Run Up the Pink Flag, Me Hearties

Back in ‘77 we were spoiled – in those days it seemed like you could just pick up the latest hot English record and be blown away. Not that it wasn’t an incredibly fruitful time in the States too, New Wave Style, but here the media and the charts were more obtuse and you had to dig a little deeper to find the domestic vein. It wasn’t until the whole Two-Tone/Specials Forget Politics, Let’s Dance business that the U.K. hot streak got a little tepid, but compared to what followed even that stuff wasn’t too bad. For a while there, there was so much good music around that you could start taking it for granted.

Which brings me to Wire’s Pink Flag. Sure, I dug it at the time, played the hell out of it on The Johnny Vomit Punk Rock Radio Show, and even saw them later when they re-formed (and watched them play pool before their set), but somehow I never transitioned Pink Flag to CD the way I did with other favorites when the Great Change happened. I literally hadn’t listened to it in fifteen years when one day Field Day For the Sundays started cranking through my head, possibly because Ex Lion Tamer was on the Rough Trade Shops Post Punk 01 compilation. Even then I would have just bought that one song if I-tunes had carried it, but for whatever dumb reason Pink Flag isn’t available, so I, thank JAH, got the whole CD.

Sometimes when I listen to the old classics I can’t take it – even bands I idolize like the Stooges or the New York Dolls – because even after all this time I’m just so familiar with ever lick and handclap that the effect is like hearing Happy Birthday or The Star Spangled Banner yet again. Not so with Pink Flag. It was still exciting, I guess because there are so many songs and ideas on it, all unified by a single vision. No less an internet heavyweight than Mark Maynard gave me a hard time for not putting the Ramones on my 20 best album list, and JAH knows I love them, but to me they’re almost a singles band. At album length it’s just too much, a single vision but only a few ideas. Another album I just got and enjoyed, Double Nickels on the Dime, by the Minutemen is kind of the reverse, a lot of ideas but a sort of hazy point of view. No, Mighty Mark, if any album was neglected on that list it was Wire’s Pink Flag.

Part of it is the subject matter. When the Clash changed I’m So Bored With You into I’m So Bored With the USA it signaled a sea-change. Part of the atom bomb impact of the Sex Pistols was the fact that Johnny Rotten sang about class war and anarchy rather than true love and heartbreak. The Wire mix political and personal songs on Pink Flag, but they’re strangely intermingled, thorny and ambiguous, more like a Jean-Luc Godard movie than the evil woman done me wrong songs that were being done at the time by the bloated Rock Stars who we all knew were showing their devotion to true love by screwing every groupie in sight.

The music is fresh too – the punk rediscovery of the possibilities on the simple electric, guitar, drum and bass, without synthesizers, long solos, horns, strings or children’s choirs. As pinkflag (?) points out in the excellent liner notes to the remastered CD, the Wire also eschewed the fall back blues progressions and shuffles that were the predictable cliche basis of so much sixties and seventies rock. Not all of Pink Flag is strictly punk, although my favorite song back in the day 12XU certainly is, but the whole album profits by the infusion of the marvelous, liberating punk spirit of rebellion, honesty, simplicity and originality. But in the end to me the most sublime bits of the album are the cocky throw away asides, Colin’s insouciantly drawling "the impossible" on Three Girl Rumba or his deadpan delivery of "that’s the lowdown."

Sometimes it takes the perspective of a few years to make a masterpiece stand out from the merely good that surrounds it, but now that I’ve had a few years and more I can confidently elevate Pink flag to the pantheon of the greatest. Hail, Wire! Salute, Pink Flag!