Customer Reviews

Wire's Pink Flag (33 1/3)

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This is the first 33 1/3 book that I've read, and if many of the others are nearly this good, it won't be my last.

Thoughts:

- Wilson Neate is clearly a huge Wire fan and it appears that he has written the exact book that he would've wanted to read as a fan.
- It's practically bulging with quotes from Wire members, related parties, and notable fans. In fact, the only ALMOST bad thing I can think of to say about this book is that some of the bio-type material tends to meander a bit because Neate seems to want all of his interviewees to get their two cents in. I can't really fault him for this, and it wasn't annoying or confusing. It's a good thing, in a way. I just figured I should toss something not entirely positive into this review for variety's sake.
- I thought that the background info on Wire was very satisfying. I can't say I've ever tried incredibly hard to find this level of information for myself, but I've read Wire's pages on Wikipedia and AllMusic and Neate goes far past the standard "they met at art school and made punk music that wasn't really punk" generalities. It really breaks down exactly how and often WHY Wire was separate from typical punk rock. Neate does a great job pulling together some fantastic candid interview material from all the right people, which really helps to contextualize Wire and Pink Flag in their time and place.
- Several Wire members describe their early childhood inclinations towards music (or, more simply, "sound") and I personally found that fascinating. They also discuss their very limited musical abilities and how they overcame them with sheer creativity and hard work. It's really very inspiring... great to read if you have any kind of desire to start your own band.
- Neate does break the album down song-by-song, with each song getting anywhere between a few paragraphs to several pages of discussion. I've only gotten to track five ("Start to Move") but this section is very thorough and illuminating. The great comments from the band members and music biz fans keep on coming.
- Finally, there's a ~5 page conclusion that I haven't read but I'm sure it's nothing sort of fascinating just like the rest of the book.

So yeah, great book, well-written by Neate. Detailed without being tedious.

This book will save rock and roll. We've reached an era where music is cheaper than water. An album is recorded, thrown on the internet, blogged about, reviewed, hyped, backlashed and forgotten within a month. The era where people spend time obsessing over and mythologizing artists, albums, recording sessions, and event concerts seems to be behind us now.

I find it wonderfully refreshing to see that there are still people in our world who aren't afraid to open up a rock album, climb inside and live in the vinyl grooves for a year or two. Neate proves to be the perfect vessel for an season long plunge into the wonderful and strange world that is *Pink Flag*. These two artists--Neate and Wire--deserve each other. For example, it seems crazy that Neate would spend four pages talking about the 28 second "Field Day for the Sundays". Surely, one would imagine that if he dug below the surface of that one, he'd hit rock in one stroke. Instead, Neate and the gentlemen from Wire--Lewis, Gilbert and Newman--riff on this tune with no regard for the length of the song they discuss. It works.

As Neate spins stories surrounding the creation of this album, each of which is heavily supported by quotes from the band members, it becomes more and more clear how different *Pink Flag* was from its neighbors in the early punk scene. When so many bands where pumping out animalistic, emotional blasts of hormonal dissent, Wire clearly were spending some time thinking and making artistic decisions. I found these in depth histories of Wire's beginnings in the punk scene to be especially fascinating; their perpendicular stance to the scene that spawned them was a bit of surprise to me.

Either way you slice it, the detailed madness of this book, in conjunction with the detailed madness of its subject, is exactly the type of rocknroll intellectualism that is sorely missing from the scene nowadays. Lately, most records don't even come with liner notes. Suddenly, this one comes with a book. Or inversely, this book comes with a great record.

Read it book and relearn how to appreciate music.

On a side note, I was a little surprised by the review that claims this book is revisionist history. I feel this reviewer was missing the entire point of the 33 1/3 series. It strikes me that Neate wasn't too interested in framing the significance of *Pink Flag* in Wire's catalog. The story that Wire "becomes overly pretentious, becomes ashamed of their early work" could very well be true, but that story doesn't have any bearing on what what into this record. This is a book about *Pink Flag*, not about keeping it real.

This book is like one of the best tracks off Pink Flag itself: short, sharp, definitive, packed with far more intelligence and wit and rock/art history than you'd think it possible to squeeze into that small space.

Neate offers something for everyone: for the real Wire aficionado, there are intriguing facts and insights (into the recording of the tracks, the band members' backgrounds, and the like) clearly based on painstaking research & extensive interviews; for the general rock reader, there's a condensed, readable history of British punk, glam, and art-school rock & roll; for anyone who heard Pink Flag 30 years ago (!) or remembers the odd single from college radio, there are a hundred compelling reasons to get the album, listen again, and notice all the little details that this book suddenly makes audible. It's fun, too, to hear tributes to Wire from the more famous of their 1977 peers (Rat Scabies, Captain Sensible, Glen Matlock) and from the American punk/post-punk icons they inspired (Mike Watt, Henry Rollins).

This book is enjoyable on multiple levels...like Wire.

A great band grows, becomes overly pretentious, becomes ashamed of their early work. That is the true synopsis of Wire. This book idulges their desire to whitewash the fact they started as a simple, but great, punk band and floods you with a bunch of blather about how they were "never a band" in the conventional sense and that they never played "music" but instead created "soundscapes." Sure.....that's why Mr. Newman cowrote the earliest works with titles like "Mary is a dyke," they were doing some high-art project. Please. These guys were just a punk band. And probably one of the best ever. Is that really so terrible?