Drill: Brighton

A new festival comes to town, curated by legendary post-punkers Wire and One Inch Badge

Cult post-punk band Wire released three classic albums on the trot; Pink Flag, Chair’s Missing and 154, before releasing Documents & Eyewitness, a recording of their infamous Electric Ballroom show in 1980, which featured 100% brand new material. A very challenging record, it documented their frustrations with the traditional confines of music performance, and attempts to incorporate visual performance and art within their shows.
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Roll on 2013, and their latest album Change Becomes Us incorporated songs based on ideas for that Documents & Eyewitness period, producing an excellent record of art pop ferocity. To coincide with that release, Wire curated the initial Drill: festival (Drill: London), the first instalment in a planned series of multi-venue festivals across the UK and beyond. To date there have been Drill: festivals in London and Seattle in 2013, with more to come in 2015 following Drill: Brighton in December 2014.

The concepts behind Drill: festivals are simple – to challenge preconceptions of Wire, and to showcase their impact on and relationship with groups and artists from younger generations, to connect with both new and established artists whose work they find inspiring and feel that they have a kinship with, and to open up opportunities for one-off collaborations.

Drill: Brighton, for example, will see Wire team up with noise-rock outfit Swans, to perform an extended version of the always-mutating Wire track ‘Drill’, as well as the return of the historic ‘Pinkflag Guitar Orchestra’, which sees Wire joined onstage by members of bands who are involved over the course of the festival. Along with local friends, allies and past collaborators, the guitarists then play an extended, improvised version of Wire’s ‘Pink Flag’ at high volume.
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For Drill: Brighton, Wire and One Inch Badge are delivering a fantastic line-up of 100 bands, artists, films, talks and exhibitions across 14 different venues, and four days. Along with Swans there’s These New Puritans, The Wytches, Jesca Hoop, Savages, British Sea Power (with The Bournemouth Symphony Brass Quintet), Blood Red Shoes, Toy, Courtney Barnett, east India Youth, Fujiya & Miyagi, The Wedding Present, Gold Panda,
and recent Mercury Music Prize winners Young Fathers.