When punk went post-punk
If punk had an eject button, 12 X U was it. Clocking in at just under two minutes, Wire’s closing track on Pink Flag (1977) blew the hinges clean off. With its serrated guitar stabs, breakneck tempo, and deliberately cryptic title (go on, say it out loud), 12 X U is pure compression, ideas, energy, attitude. All crammed into a fist that never unclenches.
Wire never wanted to be part of a scene. While their peers in London’s punk circuit were still polishing three-chord protest anthems, Wire were already thinking in fragments, negative space, and sonic minimalism. Colin Newman’s sneering vocal delivery sounds like he’s mocking the idea of a frontman altogether, aloof, irritated, brilliantly detached. This wasn’t punk rock as a platform for youth revolt. This was punk as abstract art, spat through a PA system.
The band had only been together a year when they recorded Pink Flag, and 12 X U was its exclamation point. Fast, smart, and laced with irony, it closed the album like a razor-thin guillotine blade. The lyrics read like a breakup telegram typed by someone who’s already halfway out the door. There’s no time for nuance, no interest in tenderness. Just a sharp, sarcastic kiss-off wrapped in a buzzsaw riff. Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis were trying to disassemble the song while still inside it.
12XU’ is a classic Wire song, a furious, one-minute-and-fifty-five-second blast of punk energy that closes Pink Flag with a sense of exhilarating finality.
(Jon Savage, Sounds magazine, 1977)
Wire’s genius lies in the fact that they questioned their entire purpose. Why stretch a song to three minutes when 90 seconds could do more damage? 12 X U set a new benchmark for brevity and brutality. You can trace its DNA in the hardcore explosion that followed in the early ’80s, but unlike most of those bands, Wire had art-school precision hidden inside the fury. They were playing intelligently fast.
Even the title, seemingly meaningless at first glance, is a linguistic grenade: “one two X U” = “one to ex you” = “I want to ex you.” A breakup, a deletion, a refusal to engage. That’s Wire: reducing communication to codes, slogans, and strategic silences. In that sense, 12 X U is not just a song, it’s a philosophy. Why explain yourself when you can just blow the whole thing up and start over?
