Wire's Pink Flag

by Neate, Wilson

  Gilbert’s initial attempts to make music or, better put, sound were as atypical and obsessive as his first listening experiences. Although his parents had a piano, they never encouraged him to play it. Instead, he experimented, using it to produce intriguing minimalist noises: “I used to spend an awful lot of time underneath the piano with my head against the soundboard, hitting the low notes. I loved it. That was 20 times better than any music.”

  His first tape recorder afforded Gilbert the opportunity to pursue his unorthodox inclinations, enabling him to intervene in pieces of music, to isolate, excise and manipulate elements. His maiden composition was a primitive remix of Duane Eddy’s 1960 version of “Peter Gunn”: “It was a record I really, really loved because of the repetitiveness and that massive guitar.” Considering it too short, he made an extended mix by recording it off the radio three times, consecutively.

  These early endeavours more than hint at Gilbert’s innate Dadaist spirit, manifest in a playful quest for the uncommon amid the quotidian; a taste for the absurd; a tendency to subvert received ideas and conventional structures and an emphasis on process over product—all of which would permeate his future working methods.

  After secondary school, Gilbert enrolled in a pre-foundation/foundation course at St Albans School of Art, eventually moving on to Leicester Polytechnic. He began a Graphics course there, but it proved unfulfilling: his real interests lay in Fine Art. Having dropped out in 1971, Gilbert undertook a series of “strange jobs,” ending up as an audiovisual technician at Watford School of Art.

  He painted throughout this period, with the same experimental orientation that distinguished his earliest sonic explorations, transforming the familiar into the unfamiliar: “It was mostly figures taken to extremes. Very bright colours. Completely abstract.” His canvases expanded, literally, as he sought to accommodate his particular vision, but he ultimately found the medium limiting: “My paintings got bigger and bigger, more abstract, and I also started doing 3-D things. It occurred to me that this wasn’t enough, there just weren’t enough dimensions—and this is going to sound corny—but I wanted to paint and sculpt with noise.” Consequently, he began experimenting in Watford’s sound studio, “creating quite violent sonic landscapes.”

  Gilbert’s definition of what it means to experiment shows a line of continuity extending from his first projects through to later work, always in pursuit of otherness: “One way I describe experimentation to myself is curiosity and taking advantage of accidents. I think of it as a journey through my machinery: pushing machinery and sounds to the limit, until you get that strange recognition—you recognise something as being something you haven’t heard before. It’s about how far you can push a sound, how radically you can change it and if another structure appears, another texture; if you take it as far from the original sound as possible, during that journey one finds all sorts of intriguing, novel sounds. Well, hopefully.”

  Notwithstanding his abstract, experimental work, by spring 1976 Gilbert had become involved in a more mainstream undertaking, joining—as a guitarist—a large, loose-knit band named Overload. This included Watford students George Gill, also on guitar, and vocalist Colin Newman. After one chaotic performance, Gilbert was talked into continuing with just Gill and Newman, all three now playing guitar.

  By that summer, punk’s DIY cultural shift was underway, but Gilbert took his lead from the pre-punk theory and practice of Brian Eno, who was a visiting lecturer at Watford. Eno would become an intellectual and artistic touchstone for Wire. “I have a lot to thank Brian Eno for in terms of the idea that you could operate in music without a great deal of musical skill. I thought this was an ideal opportunity to experiment and see what happens, albeit with song-based, word-based material.” Gilbert also found early Roxy Music appealing, especially Eno’s role as an artist functioning almost as a separate entity, towards the avant-garde end of the spectrum: “They were the most interesting band at the time, and, in Eno, they had a non-musician doing squiggly noises and processing other musicians’ stuff. It seemed almost perfect.”

  Gilbert initially saw punk as offering the opportunity to create a project that negotiated between art and rock. He acknowledges certain models: “My sense of the Velvet Underground was that it was a piece of art. It seemed much more to do with art than with music. There was an element of that with Roxy Music too—the Pop Art angle.” This notion of a larger artistic identity was key to Gilbert’s vision of Wire: “My objective, if I was going to be involved in a group project, was to create something of not necessarily lasting value, but something that felt valuable: an exploration of what was possible and how far you could stretch something before it becomes invisible.”

  Abstraction and minimalism were core obsessions defining Gilbert’s approach to Wire and to his instrument. “He was an inverted guitarist,” says Robert Hampson (Loop, Main). “He played in the gaps where nobody else played. Without his inverted take on the guitar, I don’t think Wire would’ve been as strong. I don’t think anyone else had such overt minimalist tendencies. He threw all caution to the wind.” Band of Susans’ Robert Poss also recognised Gilbert’s uniqueness: “Bruce’s Pink Flag-eta. less-is-more, simple but not simplistic approach to guitar playing…uh…strikes a chord with me. Basic open-tuning chord formations and incisive rhythms with spaces left at all the right moments—that’s a great deal of the quintessential Wire sound.”

  Robert Grey (6’3”)

  He was unique. They couldn’t have done it with anyone else.

  Rat Scabies

  Like football goalkeepers, drummers generally fall into two distinct categories: flamboyant, larger-than-life showmen and anonymous, interchangeable journeymen. The extremely reserved, self-effacing Robert Grey tends towards the latter, but he’s always been irreplaceable in Wire.

  Grey’s total dedication to drumming is striking in its disciplined simplicity, something journalist and drummer Jim DeRogatis notes: “Robert’s one of those Zen personalities: whether he’s planting crops or digging a hole or playing the drums, it’s methodical, it’s beautiful, it’s precise. There’s not a wasted motion.” In his absolute, minimalist focus on his craft, Grey gives the impression that he exists only in the context of that intense relationship, that he considers everything lying beyond it, including ego itself, inessential and extraneous. This registered with bandmate Graham Lewis: “When I first met him he was doing Aikido, and it always seemed that the way he took up the drums was the same—from a natural interest in minimalism.”

  Perceptions of Grey’s cypher-like character begin with the ambiguity surrounding his name. Born in Marefield, Leicestershire, in 1951 as Robert Grey, he later changed his surname to Gotobed. In 1977, many presumed Gotobed was another nom de punk, but it wasn’t. “I changed my name in 1972. Gotobed had been my family name, but my grandfather had found it a problem to be called Gotobed. People didn’t tend to take you seriously. So he thought it would be better to be called Grey, and that was the name I grew up with, but when I was searching for my identity in my youth I had the option on this outrageous name. So I changed my name. And then, of course, when punk came, it was like all the other funny names people adopted and people assumed I’d done the same thing. Later, I came to agree with my grandfather. It has its uses, but as you get older, you probably don’t want to have an outrageous name. So I decided Grey was much more usable. I feel maybe I’ve got an identity now, so I don’t have to do something like that to establish myself.”

  Grey has always had an ambivalent relationship with music, feeling mystified by how one acquires the ability to play an instrument and lays claim to the identity of a musician: “Music was something I’d have liked to do, and I had this interest in drums. It seems like an odd thing to say now, but I always thought that people who played instruments were born to do it. They seemed to come from musical families, and when they arrived at school, they were already playing the oboe or the violin. They just seemed to have this musical ability, which I did
n’t have. I didn’t believe I could pick up an instrument and start playing it. I just didn’t have any family background. My dad didn’t like classical music. He wasn’t attracted to anything that you would really call cultural. That world happened elsewhere.”

  Still, Grey was an avid listener. As a teenager at Oundle School, he became a Cream fan: “I did like that abrasive tone and Eric Clapton’s style, but I would probably have been listening slightly more to the drumming. I wasn’t only focused on the drumming, but, out of the group, Ginger Baker would have been my hero.” Despite Grey’s feeling that he lacked musical aptitude, he appreciated very specific features of Baker’s playing: “I noticed that he always had a different arrangement for each song, a different pattern or way of playing that fitted with that song.” Later, John Bonham became another favourite: “Bonham did the same thing as Ginger Baker—he’s got ideas that he’s adding to the song. He’s not just playing a 4/4 beat. You can hear that they’re playing the instrument but also playing with ideas. They’re inventive.”

  After several attempts to secure a place to read English at university, Grey settled in London, signed on for a while and did a succession of temporary jobs through the early ’70s. During this period he began attending gigs. This was the start of the pub-rock scene, something Grey found especially attractive since it demystified the concept of the musician: “You could be close to the people who were playing and actually see what they were doing. That was new. The musicians were more like the people in the audience, unlike musicians miles away onstage.”

  Like his future bandmates, he also enjoyed Roxy Music, and he saw them at the Rainbow in 1974. He saw Eno perform that year with the Portsmouth Sinfonia at the Albert Hall: “That was a memorable occasion. Brian Eno was playing clarinet. I thought it was hilarious because classical music had always been sanctified to such a degree and was so serious. But when the Portsmouth Sinfonia started playing—people who couldn’t play their instruments—it was such a supreme joke.”

  In mid-1975, Grey joined old schoolmate Nick Garvey (who’d just left Ducks Deluxe) in a pub-rock group called the Snakes. By chance, he ended up as the vocalist. The band lasted a year, playing the London circuit and releasing one single, a snarling cover of the Flamin’ Groovies’ “Teenage Head.” Given the anti-rock ’n’ roll path Wire would take and the understated role Grey would assume, this is an ironic artefact: adopting an American accent, he drawls about being “California born and bred,” boasts that his woman’s “a teenage love machine” and warns that he’ll “mess you up for fun.”

  After the Snakes disbanded, Grey dabbled in acting, but punk refocused his attention on music. He borrowed a drum kit and started practicing, playing briefly with the Art Attacks, but still he insists, “I really didn’t know anything.”

  At a party in Stockwell in summer 1976, Grey met Colin Newman, who coaxed him into rehearsing with the embryonic Wire. Although excited by the prospect, Grey was uneasy. “I didn’t have any experience. I thought playing songs in a group was way beyond my ability, but if they wanted me to do it, then I’d have a go. It was just what I wanted as an opportunity, but living up to the opportunity was a bit of a problem.” In spite of his misgivings, punk’s democratising spirit gave him heart: “I suppose punk meant you didn’t need to be able to play your instrument to be in a group, and you could still get away with it.” Nevertheless, he remembers little about the first rehearsal: “I think the panic has erased the memories I had of it. As far as I could tell, they could play and had some experience, and I was just bluffing, really.”

  His limited skill notwithstanding, Grey endeavoured to bring something to the band: “I’d try to come up with things that fitted the songs, but if you haven’t got playing abilities, it has to be more of an idea that you can put into it—it’s that difference between an idea and technique. If I’d had technique I suppose I’d never have been in Wire. It would have been just wrong or it would have unbalanced what we were doing.”

  What Grey did have was a signature style. “He was like a drum machine. It was post-human in a way,” is graphic designer Jon Wozencroft’s assessment. This emphasis on the mechanical, the metronomic, the robotic has become the standard characterisation of his playing. However, while Grey’s drumming certainly has these aspects, there’s more to what he does. Mission of Burma drummer Peter Prescott makes this point, stressing Grey’s idiosyncratic approach: “He’s a fascinating drummer. He’s extremely minimal, but I don’t think he sounds anything like a drum machine because he has too many strange little tics, like the way he’d do rolls. He tended to stick to the hi-hat, kick, snare, but there was always a slightly odd feel to it. I’d never have confused him with a beatbox. He was too distinct.” From a slightly different perspective, Gang of Four’s Hugo Burnham also rejects notions of Grey’s style as affectless and mechanical: “Robert had a great ‘I’m not a slick drummer who knows all the rudiments’ vibe to his playing early on, but he was solid as fuck. I loved that. It was an essence and style too often missed then (as now) by all the hit-anything-that-you-can-as-often-as-possible merchants sitting behind drum kits. I’ve always tried to stick to that same principle.”

  Graham Lewis (9 st. 6 lbs)

  I liked the fact that Graham seemed quite middle class. That was amusing, particularly when he lost his temper at the Roxy and told somebody to fuck off in a rather genteel voice.

  Jon Savage

  Born in 1953 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, Graham Lewis had an itinerant upbringing owing to his father’s RAF career. Until age four he lived in Germany and Holland; on returning to England, his family moved around as Lewis senior was posted to bases along the east coast.

  Lewis’s childhood memories of pop music are unusual. It wasn’t hearing individual songs on the radio that made an impression but the experience of a dynamic, chaotic sonic landscape: “We were living in Mablethorpe, a seaside town full of amusement arcades and funfairs. This was where I first heard music, through very loud sound systems for the dodgems, carousels and those kinds of things.” It’s tempting to view this as the origin of Lewis’s interest in ambience, industrial soundscapes, mechanical reproduction and the pleasures of random noise. Like Gilbert, he wasn’t content to listen passively. Instead, he actively explored the aural environment’s possibilities, probing methods of transformation: “I remember finding places between rides and different sound systems and hearing sounds and music in a very peculiar way—depending on where you stood, you could get the most peculiar mixes.”

  Growing up around military installations during the Cold War shaped Lewis’s psychology, and he recognises that some of his Wire lyrics reflect the foreboding attached to those surroundings: “The dread came from living on the RAF base. We’d have these alarms: the Russians are coming or some attack. The Russians always chose a very, very inconvenient time—three, four o’clock in the morning. I’d been brought up with that. You’d get to school bleary-eyed and they’d ask what happened and you’d say, ‘Oh, we had a nuclear attack last night.’”

  Throughout the ’60s, pirate radio fed him a diet of random rock and pop. In his teens, he started collecting singles and developing an interest in the bass. “It was through listening to Motown. The bass was what I focused on, and then, in rock, I became aware of Jack Bruce—someone who actually sang and played bass. Later, I became aware of Andy Fraser in Free. Not surprising really, because his roots were in the Motown playing: it was as much what he didn’t play as what he did play.” This attention to space and a restrained approach would characterise Lewis’s style and, generally, Wire’s Pink Flag sound. Fraser was also known for prominent, melodic basslines, a signature of Lewis’s playing that anticipated the instrument’s pronounced role in post-punk.

  Having moved to Newcastle in his mid-teens, Lewis began making his own sounds, thanks to a local coffin-maker, Jimmy Moore, who gave him a homemade bass: “I used to plug it into a valve radio. It produced an intriguing noise—it wasn’t terribly musical.” As with
Lewis’s exposure to the noisescapes of the funfairs, his early bass experiments highlight a fascination with sound qua sound, a thread weaving through his other teenage explorations and beyond: “I also discovered the power of locked grooves, using a pin on a Motor Magazine diagnostic flexi disc. Changing its speed, frequency and tone on the Dansette was a marvellous way to kill time, a portal to the parallel world of noise and gratuitous repetition.”

  If Moore’s gift would have long-term repercussions, the coffin-maker also had a more immediate influence, encouraging Lewis to apply to art college. Lewis’s curiosity was further piqued by a teacher at his grammar school who’d known Eric Burdon at Newcastle College of Art, embodying the connection between art education and rock. Upon leaving school in 1971, Lewis began a foundation course at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry.

  Lewis had already started learning about Dada and Surrealism. From Duchamp in particular, he absorbed an emphasis on concept and process—“the questioning, the freedom and the notion that the ideas are as important as the object.” Also crucial was a sense of “the absurdity of language and trying to break it, to make new metaphors and understanding that commonplace things can hold as much interest as what one considers exotic. When you put them in the same place, you can get something more.”

  At “the Lanch,” Lewis was introduced to new cultural experiences—for instance, a tutor played the students Stockhausen: “I remember thinking, ‘This is intriguing.’ You were there to learn how to think. Art college was one of the few places where that was promoted as the number-one thing.” Eno also entered the picture, as a guest lecturer, and Lewis remembers being struck by his approach: “He was putting forward the idea that he was interested in the avant-garde and doo-wop and that this was perfectly reasonable.”

  During his foundation year, Lewis immersed himself in early ’70s art rock, seeing acts like Roxy Music, Van der Graaf Generator, Pink Floyd and Kevin Ayers. He also worked on the college’s entertainments production crew, staging wildly eclectic shows and even DJ-ing an event featuring the Ken Campbell Roadshow, Roland Kirk and Marcel Marceau.