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BILL DRUMMOND (1953– ) is a Scottish artist, musician and writer who came to prominence in the 1980s with his band The KLF. He achieved notoriety after burning one million pounds in cash as part of his art project the K Foundation. He is the author of several books and is the founder of countless art, music and media projects as well as the writer of two solo albums.

BILL DRUMMOND

St Benedicts Street, Norwich

Summer 2007

I’m building my airship in the Student Union; a month to go before the autumn term and the hall is empty. It’s early and brilliant sunlight pours down from the cinquefoil windows above me, flooding the low stage where I work.

I enjoy being here out of hours. I have the run of the building from as early until as late as I like.

Most of the student art and canvases have been stored over the summer – to be hung up again once the bar reopens – so the white walls are bare except for one large red and yellow canvas which looms to my left as I look down the room: MAKE SOUP.*

I like MAKE SOUP. It greets me every morning with bright clarity and purpose. The framed text beneath it reads:

NOTICE

Take a map of the British Isles. Draw a straight line diagonally across the map so that it cuts through Belfast and Nottingham. If your home is on this line, contact soupline@penkilnburn.com Arrangements will be made for Bill Drummond to visit and make one vat of soup for you, your family, and your close friends.

I appreciate the simplicity and generosity behind this venture. I like soup, for one, but also I like the sense of quest, the bold colours, the aesthetic of the large stark letters − four and four, MAKE SOUP – the fact Bill will rock up and physically make you literal soup with his actual hands.

I look on Bill’s Penkiln Burn website and find that there are many more canvases of the same size and style − PREPARE TO DIE, SILENCE, DRAW A LINE, 40 BUNCHES OF DAFFODILS, STAY − each with an attendant story and aim.

I ponder what a BLOODY GREAT AIRSHIP canvas would look like; three words, one above the other. I sketch it in my notebook.

• • • • •

March 2009

Bill’s workshop is a grey unit with a roll-shutter front, solid and anonymous on a ring road industrial estate … outside Norwich.* As the shutter rises it reveals a stacked interior. I follow him into the space, stepping over piles of books and magazines, around walls of filing cabinets and heaped boxes into a clearing with a large canvas suspended upside down on a stretch of bare white wall − . White on red. Bill rummages in a cupboard and emerges with a handful of bungee leads, picks the canvas up and makes his way back out to the Land Rover, before climbing onto the substantial roof rack to secure it there. I ask what happens to his older, redundant signs; Bill says he paints over them.

Rather than the portentous figure I’d been expecting, Bill seems a quiet, thoughtful man – far more tolerant and humorous than I’d imagined. On the drive back into town I think over the disparity between the Bill with the reputation for dark shenanigans that I’d read about in preparation for this meeting and Bill the enthusiastic instigator of spontaneous choir The17 because it’s the latter who’s sat beside me now, imagining aloud waking up tomorrow to find all recorded music had disappeared.

• • • • •

Later that day − Norwich Arts Centre

A dark hall. Set up on a stage at one end is The17 canvas collected this morning. On the floor down the middle of the room runs a white line, bisecting the eighty or so chairs on which people are starting to sit, filing into the gloom from the light outside. Shuffling to a seat while their eyes adjust.

Between the seats and the stage is a table.

On the table sit a laptop and an Anglepoise lamp. The lamp is the only light in the room and the room − once a church − is large, with a high black vault and pillars that mark out the nave and frame the stage and table.

More chairs fill, more shuffling, low whispers.

Bill appears and walks to the front to a scattered applause and sits down to face the audience.

‘Hello,’ he says, ‘my name is Bill Drummond and you are The17.’

Thereafter the audience, myself included, are told the story of The17, how it grew from the sounds in Bill’s head as a child and his lifelong love of choral music; how Bill tried to fight the music, which welled while he drove his Land Rover, tried to ignore it, but how he found it swirled and coalesced with other ideas he was having about the way music in the twentieth century − recorded, manufactured, sold and now ubiquitous − had lost touch with time, place, event and performance … how he’d sought to write these feelings out in under a hundred words; how he got it down to ninety:

Bill sells us the idea of The17, seduces the room. He sits in his circle of lamplight before the red canvas and reads out ALL RECORDED MUSIC and his sonorous Scots tones reverberate around the building, then he moves to another score, IMAGINE, and begins to form us into a choir − no previous musical experience necessary − to create a new music. Year zero now.

I can’t tell you much of what happened next because it would spoil the inherent mystery and magic of The17 as a uniquely immersive happening, but it’s enough to say that the choir, led by Bill, made sounds that swelled and filled the space, more moving and beautiful than I had ever expected and when we filed out of the building, blinking in the light, we were all grinning and buoyant and wanted to do it again.

• • • • •

Later still that day − Rob’s front room*

There is only one chair in the room where we later convene to talk. Bill sits on it. I sit on the floor. At this angle he appears even taller than he is – which is very tall.

The room is full of Bill’s work. About ten framed posters lean or hang on the walls having migrated from the art school bar.*

As we entered we passed two large canvases, GET YOUR HAIR CUT and MAKE SOUP. Since I last saw them in the union bar I’ve read, watched and researched the Drummond canon, spoken to fans, friends and collaborators and come to appreciate the extent of Bill’s range … and it’s fair to say MAKE SOUP is not the work that defines him in the public consciousness. No. That’d be THE MONEY;* an event chronicled in a film titled The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid.

I begin by asking if being Bill Drummond is sometimes a hindrance to work like The17.

‘It is something that I think about. Not all the time but … and I’m not the only person this happens to, it happens to most people that have done certain things. It casts a long shadow. I can feel that stuff I’ve done in the past will cast a shadow over whatever I do from here on in and there are times when that can get to me and it has influenced, to an extent, the way that I work. I have evolved ways of working where my name might not be attached to something.

It just so happens that piece thing behind you there, 40 BUNCHES OF DAFFODILS, that very thing, I’ve been doing that for about nine years now − I did it last week in Southend − and it’s got nothing to do with me. I go out in the street, I’m just a man, I’ve got a box of daffodils and I hand them out. There is no explanation. I don’t go out there to explain what it’s about. I do it and some people say, “What’s this about? Is this some sort of promotional thing?” and I say, “No no, I just want to give out forty bunches of daffodils.”’

Do you like that anonymity?

‘Yes, I like that. When Penguin were going to be putting out a book of mine called Bad Wisdom, at that point I wanted to call myself “W.E. Drummond” in that tradition of writers having two initials and their surname − which goes back to a time when most businesses were like that, WH Smith or whatever − but Penguin weren’t having it.

Whereas, when I first started doing The17, the first place we did it in the UK was in Newcastle. I’d posters designed just saying “The17 − a choir, blah blah” and I thought, “Wow, this looks so good! Who wouldn’t want to come along to something called ‘The17’!?” Of course, tickets weren’t really selling and the guy said, “Look, Bill, we’re going to have to stick your name on this,” and I really didn’t want it to be but I realised that I had to. I do realise with The17, when I do it publicly here, I have to attach my name to it just to make it work. I still balance doing that with going into all sorts of places and doing The17 where they don’t know who I am. It doesn’t matter.’

Months later, when I mention this to Stanley Donwood, he laughs:

‘This is why I love Bill Drummond’s work; it’s a constant series of genuinely inspired and brilliant ideas that somehow always seem to go awry or sideways; a constant cycle of admitting he doesn’t know what he’s doing and is probably naive or an idiot; but so fired with it. I find that inspiring. You know, who wouldn’t want to go along to something called “The17” with a great red painted sign? I would.’

Do you think your media caricature as a money-burning pop star has hindered the message and impact of subsequent work?

‘I know what you’re saying. I don’t know. I think I live a pretty unsociable life so I don’t get into situations much where these conversations can happen. I’m usually so focused or wrapped up in what I’m doing at that moment … Even when I’m being interviewed by a journalist, they don’t seem to ask those questions or maybe they tip-toe around them but then, when they write up their piece … it’s there. Maybe the first third of the feature will be a potted history of Bill Drummond. They feel that, if they don’t put all that in, whoever is reading the piece won’t know who this person they’re writing about is and I don’t know if that’s because I’ve never particularly gone out to have a large profile as a personality, maybe they’ve got to give that history to say, “Look, this person has been working for quite a long time in some sort of way and there’s some sort of thread here that leads through to where he’s at now …” I don’t know.’

You’ve always pursued that thread with a strong work ethic; is that linked to your Scottishness?

‘It is that, it’s very much that; that’s the background I come from, that’s the attitude. I’ve never been drawn to decadence. I’ve never been drawn to that thing of “the wild artist”, it just doesn’t interest me. The work ethic is … it’s not work for work’s sake. I get wrapped up. I get driven. The big motivation is that “life is short”. I’ve got a lot of things I want to get done. I could die tonight, that’s always there; and I’m always excited by what I’m doing. Exploration. The next thing.’

Do you see a pattern or progression in your work?

‘Usually, I can look back on what I’ve done − or look into myself − and see a theme. It’s almost always like I’m gnawing at the same bone or scratching the same wound. The17 this afternoon and “Doctorin’ the Tardis” − in one sense they’re a million miles apart, in another sense they come from a very similar place.’*

• • • • •

You often relate your ideas and journeys in a very characteristic first-person style when you write – often in retrospect, often in the form of a diary or log.

‘Yes, although some of the time I cheat. Sometimes I write in the present tense although it’s been written after the event and I’m aware, in the sense that all writing is lying, that I’m telling a story so I’m leaving out a percentage of things in order to tie a thing together so that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and I will do that unconsciously. I don’t set out to do it but somehow I’ve learnt to do that. Sometimes I look back and think, “I’ve just learnt these tricks,” and sometimes I try to break free of that − I can see my own clichés.

I’d like to think I could write a proper book with one whole story, like a novelist does but I guess, for a successful novel and definitely a successful film, you have to have something that happens in the first ten minutes or the first X amount of pages in a novel that sets something up: Something has now happened that changes everything – you’ve got to get to the end for it to resolve itself, that’s what takes you through. That doesn’t really happen with my things.

You mentioned earlier that your writing is episodic, Dan. That’s what my stuff is and that’s what will stop it from ever crossing over commercially, I think. That’s the reason people can maybe get so far with one of my books and then go, “Okay, I get the picture,” you know? There’s no plot, it’s not going to go anywhere particularly.

‘When I was eighteen I read On the Road by Jack Kerouac − huge influence on me; that and Henry Miller is what got me wanting to write.

When they brought out the scroll of On the Road a couple of years ago I reread that and it was weird. I’m now, you know, quite a bit older than Jack Kerouac was when he died − he was young when he wrote it − and it’s only now that I realise “but there’s no story here, there’s nothing!” He could have cut that book off at any point, it has no conclusion.’

Has that influenced the way you see your role as a raconteur?

‘It was never a conscious thing; it wasn’t until me and Z, Mark Manning and I, went to New York to do Bad Wisdom* and we became like a double act, reading and telling the story, that I started learning how to actually talk to an audience. I knew I didn’t want to do it with a microphone. I knew I wanted to keep it as intimate as possible but I was aware that a craft was being learnt − it was an act to a certain extent but I knew that it also had to be for real. I know that, every time I go out and tell a story, like with The17 this afternoon, which I’ve told who knows how many times, I’ve got to somehow reach down into myself and make it real, in the same way as an actor has. Now, the last thing I ever wanted to be was an actor, but I know that’s what I’ve got to do and that has now become a big part, to use a cliché, of my practice as an artist; to get out there and tell stories and make it work, draw people in.

‘There’s another thing to this too. My dad was a minister in the Church of Scotland and in 1963 we did an exchange. He took over a church in a small town in North Carolina and the minister from that church worked at my dad’s church in Scotland. We went and lived in their house for three months and they came and lived in ours. Then, in 1993, we went back. It was just for a week or so but my dad was asked to give the sermon in the church there. Now, I grew up seeing my dad give sermons every week, as a kid, and I didn’t think about it, you know? “He’s just my dad.” When I was very young I’d be off into Sunday School by the time he got to the sermon … anyway, my dad was asked by the regular minister to come up and give the sermon, “We have Reverend Jack Drummond here …” and he got up out of the pew and started walking backwards down the aisle and started talking straight away. He got to the front and started going into it and I thought, “My dad’s got an act!” It had never crossed my mind (snaps fingers) and he was really good at it! He had them in the palm of his hand and the guy afterwards, the minister, said, “God, if I could roll my Rs like you, I’d be able to charge X amount more as a visiting preacher!” (Laughs) Which in this country, especially in Scotland, would never be said but that’s how Americans think, and I really learnt something from that. It’s not that I’m trying to imitate my father at all …’

But it’s in you.

‘It’s in me. And I realised I must have taken that in from a very early age − to get up and stand in front of an audience, no amplification, no band. You know, you’re not hiding behind the loud sounds of your guitar or the drums, or everything else, it’s not even that you’re hiding behind a tune. It’s just you and those people there and you’ve got to communicate something and leave something behind.’

You don’t think of yourself as a writer, though?

‘No. I’ve written books but I’m not a writer. I’ve made records but I’m not a musician. I can pick up a guitar or sit down at a keyboard and play some things but I don’t think of myself as a musician, never have done. I don’t think of myself as a writer, don’t think of myself as a painter … I went to art school by accident and I fell in love with painting. I was pretty good at painting too. That’s what I thought I was going to do and then, while I was there, I rebelled against the whole thing. Maybe I realised I wasn’t the genius I hoped I would be but I also thought, and this is going to sound arrogant, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life attempting to make things to sell to rich people.” You know, one-off things.

I was then beginning to read, as I said, Kerouac and Miller. I liked the idea that with writing you could buy the paperback, everybody could buy the paperback and it was the same everywhere; and the same with music − a seven-inch single. I wasn’t thinking of getting into pop music at that point but I thought − the example I gave myself at the time and remember writing about is that Andy Warhol’s seven-inch of “Penny Lane” by The Beatles is no better or worse than my version. I liked that democracy.

‘So, I walked out of art school, walked away from painting and thought, “Well, I’ll write. To do that, I’ll have to go and live life and do all sorts of jobs, go all over the place.” It’s not like I just wanted to sit down and write novels about relationships and all that kind of stuff. I wanted to get out there into the world and live a life but I realised after a while that I wasn’t really a writer. I don’t know at what point it dawned on me but I was actually doing everything with the head of somebody who’d gone through the British art school system circa early 1970s and that’s still the overriding thing. So the storytelling, doing the posters, coming up with a way of allowing myself to do the paintings all comes from that.’

You say ‘allowing myself to do the paintings’ and you do often seem to structure work around a dogma or set of rules − allowance and denial.

‘It’s not like I’m “into denial” like some sexual or perverse thing … It’s like when I was making three and a half minute pop records; there’s no point making them longer than three and a half minutes. The way that these things are communicated to people is via radio, initially, and radio stations don’t want to play anything longer than three and a half minutes. If it is, they start fading it or talking over it. Also, with a pop record, any record, any recorded music, you can only have it within so many megahertz − you can’t have really high sounds or really low sounds because it can’t exist on a piece of vinyl or an mp3.’

You see a beauty in restriction?

‘Yeah. Like, with oil paints – not that I use oil paints now – you know that this colour and that colour, they can’t mix chemically – so you’re always aware of it.

Doing the posters over the years, I always thought, “Trim it down. Trim it down.” Whereas they started off a lot wordier and there wasn’t much difference between the posters and the writing in the book.’

Are you happy with the term ‘artist’?

‘I’m never happy with that at heart, no, but anything else I try to come up with, it doesn’t work. There was a time when I thought, “No, I’m a poet, that’s what I am, just so happens I don’t use words …” and I tried to convince myself of that but I knew it was even more pretentious and would need even more explaining. There was a period when I was reading more poetry than I was looking at or thinking about art … I don’t know, saying you’re an artist has always had, maybe should have, that pretension. “Oh, you’re an artist are you? That what you think you are? You’re an artist now?” Pop record making was only (holds up thumb and index finger) that much of my life. There was a lot before and after that.’

The advent of The17 seemed to coincide with a shift in popular music away from the single voice to a more choral sound.

‘I think it’s a zeitgeist thing. I think I’m just part of a … this didn’t come into The17 book but I could have started from another point of view:

I buy an iPod. Theoretically, I can have every piece of music that I have ever wanted to listen to on there and I can listen to it when I want. So I get all these tracks and I start flicking through, this one, this one, this one − that’s just me though, jaded − but then I notice my thirteen-year-old doing the same thing, “flick, flick, flick, flick”, or she hears something on an advert, likes it, types it into Google, downloads it − whoosh, she has the band’s whole everything. She doesn’t know what decade they’re from, where they’re from but she’s got it all and maybe listens to it for a week and then it’s gone. Bang.

Next week it’s something else.

‘Something has vastly changed, really hugely changed. When I was a kid, to have an album cost you quite a bit of money. You invested in it. When you got it, if you didn’t like it, you accepted there were maybe only two tracks you liked but you worked at it and you ended up liking it, learnt to like it − that’s not going to happen now, it’s different and I’m not saying anything’s better or worse, it’s just changed. What’s happened since the whole downloading thing has kicked in big time is the live side − going to see the act live is far more important; last year with Leonard Cohen over here − whole generations said, “We’ve got to go and see Leonard Cohen.”

It doesn’t matter if they buy the album …’

It’s the event.

‘The event, yes. Look at the rise and rise of the amount of festivals. It may be a bubble that’s going to burst but it’s now about time, place and occasion – all of those things that I’m dealing with in a different way with The17 – that is what people are going for. It’s no longer contained within the recording.

Some people now, people more of your generation, fetishise vinyl and it’s young people who are buying into a want, a need for music to be more solid, the sleeves bigger …

So those are all reflections of that thing. Of course I hear Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes and I love it but that’s just me, that’s because of my age and the way it reminds me of things from other times.

I didn’t bring it up this afternoon but I know, over the years, any time I’ve heard choral singing music my ears have gone out to it and that’ll be because I sang in choirs as a kid.’

Perhaps part of the magic of singing in church as a child is that you’re unaware of what you’re singing about.

‘It’s just the sounds, yes, and I’ve read recently how − I can’t remember the composer − he wanted less words, more long vowels and more harmonies because that’s what’s really being communicated. That’s what has the power in religious music. It’s not the words, it’s the sounds, it’s the voices.’

Are you finding that many members of The17 are being affected by the experience?

‘I don’t know. I don’t know enough people … I’ll go and do something like today but I don’t know what the long-term effect is. I’ve got no idea.’

• • • • •

Stoke Newington, London

March 2010

Bill is sitting on his roof − the roof where he writes, weather permitting.

It was here, surrounded by the ambient noise of outer London, that he wrote much of his book about The17*.

Earlier in the day, when I expressed concern that the portrait we’re here to take might look contrived, Bill patiently pointed out that, since he wasn’t in the habit of writing on his ledge with other people looming over him, it was contrived whether I liked it or not and we should probably just make the best of a contrived situation and not worry about it. So we do; Bill with his notebook and tea, Lucy and I teetering precariously above the guttering and the drop, trying to frame the shots.*

We speak about Lady Gaga. Bill loves Lady Gaga; loves her complete ease and ownership of pop. She has compromised nothing, he says, she has created a whole universe and now straddles it, unsurpassed.

Bill tells us that, for a few weeks last year, he and fellow ex-KLFer Jimmy Cauty were in agreement that the only thing which would tempt them back to pop music would be to work with Lady Gaga.

‘Jimmy said he was surprised she’s not telephoned us yet.’

• • • • •

After leaving Bill’s house, I’m struck by the thought that the way he records and narrates his work, however unreliably, may be a stratagem to buttress and bolster its shape – for himself as much as the layman. His world of mad doings only lines up in retrospect when viewed from the justified headlands of 17, How To Be An Artist and the other written records of his work. His books are accepted histories of a lifetime of tangential missions into the unknown and he takes such care to define the narrative path because he knows the chaotic abyss that lurks either side of his stated methodology.

Even the story that there’s no story – no meaning behind a decision – ‘Nothing to see here’, is a sleight of hand way of working.

He generates the story and embodies it, but sometimes his stories are not enough, the wilfulness of his acts too great to be constrained within the books, films, music and statements he makes in their wake – as with THE MONEY – and long shadows threaten to swallow him up … but he writes and talks his way out of it, making something new from the fallout; forms a new plan; invokes a new dialectic and moves on.