Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Pink Flag by Wilson Neate Pink Flag by Wilson Neate. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6582423bb84b15e8 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate. Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property. What can I do to prevent this in the future? If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware. If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices. Another way to prevent getting this page in the future is to use Privacy Pass. You may need to download version 2.0 now from the Chrome Web Store. Cloudflare Ray ID: 6582423ba81f15e8 • Your IP : 188.246.226.140 • Performance & security by Cloudflare. Pink Flag by Wilson Neate. To coincide with the publishing of Wilson Neate's book on Pink Flag, we publish a conversation between the author and writer Jon Savage. Before you read on, we have a favour to ask of you. If you enjoy this feature and are currently OK for money, can you consider sparing us the price of a pint or a couple of cups of fancy coffee. A rise in donations is the only way tQ will survive the current pandemic. Thanks for reading, and best wishes to you and yours. Wilson Neate: Can you tell me a bit about your first encounter with Wire? Jon Savage: I was training to be a solictor, I was an articled clerk — that was my day job — and I was writing for Sounds at the same time. I started in April '77 and that happened because I'd done a fanzine called London's Outrage , which was about punk rock. The whole punk scene was so small and I remember I'd met Dave Fudger, who I think got me on to Sounds , at a Clash gig in October 1976. Of course, Dave was a great promoter of Wire and, in fact, later on he became their music publisher at Virgin Publishing. He was quite an important person. And so because the scene was so small, you could get noticed: I did the fanzine and that got me picked up by Sounds . They were doing a generic round- up of punk rock groups called Images of the New Wave , or something naff like that, and my first task was to interview Wire. It was a little 50- word piece. I think Colin was still calling himself Klive Nice at that point and, much to everyone's continued amusement after 30 years, Graham was calling himself Hornsey Transfer. WN: So when was the first time you saw them perform? JS: I first saw them at the Roxy. It was one of those big nights when all the groups were playing there, April 1st and April 2nd. I saw them on one of those nights. WN: Was it just the four of them by that time? JS: Yes, they were a four-piece by then. There was no George Gill. I don't have enormous memories of seeing them play after that. My memories of Wire are mainly to do with actually hanging out with them, having a drink, because they used to hang out at the White Lion, which was the pub around the corner from the Sounds office on Long Acre in Covent Garden. Wire used to drink in there and they were also great friends of a friend of mine, Jane Suck. Oh, and the other thing I remember, in fact, is Dave Fudger giving me their early demos, which later came out as Behind the Curtain . I also remember going around to Graham's flat in West Kensingston. Those are my main early memories. WN: From the times you saw them play, do you recall anything striking about the way they presented themselves, in comparison, say, with the other bands of the period? JS: Well, they were a bit older. They weren't completely adolescent and they weren't pathetic — a lot of the punk groups you saw at the Roxy were completely hopeless, they couldn't even stop and start at the same time. They weren't teenagers like the Cortinas and they weren't pathetic like someone like Eater. They obviously had a clear idea about visual presentation. They were very stylised and in fact they sounded much better than most of their peers; hence all the comments about their material for the Roxy London WC2 album being sweetened, which of course it wasn't. It's just that Wire worked harder and had a better idea of what they were doing. And I liked the fact that Graham seemed quite middle class. I thought that was amusing, particularly when he lost his temper at the Roxy and told someone to fuck off in a rather genteel voice. And onstage Colin was vaguely menacing and quite conversational. I liked that too. WN: Could you give me a sense of how they were perceived by audiences and by the other bands? JS: They were always outside of everybody. They weren't an inner circle punk rock group. They weren't matey with the main players. They weren't keyed into the groups around the Clash and the Sex Pistols, the punk inner circle. They were always quite separate, which was never anything that bothered me. I thought they were very much of the time, actually, because I liked the fact that the songs were so short and quite accelerated. That seemed to go with the ideas I had at that point about acceleration, and they also developed the ideas that the Ramones had been playing with, which was to do very short songs, which I thought was a terrific idea. WN: Going back to your comment about Graham's accent and diction, do you think people saw Wire as middle class? Do you think that contributed to their separateness? JS: Probably. But there was so much bad class faith at that point in pop music that I don't know whether they were or not. But I certainly remember it as being quite striking. I thought, "Good on you!" In fact, there were quite a lot of middle class people in punk; in fact, there's a lot of middle class people in the music industry and the media industry, and a lot of them try to hide the class that they came from, which I think is a particularly pointless activity. WN: A lot has been written about the importance of the art schools in the development of British music. Do you think this was an important factor in Wire's case, given that three of them come from that background? JS: I think it would have to be, really — first off, because they were a bit older and secondly because it would have given them ideas about how to present themselves: it would have given them ideas about clothing and it would have given them ideas about sleeve design. I think it must have influenced them considerably. WN: It seems that Wire often get omitted from popular narratives of punk (most recently, for example, in Don Letts's Punk Attitude ). Why do you think that is? JS: Well, in the Don Letts case, it's because Wire don't have the right attitude. It looks a bit like sour grapes for me talking about other people's narratives of punk because I've laid mine down in England's Dreaming — and Wire were definitely in there — so that's really my attitude about the whole thing. But, as far as Wire are concerned, I don't know. People got obsessed about the Clash and the Sex Pistols I think, maybe the Clash more than the Sex Pistols. The Clash seem to be leading the way in the whole punk rock nostalgia business at the minute. And the Clash had a lot of followers and they had a lot of groupies. And the Sex Pistols did less, actually, to their credit. The Sex Pistols had a really tight group around them, whereas the Clash had all these dreadful fans and kind of male groupies hanging around them. And also, there was this impulse to be street street street , which, again, was a whole lot of fucking bollocks, really, although there was quite a lot of class rage in punk. People tend to have very limited definitions of punk that have to do with youth or a particular musical template or a particular class base, as opposed to the idea of constant reinvention. People are rather fundamentalist about punk, which seems peculiarly pointless. I always thought punk was about being new, which was why I liked Wire in the first place. You know, I remember going to see the Jam playing with the Subway Sect in January or February '77, and Subway Sect were new . They were doing something new and they were therefore terrific; the Jam were doing something old, therefore they were shit. And I know what Wire and I have in common was that we thought the Jam were just absolutely terrible, which of course they were. But, again, now they've been put in as a central punk rock group — and they just weren't. WN: In what ways would you say that Wire weren't a punk group? JS: Well, except for the wonderful 'Mr Suit', they didn't really do "fuck you" songs, although I have to say that 'Mr. Suit' is one of the very best punk "fuck you" songs — it's very entertaining, it still makes me laugh. And they didn't really do rama-lama, you know, na-na-na-na-na-na, the Ramonic template; that said, they seemed to take from the Ramones in a really creative way. And in fact the songs are quite a different variety on Pink Flag , which was most people's major exposure to the group: there's '60s garage stuff, which I really liked. I mean, 'Feeling Called Love' sounds just like 'Wild Thing', which I thought was extremely amusing. And then, obviously, something like the track 'Pink Flag' goes way beyond all that. Most punk rock groups tended to find just one mode and stick to it, really. It was all pretty much the Ramonic thrash, or else refried Mod in the case of the Jam. There's a variety of styles and approaches on Pink Flag . WN: Bruce Gilbert invokes the avant-garde notion of the "living sculpture" to characterise Wire. How successfully do you think the band blurred high culture and pop culture sensibilities? JS: I think quite successfully. I know they're still the art world's favourite punk band, which is testament in itself. Being arty myself, I really liked them because they kept on changing all the time. Also, I was interested in the differences between the demos and the early LPs. I think the least successful part of Wire was the interviews. I think they used to get too self-conscious in interviews and strangulate themselves, basically. But the rest of it was all pretty good stuff as far as I was concerned. The LPs were terrific, all of them sounded really good. They were melodic and the lyrics were usually pretty interesting and the ensemble playing was always quite kinetic, and they did rock. So it was a good mixture: they could do art, they could do rock and they could do pop. They didn't give too much away and didn't ally themselves with any fashionable cause or politics — they didn't really link themselves to that particular time, whereas a lot of punk stuff sounds like a rather bad teenage diary and they didn't do that. WN: Which of the first three Wire albums do you like best, Pink Flag , Chairs Missing or 154 ? JS: Well, I've gone around the houses on this one over the years. It changes all the time, really. I used to really like Pink Flag and then I used to really like 154 and now I really like Chairs Missing . I think they're all good enough to be the "best" and it depends on how you feel at a particular time. I've always slightly underestimated Chairs Missing because I had the demos and I really liked them and then I was slightly disappointed when I heard the actual album — but now I think it's really terrific. So it goes around and around and around and around, as far as I'm concerned. They're all are really good. There are pluses and minutes in each case, but they're all A+ albums. So there you go. WN: How about a couple of favourite tracks? JS: Well, I just love 'Mr Suit' because it makes me laugh. As I get older, what appeals to me most about punk is the humour because we were all terribly busy being serious young men at that point. So it's quite nice now just to have a laugh with it. It's just so fucking funny. What else do I like? I know I really like 'Too Late' on Chairs Missing and I've discussed it with Colin, who thinks it's a bit of a shit track, really. I quite like the fact that the actual song goes on for about a minute-and-a-half and then you have this endless jam at the end, which was quite unpunk. WN: You mention humour. Where do you think the humour is in Wire? My sense is that it's something that's often overlooked or missed. JS: Well, I found humour when I met Wire. We used to have a laugh, and so that would have encouraged me to see it. So I was privileged, in a way. I think British humour's very sarcastic and often very much to do with context and time and place. And you could easily take 'Mr. Suit' as a very angry song, for instance. In fact, it is a bit angry but it's howlingly funny, as I said before - the idea of that stupid chorus in the background going "no-no-no-no-no-no Mr Suit" in that rather clipped punk style is a hoot. And yet we can all identify with that song - "I'm tired of fucking phonies, that's right I'm tired of you." It's that very punk YOU , that very punk vocal. Another thing that made me laugh was that I went to Colin and Malka's place a few years ago and he had one of those classic photo booth photos on the wall . . . and when I think of Wire I think of those photo booth pictures that we all used to take of ourselves during that period, where we'd kind of put our heads back and open our mouths and look really stupid. And we weren't stupid — it was just fun to play at being vacant. So, anyway, he had one of those pictures on the wall, where you roll your eyes up and open your mouth and go DUUUUH . And so that's sort of what I feel about what a lot of us were doing during that period. We were trying to be stupid, but we weren't stupid — you know, we were just playing around with ideas of simplicity and earthiness, really. 33 1/3 has moved to http://333sound.com. The book features in-depth analysis and history of the album's origins and creation, with input from pretty much all the band members. There's also a smattering of very rare images, a foreword by Robin Rimbaud, and reflections from luminaries including Graham Coxon, Steve Albini, Henry Rollins, Ian MacKaye, and Robert Pollard. Also, the colour scheme on the cover is just gorgeous. Here's the copy from the back of the book. " Pink Flag is very much about the climate of the time: about 1977, about punk rock," reflects Colin Newman. "But it's not a punk record. It's about giving punk a good kicking using the tools of punk. It was very much about not being like the Sex Pistols or the Clash - or another rock band." Wire emerged late in punk's day, when its creative impact had dissipated. A second wave of bands was transforming punk into a cartoonish, homogeneous style, reconstituting formulaic rock-as-usual, and Wire's initial excitement at the potential of this cultural revolution had turned to ambivalence. Wire shared some of punk's vocabulary but spoke another language, and Pink Flag may have been the first post-punk album, although - or because - it embodied punk's most radical spirit. More punk than punk and more genuinely arty than art rock, Wire pursued an obsessively minimalist, conceptual aesthetic, playfully discarding conventional boundaries between fine art and popular culture. While British rock abounds with art-school musicians, few brought that pedigree to bear on their work as rigorously and adventurously as Wire. Drawing on original interviews with Wire and their producer (plus contemporaries and heirs), Wilson Neate offers a sharp and incisive study of Pink Flag in the context of the punk scene and broader rock traditions. 4 comments: Oh is it more, too much more than a pretty face It's so strange the way he talk, it's a disgrace Well I know I've been out of style For a short while But I don't care how cold you are I'm coming home soon I'm gonna make you a star, yeah. Have you been at the sherry again gran? Not quite, mate - but alcohol-fueled nostalgia is unpredictable. Who'dda thought - David Essex. Teen dream of a million 70s girls. But, I look forward to reading the book and I hope it makes yer a star. Pink Flag, by Wilson Neate. There’s a lot to like and a lot to admire about Wilson Neate’s Pink Flag (2008) in the 33 1/3rd series, and if in the end I have my reservations, they’re primarily reservations about the album, and reservations about the book only because Neate didn’t anticipate me as its reader. Neate opens personally, narrating over two and a half pages how he first heard Wire, but the book really begins with the second chapter. Here Neate introduces us to the band, member-by-member. Doing this also enables him to establish some of the main reference points: the bands they were listening to in the 1960s and early 1970s; art school and Brian Eno. Here, as throughout the book, Neate draws on extensive new interviews with the band members. Chapter three traces how they fitted into the punk scene, which they were part of, but which was settling into cliché by the time of their first performance. They were significantly older than many punk bands (the oldest, Bruce Gilbert, turned 30 in 1976), and their experience and their art-school background gave them some critical distance from the scene. Chapter four gives us both an analysis of the main concepts at play in the structures of Wire’s songs, in particular, ideas about framing and subtraction. And it also extracts the maximum comedic potential from the presence, personality, and removal of George Gill, one of the band’s guitarists in its early phase: Gill was Keith Richards played by a Yorkshireman, a blunt, acerbic blues-rock purist …. flatmate Slim Smith remembers: “He was the college’s main rabble-rouser, always causing trouble in class and drinking heavily, which occasionally resulted in getting into fights.” Gilbert goes further, commenting that Gill often “looked like he was about to break into a fight with himself.” (p.59) The fifth chapter turns to the recording of the album. Neate points to there being disagreement about how important producer Mike Thorne was in creating Wire’s distinctive aesthetic and sound: the release in 2006 of their 1977 gig at the Roxy seems to have demonstrated that the band had nailed it before the producer became involved; on the other hand, the interviews with Thorne that Neate draws on throughout the book create a very sympathetic impression of him, both as regards the technicalities of production and the management of a band who were new to the studio environment and somewhat overawed by it. There’s also a fabulous anecdote of Bruce Gilbert overindulging in Thorne’s herbal cigarettes on the first day to the extent that he thought they’d completed the recording and could pack up and go home. (In fact the recording took about three weeks, with another three needed for mixing.) The chapter of track-by-track analyses draws out the more general ideas in relation to particular songs, and sets further ideas in motion, placing songs on a spectrum of orthodox to experimental. As there are twenty-one tracks on the album, each analysis is necessarily brief, some of them not more than a page, and in consequence, and by contrast to what went before, the chapter somewhat disjointed. The final chapter, a mere six pages, considers the afterlife of the album, particularly as regards the revision of songwriting credits. Neate takes what could is potentially a dry and technical question and uses it to reopen the larger conceptual issues underpinning Wire’s work — above all, what is a song — but it’s still not the conclusion I’d hope for in a really great book. But I may not be Neate’s ideal reader. I came to Wire relatively late, via their On Returning compilation CD, and have mixed feelings about them. On the one hand, they were capable of writing the most insanely catchy high-tempo guitar songs — ‘Dot Dash’ in particular never fails to delight — but in spite of the energy and the at times snarly vocals, there’s something dry and cerebral about their work that means it feels one dimensional. In this respect they’re like several other late 1970s bands: Talking Heads, another band with an art-school background, similarly accentuate the cerebral. Likewise with them, I’m always pleased to hear their music, but in some way it doesn’t stay with me. Neate’s book makes me admire Pink Flag more, but it doesn’t make me love it. He does acknowledge that the band were sometimes ‘seen as too intellectual’ (p.40) and as ‘sterile’ (p.43), but his book isn’t designed to engage with those sorts of criticism: discussing Wire’s work in terms of framing keeps them at the cerebral level. It’s much harder to devise a critical vocabulary that will allow the reader to recognise a flicker of an emotional reaction to a band and then to nurture that reaction into some kind of love for them. I wonder if, by interviewing the band and the producer, and building his book around those interviews, Neate got a narrow perspective, as any historian might if working with a limited set of sources. There’s relatively little by way of quotation from contemporary reviews: how might the book have read if Neate had taken negative reviews as his starting point and worked outward from there? Having said that, I’ve enjoyed Neate’s writing and analysis, and am tempted to read his later book, Read & Burn: A Book about Wire (2013).