Wire- Pink Flag (1977)

Wire are, of course, very much still going, and I absolutely must hear their new album. But it's the early albums that had a huge influence on bands from Elastica to pretty much all UK Indie music between 2001 and 2001. Their second long player, Chairs Missing, is the better album, and has the brilliant "I Am the Fly" on it, but this is generally the only Wire album that people own, and its influence has been incalculable.

It's a winning formula- short, unpretentious but weirdly structured and slightly atonal yet somehow completely poppy songs, plus socially aware lyrics that I really ought to read sometime. This is from straight out of the DIY punk ethos, and is made in the year of peak punk (I chose a good year to be born in) yet feels like it has much more in common with the '80s sounds which are known, in the UK at least (the many fertile scenes in the contemporary USA are a different matter entirely) as post-punk. And it's just an awesome collection of songs.

So, basically, I probably ought to get a Wire album made within the last forty years...