Free Wire's Pink Flag by Wilson Neate

some sort of policy, some rules to what they were doing. That’s fascinating. When you’re making music as an artistic expression, then you’ve got to come up with something a bit more interesting.” He continues, “If Wire influenced us, it’s above all in that sense of purpose, that there’s no bullshit, no solos, no flabbiness to the music, it’s all about economy and immediacy.”
    Wire’s style failed to make a noticeable impression on British rock until the ’90s, but its effects were felt sooner in San Pedro, California, as Mike Watt and D. Boon took a page from theband’s slim book. According to Watt, the Minutemen’s pursuit of a similarly lean sound saw them ostracised by their own punk community: “People always said, ‘You’re not a punk band,’ and it’s all because of the debt we owe Wire. We wanted to channel our ideas into very strict shorthand and have no filler, and this is what we get from them—you distil a song to the bare
nada
. We took that ethic right to the tune and boiled it all down. We have to acknowledge Wire for that simple idea, what Wire did with format. It seems like a simple idea, but, you know, the bicycle’s only a couple of hundred years old, even though the chariot’s thousands of years old. They had two wheels for a long time, but they never thought of putting one in front of the other. That’s what Wire did. A simple, elegant idea—but nobody had stumbled onto that shit before.”
    How can you take rock music seriously? So much of it’s rubbish.
    Colin Newman
    Beyond punk, Wire endeavoured to evade categorisation as a rock band and avoided positioning themselves in an obvious lineage. Of course, no group escapes its progenitors completely, and other bands’ work inevitably informed Wire’s. Nevertheless, they resisted replicating what they enjoyed, often ruthlessly: “Everything you heard would make some impression, but if something started to sound familiar then that would be stamped out,” remembers Grey. “There was always a feeling to try to avoid rock clichés. That was a working method we had.”
    When Wire’s work did develop in relation to other music, that relationship wasn’t about imitation but, rather, abstraction. Their aim wasn’t to incorporate another artist’s sound but, frequently, to pursue an
idea
it suggested. Such ideas served as creative foils for subversion or transformation: Newman often describes theminimal chord structure of “Pink Flag” as a bare-bones version of his rock ’n’ roll nemesis, “Johnny B. Goode”; “Brazil” was a love song that lyrically skewered the love song. Other tracks likewise followed a paradoxical logic: in the Martin Hannett “faster, but slower” tradition, “Lowdown” was a funk number drained of funkiness. These reimaginings were partially satirical; Newman comments, “There’s an element in
Pink Flag
of taking the piss out of rock music.”
    With a bigger drum kit, you’re doing more and the group becomes more of a rock group, which isn’t what I would want.
    Robert Grey
    Wire’s minimalism and their orientation towards difference were also crucial to distancing their live performances from both punk and traditional rock. Their minimisation of movement, interaction and lighting, as well as the suppression of familiar numbers, colourful attire, drinking and smoking, can all be read not only as attempts to eradicate gestures conventionally associated with rock concerts, but also as negations of personality and image—usually to the fore onstage. In that environment, Grey’s kit epitomised Wire’s subtractive bent: if it was sparse in 1977, he continued to simplify it in the ’80s, ditching tom-toms and cymbals and retaining just a snare, bass drum and hi-hat. “As groups get better known, the drum kit gets bigger,” he explains; “I thought I’d take the opposite route. I was interested to see what you could do with less. Also, it’s less of a rock drum kit if you take those