wire didn’t care about that kind of stuff. They cared about creation, and the evidence was that as soon as the world caught up to them, they were already moving on to the next thing. Going back to the beginning, landmark early singles “Mannequin” and “1 2 X U”, two sides of a kiss off, the former a sugary taunt and the latter a minimalist roar, it’s clear that these four guys were destined for something special. And just to prove that there were some intelligent concepts and magical artistry in between all the guttural bluster of 70’s Punk Rock, throwing on Pink Flag can make you a believer in Punk Rock and still leave you speechless.  

Tracklist :
01. Reuters
02. Field Day For The Sundays
03. Three Girl Rhumba
04. Ex-Lion Tamer
05. Lowdown
06. Start To Move
07. Brazil
08. It’s So Obvious
09. Surgeon’s Girl
10. Pink Flag
11. The Commercial
12. Straight Line
13. 106 Beats That
14. Mr. Suit
15. Strange
16. Fragile
17. Mannequin
18. Different To Me
19. Champs
20. Feeling Called Love
21. 1 2 X U

- Album Spotlight by Raz