Fascinating article about "the 17" a whole lot more:
http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/bill-drummond-man-who-wants-end-recorded-music
Hightlights include - the story of the "Martin Borman" leather jacket (which
he still wears, apparently); a discussion on his Dad (who's still alive at
95, apparently - which bodes well for Bill's longevity); a brief history of
his family's stay in America in 1963, including its possible influence on
"Chill Out" (did he actually visit some of the places mentioned on the
sleeve? I always thought neither of them ever did); brief mention of Jimmy
and a long explanation his "alternative" plan for the BRITS awards (not sure
about the Red Hand of Ulster thing); and a couple of photos (he looks like
he's gained a little weight, and actually looks a lot healthier than he did
a couple of years ago):
Full text:
*"Art conspirator Bill Drummond turned band management upside down and
conquered pop with The KLF. Why does he want a Year Zero in music? Andrew
Harrison reports*
It's dark, and for the past 25 minutes I've been singing. Well, by "singing"
I mean cranking out a monotonous ahhh sound till my sinuses rattle and my
head goes numb. With 16 other people – from HMV and the ICA – I've crowded
into a fourth-floor recording studio in London's West End and attempted to
do what none of us connected, however tangentially, with music ever do: hold
a note. The results will later be layered five times and mixed into a single
five minutes of... well, I don't know if it's music but it will be the sound
of an 85-voice choir. We have ahhhed and uhhhed until our vision swims and
it's fair to say that we're developing headaches. But you cannot make the
omelette of art without breaking the egg of personal physical comfort. This
is art – and we, at least for today, are The17.
This puts us in illustrious company, because like Echo And The Bunnymen, The
Teardrop Explodes and The KLF, The17 are A Bill Drummond Project. Drummond,
now 55, remains probably the greatest prankster – in the serious sense, for
all of Drummond's pranks have points – that the world of British music has
produced. Working in Liverpool during the post-punk years, he had his
management clients the Bunny-men play a tour mapped out in the shape of
their own rabbit-head logo, and at least consider faking the death of their
singer Ian McCulloch. His "stadium house" duo The KLF were reportedly the
biggest selling singles act in the world in 1991. With KLF partner Jimi
Cauty he notoriously "retired" from the music business onstage at the 1992
Brit Awards ceremony with the aid of a mock AK-47, the thrash metal band
Extreme Noise Terror and a dead sheep, and then buried their Brit award at
Stonehenge; the duo made their exile permanent by burning a million pounds
of The KLF's cash on the Scottish island of Jura the following year. In 1988
he and Cauty wrote The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way), a
playfully cynical treatise on manipulating the music business that became a
useful guidebook to artists as diverse as Austrian novelty pop act Edelweiss
and the Klaxons. Since retiring The KLF, Drummond was scarcely touched
music, working almost exclusively in conceptual and actual art. Unlike a
bisected cow or a tent decorated with the names of one's former lovers,
Drummond's work reaches outwards from the art world. At least it isn't all
about him – at least it's funny. There used to be a name for this: pop art.
Drummond's relationship with pop music is an inconstant one, oscillating
between extreme love for what it can be and extreme disappointment at what
it mostly is. This is where The17 comes in – a one-off "group" performing a
one-off "song" in an assault on the very nature of recorded music, a form so
ubiquitous and dominant that we never even think to question it. Before we
began singing, Drummond sat down with us in the recording studio and
explained The17 to us. In his flinty Scots brogue he described the great,
mind-opening experience of playing his original copy of Strawberry Fields
Forever over and over as a teenager, and how in the ensuing years recorded
music measured up less and less to this formative experience. He'd tried
various stratagems to bring back the magic – only listening to brand new
recordings, only listening to artists whose names began with "B" – but none
of it had worked. The music he really wanted to hear was the mighty sound of
the imaginary choir he heard in his head when driving his Land Rover: music
so grand and monumental that it did not yet exist. So, being Bill Drummond,
he decided to create it. The17 changes its membership every time it
performs. It is its own audience. And, in a symbolic gesture against the
deadening effect of recording a piece of music – and for the glory of the
single, unrepeatable moment – each performance is played once and then
deleted.
We listen to our 17 performance. It sounds like a lot of ooohing and
ahhhing, or maybe the soundtrack from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm not sure if
it's good or bad, or even if it's music. But it's undeniable that it's only
happened once.
"Now here's the most important bit," says Bill Drummond, and nods to his
collaborator John Hirst, who's been operating the Mac on which our
performance was recorded, mixed and played back. Hirst turns the screen to
face us, ceremoniously drags the sound file into the bin and selects EMPTY
TRASH. Which, when you think about it, sounds like a punk band.
Some days later I meet Bill Drummond in the cafe of an arts centre in
southern Shoreditch, adventure playground of Brit-Art. He's a big man but
soft-spoken, and his giant, battered leather coat – bought in an Amsterdam
flea-market in 1972, seen flapping in a wind-machine gale in many a KLF
video and that valedictory Brits performance – compounds the image of
sheriff or preacher. Drummond is, in fact, a son of The Manse – his father
was a Presbyterian preacher. Today Bill drinks tea and eats chocolate
brownies. When I ask him how our performance as The17 measured up, he
winces. "Not great." Bill wants to discover what music would sound like if
none of us had ever known what music was. But is a Year Zero in recorded
music a good thing? Aren't you just rejecting your culture and what makes
you who you are?
"Yes, but I find that very attractive," he says, "I'm not campaigning to end
recorded music, I'm just saying it's going to seem like a very 20th-century
kind of thing and it'll lose its appeal. What we want from art is meaning;
we want it to make us feel alive. But meaning can disappear from works of
art. When music moves from one form of existence to another – for instance
if it's recorded – then its meaning can't help but change. And live gigs
still depend on bands making recordings. That's what I'm questioning.
"I loathe nostalgia." He's going up a gear. "That way lies death. I see it
in blokes once they reach 40, sometimes younger: the illusion that the music
that was made when they were 13, or 19, is intrinsically better than what's
being made today. When you're in your teens, you're working out what makes
you you, what makes you not your dad. You're drawn to stuff created by guys
who are only a few years older than you, and living the life you wish you
had. The older you get, the last thing you want to identify with is people
who are 20 years younger than you. That's a problem for men, especially –
they'll only let themselves do it with footballers. In music, they let
themselves get trapped in the past. I don't know why but I don't like it."
[image: Bill Drummond]Drummond is, he admits, more like his own father – now
95 – than he ever thought he'd be. Drummond Senior was a minister in the
Church of Scotland, self-educated and a writer of poetry. "I get up in front
of people and lecture them too. I understand where the spirit comes from."
The questing spirit too: in 1963 the Drummond family participated in an
exchange scheme with an American minister and moved for three months to
Lexington, North Carolina. Bill was ten. The morning after they arrived,
they went for breakfast and discovered that two young black men, refused
service at a drugstore, had shot the sales assistant dead. At a Sunday
barbecue, a farmer showed off the Winchester he kept on the wall and
declared that his family never lost the Civil War. Meanwhile young Bill was
missing The Beatles but discovering the cream of R&B. "I'd never really
heard pop music before. We didn't even have radios in the car, but suddenly
we're driving a Buick saloon with a new pop station in every town. That had
a huge effect on me." The journey imprinted on Bill images of a timewarped
West that would later reappear on The KLF's Chill Out album – an ambient
house roadtrip – and also a love of black American music that would surface
both in the independent record labels he'd create over the years and in The
KLF's dance hits.
Inspired by raves, conspiracy theory, a crazed sense of humour and
Drummond's years in Liverpool's avant-garde art underground, The KLF were
perhaps the greatest pop group of the 1990s – no mean feat considering they
shut up shop in 1992. Drummond and Jimi Cauty made huge, no-brainer radio
hits with a subversive undercurrent, shot videos that were so ruinously
expensive they were almost idealistic, and almost made Tammy Wynette the
number-one artist in Christmas 1991. But their greatest achievement was the
manner of their leaving.
Their 1992 Brit Awards performance has been variously described as
"violently antagonistic" (The Times), the work of "pop's biggest wallies"
(Piers Morgan) and the most heroic act of public self-destruction in the
history of pop. Drummond staggered onstage on crutches, wearing a kilt and
smoking a cigar. With partner Cauty and Extreme Noise Terror he performed a
deafening thrash version of 3am Eternal that was so offensive that the
Anglo-Hungarian composer Georg Solti fled in terror. They finished with
Drummond pretending to machine gun the audience and a voice announcing that
"The KLF have left the music business". The band had disrupted the BPI's
annual festival of cheery bonhomie with a giant black note of horror, but
Drummond's apparent derangement wasn't faked.
"I wanted it to be a lot worse, and I was only saved from that by good
friends." At first he planned to buy a meat cleaver and, at the climax, chop
off his left hand and throw it into the audience. This would be a homage to
the myth of the Red Hand of Ulster, in which a sailor boy beats a fleet of
competing boats to claim the new land for his king by touching the shore
before anyone else – with his severed hand. In Drummond's confused state –
The KLF's sudden and intense success had driven him close to a breakdown –
this would mean that The KLF had finally claimed the music business for
itself, and could therefore retire in good conscience. Jimi Cauty's wife
persuaded him out of the plan.
Then he decided to kill a sheep onstage, in reference to the Biblical story
of Abraham and his son. Extreme Noise Terror, who were hardcore vegetarians,
were having none of it, so Drummond had the unfortunate animal slaughtered
and its blood drained, planning to shower the Brits dignitaries with sheep
blood as the finale of The KLF's performance. Horrified band and stagehands
refused to co-operate, so The KLF dumped the dead sheep at the awards
after-party instead. A placard round its neck read: I DIED FOR EWE – BON
APPETIT.
Bill Drummond has not worked in mainstream pop music since (although he was
once approached to resurrect the Drummond management magic for a
currently-extant band – Embrace. "I thought they'd be three black girls
doing R&B. When it turned out they weren't, I said no."). Was he simply
trying to appal the industry and audience so badly that even if he wanted a
way back in, he wouldn't be allowed?
"I guess so. With hindsight, I can say that pop careers ought to be short.
Jimi and I knew we'd never have the energy to do anything like The KLF
again. I don't think I could have thought it out consciously, I was
absolutely knackered – but I can see there's a logic to making an end so
final you can't come back from it."
As part of The KLF's resignation from pop music, he and Cauty deleted all of
the band's music and it remains unavailable today – a unique and financially
costly decision. Sixteen years later, the business he resigned from is more
mired than ever in reissuing and reiterating its past. Does Bill Drummond
ever look at the travails of his old employer and think, "I could fix that"?
No, he says, it no longer crosses his mind, although the dissolution of the
album amuses him. When he first signed Echo And The Bunnymen to Sire
Records, he wanted them to remain pure and only make singles. The label
bosses smirked. Now, in a roundabout way, that dream is coming true. Could
his other dream – the end of recorded music – also come to pass? It seems
impossible. But then everything seems impossible until it happens.
*Bill Drummond's book 17 is published on 31 July by Beautiful Book"*
