Review

Words by Reggie Chamberlain-King

I would suggest that there are very few essential punk albums. I would find it hard to concede that there are even that many essential punk bands. There is Wire, of course. But, Wire have only three essential albums: Pink Flag, Chairs Missing and 154. And only two of these essential albums are truly essential: 154 and Chairs Missing. Of those, I like Chairs Missing the most, I think. And that is quite enough of the word essential.

However, Wire, as Mr. Neate neatly surmises and summarises, were all about the process. They developed between those first three albums, not because they honed new skills (they had none) or because they had new things to say (they said nothing directly), but because that was how the process moved along. That is, their interests lay in the processes of rock music and their work was a process in rock music, of first deconstructing and then reconstructing its structures and conventions. Guitarist Bruce Gilbert characterised Wire as a “living sculpture,” an ever changing piece of art, and discussing their later albums would be like starting I Am Sitting In A Room or In C in the middle. To understand the shaping of the structure, one must start at the beginning.

Mr. Neate talks a lot about ‘framing’ and Pink Flag is part of the frame around Wire’s career, as are the many year long hiatuses surrounding releases. By frames, he means those structures that control how we listen to pop music and what we expect of it: intros, choruses, fade outs, codas. And, on Pink Flag, these structures are revealed to us: the joins that are usually hidden by clever songwriting and the tricks that are concealed by the production wizard. On opener, ‘Reuters’, the intro and outros are extended until they comprise half the song. In ‘Ex-Lion Tamer’, the expectations of what makes a verse and what a chorus are reversed. By exaggerating or dispensing with such conventions, Wire could write songs of such brevity as ‘Field Day For The Sundays’ or of such atonality as ‘12XU’. With the standard trappings of rock ‘n’ roll stripped away, they could build up something else in its place. This act of deconstruction acts as a introduction to the slightly more intriguing Wire records that would follow; it is one of the structures that explains to us what we are listening to; it is a frame.

Well, of course not. It can only be seen that way in retrospect. In much the same way that an intro is only an intro if it is at the start of the song. If the intro is all there is, then it becomes the song. If Pink Flag had been the only Wire album, and considering their willingness not to record, it could well have been, it would have been a complete statement, rather than a statement of intent. And, until Chairs Missing, it was the only Wire album.

But there is a difficulty in discussing art that is about process, when the document of that process is static. One has to talk around the record, dysphasically. What seems important are those intentions and accidents that brought it into being and the relationship it has with everything around it. The difference between its structure, length, timbre and speed and those qualities in other songs reveals the processes and conventions that pop music keeps hidden in plain sight.

As a result, Mr. Neate writes about the band, always, as being in opposition to the punk movement of which they were seemingly a part, although also, seemingly, apart. Wire wore minimal black clothing, where others ripped and tore their Sex shop cast-offs.  Wire were all older. Wire kept themselves to themselves. Wire didn’t sloganeer and their between-song banter was brief at best. To hear it told, it is a wonder that they were caught up in that scene at all.

However, to set up this opposition, Mr. Neate chooses to argue that the other punk bands got punk wrong. Punk, he claims, was about people being able to do what they want, artistically, which is fine and well, but he makes the leap from there that what people should want to do is to create something new. The members of Wire back him up. Punk, though, was a populist movement. It was about democratising music and fashion. And it is the lazy supposition of the intellectual to presume that democracy means moving forward. People do not want change quite so much as they want to be involved in mechanisms that may bring about change. As a result, most punk bands played the same old rock and roll, only badly; but, at least, they played it.

The negative tone of certain passages gives Wire less credit than they deserve. The quality of those three records (although Pink Flag is no Chairs Missing. It’s not even as good as Cut by the Slits, but that is another record altogether) is inherent to the songs and not simply because they weren’t this or that or in bondage trousers. This doesn’t quite come across in Mr. Neate’s thorough examination of the correlation between this record and everything that surrounded it. Only the occasional interjections of notable fans, such as Mssrs Coxon and Albini, revel in the enjoyment of the songs in themselves. But, Mr. Neate’s discussion, for all its accuracy and solid research too frequently implies that Wire were a great band for purely patrician reasons. Just because they had ideas does not set them above the gobby plebeians. They are above them, because they executed those ideas well and wrote some great songs as a result.

Of course, it must have been very difficult to talk about a Wire song as a beautiful thing onto itself, because ‘Outdoor Miner’ wasn’t on Pink Flag. It was on Chairs Missing.

Posted on: May 6, 2009