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Photo: Richard Gray
This was never going to be a greatest hits gig. When Wire return to their roots they give early songs new names as in 2011 album, Change Becomes Us. If they lose a band member they drop a letter and become Wir. They even get support acts to playtheir old material. So the first stint of the four night Lexington residency is a platform to showcase the forthcoming album, entitled, simply, ‘Wire’: as if it’s a debut, when it’s actually their fourteenth.
After experimental, electronic excursions in mid life the band has triumphantly returned to its punk roots in recent years.
‘Wire’ continues this trend apace and comprises the bulk of the set. Live the band is a ‘we do what we say on the tin’ kind of outfit. Minimal audience interaction, no carefully rehearsed segues, just the numbers belted out, to leave you coated in a jagged, metallic glaze.
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For the nostalgia hunters there’s, unsurprisingly, the eponymous ‘Drill’ , ‘Adore Your Island’ and the brilliant ‘Stealth on a Stork’, but it’s the imminent releases that catch the ear, from the thrash of ‘High’ to the indie pop of ‘Burning Bridges’; where singer, Colin Newman, could pass for Pete Shelley. The biggest highlight is bassist Graham Lewis’ vocal contribution on an atmospheric, film score-like sweep ‘Sleepwalking’.
It’s a transformative, exciting show and the encore is pure delirium, as Newman leans in to his aquamarine guitar to send us on our way with its frenetic fury ringing in our ears.
Support Karen Dwyer was not asked to deliver Wire’s back catalogue and treats us to her dense, synthesised, electronic strata, with such complete absorption in her craft, that she appears to fuse biology and machine, foreshadowing the future laid out for us by so many science fiction writers.
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