My Album Project: Pink Flag by Wire (1977, Harverst Records)

WHY I NEVER GOT AROUND TO LISTENING TO THIS ARTIST/ALBUM

I did not grow up listening to punk. I don't even front like I did. It was not because I was very young during the first punk wave of the mid-1970s – not at all – I was already into contemporary music by the time I was three yeas old. But it was more on a Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Santana vibe, as my dad used to let the older kids from down the street use our basement as the rehearsal space for their rock combo. And I didn't get into punk because I was not an angry kid – I certainly was. But my release of aggression came from watching pro wrestling and listening to Iron Maiden and Judas Priest records really loudly. Maybe it was because I did not really start feeling disconnected from the world until I was in my 20s and only then did I get into punk; call me a late bloomer.
The punk music I did know (and liked) was rather mainstream – as mainstream as punk could get in the late-1970s and early 1980s – the Clash and the Monks, as well as the local, southern Ontario punk bands the Diodes and Teenage Head. I knew about the New York City CBGB's scene of the late 70s, but I never considered Talking Heads and Blondie (two bands I really got into) to be punk music. In high school, I bought the first two Ramones albums on cassette; three-chord pop ditties played very fast, and I dug the minimalism. It was also around this time I tried to figure out why all the fuss about the British bands like The Damned and Sex Pistols. In fact, that's something I still wonder about to this day.
It was not until 1995, when I moved to the top two floors of a house on Montrose Avenue in Toronto's Little Italy, that I discovered punk. One of my roommates in that house was Neill Cunningham; a collector of vinyl records, a reader of many, many books, and a bona-fide punk who was old enough to have come of age during the heyday of the genre. Every morning for the year that we were roommates, Neill would put on some coffee, smoke cigarettes, and loudly play music on the stereo. Little did I know that what he was doing (other than waking me up much too early for my liking) was educating me in punk and post-punk. For the first time, I heard the music of many bands that, up until that point, I had only read about: the Buzzcocks, the Stranglers, the Heartbreakers, Television, the Voidoids, Pere Ubu, Stiff Little Fingers, Magazine, and the Slits. Several months later, Dwayne Slack and his record collection moved in and further supplemented my punk education. In retrospect, I'm sure either Neill or Dwayne played some Wire during my time at the house on Montrose, but I guess I slept in that day.
By the way, you can buy your assorted punk rock albums (and any other kinds of records) at Pandemonium Books & Discs, Neill's shop at 2920 Dundas St West in Toronto's Junction neighbourhood.

WHAT I KNEW ABOUT THE ALBUM BEFORE THIS PROJECT

While I worked with Jonny Dovercourt and the Toronto independent arts collective Wavelength as an editor for their zine in 2003 and 2004, I remember many of the bands playing Wavelength's Sunday night music series would cite Wire and/or Pink Flag in their zine interviews and press kits as being extremely influential. That should have steered me in the direction of this record, but somehow it didn't.

AFTER A WEEK OF DIGESTING THIS ALBUM

Even after the first listening of the record, let alone a week digesting this album, I totally understand why Wire and Pink Flag are cited by so many musicians as inspiration for their own art. Pick up any record by Fugazi, Pixies, Arctic Monkeys, or the Strokes (among thousands of others) and you will find Bruce Gilbert, Graham Lewis, Colin Newman, and Robert Gotobed's collective fingerprints all over them. Just give a listen to “Reuters”, "Lowdown”, “Straight Line”, “Mr. Suit”, and "Commercial" and tell me I'm full of shit. You can't.

While being a punk record, Pink Flag goes in musical directions which many records from the era – punk or otherwise – do not go. The musicianship is raw, yet they still play their instruments extremely well (perhaps a lingering misconception I will always have about punks is that they could not play their instruments – I blame Sid Vicious for that). The songwriting is intelligently sparse, yet vast in its presentation, exemplified by the album's title track, “Strange”, “Fragile” and “Mannequin". This album is “all killer and no filler", no easy feat for a 21-song recording.
I usually deem a record as a My Album Project success if it leads me other musical works that I might not have otherwise picked up. I have just procured Chairs Missing, Wire's 1978 follow-up to Pink Flag. So, shit yes, success!