"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."
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"