1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 392. Wire – Pink Flag (1977)

 

Well this one’s a delight. It’s another step on the punk ladder, but feels much closer to Nineties than it does Seventies, way ahead of its time. 

That’s in part, I think, because of the obvious influence on bands like Elastica, who pretty much nick the riff of Wire’s Three Girl Rhumba for their track Connection, but also because they do the same kind of super-short tracks as well. Wire have a lot of sub-one minute tracks on here, most are around a minute and a half, two minutes tops. Only the track Strange, with its gloriously muddy, dirty, guitar riff weighs in at a comparatively epic 4 minutes. 

Wire are kind of punk, I guess, their tracks are intense bursts of high-speed guitar and beats, with Colin Newman’s vocals more shouted than sung, but with quite dense and complex lyrics over the top. Mannequin, for example, is kind of the antithesis of Kraftwerk’s model -  

“Well, you're a waste of space  
No natural grace  
You're so bloody thin  
You don't even begin  
To interest me  
Not even curiousity  
It's not animosity  
Just don't interest me” 

The riff to Mannequin has quite an REM feel, and apparently Wire were an inspiration to Michael Stipe. I also get bits of The Fall, Therapy?, Nine Inch Nails, but none of these manage to replicate the micro-encapsulation of Wire’s songs. I remember mentioning John Lydon’s opinion of Todd Rundgren’s tracks on Something/Anything that they did what they needed to do and then got out: the ones on this album do that even more so. (That feels like one of Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards - “do what you’re doing, but do it more so”). I rather liked this one.