Wire - Pink Flag
The weird thing about the internet is that is turned everyone's ability to form an opinion into an exercise in copy and paste. Things like, "Menswear were a one hit wonder" - well, we weren't if you were around at the time, we had quite a few top 20 singles actually. The other one is this idea that we ripped off Elastica and… it's the one thing that really gets on my tits because we were ripping off Wire! I used to go to Blow Up and we were quite friendly with Graham Coxon and because we lived in Southend he used to let us sleep on his front room floor. He'd get up the next day and play records to us and that's when I first heard Wire. It's a traditional band set-up but insanely tight, the tightest band I've ever heard in my life, which gives them a machine-like quality. It's very robotic and the fact Colin Newman doesn't really sing really fired my imagination. The two big songs on this for me are 'Lowdown' and 'Strange', which will come as no surprise if you like 'Daydreamer'.