Thorne’s practice suited Wire. “Mike applied his psychology with humour,” says Lewis. “He gave us the discipline to follow good habits, and he was good at getting us to realise more potential than we thought we had.” Grey, too, praises Thorne’s ability to draw the best from Wire: “He was very good at talking to you, helping you do things and impressing on you what he wanted to get out of you.” In particular, Grey remembers Thorne’s unique hands-on style: “He’d do a lot of conducting—very exaggerated arm movements to make the point where you were supposed to play very obvious. When conducting was necessary, he’d come running out of the control room and into the studio so he was more or less on the shop floor with us. It was like him joining in. That technique worked very well and was entertaining for everybody.”
Importantly, Thorne shared Wire’s allergy to the shambolic rock dominating punk; Ken Thomas recalls how the producer’s rigorous modus operandi was geared towards creating a distinctive sound: “Mike comes from a physics background. Everything was so methodical. He’d have everything precisely done. It wasn’t very rock ’n’ roll, which helped it stand out. Punk had to do with spontaneity and rawness, and he took that away. He made it very stylised.” Thomas offers examples of Thorne’s disciplined approach: “After playing a snare drum five times, he’d change the snare drum to make it sound the same. He’d bring these pedals in and spend ages getting this weird sound through a particular amp. Or he’d work out the delay mathematically—usually you just pump it up, and if it’s one digit out, it won’t affect it. He wanted everything really bright and clean, a bit like Kraftwerk. I liked it because it was so sterile. I’d worked on sessions that were much more rock ’n’ roll. Mike’d hate rock ’n’ roll.”
Mike said he’d have us on our knees by the time we’d finished, and he was right—it was draining. I don’t think you’d call the whole process enjoyable, but there were very enjoyable parts. It’s a voyage of discovery, isn’t it?
Robert Grey
The group worked five or six days a week for three weeks (with another three for mixing), starting around midday and finishing in time for last orders at the nearby White Lion. The sessions were fairly standard: “It was made in the conventional method of the time,” says Lewis. “We were playing together, and what was important was to get down steady backing tracks—a good relationship between the bass and drums and perhaps the rhythm guitar, but everything was replaceable after that. It was done fairly scientifically, replacing and overdubbing. There were huge amounts of overdubbed guitars: on ‘Strange’ there are maybe about 12. Then there’d be some updating of vocals as it went along until things became more and more solid, then the backing vocals and final vocals were done.”
The process was demanding and at times dull. “It was hard work getting the backing tracks down,” Newman recollects, “but it was dead boring for me, and probably Bruce, because it was all about the rhythm section.” Gilbert points out that Thorne was conscious of the demands he made and tailored the sessions accordingly: “Sometimes it seemed like a bit of a grind, but Mike made it enjoyable because he was always thinking about different things we could do, like going to the shops for a different pedal.” Thorne was adept at maintaining a mood conducive to the work, gauging energy levels: “There was always a pause between takes. But sometimes the adrenalin was flowing and had to be channelled. Wire were ready to go, and it was just a question of hanging on and keeping their wits about them. I always made sure they had the appropriate break, though. You don’t grind people on and on with intense music like this, take after weary take. I’d let everybody finish the analysis and kick back in the control room while I’d creep out and tune the guitars, ready for the next take. They wouldn’t have mechanical distractions and could go back in there ready to fly.”
Newman remembers that whenever things came to a head, tensions were promptly defused: “When Rob’s sticks used to go flying across the studio, Paul Hardiman and Mike used to get under the desk. Everybody would be laughing. It’s a very intense situation, in a studio with a bunch of people who are discovering something.” Humour was an important part of Wire, and Grey particularly valued it: “Some people see us as dour and serious. The humour didn’t come across so much in the performance but more in rehearsal. There were endless strands of humour and jokes that went through the interaction of the members of the group.” Newman adds, “Something I love about Wire is how moronic it is. Wire is fantastically moronic, but in such an intelligent way: intelligently moronic.”
As well as creating optimal working conditions, Thorne proved musically valuable. According to Lewis, “Another of Mike’s contributions was in terms of arrangement, tightening arrangements, and also his understanding of composition. He was very good at working with Bruce and Colin on inverting and separating chords and strengthening aspects of them so you could make things larger and more solid.” Similarly, Gilbert recognises Thorne’s “musical imagination,” acknowledging his role in constructing Wire’s “sonic landscape”: “I trusted Mike. He was an incredibly creative force.” In Grey’s view, “Mike’s knowledge of music meant he could interpret what we were doing into something musical enough to record. He knew a lot about music that we didn’t, and we benefited from that and also from the way that songs are put together in a studio. That was new to me. I’m sure it was new to everybody—just the possibilities a 24-track studio offered. We couldn’t have done it without him.”
Newman is more circumspect. He believes that—through no fault of Thorne’s—critics and fans have exaggerated the producer’s role, casting him as the lone person able to transform Wire’s raw material into something timeless and memorable: “He got a reputation of being a George Martin figure, but my gut feeling is that Mike was over-credited. People thought, ‘Oh, they can’t have done it—Mike must have done it.’ That idea needs to be taken away,” says Newman. “That it was all down to him isn’t true.” This perception dates back to the suspicions surrounding Wire’s Roxy album tracks. Newman is keen to stress that, as early as April 1977, before Thorne’s production involvement, Wire’s sound was already solidifying. For him, this was a motivating factor behind the 2006 release of the band’s complete April Roxy performances, in that they attest to Wire’s relative competence and comfort with their material long before recording Pink Flag—debunking the myth that their sound was the producer’s work. “That’s the same band six months before,” emphasises Newman. “That wasn’t invented on Pink Flag—that’s what the band sounded like.”
Interestingly, Gilbert offers a different reason for releasing the Roxy sets: “It’s important for people to hear that we didn’t suddenly appear fully formed as on Pink Flag. We were doing other things. Amusing ourselves. And the crudity of our technique—I thought it would be fascinating.”
6
God Those R.P.M.: Pink Flag Track by Track
Pink Flag is a perfect record. There are few records you could listen to at any point since the advent of rock music and not necessarily be able to hang them on a certain era and find them rewarding in the same way they were when they came out. Pink Flag’s one of those records. If I could make records that sounded that good, I’d be happy. From the sound of their instruments to the economy of their presentation to their willingness to go beyond the expected forms and content, there’s literally no part of Wire that I didn’t want to rip off at one point or another.
Steve Albini
“Reuters”
“Reuters” always used to freak me out. It’s really stark and horrifying.
Graham Coxon
“Reuters” was a statement of intent. It announced Wire’s singular presence amid 1977’s increasing homogeneity, contrasting dramatically with the typical first track on any number of contemporaneous punk albums.
The initial batch of UK punk LPs mostly adhered to rock and pop orthodoxy: convention demanded a catchy opener, instantly drawing listeners in and reinforcing their sense of being in a familiar place—at the beginning of an a
lbum. Like Bowie’s disorienting opener to The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, “Five Years,” “Reuters” makes no such concessions. Rather than start with an upbeat, unchallenging anthem, Wire subvert narrative expectations with a crawling, monochromatic drone, devoid of chorus or melodic hooks. It doesn’t invite you into the record; it sucks you in and overwhelms you. In Sounds, Dave Fudger described “Reuters” as a “morbid minor-chord stunner.” For Crawdaddy’s Gary Lucas, it indicated the band was “obviously on to something of seismic importance.”
While it doesn’t fit the paradigm for an album-starter, in the context of this record “Reuters” is an unmistakable lead-off track. This was always apparent to Mike Thorne, who saw its capacity to “define the sound of the album.” Central to that “sound” is its air of menace and apprehension. According to Gilbert, “It’s relatively simple. Very direct. A D chord, in the beginning. It’s a fairly ominous tolling of the bell.” Newman, too, emphasises that foreshadowing quality: “We thought, ‘If you’re going to do an album, then start with something portentous.’” This wasn’t lost on listeners like Robert Pollard: “’Reuters’ was the harbinger of what was to come.”
The brooding intensity that’s vital to the impact of “Reuters” as an opening track resulted from meticulous attention to detail. Thorne, for instance, remembers a small but significant change in the arrangement: “We cut a bar, and I had to cue the change into ‘in the hills there is movement.’ There was originally an extra bar before that, which I suggested was losing the tension—junk DNA in a way.”
Above all, “Reuters” is Wire’s tour de force of distance and remove. Although by rockist standards such attributes supposedly undermine authenticity—and, therefore, rock’s affective reach —“Reuters” demonstrates how a measure of musical and lyrical distance can increase potency and gravity. On both levels there’s a gap of sorts: between the tentative, foreboding introduction and the harsh, turbulent viscera, as well as between the narrative voices and their fraught subject matter. It’s the tension in these gaps that makes the song so powerful. In the Village Voice, Christgau noted its “simultaneous rawness and detachment.”
Pink Flag’s titles range from adjectives divorced from nouns (“Strange”; “Fragile”) to cryptic crossword clues (“106 Beats That”; “Ex-Lion Tamer”). As the name of a news agency, “Reuters” signifies the objectivity and disinterestedness of effective journalism. However, this unevocative title refers to no specific object, event or feeling, giving little indication of the theme beyond the simple media reference. That distance is underscored by the title’s absence from the song, against the grain of tradition. “We got into the habit of titling things not the obvious way,” explains Lewis, “but with something we felt described the piece, more than just taking a line from the chorus.”
The track evokes a radio broadcast. Framing songs as radio transmissions is nothing new, but Wire avoid cliché. The song-as-radio-broadcast is steeped in rock mythology, often about nostalgia or teenage rebellion, frequently a meta-song about pop music itself. Unlike many predecessors, the programme suggested by “Reuters” has nothing to do with music or pop culture; it’s a news broadcast, nodding to BBC Radio’s current affairs programme From Our Own Correspondent (a favourite of Lewis’s).
The lyrics maintain the title’s detachment. The absence of the first-person pronoun contributes to this impression. The opening voice is anonymous, presumably speaking for the agency and summarising events in an unnamed conflict on behalf of the journalist, who doesn’t explicitly address listeners until the end. By not identifying the conflict, not situating it in a particular time and place—by preserving a distance—Wire guarantee the song’s lasting power. Were “Reuters” given clear markers of identity, it would be reducible to a past, completed event, already confined to the history books. The absence of specificity highlights the historical continuity of conflict and war: “The subject matter is very political, world politics, and it’s very generalised. It applies to any era,” notes Gilbert. Lewis remembers a news report on tensions between Guatemala and Belize impacting his thinking about the words, but rather than portray a concrete situation, he isolates the conflict’s common motifs that repeat throughout history. Jim DeRogatis captures the effect of this: “It was journalistic, but it was otherworldly.”
Having been introduced to the scenario second hand by an anonymous voice (“Our own correspondent is sorry to tell…”), listeners then receive an impersonal report of socio-economic and political implosion. When the correspondent’s voice finally emerges directly, the intensity is heightened as things spiral out of control: “This is your correspondent, running out of tape, gunfire’s increasing, looting, burning, rape.” The song breaks down into the “rape” chant, taking listeners from the removed start into the heart of anarchic destruction. With tape “running out,” the track ends without a resolution, and events continue undocumented outside the narrative frame.
Another distancing effect enhancing the timelessness derives from the use of voices as texture. This attention to the voice’s possibilities, beyond the lead vocal, was a characteristic of Wire’s early work. “Wire always thought vocally,” comments Thorne, “which wasn’t at all true of other groups around this time.” At the song’s midpoint, indecipherable, crisscrossed voices bring to mind radio chatter. If “Reuters” had been recorded today, Newman thinks they would have “probably used a bit of shortwave radio.” The original technique remains compelling exactly because it’s not a sampled broadcast, which would trap the track in its historical moment. Moreover, many of rock’s early sampling experiments have aged poorly, now sounding clichéd; this non-literal rendering of radio ensured longevity. Still, Newman mentions a potentially more valid change: “Nowadays, we’d have thought twice about having a repeated chant of ‘rape.’ It was supposed to be despairing, but it sounds a bit too gleeful to me now.”
The musical structure reinforces the effect of detachment. A more conventional way of starting “Reuters,” as the album’s first track, might have been to cut immediately to the chase, with Gilbert’s crashing guitar. However, the 30-second beginning section is crucial. The hesitant Morse-code guitar, bass and drum patterns create uneasy expectation in the build-up to the dramatic entry of Grey’s bottom-heavy snare and what Thorne calls Gilbert’s “cheese grater” sound. “I was getting quite adventurous,” recalls Thorne. “These were the early days of the effects units, and the opening, pealing guitar, the first you hear, was double-tracked. Then, on the mix, I took these into an MXR Phase 100, then out into a common connection, then into an Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress and finally to the two sides of the stereo: this gave that sheer sheet of sound. It doesn’t sound like a double-tracked guitar. This was my physics background, getting very theoretical, but it turned out very nicely indeed: it’s a very distinct sound, and it certainly wakes you up when it kicks off the album.”
Amid Gilbert’s initial layered guitar tracks, Newman and Lewis still notice a glitch. To casual listeners it sounds like part of the song’s dark, tense ambience. “The first chord is wrong,” remarks Newman. “There’s a mishit string or something like that.” Lewis counters, “That’s why it’s so interesting. There’s a few places where it’s slightly discordant. I don’t think Mike would have let it go if he hadn’t thought it was deliberate.” Indeed, Thorne enjoys the disunity between the guitar tracks: “When the double tracks—the heavy crash guitars—are on each side, the sort of variation between the two of them gives such an unsettling excitement: the struggle to get it right, to converge. It’s so different from the heavy-metal precision where the riff is just being played efficiently.” Newman’s still unconvinced about the opening chord: “It wasn’t on purpose. I don’t see it as a good mistake. I just think it’s wrong.” He also faults the mixing: “I find it very weird. The way the snare drum comes in with reverb suddenly halfway through sounds out of scale with the rest of the track. I would’ve mixed it differently. My
criticality doesn’t stop just because of the passage of time!”
“Field Day for the Sundays”
Wire got a lot of mileage out of Britt Ekland and Rod.
Colin Newman
At 28 seconds, “Field Day for the Sundays” comes almost as punctuation between “Reuters” and “Three Girl Rhumba.”
The back-to-back placement of “Reuters” and “Field Day for the Sundays” exemplifies Pink Flag’s attention to track sequencing, here stressing Wire’s capacity for extremes. One of the record’s lengthier numbers (one of only three to break the three-minute barrier) gets juxtaposed with the shortest: “It’s a complete contrast with ‘Reuters,’ which was huge, dramatic and expansive,” says Thorne. “This is claustrophobic and in-your-face.”
Critics often describe Pink Flag’s shorter songs as sketches, but that implies they’re incomplete or wanting. Notwithstanding the absence of a standard verse-chorus structure in “Field Day for the Sundays,” as Thorne says, “It does sound complete in and of itself.” The track epitomises Wire’s mastery of economy and their ability to achieve more than their minimal means might seem to allow. In under 30 seconds, they craft a tune with a strong, if fleeting, melody and even a sing-along quality, yet without the basic components of conventional song structure. And within that compressed framework, there’s time for a sequence of stops, the song breaking at four, eight and 23 seconds with proto-math rock precision.
Wire often account for the brevity of their early numbers by citing the edict, “When the words run out, it stops.” Nevertheless, they didn’t always obey this. For one thing, Newman’s sung versions often deviated significantly from the written lyrics as he substituted words or repeated phrases. Additionally, text and song lengths didn’t always correspond: “Reuters” has 73 words on the 1977 inner sleeve, and it lasts 3’03”; “Field Day for the Sundays” has 80 words and lasts 28 seconds. “None of these things are hard and fast rules,” concedes Newman, “but it’s a good line for an interview.” This track is the maximum expression of Newman’s knack for squeezing lyrics into small spaces: as sung, it works out to 2.86 words per second. Newman also proposes another, more intriguing reason for the brevity: “If it was any longer, you’d see it for what it is. It’s like a folk tune, almost, the way the chords go around, the way the melody works. It’s got this English quality, but it’s concealed because it’s over so quickly and because it comes after this stark opening track.”
Wire's Pink Flag Page 9