Wire‘s Pink Flag is, as you know, essential listening. Twenty one tracks in little over half an hour trip over themselves in a rush to the finish line, skinny-waisted, free of flab, fighting fit at flyweight…or I Am The Flyweight, if y’prefer. Drums, bass, guitar and vocals meld as one; shouty in parts, pseudo-menacing in others, the group sounding fragile one moment then like the apocalyptic big bang of post-punk the next. There’s no fancy gimmickry, no keyboard parts, no horns, nothing added that can’t be played on a stage between the four of them. A double-tracked vocal? Forget it. They’ll all sing together when volume and texture are required. Overdubbed solos? No chance. Actually…solos? Not really. That’d be muso and the Wire manifesto suggests that muso = bloated fatness. There’s neither a blues-inflected up-the-frets wig-out or a slightly-bent B or G string anywhere on the record. Where their peers unselfconsciously slipped into the sort of riffage Chuck Berry might’ve spat out had he been pointed in the direction of a Marshall stack, Wire eschew that particular boring old rule book and rewrite their own. Guitars will be loud. Incessant. Slamming like a downpour of anvils from a heavy iron sky…and it’ll all sound fantastic. The skill of Wire is that they can say all they want with just some carefully considered words and a rammy of guitars. Often, they can get their point over in well under a minute.
Saying that, half way through the second side you’ll find Strange.
Wire – Strange
Strange is just one of three tracks that breaks the 3-minute barrier on the record. Indeed, had they sustained a tiny hint of cymbal splash at the end, it would’ve passed the dizzying, nose-bleeding 4-minute mark. As it is, it’s the longest track on Pink Flag and one of the more conventional songs at that.
Here, Wire are economical and taut, sludge-rock without the pantomime of Sabbath or the self-masochism of Iggy and the Stooges. Guitars and bass military two-step their way through an electric crackle of distortion. The drums thunk their way in 4/4 time, the hi-hat crisp and clear and opening and closing with total robotic precision. Colin Newman’s sneery Thames Estuary vocals are at odds with the duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh-dumb vocals in the background; neanderthal and thick and totally rock, something, you have to think, that Wire would be horrified at the thought of.
Block chords slide a couple of frets up for a brief key change. ‘Refrain! Refrain!‘ comes the shout. Where they might’ve naturally ended things, the song picks up again. Crunch, crunch, crunch goes that G to C chord change. Hiss, hiss, hiss goes the hi-hat. Slam, slam, slam, they all go as one. The tempo never wavers, hovering as it does somewhere around resting heartbeat level, impressively marginally slower than you feel the band wants to play. Takes discipline, that. Lesser bands would’ve sped up and thrashed their way to an undignified and calamitous ending by now. Wire march on, keeping the tempo steady but weaving ambient and atmospheric guitar noise to flavour the stew. A bit of feedback. Wacky high notes. Strings that are hit and abused rather than plucked. Beautiful art rock from start to finish.
A version of Strange pops up on REM‘s Document album. But you knew that already. I lent my record to a pal many years ago and after he died I felt I couldn’t ask anyone for it back. Thanks to a clueless Vinted seller (£3, ya dancer!), it’s only in recent years that I’ve owned it again. Listening on Saturday morning, on the same day my social media was filled with Oasis fans sharing their happy news of securing tickets for the cash-grab shows next year, a line in the record’s imperious King Of Birds leapt right out at me. ‘Standing on the shoulders of giants leaves me cold,’ goes Michael Stipe, ten years ahead of the critics.
But back to Strange.
Strange positively bounces right off of Document‘s grooves.
REM – Strange
It’s faster than the original by half a minute, and, ach, there’s no ‘Refrain! Refrain!‘ part either, but then, Wire never thought to add a rollicking barrelhoue piano trill at the beginning of theirs. Michael affects a Georgian version of the Newman sneer and changes the original’s ‘Joey‘ line to sing of himself in third person, which is very Stipe. Mike Mills hits those high high high notes that he’s totally made his own as REM’s secret weapon on backing vocals. Even the duh-duh backing vocals sound effervescent and life-affirming. Peter Buck’s guitar is almost twanging with joy. ‘Thanks, Pete,’ it goes, ‘for dropping the open-stringed jangle just this once and letting me power chord my way to the end. I can’t, however, let this moment pass without a wee, mangled solo half way through. You don’t mind, do you?‘
REM’s band-in-the-backroom-of-a-midwest-bar version of Strange was the first version I heard. It was quite something when I finally caught up with the original. I love them both. Sometimes you want disciplined art rock. Other times you need hot-wired, countrified rockin’. But at any time, Strange will more than suffice.
