WIRE - Pink Flag LP Harvest UK original punk nice copy

$

48

No introduction necessary, this is Wire's Pink Flag LP, released in 1977 on Harvest records. Nice copy that includes original lyrics inner sleeve. Obviously rare and hard to find - but poverty calls for selling even your best records sometimes!

CONDITION (cover/record): NM-/NM. Includes original lyric inner sleeve.

Reviews:

Wire's debut is the smartest record of the '77 punk explosion, a formally seamless suite of 21 songs in 35 minutes, edited to the bone and graced with allusive, thoughtful lyrics, howled by Colin Newman like political slogans. The band's crisp, precise snap gets an awful lot of mileage out of their three-and-a-half chords, and their attack never lets up. The album's minimal structures and snarly guitar sound are still hugely influential ("12XU" has been covered many times, and Elastica's "Connection" is basically a rewrite of "Three Girl Rhumba"), and its sequence is so perfect that the band that opened for Wire on their reunion tour ten years later simply played Pink Flag straight through, including between-song pauses. --Douglas Wolk

Greil Marcus wrote that Pink Flag owed more to Jean-Luc Godard's New Wave than to the Sex Pistols, or something like that. Cryptic though it may be, he's on the right track: Pink Flag takes Malcolm MacLaren's idea of pumping rock songs full of Situationist manifestoes the next natural step: the songs themselves play like Situationist "moments," bite-sized Impressions rather than fully-realized Ideas. I'd include it in the (always paradoxical) Punk canon because of the sense of dread that most of these songs manage to convey. Wire didn't suffer from the same kind of paranois you find on the Pistols' "Holidays in the Sun" or SLF's "Suspect Device; where tracks like those convey an Us-against-Them-but-we're-Them-too mentality, Wire relies on terse, direct songs with vague, abstract lyrics to give the sense that "There's something going on that's not quite right." And the fact that they never give you enough information to figure out exactly what that something is makes Pink Flag a creepy listen. Highlights for me include "Reuters;" "Lowdown" for its insistence on jackhammering a single riff for 2 and a half minutes; "Strange" for parodying Punk's buzzsaw guitar with a sound like the bloaded corpse of Steve Jones; and "Champs," just for rockin'.

SHIPPING: $4.50 for the first LP, $0.50 for each additional LP. Shipping rates are for US only, other countries ask.

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