Wild Flag + Peggy Sue @ Electric Ballroom

“We’ve been watching Wild Flag every night trying to steal their moves, but it just doesn’t work. Might do a double kick now. We tried at soundcheck. Didn’t work.” Peggy Sue are an adorable band, though a while ago they may have seemed an odd choice as support to Wild Flag but it turns out that they’ve now graduated to a much more electric band. So maybe it’s no double kick levels, but with all the liveliness and extra instruments (apart from guitar, Rosa plays keyboard and a drum, plus there is a backing guitarist/bassist/drummer in the background shadows), it definitely makes sense.

As part of a Gender and Music class this Girls Are has been taking we were recently supposed to think of examples of musicians who support the status quo; appear to uphold it in order to protect other values, subvert it superficially, and lastly, actually challenge and threaten the established order. For that last category, somebody yelled “Wild Flag!”, and I jolted in joy and agreement. There’s something so raw and radical about this band: composed of middle-aged women, which is not a position that’s easy to hold in pop culture and all legends with a baggage of success and recognition – that makes it even more difficult to be taken for who they are and not in terms of what is expected of them. But Wild Flag don’t give a fuck about your expectations. Against the annoyingly retro-maniac reunion trend, they resisted resurrecting their previous bands and created a completely fresh, original and powerful quality. Translated into a live performance, it has ‘badass’ written all over it.

The very first chord is already accompanied by a kick, and then it’s all crazy solos, long jams, guitar poses, jumping, throwing hair around, playing off each other, and finally Carrie pushing Mary’s head down so that she falls over and all we can see are her boots up in the air as she continues to play from the floor. When she stands up, Carrie takes a picture, quick enough to still get Mary giving her a playfully pissed off face and the middle finger, and even without seeing the shot on facebook hours later you can tell it was unscripted, spontaneous, and fun. These mad antics are interspersed with comments that betray no pose at all: apart from a frequent thank you, Carrie also informs the crowd she just spilled water all over her amp (“That was an amateur move”) or how they’re having an “English experience” on tour, listening to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake (“Best record ever”) and reading Stephen Fry (“You guys hate him, he’s over, right? We still love him in America. What about Hugh Laurie? He’s fine too. Come on! I’m learning a lot about Cambridge in the 80s. Do you all go to Cambridge?”)

Bar one song, the play their self-titled record in full.  Romance is introduced by “This is for all you lovers out there … NOT REALLY”, and Future Crimes described as “an apology”, but what follows is a decidedly unapologetic mini-riot. They play four new songs, all in quite different styles: Winter Pair is punkier, Nothing and Mary’s new untitled song all 60s girl group high voiced sweet chorus and a tambourine, but with rhythm steadily building up, and Carrie’s new song strong, confrontational, screamy. With Television’s See No Evil and Patti Smith’s Ask The Angels as encores (dedicated to their record label, Merge, “who are awesome”), there is not much to add to this show that would make it more wild, cathartic, life-affirming, and plain awesome.

Marta Owczarek

Did you catch the Wild Flag tour?

Who do you consider to be our UK equivalents, in terms of the band and their label, Merge Records, who represent an astounding number of alternative and popular bands to be proud of: Wild Flag, Magnetic Fields, Wye Oak, for starters…?

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