IN MARCH 2013, the experi- mental four-piece and quintessential art band Wire released Change Becomes Us.

To celebrate, they organised a London festival showcasing bands with connections to Wire. That first Drill Festival was followed eight months later by a similar event in Seattle.

A year on the event is coming to Brighton. A hundred bands will play in 14 venues over four days.

“The thing about Drill is you have to see it in the context of Wire, ” explains Colin Newman, driving force behind the singular band, who will headline the opening night on Thursday.

“Wire is a band which is hiding in plain sight. We always get critical response for our releases and are regarded as a contemporary con- tender, but so many are focused on our past or don’t even know we are around and doing stuff.”

Drill is part of a strategy by the band to reach out and exclaim: “this is the landscape in which we work”.

They hate the idea of movements but there are other mature bands who make new work which is well- received.

“Swans are a fine example of peo- ple more interested in what they are doing now than what they were doing then.”

Michael Gira’s epic noiseniks Swans, formed in New York in 1982, headline Drill’s Sunday night show at The Old Market in Hove.

In a slice of bilateral trade, Wire performed at the Swans-curated Le Guess Who? festival in Utrecht last weekend.

The two groups will come together in Brighton for an exclusive per- formance of classic Wire track Drill. That will close the festival.

Wire’s Thursday set will also be followed by a performance with The Pink Flag Guitar Orchestra, a collective comprised of members of other festival bands.

Wire have programmed Drill Brighton in conjunction with pro- moters One Inch Badge. Together they have booked artists from across the musical and age spectrum.


Newman says the approach again reflects the band’s hatred of scenes and labels, not least the post punk tab they were afforded when they emerged in 1977.

“Wire would never even perform at a post-punk festival let alone host it. Drill is about variety.”

One big coup, albeit an accidental one, are Mercury Music Prize winners, Young Fathers. “We were looking for something hip hop and they were a recommen- dation by One Inch Badge.

They were available and we were able to get them. I’m happy to have them on the festival bill – we need that diver- sity.”

The story behind Drill really begins at a 1980 Wire show at Camden Electric Ballroom. The band, feeling restricted by punk and rock, played a set made up of new material and performance art pieces without warning the audience.

The set was later released as live album Document & Eyewitness. For Wire’s 13th studio album, Change Becomes Us, the band put the discarded sketches from the Camden show alongside other demos, new ideas and fragments from the Legal Bootleg series (one was recorded at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre in November 1979).

They performed the album in its entirety at Drill London in March 2013 before anyone had heard it. “That is a classic Wire thing to do. That is not what we plan for this event. We are working on a new album but it is not ready and not coming out until next April.”

Newman’s experience curating Sled Island festi- val in Canada also inspired Drill.

“The corporate nature of lot of festivals is depressing. You have city- organised festivals and you feel like the tourist board of city has organ- ised it. Drill will not feel like that.”

Newman, who recently moved to Brighton, says the festival fits Wire’s desire for artistic reinven- tion and curiosity for new ideas.

“We find the whole lega- cy thing difficult. There is a legacy industry. Take an extreme example – a band like The Rolling Stones. They realised if you want to make s**t loads of money you only need to play the old stuff.”

Wire have split and reformed twice. The first releases since they reformed in 2000 – the 2002 Read & Burn EP series – sounded as if they had been made by a group of 20-somthings rather than four 50-somethings. Wire were transgressive to think that way.

“No one was interested in older bands doing anything other than doing what made them famous. “For some people they have a mindset of enter- tainers – ‘well they are great songs, we can play them, look at this pay cheque’.

But that doesn’t interest us as it has a limited life.” So do not expect Wire to close the opening night of Drill with a set of tracks from the classic three-album run, Pink Flag (1977), Chairs Missing (1978) and 154 (1979).

Drill Festival, venues across Brighton and Hove, December 4 to December 7.

Wire, Sallis Benney Theatre, Grand Parade, Brighton, December 4, 8.30pm.