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33⅓ Main Series #62
Pink Flag
In contrast with many of their punk peers, Wire were enigmatic and cerebral, always keeping a distance from the crowd. Although Pink Flag appeared before the end of 1977, it was already a meta-commentary on the punk scene and was far more revolutionary musically than the rest of the competition. Few punk bands moved beyond pared-down rock 'n' roll and garage rock, football-terrace sing-alongs or shambolic pub rock and, if we're honest, only a handful of punk records hold up today as anything other than increasingly quaint period pieces. While the majority of their peers flogged one idea to death and paid only lip service to punk's Year Zero credo, Wire took a genuinely radical approach, deconstructing song conventions, exploring new possibilities and consistently reinventing their sound. THIS IS A CHORD. THIS IS ANOTHER. THIS IS A THIRD. NOW FORM A BAND, proclaimed the caption to the famous diagram in a UK fanzine in 1976 and countless punk acts embodied that do-it-yourself spirit. Wire, however, showed more interesting ways of doing it once you'd formed that band and they found more compelling uses for those three mythical chords.
- GenresMusicNonfictionPunk
160 pages, Paperback
First published December 19, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
April 29, 2014
I keep reading these 33 1/3s and I love the concept but they don't always work. The reader brings one brand of understanding about the album and the author brings another, and if they line up, the book feels successful, and if they don't, it seems like someone's missing the point. I've tackled 33 1/3s on albums I know backwards and forwards, including all the backstory and history of the artist, and I've tried books on albums I didn't especially like by bands I don't know well and wanted to know what all the fuss was about. This was somewhere in the middle: I totally dig Wire but discovered them more through their later, much different, work. Pink Flag seems like an odd relic when you go about it that way.
The book isn't without flaws. The first half drags a bit trying to sort out pedantic definitions of various rock genres and how Wire does or doesn't fit into them. The second half is better: it's a track-by-track breakdown that encourages you to listen more carefully to each (a worthwhile task since it's 12 songs in like 30 minutes, some of which are under 60 seconds and zip by like a frenzying tasmanian devil). There's also some pedantry here as lyrics are dissected for meaning, despite them being largely unintelligible and the band coming right out and saying they're mostly meaningless free associations.
On the whole, though, this is a success. I feel much more acquainted with early Wire and why this album stood out in its time. And it doesn't matter that I don't agree with Neate's interpretations that much--they aren't all that literal so you can take or leave them. I'll probably read his more exhaustive book on the band later on.
The book isn't without flaws. The first half drags a bit trying to sort out pedantic definitions of various rock genres and how Wire does or doesn't fit into them. The second half is better: it's a track-by-track breakdown that encourages you to listen more carefully to each (a worthwhile task since it's 12 songs in like 30 minutes, some of which are under 60 seconds and zip by like a frenzying tasmanian devil). There's also some pedantry here as lyrics are dissected for meaning, despite them being largely unintelligible and the band coming right out and saying they're mostly meaningless free associations.
On the whole, though, this is a success. I feel much more acquainted with early Wire and why this album stood out in its time. And it doesn't matter that I don't agree with Neate's interpretations that much--they aren't all that literal so you can take or leave them. I'll probably read his more exhaustive book on the band later on.
September 25, 2011
Wire is a band that I feel I need to get to know better. Back when I was just getting serious about my music, my father brought home an orphaned cassette that he found at work, (the post office) and it was Wire's 1987 album The Ideal Copy. (Incidentally, REM covered "Strange" from Wire's first album Pink Flag on their 1987 album Document). I remember liking Wire, but in those days I was too lazy and cheap to get backlogs of bands I liked (I had a lot of friends dubbing cassette tapes for me). I'm not sure whatever happened to the album, but I recently decided to get Pink Flag partly because of Simon Reynold's canonization of the album in his book Rip It Up And Start Over Again about the post punk movement. However, I have to say that I immediately liked and felt connected to Pink Flag when I heard it. To me, it screamed late 70s punk despite the eclectic array of songs. Wilson Neate's book for Continuum Pink Flag is a great resource. it was painstakingly researchedd with interviews with band members and devotees that later became musicians-people like Graham Coxson formerly of Blur, Henry Rollins, Steve Albini, and Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices (in fact his devotion to the band has made me decide to read the 33 1/3 book on their album Bee Thousand next due to Wire's influence). Neate profiles each member and gives context and background to the forming of the band and discusses how the band formed and made music prior to making their first album then gave a detailed account of the recording session followed by commentary on the 21 songs (only 35 minutes) individually. Reading Neale's book inspired me to listen to the album in order (Something I rarely do in this shuffle-iPod-era) and it really had an effect on me and made me realize the genius of the opening track "Reuters"(which almost feels like a Joy Division song to me) and hear the importance of the starting and stopping of the songs. The tracks that stood out immediately were "Ex Lion Tamer" (with it's great guitar riff and song-response dynamic) and "Three Girl Rumba" with it's infectious funky bass line. "Strange" was also standout (even though REM's version sounds nothing like it) along with A Feeling Called Love" and "Mannequin." It made sense that their big punk "hit" was "1 2 X U." This book is just another example of the high quality of writing going on in the series. I have to say that this album has become one of my favorite of all time in a very short time. How could I have over-looked it for so long?
March 8, 2024
Not as in depth as I had hoped but the chapter that break the album down song by song was revealing and I was surprised by how little of the lyrics I understood. Perhaps it was their accents. The last chapter made for an interesting epilogue as the original line up has splinted over credit and money.
December 11, 2021
If you’re a fan of Wire’s ‘Pink Flag’ this book will give you a deeper appreciation of the band and the songs. While Neate’s assessments of the material can get a bit convoluted here and there, I appreciated the context the author provides which helps the reader better understand the environment and circumstances surrounding the creation of this incredible album. Interviews with all band members provide detail, but as a recording geek I wanted to know a bit more about the gear used to achieve some of the monstrous tones heard on the album. Overall it was a fascinating read.
March 9, 2009
Really interesting if you're a crazed fan of Wire (like me.) Otherwise, it's probably gobbledygook. The tension between Colin Newman and Bruce Gilbert --more or less melody guy vs. noise guy-- was something I never picked up on, but it explains a lot about their music. And why Gilbert left the group.
May 26, 2012
Excellent work on a seminal punk album.
March 18, 2025
One of the better contributions to this cult-classic-quirky series I've encountered. I reviewed Wilson Neate's Read + Burn history of Wire when it appeared a few years after this take on their debut '77 LP. At 21 admittedly short tracks, it marked them as heirs to the art-rock sensibility and creative adaption of concepts, as Neate correctly stresses, that hardly any of the grads from British art schools lauded in the Sixties and Seventies had incorporated. Maybe only Soft Machine, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music/Eno. And as a fan of the very early Floyd and Roxy-Eno, I was pleased to find out in quotes from each member how much they'd been inspired by Eno's "non-musician" aleatory bent.
Similar to Roxy, as Neate emphasizes, the difference when they appeared amidst the Americanized blues-based thuggish punks, is that Wire brought into its lyrics, music, presentation, and staging careful attention; and the album sticks in one's mind, as many musicians influenced by it will attest in these pages, as a suite adroitly arranged rather than a standout array of tracks as in most of the standout records from the era of "classic rock" however ornamented or not by intellectual craft.
And Neate again stresses how removed Wire were, intentionally by "design" if a bit too affected, by their posturing amidst the gobbers and pogo-ists. Mike Thorne's production is shown, based on the comparison and contrast with the concert tapes released from the Roxy Club in London, to be either a great leap forward for amateurs or a consolidation of already intact chops and massed confidence.
I'd have appreciated depth about how Eno in particular profoundly shifted Wire away from the rockist and precious poses of their mid-Seventies origins, and if unschooled in their instruments as was Eno, how they tipped topsy-turvy in Wire's case at becoming obsessed musos alongside the direction and cooperation of Thorne, with his legacy on the Harvest label for prog and for European rather than "Anglo-American" contexts which channelled themselves into the scene he supervised.
The book after the usual history of the quartet, how they wrote the tunes, how they used the studio to enhance their live experience or lack of, all gets recited neatly. The closing, however, reveals a spin. For Bruce Gilbert's credit on much of the music herein was changed by Colin Newman in the reissues of the material almost twenty years ago. This split between what Gilbert (not sure about their mates Robert Grey and Graham Lewis in turn here, but they still play in the lineup, after all) and Newman see as respectively a project along Roxy Music in the Brian Ferry/ Brian Eno nascent phase, or Pink Floyd before Dark Side, with or without Syd Barrett, or contrarily the rock-band act that the four originally wanted to subtract themselves from as literally in their creations as they could dare or carry out, remains fundamentally a fissure cutting the short sharp titular, taut Wire.
Similar to Roxy, as Neate emphasizes, the difference when they appeared amidst the Americanized blues-based thuggish punks, is that Wire brought into its lyrics, music, presentation, and staging careful attention; and the album sticks in one's mind, as many musicians influenced by it will attest in these pages, as a suite adroitly arranged rather than a standout array of tracks as in most of the standout records from the era of "classic rock" however ornamented or not by intellectual craft.
And Neate again stresses how removed Wire were, intentionally by "design" if a bit too affected, by their posturing amidst the gobbers and pogo-ists. Mike Thorne's production is shown, based on the comparison and contrast with the concert tapes released from the Roxy Club in London, to be either a great leap forward for amateurs or a consolidation of already intact chops and massed confidence.
I'd have appreciated depth about how Eno in particular profoundly shifted Wire away from the rockist and precious poses of their mid-Seventies origins, and if unschooled in their instruments as was Eno, how they tipped topsy-turvy in Wire's case at becoming obsessed musos alongside the direction and cooperation of Thorne, with his legacy on the Harvest label for prog and for European rather than "Anglo-American" contexts which channelled themselves into the scene he supervised.
The book after the usual history of the quartet, how they wrote the tunes, how they used the studio to enhance their live experience or lack of, all gets recited neatly. The closing, however, reveals a spin. For Bruce Gilbert's credit on much of the music herein was changed by Colin Newman in the reissues of the material almost twenty years ago. This split between what Gilbert (not sure about their mates Robert Grey and Graham Lewis in turn here, but they still play in the lineup, after all) and Newman see as respectively a project along Roxy Music in the Brian Ferry/ Brian Eno nascent phase, or Pink Floyd before Dark Side, with or without Syd Barrett, or contrarily the rock-band act that the four originally wanted to subtract themselves from as literally in their creations as they could dare or carry out, remains fundamentally a fissure cutting the short sharp titular, taut Wire.
October 15, 2017
Many of the 33 1/3 books throw curveballls, but this is a fastball right down the line: a bit of band bio, a bit of recording detail, a solid track-by-track analysis, and a bit about the album's post-release history (including Elastica's, urm, homage to "Three Girl Rhumba"). Neate is amply readable and marries his own insights with a plethora of quotes from the band, their peers, and many of the musicians directly or indirectly inspired by Wire. I quibble a bit with the dismissive attitude to some of the punk greats, but I can overlook it. Most surprising to me: how many, and which, of Pink Flag's tunes were about trying to get together with ladies.
Read
May 6, 2023"At its most vital, between 1977 and 1979, Wire's music was an exploration of instant and ambiguity, documenting an ongoing state of becoming other and encountering otherness."
January 3, 2024
very good insight into a fantastic album
December 24, 2025
It's about a 1977 punk record with 21 songs on it, several of them really short. It analyses just about everything that can be analysed, and then some. Strictly for the fans. I'm a fan.
May 17, 2015
(Three and a half stars.) I've been dipping back into some of the old punk cornerstones lately, and as far as I'm concerned Wire's Pink Flag licks them all--Ramones, Singles Going Steady, Never Mind the Bollocks, Entertainment, even (forgive me, Joe) the Clash's first. While Wire does regroup occasionally to produce surprisingly strong new music that somehow keeps the old mystique fairly intact (I recently found that, while I was marching along the cold beaches of Duck with the family over spring break, I missed Wire playing the Black Cat in DC), it is of course their classic trio of late-70s records that remain their big attraction. Pink Flag and its 21 songs in 34 minutes was the first of a great run that continued with the arguably even better Chairs Missing, which almost singlehandedly spawned post-punk, and concluded with 154.
This little book on the debut record has a problematic first half; the backstory is told decently enough, but the discussion of the group's intentions and methods is horribly prolonged. Mind, an overview of Wire's peculiar aesthetic, which owes at least as much to Marcel Duchamp as it does to Johnny Rotten, is much-needed, and there are many good insights here, but they are buried under extreme repetitiveness. It's kind of a mess. But then, at its exact midpoint, the book shifts to a making-of account of the record, acquires a sudden focus, and becomes about as good as these things get. Small but essential reading for any fan.
Incidentally, I've read a million of these 33-1/3 books. I used to run into the Continuum people at publishing meetings all the time and, after plying them with questions, would pick up stacks of these little books for almost nothing (or sometimes just nothing) and read them on my plane rides home. If I start inflicting on you reviews of all these little books I've read and enjoyed, however--from Swordfishtrombones to Paul's Boutique to Village Green Preservation Society--we'll never get out of here. Or I won't anyway.
This little book on the debut record has a problematic first half; the backstory is told decently enough, but the discussion of the group's intentions and methods is horribly prolonged. Mind, an overview of Wire's peculiar aesthetic, which owes at least as much to Marcel Duchamp as it does to Johnny Rotten, is much-needed, and there are many good insights here, but they are buried under extreme repetitiveness. It's kind of a mess. But then, at its exact midpoint, the book shifts to a making-of account of the record, acquires a sudden focus, and becomes about as good as these things get. Small but essential reading for any fan.
Incidentally, I've read a million of these 33-1/3 books. I used to run into the Continuum people at publishing meetings all the time and, after plying them with questions, would pick up stacks of these little books for almost nothing (or sometimes just nothing) and read them on my plane rides home. If I start inflicting on you reviews of all these little books I've read and enjoyed, however--from Swordfishtrombones to Paul's Boutique to Village Green Preservation Society--we'll never get out of here. Or I won't anyway.
October 24, 2009
If you love the album, you'll enjoy the book. I have a much deeper appreciation for what Wire intended and achieved with this landmark album. Wilson Neate deftly ties together contemporary interviews with the band, the engineer who recorded the album, and many of their contemporaries and peers to present the story of the album's creation, interpretation, and lasting influence. The whole book was quite good, but of special interest is the song-by-song breakdown of the album that shares the inspiration of each song, some background on its recording, and other tidbits. The book is worth the modest price for this section alone, but the whole book is illuminating if one is fond of the band and this first album of theirs. It chronicles their early history and the circumstances that gave rise to their 1977 recording and release of Pink Flag. I only wish it had been possible to include the full lyrics for the songs. The lyrics that are quoted are helpful as a guide to some of the more difficult-to-decipher portions, and the author gives ample consideration of Wire's lyrics as an integral part of their music. This is such a well-considered guide, however, that I found myself wanting to have all the lyrics in front of me at a glance.
December 9, 2009
I would like to start by saying I am a humongous Wire fan. This book is just okay. I have heard that the 33 1/3 books are very inconsistent, and I do think this is one of the better models for writing about an album (Neate actually conducted interviews with the band members and producer and was fortunately able to come up with a lot of unknown information about the recording sessions, songs, etc). This certainly is better than the "let me tell you what this album means to me" 33 1/3 books. Except the Master of Reality one, which cannot be beat. This is a good book for the Wire fan, and is a good book about the album but not a great one.
SPOILER ALERT: Bruce Gilbert apparently left the current incarnation of Wire due in some part to the revamped credits on the reissue of Pink Flag which list specific songwriting credits... kind of lame...
SPOILER ALERT: Bruce Gilbert apparently left the current incarnation of Wire due in some part to the revamped credits on the reissue of Pink Flag which list specific songwriting credits... kind of lame...
July 1, 2016
It may be heretical, but I'm not intimately familiar with Wire of Pink Flag. They've existed as an "important" band to me, but a little intimidating to approach. For whatever reason, I decided to jump into this book as my primer and I'm glad that I did. William Neate does a great job of explaining the dynamics of the band, why they're important, and how they still matter. It's also one of the most hilarious books I've read in the series with the band members bickering in quotes and giving charming diatribes about their processes (or lack thereof). Color commentary from punk and hard rock legends like Henry Rollins, Ian Mackaye, and Steve Albini helped to ground it into something familiar while also being insightful in their own respects. It's thoroughly in-depth and I imagine devoted Wire fans will find a lot to enjoy and pick apart.
May 18, 2009
My first 33.3 book! Thanks Amber. I am such a rock geek, and I love getting the details of how the album came together, the song-by-song analysis, and discussion of the album's impact from lots of different angles and perspectives. This was a good one to start with, because I can't say that I appreciated Pink Flag enough. It was rad to read the book and listen to the music concurrently. It made me fall in love with the record, and lots of the individual tunes. I still couldn't choose between Pink Flag and Chairs Missing, thought--I had Chairs Missing first, and it really made a strong impact on me when I bought it. (For my Cougs, I bought Charis Missing from Rodeo Record with the going-away gift certificate you gave me...)
December 7, 2009
This book was great, and I really enjoyed the early approach to the book, especially as I have a lot involved, personally, in the history surrounding the book. Sure, it got a bit tedious going song by song near the end, but it wasn't nearly as dull as some of the others in this book; it actually provided some good insight into the recording. At the end of this book, it made me love Wire even more.
August 13, 2009
one of the better in the series. Good combo of fanboy stuff with interviews with the band that are enlightening. Especially if you love this album. And if you don't love this album you probably won't be interested.
December 24, 2012
If you're a fan of the album you'll probably find some new insights into the tracks and how they were created but the writing can be a bit pretentious - something that happens a lot when writing about music.
June 12, 2013
A good book,though Read and Burn is a better read. Some of the textual readings seem a bit of a stretch for me, but there are some revelations. Most importantly the songs are discussed not dissected, so they survive the process and listening pleasure is not impaired
Read
August 25, 2009 Bruce Gilbert is dead funny.
January 16, 2015
A fantastic entry in the 33 1/3 series about Wire's "Pink Flag," which must be the most meticulous and intelligent punk album of all time.
May 15, 2014
One of the better written in the 33 1/3 series.
April 26, 2015
This is how rock journalism should be done. Neate is a reviewing virtuoso who should be proud of his insights, interviewing skills and song analysis.
July 17, 2016
tells you what you want to know, gets you where you want to go.
Currently reading
June 6, 2009this series is awesome...rock geekdom in print
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews