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.