Pink Flag

Yeah, so we did these, that was the CD piece.

And that probably nods back to Wire and Pink Flag and that whole, you know, kind of Ramones, you know, playing extra fast to get off stage and that sort of stuff.

You know, I quite like that.

Well, it's nice to sort of get into a mindset where you can just sort of get, you know, there's a sort of a certain deadline that you can just kind of push towards and then sort of get it done.

From their debut LP of over 20 now, I think, the first four came out in quick succession, followed by a hiatus of six years.

This one is called Pink Flag.

Bob is like that small-time dealer on the playground, you know, like that whole first-taste-is-free guy.

Yeah.

Welcome to the History of Punk Rock podcast.

Today we’re diving into Wire’s groundbreaking Pink Flag, a minimalist tour de force that reshaped punk and post-punk.

And now let’s trace the sound, personalities, clubs, labels, and history behind today’s story.

So here’s a record that still feels like it ripped the whole punk thing into a glass and turned it over in a blender.

Wire’s Pink Flag, released at the tail end of seventy-seven under Harvest, but recorded just before Christmas in Advision Studios.

It is an album of twenty-one tracks that together run barely half an hour, which makes every minute feel like you’re on the edge of a cliff you’re about to jump off.

And yet all of that comes from bands that were still clutching at the last edges of the rawness coming out of New York clubs.

They instead let the music breathe by pulling in moments where the guitars drift into thin reverberant washes before plunging back into jagged angular riffs, which gives each track a sense of unpredictability.

Red Krayola demonstrated that punk could accommodate complex theoretical frameworks while keeping DIY aesthetics intact.

In London, the band Wire pushed punk into intellectual territory with their nineteen seventy-nine debut Pink Flag.

Lead singer Colin Newman wrote cryptic lyrics that echoed political pamphlets more than catchy slogans.

Their guitarist, Bruce Gilbert, employed feedback loops and tape manipulation to create abstract sonic textures.

and then playing it live.

So we did this, and we did it with me and Fred, Tully Potter on bass, and Adam Dahlquist on drums, who is the current, this is the band that's Vic Bondi and his issues, but originally we were the first Shat band, and Seattle album, Seattle Hardcore Album Tribute, or Shat, the first Shat performance was of Pink Flag by Wire, and the four of us did it, and it was really, uh, kind of magical and Redshift was winding down and I had a bunch of new songs that I wanted to record.

So I thought to myself, well, I'll just pull this band into the studio.

And so we did the new album or the new LP, uh, EP, sorry.

It really does complement what's being done on this album and these are quick constructions i'd say two minute and 30 second songs all the way up to like three minute 20 to three minute and 30 second songs um they have a real sense of building to choruses that are propulsive but not in a big over the top way they're They're profound, but in their own way.

That's where it's a little bit like wire in that they do these quick hip snippets, whether it's Pink Flag or 154, Chairs Missing, even though all those wire albums are very different.

They all kind of have that thing where they grab your attention.

There's just something about them that grabs your attention.

But The Wolfhounds can get away with it, unlike, uh, Elastica, who, uh, plundered nine [laughs] Wire songs, literally, literally begging for a lawsuit.

I could see how you, you know, you might mix up some of those punk chords from Pink Flag, but they were, like, ripping off Kidney Bingos and everything, so they got, they got slapped hard, that Elastica.

Behind Wire, we heard Prolapse and a brand-new collection of their Marianne Hobbs BBC sessions from 1997 and 1998, from which we heard TCR and Killing the Bland.

And, uh, they have a album out from last year, and were here on the show as well, uh, sometime last year.

... and then look at the lyrics-

Was Pink Flag their first album?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, good album.

And all this was going on at a time in London when music was being reinvented right before our collective eyes so fast you could have easily missed it.

Of course, I am talking about Wire, a band who by their own admission are, quote, "intelligently moronic." And tonight we're covering their debut album, Pink Flag.

So let's start things off to get you situated into what we've been listening to here with a clip from the opening track on this debut album.

It is called "Reuters." [rock music]

Our own correspondent is sorry to tell of an uneasy time that all is not well.

And we, we decided we even want to do out of the box.

We didn't want to do, um, Marky Moon, we decided instead to do Wire, we decided to do Pink Flag, the first Wire

record.

And so we did that.

Deliberate, deliberate.

Yeah, it was a plan.

And so we did Pink Flag and man, the response from people was off the chart.

And then also just the sheer joy that we had, the four of us playing together was pretty great.