Wire - Pink Flag

Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first.

Usually contextualized against a backdrop of two years of the growing cultural importance of punk rock - Wire’s 1977 debut album Pink Flag, released on EMI’s progressive label Harvest was in fact was something “other.”

To the keen cultural commentator, the timing and label of it’s release will register two essential facts about it. Firstly, too late (a year after the Sex Pistol’s debut release) to be part of UK punk’s first flush and secondly that the band were signaling something beyond punk by their choice of label.

Further investigation would reveal twenty-one tracks, some of them clocking in at well under a minute and covering a range of tempi well beyond the buzzsaw rockabilly that had become, even by the second half of 1977, punk’s staple.

Heavyweight vinyl produced by Cargo Records in 2018.