Wire - Pink Flag (Black Vinyl)

Originally released on Harvest in December 1977, Pink Flag is perhaps the most original debut album to come out of the first wave of British punk. Exhibiting severe art school damage, Wire careers at breakneck speed through 21 songs in 36 minutes to create an album that has influenced bands for over forty years.

Pink Flag proposed a form of expression which drew on formal structures taken from historic styles of rock and pop (including punk) but somehow subverted those structures by maintaining a sense of controlled distance from the form. A kind of modernist deconstructed rock made in what seemed at the time to be an almost mechanically precise way.