There are some gaps in the answers to the questions.
These gaps will be filled in the coming weeks.
I have very little interest in the state of Pop in 2009. Pop is at its most powerful when you are a teenager; it has been along time since I was a teenager. Occasionally I will become aware of something that captures my interest fleetingly like Lady Gaga, but it does not last. That said I hate people too old for Pop thinking it was some how better in the past. Nothing was better in the past. I like things evolving and changing; I like the fact that the iPod and free file sharing sites have changed our relationship to music. And these changes cannot help but change the position and role that music has in our culture, especially pop music. Thus it will no longer be one of the central cultural forces in the century ahead of us.
There is nothing wrong with the idea of recorded music, but for me it is like its perfect partner Pop music - a thing of the 20th Century. Even the most potent of art forms have numbered days.
As the technology to record music evolved through the 20th Century it seduced all forms of music before it. There was hardly a genre of music in the world that did not want to be recorded, packaged and sold. In doing so, much of this music lost its power. So much of the strength of a lot of music is about time, place and occasion. Once music is recorded and can then, theoretically be played at any time, any place and on any occasion it has so much of its power cut from it.
The greatest thing that came out of the technology to record music was Pop music itself – it being a genre of music that was totally reliant on its power as a recorded document. It provided a soundtrack for us to fall in love, lose our virginity, break our hearts or just take drugs to. It inspired us to storm the Bastille or man the barricades of our day. With pop music we could dream dreams of far off places, oceans away from our grey little lives on non-descript housing estates. But by far and away the most powerful force that recorded music contained is the memories it can trigger - memories of lost youth, missed chances and those endless days of summer when the world was still young.
Then there was the other side of recorded music, like the movie industry, it was almost the perfect commodity for the democratic capitalism that swept the western world in the post war years. By the 1950s this recorded music could be captured on light and easy to distribute bits of plastic. And the bits of plastic could be played on things called recorded players. Soon every household had one. And then even sooner, every teenager had one in their bedroom. These bits of plastic with recorded music on them sold by the millions. And then the billions. People could never get enough of them. And there were always new ones, better ones, different ones. Ones for every taste, every class, every gang, click or troupe in town. Absolutely everyone was catered for, the free market economy made sure of that. All we had to do was keep buying them and they would keep making new and different ones to satisfy our needs. The ‘they’ mentioned in the last sentence was the music industry. In a few short decades it had grown from being a few fat men chomping on cigars in cramped Tin Pan Alley offices to a global industry. This global industry included the small and purest independent labels to the big bad majors, but they, even if they didn’t know it, were all in it together – they all wanted to keep us buying these bits of plastic.
But then the Internet was invented and soon after that the MP3 player and we did not need to pay for bits of plastic anymore and we didn’t need record players (ok, CDs or CD players). Suddenly we didn’t need to pay for music anymore and we could have these iPods that could have all the music we could ever want to hear in a lifetime in our pocket to play anywhere at any time, while doing almost anything. Things were changing and I like change. Our relationship with music was changing fast. Now that we could have all this music that we ever wanted with us all the time and we didn’t have to pay for it, it now longer meant the same thing to us. And now we were not going to be paying for it, the music industry was soon not going to be investing the same sort of sums into making recorded music for us not to buy. Their business model was falling apart. They kept trying to reinvent business models but they knew it was over. The days of global stars like Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson who could generate millions upon millions by the sale of recorded music was over. We will never see their like again. In centuries to come they will look back at the second half of the 20th Century and be incredulous at the fact that a mere musician could be worldwide heroes. Like I said above - even the most potent of art forms have numbered days.
There is another side to this. Now that anybody can make a track on their laptop with a bit of software and stick it up on their MySpace, something has been lost. It is no longer a special thing to make recorded music. It use to be a special thing that only special people could do, now we all know some one who has made and album or got tracks you can down load. Every busker you pass is trying to sell his CD. Thus the young and creative music makers of the next few years are not going to want to make music that anybody can down load off the Internet, listen to at any time while doing almost anything. They will want to make music that is about time, place, occasion. They will want you to invest something of yourself to hear the music. They will not want you to be a mere consumer but for you to be part of it.
The17 has currently over 5,634 members and potentially every body in the world could become members. All they have to do is take part in a performance by The17 and they are automatically a lifetime member – no way out.
But I guess what you may mean to be asking is – Why does The17 not have a fixed line up of singers every time The17 perform? And the answer to that is - Back in 2005 I imagined that The17 would consist of a regular line up of 17 singers who sung at each performance. But that soon seemed to limit what the idea of what The17 could be in my imagination. I wanted The17 to be a choir that could be made up of different people every time that it performed. And that these people need not be proper singers, people that may not have sung since they were children or on a drunken night doing karaoke. I wanted The17 to be a choir where I could walk into a shopping centre, enlist a bunch of folk to perform as The17 there and then. And once the performance was done we could all walk away and get on with what ever it was we were doing in the shopping centre.
There are often plenty of harmonies in the music of The17. These harmonies may not be that pretty but sometimes they are very moving and powerful. As for melodies they are few and far between and only happen by accident, the same goes for rhythms. There are never any lyrics.
I wanted The17 to start from as close as I could get it to a year zero for music. This is of course an impossibility, I cannot un-know the things that I know, but the idea of a year zero is very seductive.
As for the audience - the choir are the audience and the audience are the choir. The17 is not entertainment, as consumer culture has understood what entertainment to be, where one group of sanctioned ‘talented’ people perform for the other less talented people to pay money to do nothing but consume.
I do not know what the idea behind The17 is or what particularly inspired it. I just know that what I am doing with The17 has reconnected me with music in a far deeper way than I thought could ever be possible. I do not think it is the future of anything other than my own future until I get to 60 and then others will be free to do what they want with it and I can get on doing the other things I want to get done in this life.
You will have to take part to find out, is the flippant answer that I can give. It varies considerably depending on what the score is being performed. Some of the scores are supposed to be very moving others more conceptual, others to work more in the memory, something that has its real power maybe months or years later when thinking back to the performance. As for my feelings – I am usually too concerned with making the whole thing work and that the people taking part are getting something from it, to actually get emotionally involved with the music myself.
As for what I am after – I reject the whole notion of art, music, football, and culture in general as mere product for us to consume for the profit of others. As I may have said above – I loathe the whole way that our society has so developed that we willingly pay others so that we can stand (or sit) doing nothing while the ‘talented’ do it for us. For me that would be as ridiculous as paying to watch somebody have sex, instead of having sex yourself, just because they were considered good at doing it. Go and play football not watch football is what I say.
The sea, in myth and reality, has informed much of what I have done over most of my life.
Both my paternal grandfather and great-grandfathers had been in the British Merchant Navy as ships engineers. It was a tradition in Scotland for men to become ships engineers. In the literature of the English speaking world it became almost a cliché that any time a ships engineer was featured he would be Scots, from Kipling’s poem McAndrew’s Hymn to Scotty on the Starship Enterprise and every literary port-of-call between, that required a ships engineer, they were Scots. These men were always portrayed as dour, hardworking, solid under pressure and inventive, they were the polar opposite to the urbane officer class found above deck.
I knew neither my grandfather nor great-grandfather. The former died in 1918 when my dad was only five, the latter in the 1890s, like me both these men were named William. As a boy, fuelled by stories that my Granny Drummond told, these men became mythical beings who had sailed the seven seas, facing Chinese pirates and the most ferocious storms that God could challenge man with. Up until the age of 16 all I wanted was to go to sea as an apprentice ships engineer. Even when I got my first guitar at the age of 16, I imagined playing it on the bunk in my cabin next to the engine room.
The maternal side of my family came from Norfolk (“Nelson’s County”) on the east coast of England. None of that side of the family had gone to sea, but we had numerous childhood summer holidays on the Norfolk coast. On the beach facing the heavy grey North Sea, we would eat our crab paste sandwiches and drink tea from the Thermos, while watching the crab fishermen attempt to launch their clinker boats onto the relentless swell. We knew nothing then of the blue and calm Mediterranean.
The great heroes of those Norfolk costal towns were their lifeboat men. The exploits of men like Cromer’s Henry Blogg had been told and re-told to me. But above them all there was the great Jimmy Haylett of the Caister crew. It was at the inquest of 1901 Caister Lifeboat Disaster that Haylett was reported to have said, “Caister men never turn back”. That one phrase has stuck with me over the decades. Whatever the conditions, what ever the risks, whatever the losses, never-ever turn back. Of course I have never lived up to the motto, but along with Baden-Powell’s Be Prepared it is the one that I have aspired to the most.
I never made that apprenticeship as a ships engineer, instead by the age of 17 I had ended up going to art school. But the longing for the sea did not die. And as my career as an art student began to wither, I made a couple of rather pathetic attempts to get jobs at sea. The first of these was in Liverpool where I tried to get a job with the Isle-of-Man Steam Packet Company, the second a few months later was in the Port of Piraeus in Greece where I also tried and failed again to get a deck hand job on a ship heading for the Philippines.
By now I had my sites set on being a writer, my then hero was Jack Kerouac, he had been in the US Navy in the Second World War. I thought that to be a great writer you had to experience as much of the world as possible. And my understanding of that was not the urban world or even the world of relationships between men and women but between man and the elements.
To not experience even a few short months of a life on the ocean wave I believed would mean, I could never truly deliver the goods as a writer.
At the age of 21 in 1974 I finally made it. I got myself an apprenticeship as a trawlerman on a fishing boat out of Aberdeen. We would spend 12 to 14 days at sea, then three days back in Aberdeen. Within a few weeks I had to face the fact that I could not hack it. But within those weeks I have never worked harder, eaten better and felt closer to the glory of creation. The crew of six put me through the initiation rights, to avoid upsetting your more delicate sensibilities; it is enough to say that they involved the feminine qualities of a large skate nailed to the wall of the fo’castle. These were the hardiest and bravest men I had ever met. But they thought I would be wasting my life if I were to carry on with my apprenticeship in what they saw as a dying trade. I also knew I was not tough enough for the job. But while onboard and while not working, I found time to write and dream and write and wonder. The voice of God was never clearer than out there in the far North Sea when day was breaking and we were pulling the net in and all around us Gannets were diving out of the sky for the easy pickings.
That was my last attempt at a life on the ocean wave. Since then it has only crept into my work as poetry. It was there in the staging that I designed for the Illuminatus at the National Theatre in 1977. It was in much of the imagery used by Echo & The Bunnymen who I worked closely with between 1978 and 1985. On the back cover of my one solo record The Man (1986) I had a photo of me standing on the deck of an old tramp steamer gazing out to sea. What you cannot see in the photo is that this old steamer is in a dry dock in Liverpool and about to be scrapped, a steamer that will never witness the open sea again.
Then with Jimmy Cauty and myself the imagery of the sea and ships was woven into what we did. For our differing reasons we identified with it. It spoke of adventure, exploration, the unknown, the mystical and the manly. It was in our last musical creation together Fuck The Millennium that we decided to use the hymn Strong To Save (For those in peril on the sea!). Both of us had grown up with the hymn and it was easily one of our favourites. In the actual recording it was just Jimmy, myself, Nick Coller and whoever else was hanging around the studio at the time singing on the track. But in our imaginations we were hymn singing lifeboat men of old. In the performance that we did at the Barbican we had members of the Wessex Dark Age Society singing the parts. They had worked with us on the video for America – What Time Is Love? At the Barbican we had them dressed up as turn of the century lifeboat men to sing the hymn. They were dressed in the same clothes that Jimmy Haylett and Henry Blogg would have worn. I believe it is a record that we should have left unmade, its only saving grace was the Strong To Save section at the end.
All of the above may not be the answer to your question, but you asking the question has prompted me to pour these words out and they may explain how we came to use Strong To Save as our last joint musical testament. As for seeing the artist as a sailor I do not know. I am aware that in some literature the sailor is portrayed as the sexual adventurer, afloat in the world with no fixed responsibilities and maybe for some they like to see that as similar to the life of an artist. But this is the sailor in port, this does not interest me – I am drawn to the idea of man confronting everything that the seas and the skies can confront him with. So not for me Jean Genet’s Querelle, but Melville’s Ishmael.
And so to the last part of your question - how can a man of the sea adapt himself to urbanity? I do not know the answer to that either. I do know that I have never been able to be a man of urbanity. The urban man looks into the city and what the city has to offer. I look out to the horizon to see what is coming.
All artists want to be for real.
All artists want to be taken seriously.
And in turn, what people want from the artist is integrity and authenticity. In my youth if Muddy Waters had made an album of Beatles covers we would have never trusted him again to be the true voice of the blues. If John Cage started to score soundtracks for Hollywood blockbusters we would have dismissed everything he had done before.
Long before ‘demographics’ and ‘branding’ were topics to be learnt about in school lessons, every young band that wanted to get somewhere knew that it was important that they had a sound and image that was their own. A sound and image that others did not have and that a public could recognize in an instant. They knew to mess with that sound and image too much would not be good for their career, at whatever level they were on. And if the band started to have success their management and record company would not want them to tinker with ‘a winning formula’. To re-invent ones sound and image was something that was only ever achieved successfully by very few artists.
There was another side to this. To be an artist of any sort – musical, literary or visual – you had to learn a craft. That craft might take years to learn and perfect. And if you had learnt a craft and you were good at it, people respected the years that you had put into learning to play the violin or how to paint portraits or whatever. There is no way that the talented violinist could decide to throw away his bow and pick a paintbrush instead.
But the way that so much art is made has changed. The vast majority of it, be it music, literary or visual is made using the same tools that requires the same skills to use. In this day and age by the time most children leave school they have learnt to use the software on their computer to make music, write stories or create visuals. With some cheap software you no longer need to spend years perfecting a craft to make professional sounding music. It is easy to do and then you can just stick it up on your MySpace and wait for the hits. With a digital camera and Photoshop we can all make images that would have looked stunning only a few years ago. There are now thousands upon thousands of films being shot around the globe on affordable digital movie cameras and edited on laptops. Anybody could be tomorrow’s star on YouTube. We can all write our blog for a potential audience of millions to read.
We all know this but there is part of us that still does not trust the artist who flips from one medium to the other. We still want to believe that they have spent years learning their craft. That if they flip from one medium to the other the work they are producing must lack integrity and authenticity.
Mind sets change a lot slower than technology.
When Jimmy Cauty and I started to work together we were both already in our early thirties. We no longer were at that insecure stage in our development as artists where we wanted the world to view us as desperately serious young men. And we were not bothered about just appealing to one particular demographic that were made up of other desperately serious young men (just a few year younger than ourselves). As much as we wanted to make the greatest records that we could make, we also knew there was nothing to stop us making what ever kind of music that we wanted to do, and that it had nothing to do with what crafts we had learnt as a teenager. We had no interest in being a blues band, or a metal band, or a folk band, a hip-hop band, a post punk band, a synth band, or even a rave band or any sort of band that spent their time playing proper instruments on their own records. If we had thought about it all, that would have seemed very old fashioned and totally unnecessary. We wanted to be a band that could be anything because we could now be anything. And there was the added bonus we had no management or record company that was worrying about the damage we may be doing to our brand image or how we might be letting down our core demographics.
And what we learnt, or maybe we already instinctively knew, the medium that we were working in was not just the music that we were making but also the actual media itself. Our art did not primarily exist in the records themselves but in the way we were perceived on the pages of the weekly music papers, on pop radio stations, on dance floors but most importantly in conversations that people had about us in their flats or down the pub. We existed in the confusion created in peoples minds. Why would the same band that had recorded the ultimate post rave album Chill Out as The KLF, have wanted to make the novelty driven
Doctorin’ The Tardis as The Timelords and then go onto perform one of their biggest hits - a global dance anthem - at the Brit Awards Ceremony with “hyper-speed hardcore punk insanity” band Extreme Noise Terror. For many when they witnessed what we did in the media or heard about it from friends, it was only natural for them to understand it as mere publicity stunts or even worse scams. What would the point in a band doing these things if they were not as publicity stunts to sell more records. And any band that stoops to publicity stunts surely has no integrity or authenticity.
For Jimmy Cauty an myself, and of course this is with the vantage of hindsight, we believed that dumping a dead sheep on a red carpet, making a novelty pop record, inventing a new musical genre, or announcing our retirement from the music industry were all equal as works of art.
Like Richey from the Manics, we were 4 REAL.
As real as Ian Curtis singing Love Will Tear Us Apart.
Or at least as real as a post-modern pop group in the late 80s early 90s should have been.
As you may know in 1995 Jimmy Cauty and I as The K Foundation, went out and toured the film of us burning the million at various specific locations around the UK, as well as one screening in Wenceslas Square, Belgrade. After each screening a debate ensued with the audience.
Every night it was the same, there would be two questions that the audience demanded and answer to. The first of these was ‘Did you really burn the money?’ And however we attempted to answer that, whatever proof we may have given, there would always be that percentage of the audience that wanted to believe we had and that other percentage that would never believe we had burnt the money.
It seemed the more that we tried to insist we had done it the non-believers became more entrenched in their views. These non-believers would come up with far-fetched, almost conspiracy theoryesque, theories as to how the whole thing had been a sleight of hand. There were even some, who believed we had burnt it, but thought it would have been a stronger work if we had fabricated the whole thing.
The other question was the more obvious. ‘Why?’ Jimmy and I firmly believed that it was our duty, to our families first and foremost, to come up with a solid gold foolproof reason, as to why we had burnt it. But whatever answer we aired, tried out, came up with, never seemed to be good enough for the audience. And there was a thinking that if we did not have a good enough answer to the obvious question, it must have been done out of stupidity, or some sort of perverted vanity, or worst of all a sick publicity stunt. It is a commonly held opinion that an artist has a responsibility to explain his or her art, especially if it is somewhat difficult to understand. If the artist cannot explain it then it is probably bad art or not art at all.
We seriously tried to come up with one good solid reason. Some of them were very creative, they entertained, and they provoked thought. I would be sitting there beside Jimmy, infront of us a baying audience and Jimmy would say something and I would think – ‘Fuck me, that is it, that is definitely why we did it. The audience will accept it. I can tell my family and then I can sleep soundly at night.’ But these moments never lasted long before it was pointed out to us for various reasons why it was not a good enough answer.
We were on trial, night after night. This was until early November 1995. We were at a screening in Scotland where the host for the evening’s events was the filmmaker Marc Hawker. He confronted us with the fact that the whole exercise of us dragging this film around the country was not only a waste of time, but it detracted from the power and purity of the event itself. The more we tried to justify it, argue the case, point out that there were no less fruit on the trees, fish in the ocean, or even gold in the ground because a million bits of paper had been burnt; or that all we had done was made a work of art that had cost a million pounds to make – I mean a lot of works of art cost a lot more than a million - nobody has a problem with going to the cinema to watch a film that has cost £60,000,000 to make; the more that we as individuals became the central issue not the act of the burning. It was our egos, personality faults, sanities that were under the microscope not the act itself.
Marc Hawker invited us – no, insisted that we cancel the rest of the tour and sign an agreement that we would not try and justify the action anymore, even better stop talking about. Hawker drew up an agreement. We signed it on the 5 November 1995; in it we agreed to cease activities as the K foundation for a period of 23 years. And in that time stop trying to justify or explain why we had done it and instead give the rest of the world time to take on board what had been done and respond to the action in what ever way they felt was correct. Implied in the contract was that it was down to others to explain why one million pounds had to be burn.
Since then I have never tried to justify or explain it. The most I have done is what I have done above – explain how we got to a point of not justifying and explaining.
So to your points about it being a revolutionary act – I am in no position to know if it is or is not a revolutionary act. There have been times when it has been pointed out to us that other artists in the past have done similar things. How the French artist Yves Klein, in the early 60s, threw gold in the Seine. And how Serge Gainsborough had burned a 500 French Frank note live on TV. Klein and Gainsborough were considerably more validated artists than our selves. They had done it years before us and all we had going for us was scale, and bigger does not mean better. It is all down to who did it first. Or that is what we have been told.
And to the last part of your question – ‘Money can really be worthless, yes?’ The week before last I was working in Haiti in the Caribbean. Haiti is the poorest country in all of the Americas. While there a young man helped on some of the stuff I was working on. I paid him a daily rate. Over the days we were working together I learnt that he was the oldest of five siblings, that his father had died sometime ago and now his mother was seriously ill in hospital. In Haiti you have to pay for all medication upfront. This young man has no money to keep his mother alive and at the same time feed his younger siblings. I gave him my email address. We have been corresponding. I have numerous financial responsibilities that I struggle to meet in this country, two mortgages to pay, children to upkeep, and a bank manager to keep at bay. But a few dollars from me is the difference between life and death for this young man’s mother. I do not think that money can be really worthless for him and his family.
I can hear some one say ‘Well you should have thought about that first before you struck that match back in 1994’.
- We are both now in our 50s, I do not think if you asked our children that they would see us as youthful spirits. That said I feel I have already lived numerous lives. I have no explanation as to why time may be eternal. I was never very good at listening in the physics lessons when I was at school. I may return to this question at a later date.
There was no rational. Like oil and water, pop music and rational do not mix. The KLF meets Extreme Noise Terror (ENT) up town at The Brits was the perfect partnership, as had The KLF meets Tammy Wynette in an ice cream van. Machine guns, cigars and crutches seemed like the perfect props for the evening’s entertainment. Like many props used in pop, they were obviously phallic. But I do not think that is why we consciously chose them on the night. If you are planning on making your exit from pop music, you obviously want to cut an iconic dash while doing it.
Most formerly successful practioners of pop music never know when to make their exit. They usually wait until they have been slung out and barred from ever having a hit record again.
As for us winning a Brit, we had no idea before the show. Like Elvis, we had already left the building when it was announced. Thus we had to send a motorcycle courier to pick it up.
Originally I wanted to chop off my left hand with a meat cleaver and throw it into the massed ranks of the British music business – a nod to the Ulster legend. Thankfully I got talked out of that. So like Abraham, I elected to slaughter a sheep instead. We turn up with the freshly slaughtered sheep and a bucket of blood drained from it. But ENT are hard-core vegetarians and decide to pull the show if we go ahead with this. So we compromise and smuggle in an AK 47 instead.
We tied a piece of card to it with the words “I DIED FOR EWE” scrawled on it. Then dumped the sheep on the red carpet of the after show party. I have no idea what happened after that. Hope it ended up on the skewer of a West London kebab shop. Little Bo Peep never forgave me.
I didn’t know they were still going (I lie). But if they are, is it not just a bit of left over culture from the 20th Century? An anachronism in today’s world, like changing the guards at Buckingham Palace.
And I still do love all sorts of music – I have just got bored with recorded music and the live music that only exists to promote it. The difficulty is, much of the music I love the most has not been made yet. I thank the iPod and the file sharing sites for making this happen. When they first came out, I welcomed them with open arms. I could now have in my pocket, every piece of recorded music that I had ever wanted to listen to, and all the new stuff coming out, just at the click of a mouse. And I could listen to it anywhere, anytime, while doing almost anything. But within months of me having an iPod, I realised my relationship with all this recorded music was changing and changing fast. Recorded music’s very abundance and accessibility was altering my relationship to it.
Like it or not the evolution of technology has always changed our relationship, thus appreciation of art - whatever the art form.
The day after The Jazz Singer (the first “talky”) came out in 1927, we would never have been able to appreciate silent films in the same way again. They were over. It seems the same thing has happened for me with recorded music. It all sounds old fashioned. Whatever the genre it has all begun to sound the same, very two-dimensional. As if I am listening to an art form, from another era.
As for Barbie Girl by Aqua, it would take far more than my allotted words to give that particular slice of Euro pop heaven the justice it deserves.
When I awoke in the middle of last night I began to imagine a piece of music that would be created by 6,000 people standing at roughly 50 metres intervals between my bed in London and a certain, but significant for me, manhole cover at the bottom of Mathew Street in Liverpool. And these 6,000 people would be making sounds that would be rippling up and down the line between the manhole cover and my bed.
I guess that this would have been inspired by the traditional Irish dance called The Waves Of Tory and the fact that my youngest son loves to go on Google Earth, find our house, and then follow the roads all the way up England to Anfield Stadium in Liverpool.
I am not saying that this is a piece of music that will be performed in 100 years time. But it is an idea for a piece of music that was keeping me awake last night.
Many of us are still very locked into that 20th-century way of thinking about music, where all we do is passively consume it in bite size chunks.
I accept that all analogies are flawed but I am going to make one anyway. Here goes: Imagine if the porn industry had been so successful it had convinced the mass majority of people that they no longer needed to have sex anymore, because we now had experts at sex to do it for us. All we have to do is pay to watch the experts do it instead of us. That is what the music industry achieved in the 20th-century.
I hope that in 100 years, people will find it impossible to think that we so undervalued music that we left in the hands of others to do it for us.
I was in Port-au-Prince the week before Christmas leading a performance of The17 at a school in the middle of the cities slums. It was part of The17’s Coast-to-Coast world tour. It was in the poorest area of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The performance involved over 70 of the schools pupils. It was the greatest performance that The17 had ever given. Within less than three weeks after my return to the UK the earthquake happened. We know that numerous of the young folk we were working with were killed immediately, other lost limbs; others have died in the past two weeks because of lack of medication. None of them will ever be the same again. It will take years for the city to be rebuilt.
When I heard about the earthquake, I was numb for the first few days. Felt completely helpless. I have always been cynical of ‘celebrities’ involvement with charities, but when I got asked to be the patron of a large fundraising concert at the Roundhouse in London, I felt that I had to involve myself. It happens on the 25 February just after I get back to the UK from Oslo. I am currently in daily contact with people in Port-au-Prince.
I have a habit of attempting to turn nearly everything in my life into part of my art. This goes way back to my childhood, before I even thought of what I was doing in terms of art. An example of this would be on my walk to the river, about 3 kilometres from my home, for a days fishing, and then the walk back, I would attempt to get my walk to draw out the outline of a massive 3K long fish. At home I would get out the map of the area, draw on it the route of the walk to see what sort of fish it looked like.
Thus deciding to do interviews using this method is part of the same thing. I find it more interesting and challenging than being asked the same questions time and time again, and me trotting out the same answers. And if I were expected to do interviews, I would rather do them in a way that was more interesting and challenging for me. As for the for the rest of my life, my main concern is that it will not be long enough to get done all the things that I want to get done. And what ever that is, I’m sure I will be trying to turn it into part of my practice. It is the only way that I know how.
December 1972, I was standing infront of my canvas. I was in art school in Liverpool. I had dreams of being a great painter. But something was troubling me and it was not my abundant lack of talent. Even if I became a great painter, what would my great paintings be for? The only answer to present itself to me was – ‘To hang on a rich man’s wall’. Whereas my copy of Strawberry Fields Forever by The Beatles – and at that time I considered this to be the greatest work of art of the 20th-century - had only cost me 7/11d (just under 40P). And the copy of Strawberry Fields Forever that the rich man may own would be no better than mine.
I put down my paintbrush and vowed to never pick one up again until…
Since then, whenever confronted with any art, I confront it back with the question – ‘What are you for?’ And if the answer is – ‘to hang on the wall of a rich man’ – I walk away and ignore it.
I was a young man fuelled with idealism. I was filled with words like liberty, equality, fraternity and all those other heroic words that were used in revolutions. I was for the common man, the democratic process, the striking miner, the Viet Cong, The Shining Path and anything else that I heard about and half understood. But I was not for the word freedom, if all it meant was the freedom to spend thousands on a piece of art that hangs on the wall in a rich man’s house doing nothing.
I wandered around the art school and asked – ‘What is this art for?’ of every thing that I saw being made. And I was not satisfied with the answers I got back.
So I then walked out of the arts school and walked the streets of Liverpool. This walk went on for hours and through days and in and out of weeks (just like Max in his boat). It was a disjointed, fits and starts kind of walk. I would go around in circles and up dead end streets and down tunnels and over bridges and on the ferry across the Mersey. The walk took in drunken nights in the Somali Club and grey dawns in Sefton Park. It was broken by reading and writing and going to court. Walking and walking and more walking. And of course dancing to Sex Machine by James Brown. And listening to Black Unity by Pharoah Sanders. And what I came across on this walk had forty times forty more life in it, than anything going on in the art school. And none of it could be hung on a rich man’s wall.
Then I walked into an old smoked-black sandstone church on the edge of China Town. And in the church there were all sorts of things going on. And there was this saintly looking man with long thinning hair and a long beard. The man exuded Zen wisdom, as if he was a living, breathing Haiku. His name was Bill Harp. And this church that was no longer a church but was called the Blackie and was something else, but I did not know what this something else was, ’cause I had never come across a place like it. And in the Blackie there were all sorts of other people doing all sorts of things. There were unemployed local teenagers. And there were sexy older women; I mean one of them was almost 30. And there were those filled with ruthless idealism. And there were things going on all the time – from ten in the morning until ten at night – seven days a week. And the things that were going on were strange and funny, wild and risk taking. And people worked hard. And people got angry. And people laughed. And people believed that things could and should be better. And people made plans. And people got things done. And the unemployable teenagers were teaching themselves to sing harmony like The Temptations from their Papa Was A Rolling Stone psychedelic funk era. Street Corner Symphony by The Persuasions was a big album for these lads. The Persuasions had just done a UK tour supporting Lou Reed and when they came to Liverpool, Bill Harp had persuaded The Persuasions to do a vocal workshop with the lads. You do know who The Persuasions are? This was a long time before hip-hop and rap had evolved and captured the aspirations of the young and urban. But The Last Poets were hip and happening in my world and with the kids down in The Blackie. And we did group problem-solving exercise based on the ideas of somebody called Edward de Bono. And in the Blackie people took it in turn to be in charge.
And I came to the conclusion that everything going on in the Blackie was art. Or how I wanted art to be. And when I asked the question – ‘What is this art for?’ There were lots of answers clambering for my attention. Some of them were weird and wonderful answers. But not one of them was– ‘to hang on a rich man’s wall’. But the answer could have been – ‘Inclusion’.
Thus the answer to this question as I am answering it today is:
Inclusion means the Blackie (circa 1973).
I put down my paintbrush and vowed to never pick one up again until…
Since then, whenever confronted with any art, I confront it back with the question – ‘What are you for?’ And if the answer is – ‘to hang on the wall of a rich man’ – I walk away and ignore it.
I was a young man fuelled with idealism. I was filled with words like liberty, equality, fraternity and all those other heroic words that were used in revolutions. I was for the common man, the democratic process, the striking miner, the Viet Cong, The Shining Path and anything else that I heard about and half understood. But I was not for the word freedom, if all it meant was the freedom to spend thousands on a piece of art that hangs on the wall in a rich man’s house doing nothing.
I wandered around the art school and asked – ‘What is this art for?’ of every thing that I saw being made. And I was not satisfied with the answers I got back.
So I then walked out of the arts school and walked the streets of Liverpool. This walk went on for hours and through days and in and out of weeks (just like Max in his boat). It was a disjointed, fits and starts kind of walk. I would go around in circles and up dead end streets and down tunnels and over bridges and on the ferry across the Mersey. The walk took in drunken nights in the Somali Club and grey dawns in Sefton Park. It was broken by reading and writing and going to court. Walking and walking and more walking. And of course dancing to Sex Machine by James Brown. And listening to Black Unity by Pharoah Sanders. And what I came across on this walk had forty times forty more life in it, than anything going on in the art school. And none of it could be hung on a rich man’s wall.
Then I walked into an old smoked-black sandstone church on the edge of China Town. And in the church there were all sorts of things going on. And there was this saintly looking man with long thinning hair and a long beard. The man exuded Zen wisdom, as if he was a living, breathing Haiku. His name was Bill Harp. And this church that was no longer a church but was called the Blackie and was something else, but I did not know what this something else was, ‘cause I had never come across a place like it. And in the Blackie there were all sorts of other people doing all sorts of things. There were unemployed local teenagers. And there were sexy older women, I mean one of them was almost 30. And there were those filled with ruthless idealism. And there were things going on all the time – from ten in the morning until ten at night – seven days a week. And the things that were going on were strange and funny, wild and risk taking. And people worked hard. And people got angry. And people laughed. And people believed that things could and should be better. And people made plans. And people got things done. And the unemployable teenagers were teaching themselves to sing harmony like The Temptations from their Papa Was A Rolling Stone psychedelic funk era. Street Corner Symphony by The Persuasions was a big album for these lads. The Persuasions had just done a UK tour supporting Lou Reed and when they came to Liverpool, Bill Harp had persuaded The Persuasions to do a vocal workshop with the lads. You do know who The Persuasions are? This was a long time before hip-hop and rap had evolved and captured the aspirations of the young and urban. But The Last Poets were hip and happening in my world and with the kids down in The Blackie. And we did group problem solving exercise based on the ideas of somebody called Edward de Bono. And in the Blackie people took it in turn to be in charge.
And I came to the conclusion that everything going on in the Blackie was art. Or how I wanted art to be. And when I asked the question – ‘What is this art for?’ There were lots of answers clambering for my attention. Some of them were weird and wonderful answers. But not one of them was– ‘to hang on a rich man’s wall’. But the answer could have been – ‘Inclusion’.
Thus the answer to this question as I am answering it today is:
Inclusion means the Blackie (circa 1973).
But we like social barriers. Barriers are what we use to define us as us and them as them. We like to have us and them. We like to know who we are and social barriers are one of the devices we use to learn who we are. Look, I know I am being partly playing devils advocate here, but I am going to carry on with my theme, even if you are thinking - ‘Drummond is misunderstanding what I meant by “social barriers” as referenced in our question.’
As a species us humans need to operate collectively to survive. We are not like the Robin or the Wren in their army of one against all the other Robins or Wrens in the world. We have been getting ourselves into gangs ever since anthropologists can remember. And we need to know who is in our gang and who is not, we need to send out signals so that the others who need to know, know. So the Huns uniforms were grey and the Tommys had kaki. Hamas with their red and white keffiyeh can tell a member of Fatah at distance, as he will be wearing a black and white keffiyeh. When I started secondary school back in 1964, we all had to make a decision, where we to be a mod or a rocker. With that decision a lot else was decided. Mods aspired to wearing Italian styled suits, rockers wore leathers, mods preferred scooters (Italian made), rockers motorbikes (British made); mods listened to soul music, rockers listened to rock music. Mods were also more urbane, whereas rockers were more likely to be rural or at least aspired to the wide-open road.
Mods and Rockers may be a thing of the dim distant past for most of the people reading this, but what carries on to this day in every school in the UK, is that decision that is made by the vast majority of teenagers - what kind of music are you going to be into? Some variety of Urban or is it going to be Rock? Some of these are decisions that we make, some are what we are born into. But however, we end up within our social grouping, we will end up defending that grouping by building up social barriers around ourselves.
The ‘social barriers’ that Kerry and Kevin were referring to, were probably the ones that are based around class, religion, cast and educational opportunities. And of course from a liberal educated Western point of view, these are all ‘social barriers’ viewed in a negative light. And it is the social duty of all right thinking people to break as many of these ‘social barriers’ down. But all of these ‘social barriers’ would have evolved for the same fundamental reasons as everything else Darwin witnessed evolving with his Finches on the Galapagos Islands. Meaning there would have been a reason for these ‘social barriers’ evolving. And that reason would have at its core, the survival of the species. Thus the only reason for breaking down any ‘social barrier’ is because they do not work for the survival of the species any more. The class system that we used to have in this country served a purpose. Now that we do not need to have 90 odd % of the population involved in manual labour but instead we need a far more educated work force, the old class system no longer works for society as a whole.
100 years ago that 90 odd % of the population who were manual workers were not obliged to be consumers. But now in 2010, that same % of the populations first and foremost responsibility is to be consumers. The more they consume the more they are fulfilling their role in our society.
My friend Tracey is from Bargoed in the Welsh valleys. In Bargoed there was a snooker club, who had a no ladies policy. Tracey thought it her duty to break down this ‘social barrier’ that prevented her from entering the club. She achieved her aim, and they were unable to prevent her from regularly entering the club and playing snooker. She is proud of this achievement of breaking down this ‘social barrier’. I told her that those poor men would then have had to find somewhere else to go to escape the women in their lives. All blokes need to go to places where there is no female influence. She thought I was taking the piss. I wasn’t.
All ‘social barriers’ need to be regularly tested. If they can be broken down, this will usually signify that they are now no longer needed. We will then un-doubtably replace them with new social barriers, ones that society is now in need of.
If there were no ‘social barriers’ there would be no such thing as human society.
Round my way, there are a lot of different types of places of worship. If I turn right outside my front door there is a parade of shops. Tucked behind the kebab takeaway, at the far end of the parade is the Valide Sultan Mosque. It is a tiny but purpose built mosque; there is no towering minaret, in fact no minaret of any sort. Everyday I see the old Turkish guys, beads in hand, heading around there for their prayers.
Across the road from this mosque is a Victorian red brick church that has now been converted into flats, except its basement. When I walk past the basement on a Sunday evening there is always a service going on. I can hear the music pumping out from this basement and I can hear the African Caribbean voices of the congregation united in the gospel songs they are singing. Outside the church is a notice board proclaiming that it is a Trinitarian Spiritual Baptist Church and they are offering us the Solemnization of Marriages, the Dedication of Babies, the Baptism of Believers or if I want Divine Healing all I have to do is phone the number provided and talks to Bishop J. A. Hibbert. I sometimes wonder if he is related to Toots Hibbert, one of my teenage heroes.
A couple of streets away from where the Bishop does his Divine Healing is a rather dreary looking 1930s building. The Star of David in the wrought-ironwork was the first thing that alerted me to the purpose of this building. The notice board reads Walford Road Synagogue. Also on the notice board are the words Shaare Mazal Tov and underneath that Rav: Rabbi Herschel Gluck. But there is no phone number for Rabbi Gluck and no indications as to what kind of services he might provide.
If I was to turn left outside my front door and head down the road a few hundred yards you would get to a Unitarian Church that has banners outside proclaiming that it is the birthplace of feminism. I have little idea of what the Unitarian Church is or why this one in particular was the birthplace of feminism.
When I reluctantly moved to London for family reasons, and knew I was going to be in the city for at least ten years, I thought I might as well embrace London instead of just resenting it. I mean it is our capital city and by many accounts one of the great cities of the world. ‘When a man is bored of London, he is bored of life…’ or whatever the Johnson quote is. Thus it must have so much culture to offer me. So I bought a copy of Time Out, the local listings magazine, but there seemed to be an air of smugness about the magazine and this whiff put me off everything that it listed. Which I know says more about my failings than the failings of the magazine.
As the months went by in my new abode and I started to get a feel for the place I was living in, I became aware of this other culture that was going on all around me. The place seemed to be seething with it. And none of this culture was being listed in Time Out. It felt like I could not go down a street without coming across some of this culture. There was definitely more of it than there was of any other culture going on in this capital city. And this culture was religion, all sorts of religion. It wasn’t just Time Out that did not seem to be reflecting all of this religious culture that was going on. The mainstream media from the Daily Star through to the Guardian only seem to be interested in this popular mass culture of religion, if there is scandal attached to it, and then they cannot get enough of it. They want the inside story on paedophile priests or female Islamic suicide bombers, but not all this other stuff that seems to be going on under their blinkered radar.
Over the past year an idea has been brewing in my head, as yet I have been too scared to do anything about it. The working title for it is Go To Church. What I would like to do is go to a different place of worship every week for a whole year in London. But not just visit the building, but take part in the service, talk to the people, learn something. And afterwards write up my response. Now I know I could be accused of just being a tourist or dilettante, but fuck them. People go on about what a great multi cultural city London is, but the most your average white liberal does is go to an ethnically other restaurant or listen to some music from Mali or somewhere. These years in London will probably be the only period in my life that I could take advantage of all this diverse culture. And for some reason no one else seems to be documenting it or even acknowledging it.
Over these past few months, I have been compiling a list of all the places of worship that I pass while sitting on the bus routes that I regularly ride. Without even trying I have already got dozens on the list. And each one is a different denomination if not a totally different religion. I had no idea there were so many types of Judaism just within Stamford Hill (half a mile up the road from me). The 73 bus that I get into the centre of London heads down Pentonville Road near King’s Cross Station. On your left near the bottom is a red brick Victorian Church. The wording on its notice board is all in Welsh. I had put it in my notebook and I was looking forward to visiting, and wondered how big the Welsh, as a first language, community was in London. Then one day I noticed that the notice board was no longer there. I was somewhat sad about this, assuming that the Welsh as a first language community had shrunk to the point it no longer justified having a church. But within a week or so, there was another notice board up in the same place, but this was not in Welsh but it proclaiming to whoever was bothered to notice, that from now on this was a place of worship for the Orthodox Ethiopian community. It went strait into the notebook.
‘This all may be vaguely interesting, but what has this got to do with the question?’ you may be thinking. Well, I mentioned somewhere above, how I was scared and this is why: If I just turn up at the little Turkish mosque for Friday prayers, how will they receive me? Although Islam is faith, driven to seek converts, they will probably take one look at me and let me know I have come to the wrong place. As for the Trinitarian Spiritual Baptist Church across the road, I will just be as out of place there. So onto the Synagogue a couple of streets away, I put their name into Google and found they had a web site. The first sentence I read on the home page was - We welcome Jews of all backgrounds, ages, levels of knowledge and exposure to Judaism, in a non-judgemental, considerate and friendly manner. Which all sounds very welcoming and non-judgemental, except for one thing, I am not Jewish. So I might not even get through the door there come the next Shabbat.
What I am scared about is, me being a white western liberal, may inhibit my inclusion in any of these three places of worship. Is this a bad thing? Or would my inclusion weaken something of what these places of worship provide for their regular congregations? Maybe the strength of all these myriads of Churches, Mosques, Chapels, Meeting Houses and Synagogues scattered across London is derived from the fact that they do inhibit the inclusion of those that are not them. Would my inclusion water things down? Like a funk guitarist joining the Sex Pistols in 1977 or Syd Vicious being the new bass player in the James Brown backing band circa the same year. The inclusion of either musician in the other band would certainly weaken if not destroy what was precious about the music in the first place.
So what might inhibit inclusion? Me, for all those white, western liberal reasons I have already declared. But now that I have taken the step of answering this question in the way that I have, I may now be able to gather the confidence to start this Go To Church job. Give me a year or so and I will report back to you about how it is going and if the inclusion is still being inhibited.
Post Script: As for the Unitarian Church, after reading the Wikipedia page on it, I learnt all about it. And I learnt it was here that Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the seminal feminist text The Vindication of the Rights of Women, got her big break. But that is all history; I want to know what is going on in there now.
And these are some links
www.salatomatic.com/d/London+5058+Valide-Sultan-Mosque
www.walfordroadsynagogue.org/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newington_Green_Unitarian_ChurchI do not know if it does but… By its very nature the market has a tendency to want to dumb down popular culture. The market’s main interest is to make as big a profit it can from the popular culture it is selling, thus it wants as many possible people to buy into whatever it is offering. This is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that if they upset the core demographic of whoever is buying, by dumbing down the product too much, they will lose everything. From this delicate balance some of the greatest art and culture of the 20th-century has been born.
In the academic world, things seem to be different. To dumb down is a very bad thing. And even though Gaga was a very bad girl, a very, very bad girl and we loved for her badness, the academic worlds job is to do the opposite of dumbing down. The academic world has very little to do with the market that is in the job of selling popular culture, although sometimes it likes to pass academic comment on popular culture. If the opposite of dumbing down can be called intellectualizing up, then that is what many would be academics attempt to do. Especially when they are writing about contemporary art. The less people there are, that can actually understand what you are writing about the better it is, or that is the way that it seems, at times. And I guess there is an argument to say, some of the greatest thinking of the 20th-century has come from the delicate balance of intellectualizing up, but still finding enough of a readership, which will take up your ideas and they end up making a difference.
Looking back over the past few decades at my practice, I can sort of assume that neither of these two paths – the dumbing down or the intellectualizing up ones – have been that attractive to me, or maybe I did not have what it was to make it in either field. But I do know, I have borrowed from the dressing up boxes belonging to both parties.
Most of what I have done and am still doing within the framework of the Penkiln Burn, works in quite a defined way. This may have happened instinctively and it is only with the luxury of hindsight (12 years and counting) that I can see the pattern.
The pattern being that I am drawn to make work that does not require any great intellectual thinking to get. That most people whatever age, sex, race, creed or other social grouping can get in some way or another. And no particular way is any more right than any of the others. So although most of what I do is easy to get, I am not attempting to dumb it down on purpose as a method to enter the market. By enlarge there is nothing that I am selling anyway – which is a bit of a problem for me when attempting to make my monthly payments, but that is another story to be dealt with in another set of four questions.
Things like knocking on a strangers door and offering them a cake that I have just baked, or standing in a street giving out bunches of daffodils, or the My Death web site or even the cutting up of an artwork that cost $20,000 dollars, into 20,000 equal fractions and selling them at a dollar a throw, are easy to get even though there maybe many more layers to each of these actions. Layers to them that I am still learning about now.
It has also been important to me that for these things work, they do not rely on whatever celebrity is attached to my name. Even with something like The17, which I may have arrived at from a lifetime’s relationship with questioning what is music and what is it for, I know I can walk into almost any situation and put together a performance by The17, with those that are there. It does not matter if they know who the fuck I am or not, or for that matter have any interest in thinking about music in different ways, it works.
Although at times what I do has appeared in galleries, it has been far more important to me that it exists in places and ways, that those stumbling across it, may not have any idea that for some, it is a branch of contemporary art. All that said my ego has to contend with the fact that if my work is never shown properly within in the gallery system, it may never gain the validation required to have a place within the history of art.
People need meaning in their lives. But they do not want to spend too much time searching for that meaning.
At numerous times in the past I have proclaimed that to become rich, money rich that is, is a very simple thing to do. If you want to become rich you can do it no problem. The five reasons I would give, as to why this is was simple thing to do were:
1: Money is easy to understand. From a pre-school age we learn what money is and the power it can exert over our lives. We also learn that we never have enough of it, thus it seems like an obvious goal in life – to get what we never have enough of. It does not take much imagination to dedicating your life to making lots of money.
2: All you have to do is offer goods or services to people that had no idea how desperately they wanted your goods or services until you were offering it to them. And that you are offering it to them at a price they are willing to pay for. But make sure that this price is more than the price it is costing you to provide the goods or services.
3: You also have to be willing to work hard and take risks.
4: All that is left for you to do is come up with the goods or service that people desperately want before they knew they want them. But even that is simple, preying on people’s fears and perceived inadequacies are the tried and tested ways.
5: Lastly, and this may be the hard part for some people. That is holding onto the money once you have made it. Once you have made your money you may start to look for other ways to give your life meaning and in attempting to do this you could lose all the money that you have made.
This short five-part guide to making lots of money is failsafe and works every time. There has not been an entrepreneur (or artist), who has not made his or her fortune any other way.
But of course the above is complete rubbish, as the vast majority of the world’s population struggle from dawn to dusk, just trying to get enough to survive. And their continued survival is all that is needed to give their life meaning. And when there is not enough to survive there is always religion.
Which brings us back to my opening couple of sentences – our need to give life meaning. What both the businessman and the artist have in common is a hunger to give their life meaning. But being an artist may be a lot harder than the being a businessman.
The goals of an artist in this modern age are a lot less well defined and often when you think you know what they are, those goalposts start to move again. Whereas money is always money and as a colleague of mine once said to me – ‘The only answer to the question of money is MORE.’
As to me being someone who lives life as both artist and businessman, I think that your observation is incorrect. The pursuit of money is way down on my list of methods I have used in an attempt to give my life meaning. There have been times when I have found money flowing towards me, but it has always been as a bi-product of something else that I was doing. And after it flowed towards me, it flowed away again just as easily. It was at those times when the money was flowing towards me that I came up with the five pointers above. It was also before I had spent much time in parts of the world where there was no possibility for your average or even un-average individual to make lots of money. I may have also just said it for affect. But a lot of the time is still believe it. I also do think the pursuit of wealth shows a criminal lack of imagination.
So onto the 100 Questions part of your question: I briefly touch upon this in the answer that I gave to question 16, but as I was working to tight word count with the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet I was not able to fully answer it. I will attempt to give a broader response here. There is no doubt 100 Questions was born primarily out of having done scores of interviews, where I have found myself being asked variants of the same four question over and over again, thus wanting to see if I could change that. Sometimes I will sit down with a journalist and we get on well and they ask interesting questions and the conversation flows in all sorts of directions and I come away from the interview thinking – that was good. But then the feature gets published it so often follows the same format; the first third of the article is taken up with the journalist explaining to the reader who I am and what I have done and why I justify having the spread in that particular newspaper of magazine. Then the rest of the article is taken up with the journalist’s opinions on what I am doing now. In these last two thirds he/she may drop in some quotes taken from the conversation that we had, but nearly always these are from the less interesting parts of the conversation we had and usually relate to things that people already know. At times my reaction to this frustration has been for me to stamp my feet and say quietly, that I will no longer do any interviews at all. But some how that never works and before I know it I have agreed to do another one and the cycle begins again.
The thing is, we make a huge chunk of our judgements on the work of so many people, be they politicians, artists, film makers, union leaders whatever, by the way they come over in the media, instead of the work itself. This is the way things are and I do not think that is going to change soon. So I guess, I thought that by doing this 100 Questions format, it would turn me doing the interviews into part of my practice and not just this thing that I felt obliged to do to promote what ever else I was doing.
When I first proposed it to Maija Handover, who is the PR woman I have been working with since 2007, I think she saw it as something that would just put the backs up of those areas of the media that might otherwise be interested in what I do. And at best it was just another level of things that needed explaining, as if trying to explain to an editor or journalist, that I did not see my self as a prankster, was not already hard enough. She may be right. I wanted to start doing it sometime last year before the fifth and final No Music Day, but she persuaded me to postpone it until after that. I then decided to bring it into play on the 1 January (2010).
Instead of trying to work out which publications or radio interviews that I should be doing. As in the ones that would be most advantages to my career and the promotions of whatever I was going on about now, I decided to respond positively to all requests for interviews, wherever they came from. But with the improviso that they would carry out the interview by them emailing me their four questions and they have to be ones that have not been asked before and that once I had answered, I could also use them in whatever way I saw fit.
There were some complications to this. For a start some publications only wanted to have 300 words all told, thus only 75 word answers per question. Others wanted the answers tomorrow or next Monday at the latest. The whole thing began to take up more time than I ever envisaged. In the past I would have just spent maybe ten minutes on the phone with a magazine from Belgium or half an hour chat in a café, if it were going to be a feature. But doing this has taken whole chunks of my time away from what I was supposed to be doing over the past three months.
They came through thicker and faster than I could have guessed, even though there was nothing out there that I was particularly having to promote. This meant I had to prioritize. The ones with the pressing deadlines getting done first, followed by the ones that had clean and clear-cut answers already formed in my head. This left the ones like this until last, even if they had been asked early on in the exercise.
There has also been a change in the way that I respond to the questions; I have become far more cavalier in my approach. In the past when working on a book I’d spend a lot of time thinking about what I am going to be saying. There is usually, with a book something that has been brewing away and over a period time decide to channel it into a book, as in the 17 book or even The Manual (How to have a Number One the Easy Way). With this it has been far freer flowing and all over the place. Which I guess comes from just having to respond to whatever questions have come through. Some of the questions have been a bit banal, but this has pushed me to try and find interesting ways to answer them.
To begin with I never saw it as an artwork in itself, but as it has progressed, the way that I view it has changed. For a start, I would like to publish the 100 Questions as a book. The working title for that is:
Vol.1(100 Answer to 100 Questions)
Then at some point in the future do it again, with the possibility of that being published as Vol.2. And then take it from there. But even if I was to publish them as a book I might just limit it to run of a few hundred books and that would be it. Make them pretty disposable.
As to the last part of your question, I have now run out of steam. It is now time for me to go and put the kettle on so I will skip that last bit and when I get back with my mug of tea I will get on with the your second question. You can just make up a story that can act as the answer to that part of the question.
Last week I responded to a question that appears a lot later on in the list. It was Question 83, I’ve just checked. It read: ‘Did you feel that Zoo and the other independent labels of the time had a limited time span?’ I do not want to repeat what I said there, so will attempt to answer this question in a different way.
‘Independence’ is like the word ‘Freedom’ it can mean anything to any number of people who may be using it.
Obviously in terms of the music scene in the UK of the late 70s and through the 80s, it meant independent from the main stream of the major record companies. But there was nothing independent about these record labels when it came to their relationship to the bills they had to pay or the books they had to balance. All of these independents were in a situation where every record they put out had to pay for themselves. There was no room for artistic development. If a band was ‘lucky’ enough to get signed by a major label, they may then have the independence to come off the dole or quit their day job. And then have the independence to record an album in a ‘proper’ studio, over a period of a few weeks. And then have the independence to get tour support, so they can afford to hire a quality PA system, so they can sound good, when people come to see them play live. And then have the independence that even if their first album did not pay for itself, the major record company would be investing in the long term, thus see the first album as just the starting point for something far larger.
There was many a band from that period that would take two or three albums, before they had built up a big enough following to make financial sense of the money that the major record company had pumped into them. U2’s first album peaked at number 52 in the UK album charts. It would have lost a fortune, if they had been on an independent label they would have been dropped immediately. The major label had belief in the band, thus they stuck with them and of course in the fullness of time went on to become one of the biggest earning bands of all time.
Thus the point that I am making is ‘independence’ is a concept that looks different from wherever you are standing.
From the point of view of the music critic or eclectic fan of recorded music, records released on ‘independent’ labels may sound or seem more interesting, because they have not been homogenised by the pressures of the major labels. Independent labels are often regional, and are thus likely to pick up on local trends earlier than majors based in the music business capital of whatever the country is. Also, the ‘independent’ label maybe more naive in their judgement as to what might be worth releasing, thus end up releasing the quirkier or offbeat. These could also prove more interesting records to the select few who value this very quirkiness and offbeat-ness.
As anyone with a passing knowledge of British music over the past three decades or so will know, by the late 80s the term ‘Indie’ became the title for a rather conservative genre of music made by young men and women who wanted to sound not very good at playing their guitars. As a definable genre, it grew out of the records being released by the ‘independent’ record labels earlier in the decade. The bands that had been recording and releasing those records earlier in the decade did not want them to sound the way they did. They would have far rather been better musicians than they were at the time and would have far rather been able to spend more time in the studio making the records sound better than they did.
As a side issue to all of this, and I may have written about this elsewhere within the context of these 100 Questions, no interesting music makers ever set out to make music in a definable genre, they may have influences, but for their music to stand out and be counted, it has to be free from any specific genre that has gone before. Once a music has become a definable genre, it is over; only good for the history books and those that want music as a soundtrack to the lives they aspire to be living. Thus any band in the nineties or beyond, aspiring to make ‘Indie’ music, were probably not worth taking notice of. They may as well have been a tribute band.
The business models that the music business has used have always been in a constant state of flux, just like any business. Technology always leads the way in defining how the music business is going to have to play catch up, thus forcing them to re-model their working business models. And sometimes this state of flux is in more of a state of flux than usual. Sometimes the waters get undeniably choppy. This usually makes for interesting times. I have lived through a number of those choppy water times. Obviously over the past decade things have changed considerably and the music business has had to rethink massively what it is doing and how it can do it and still make some money. And I am sure that everyone that has ever been on the Clapham omnibus knows this already. I have not been directly involved with the music business for almost 20 years, so my opinions about what has been going on are only as a punter. And even as punter, I have got bored with the whole notion of recorded music and as I have said numerous times already – to my ears ‘recorded music’ sounds like the music of the 20th- century. Tired and outdated.
The17 exists completely outside of the music business. Maybe before I go any further I should skip to the next question and make what I was about to say part of the answer to that one
I could not remember what I might have said in an interview last year (2009) let alone what Jimmy Cauty or I may or may not have said in an interview in the NME back in 1993. But on the subject of time, I do often feel that I have already lived numerous lives and have had more than my fare share of living. Not that I am not hungry for as much more as I can get.
But back to the subject of the economic reality of The17, as I said above The17 is not part of the music business in anyway that I understand it to exist. I will not deny that some of what has driven me to do The17 has come from a reaction to my relationship to the music that has been part of my lives in the past.
There is no economic reality of The17; there is no business model that it can fit into. There is no financial upside to it. The success or failure of The17 could never be measured in how much money it grosses. It sidesteps the whole notion of music having to be a business. It was only in the 20th-century that music became a business. Before then music was something that people did, everybody took part in the making of music. Some people, who were really good at music, were able to make a living from it, but almost as tradesman. Even the Beethoven’s and Bachs of the world were no more than hired hands, not international superstars earning a kings ransom.
The idea that music has to carry on being a business is not a given either. Maybe in a couple of hundred years we will look back at these past few decades as the time when there was this economic bubble surrounding the trading of music, like the tulip bubble in Holland a couple of hundred years ago.
For someone of my generation it is strange to think that there are now courses in universities where you can be taught the music business. For me there seems no logic in being taught it, it is just something that you go and do, that’s if you want to. The only way that you can learn is by doing it and making mistakes. If it had been something that could have been studied at university when I was in my late teens and early 20s, I am sure it would have put me off wanting to have anything to do with recorded music. All the greatest music that came out of the recorded music era was self-taught, both from the musicians that made it and the folks who nurtured, promoted, produced and flogged it.
But to get back to your question, or at least the last part of it, the economic reality of The17 and what it tells us about my experience of time. As I said there is no, or very little economic reality to The17. There are performances that I would like to do with The17, between now and the 28 April 2013, when I hope to leave The17 behind to get on with other things. A number of those performances are in far flung corners of the world. There is no economic reasons for going to those places, and there is no one there that is going to pay me to come. I do not have some vast private income, nor do I have any stashed wealth, if I want to go to Guatemala to do a performance of The17, I have to find a way, to pay for it myself. I am also loath to go cap in hand to the Arts Council, as I am fundamentally opposed to the funded arts, that said I know I have been commissioned to do certain things in the passed by funded organisations, and I am sure I will again in the future.
This means I will do certain things just to raise funds to pay my monthly payments and hope there is some left over to take the idea of The17 to wherever it is in the world that I want to go with it. The ‘certain things’ that I allow myself to do, to raise funds are pretty limited. Firstly I will not allow myself to be hired as a producer of records, for me that would drag me back in time. I will allow myself to be hired to go and talk at certain places and for those I will charge whatever I can get.
So onto my experience of time – I am sure it is the same of everyone else who gets to my stage in life and it is a cliché that we all know. Time gets faster. There is only so much time to get all the things that you want to do done and every day that passes there is less of that time. Conclusion – do what you want to do now, do not wait until tomorrow, or the time is right, or the weather is better, or you have done your exams. And don’t piss around; keep focused on what it is you are trying to do, even if part of that is you do not quite know what it is. Do not wait for somebody to give you permission. You do not need to be given permission to make great music, you just make it. Or you die trying. Either way you win.
For me there is nothing Utopian about The17, it is just what I get up in the morning and do. The same way the Miles Davies gets up in the morning and blows his horn or Bach gets up and writes what he has to do for the service that day. You have a vision in your head what you want your music to sound like and you just try and make that a reality. Nobody wants to make shit music, although it seems a lot of people want to make music that has already been made, which is something I find difficult to understand.
As for the million quid, I am sure if it had not been burnt, my situation would be pretty much the same as it is. It would have frittered itself away in other directions. I would still be sitting here now doing what I am doing. Maybe I would be regretting that we had not burnt it when we had the chance. Maybe Jimmy Cauty and I would not forever be known as the men who burnt a million quid and maybe that would have given more space in peoples heads for whatever it is we have done since. But the flip side of that is that people might only take notice of what we do know because we were the men who burnt a million quid. And maybe that does not answer your question. I mean if you are asking what would I do if tomorrow morning if my half of the million quid was in my bank account. The answer to that is quite simple and it would be the same answer that I think a lot of people in this country would give – I would pay off the mortgage. And the mortgage on the house that my younger children live in and help pay for the care of my mother.
In the book 17 (Beautiful Books 2008), I write about witnessing a skiffle group in Penningham Prison in 1957 or 58. The group was made up of inmates and it was at the prison Christmas party for the children of the warders and other prison staff. My father was the chaplain to the prison that is why my sister and I were there. The skiffle band had a profound impact on me. They made the loudest and most exciting noise I had ever heard.
By the time I was 6 or 7 I had started to go to the pictures regularly on my own. This meant I saw a lot of films in my hometown of Newton Stewart’s picture house. This was in the late 50s and early 60s. I have many memories of these films but mostly no idea what they were called. Some I learnt decades later are now considered classics. Usually they were just Cowboy & Indian or Carry On films or other trash. It was not until early 1964 at the age of 11 that I saw an Elvis film. The film was Roustabout. I had heard of Elvis, but I do not think I had ever heard an Elvis record before, or did not even know what he looked like. The BBC Home Service was the radio station that I can remember being on in the house, and there would have been no way that we would have heard Elvis on that. And although we would have recently got a TV, Elvis was never seen on the TV either. It was seeing that film that turned me into a huge Elvis fan. Being an Elvis fan did not require me to buy any of his records or even go and see the films; it was enough to hear Elvis by accident when ever those accidents happened. For me that is always the best way to experience recorded music. The very moment of seeing Elvis for the first time and the ongoing impact he had on me is something that I explored in the book Bad Wisdom (Penguin 1996)
Also in the book 17, I explore the affect of buying my first record. This was at about quarter to five on Friday the 17th of February 1967. The record was Penny Lane by the Beatles. But it was the B-side of the record, Strawberry Fields that was going to have the lasting impact, an impact I still feel on a daily basis.
Now that I have got all that out of the way, I can attempt to answer the question the Offline People are asking me. Well sort of, because the answer that I am going to give you is the answer to the question that they did not quite ask. If the Offline People were to have asked me: Your first memory of recorded music? Without hesitation, I would tell you about the time that I was standing in the kitchen of our house, and I could take you to the very spot where I was standing on the brick red linoleum, when and where it happened. I was maybe no more than three years old at the time but I can distinctly remember the sound of a funny man’s voice singing a song about leaning on the lamppost at the corner of the street incase a certain little lady was to come by. My instant instinct was to turnaround to see who was singing in our kitchen with this peculiar voice. There was no one there. I then realized that the voice was coming from the Bush wireless set, that was up on the high shelf. I was used to hearing men’s voices coming from the wireless but not the singing of songs. Maybe my mother had changed channels from the Home Service to the Light Programme while she was getting on with the housework.
Up until then the only music that I think I was aware of was music that was being sung or played live. On Sundays I would hear the hymns sung in church, I would have heard my mother play the piano at home, the accordion at church dances and the bagpipe band that marched through our town. As yet I would not have gone to the pictures or the fair ground where I might have heard amplified recorded music and we did not have a television.
It was not until years later that I heard this peculiar song about leaning on a lamppost at the corner of the street incase a certain little lady come by, again. And then I must have learnt the singer with the strange voice was George Formby and this strange voice was a Lancashire accent. Even back then in the mid 50s when I heard this song coming out of the wireless set, it was already an old song, and just checking on Wikipedia now, I have learnt that it was recorded in 1937.
As for earlier musical memories than that, they are all too vague.
To begin with I was a bit confused by this question. Did the Offline People mean which album did I like to watch drinking? But as I am not aware that albums could or ever have drunk, I have decided to interpret their question in a different way. Thus I have decided that what they are asking me is what album do I most like to listen to while drinking alcohol?
The strictly correct answer to this would none, as I no longer own any albums. And even when I did, I cannot recall ever having sat down to drink alcohol and listen to an album at the same time. But that to be the end of my answer would be a bit tight of me, partly because I already know the answer that I want to give to this question.
And that is Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Green River. The album first came out in 1969 at the height of the bands commercial success. They were selling millions of albums around the world, but at the time I was not particularly interested in them or their music. They made a rather conservative, one dimensional, blue-collar rock music. There were a lot more interesting things going on, in all the other genres of music that I was then into.
Over the succeeding decades Creedence have continued to hold their place in the hearts of white, blue-collar America. The fact that they are The Dude’s favourite band almost seals this position forever. You know, as in The Dude from The Big Lebowski. But even with The Dudes seal of approval Creedence have never become hip in a Velvet Underground or The Kinks or… anyway back to Creedence. Back in the very late 70s, when Post Punk was all the rage, or at least within the cultural back water that I then inhabited, I for some reason bought a second hand copy of Green River. Creedence were about as un-Post Punk as you could get. They celebrated everything that was not being celebrated by the Gang Of Four or The Delta Five or The Fall or whatever it was that you might have then thought Post Punk to be.
But once I got this album and for the following 25 years, until I got rid of all my albums, this was always the first record that I would put on, if I were alone in the house. I’d turn it up to full volume and get on with building a table, or bed, or kitchen cabinet, or whatever else I was making out of wood. And Green River always did the job just fine. And by the time I got to the last track on side two, their version of the Night Time is The Right Time, I would be screaming along with it at the top of my voice.
If I were to write why Creedence Clearwater Revival and this album in particular are so unwavering perfect, I would tie myself in knots of pretention. Instead it is enough for me to say – if you were to lock me in a house with two bottles of wine, which I had to drink while listening to an album, chosen from all the albums I had ever heard, Green River by Creedence Clearwater Revival would be the one.
More confusion. By the word text, do the Offline People mean a novel or a play to be turned into a film? Or do they mean a text message on a mobile phone? I’m concerned that the English may not be the first language of the folk setting these particular four questions. Something may be getting lost in translation.
If it is the former of these two, it all gets a bit complicated, as over the past few years I have begun to resent soundtracks on films. It has got to the point that I feel cheated by the filmmaker when he/she sticks a bit of music on a sequence in a film to arose my emotions. If I am sitting in the cinema, watching film and soundtrack music starts up in the background of a scene, I will start to imagine this section of the film without the soundtrack just to see if it still stands up. If it does not, then I dismiss the film, or at least it starts to go down in my estimation. Its as if they have only stuck the soundtrack music on that bit of the film, to try and cover up, for the fact they have not been able to make the film strong enough, without over flavouring it with herbs and spices.
Thus, on ideological grounds, I would never be interested in making soundtrack music for a film, I would feel like I was being a whore or a… Look, if you were to offer me enough money I might consider it.
As for making a soundtrack to a text message, that sounds strangely interesting.
In late 1969 I went into the second hand record shop that was just out side the Derngate bus station in Northampton. I was flicking through the racks when I came across a double album by an artist called Wild Man Fisher. On the album cover was a rather arresting looking photograph of Wild Man holding a knife to the throat of a woman, who I later learnt was his mother. The albums title was An Evening With Wild Man Fisher. I remembered hearing a track off it on the John Peel show and thought it sounded good. It was a double album and it was being sold for less than ten shillings (50p). The record was also produced by Frank Zappa, this fact made it very desirable artifact in the eyes of some my peer group. Frank Zappa was about as hip as you could get.
That evening I was not going out, so instead I planned to spend the evening in listening to my Wild Man Fisher album from beginning to end – all 36 tracks. I was 16 years old and had recently painted my bedroom black. I lit a candle switched off the light, put the record on and lay down on my bed.
The music started.
Merry-go, Merry-go,
Merry-go-round.
Beep Beep.
So far so good. This was the song that I had heard John Peel play. It was a bit strange, but that is what you expect from a record produced by Frank Zappa. I had already got Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart, which was also produced by Zappa and also a double album. By the way, it being a ‘double’ meant that it was seriously serious. Releasing a double album meant you were as far away as possible from being a bubble-gum pop group as you could get. Only serious artists released double albums. Captain Beefheart was a serious artist. Obviously Wild Man Fisher was going to be a serious too.
But then track two started. And it wasn’t any sort of song that I could recognize as a song. It was Wild Man out on the street going up to people telling them that he could sing them a new sort of song that he had made up, if they gave him 10 cents. Then Wild Man, or Larry as I had now learnt was his real name, was not shy anymore. I made it through to the end of side one, flipped the album over in the hope that things would get more ordinary, or at least more recognizably like some sort of music that you could… I mean even Captain Beefheart made music that sounded like music, even if it sounded like it came from another planet.
Side Two and things were not getting better. There were a lot of short songs one after the other. All sung unaccompanied by Larry in his demented voice. As I lay there on my bed, things started to get strange inside my head. This was affecting me in a different way than any record I had ever listened to before had ever affected me. I wanted to stop and put on the new Van Der Graff Generator album or something to sooth me. But I knew if I did, I would be selling out, or something. I had bought the album thus I was committed to it.
So onwards to Side Three. This was getting tougher. Listening to a double album was not for the feint hearted. It was like doing cross-country, which felt like the worst thing in the world while you were doing it, but you felt great afterwards. But the more I listened the more I was losing it – whatever that IT, was. I was getting scared. But I kept going. I so wanted to go into school on Monday morning and say – ‘Yeah, I got the Wild Man Fisher double album, totally brilliant, even better than the Captain’s Trout Mask Replica. Now that even the girls in my class were getting into like Chicken Shack and Tens Years After, I needed to get a few steps ahead of the game.
Finally Side Four. Opening track – Why I Am Normal. ‘Maybe I should be more like Wild Man Fisher and just start singing the songs I am writing in my bed room, up in the Market Square on a Saturday afternoon. Sod all this trying to learn to play the guitar like Peter Green.’ I found my self being seduced by Wild Man’s world. Ugly Beautiful Girl sounded like a song that I should have written for the girl that I fancied up at the Open Hearth but was embarrassed to tell my mates because she was so conventionally ugly. After that track Wild Man just starts talking about his guitar and banging out chords on it, I mean even I was a better guitarist than he was. Maybe Frank Zappa might sign me to his label and produce a triple album of my songs. Then Wild Man says something like – ‘Imagine one day I might get some of those big amplifiers and I would sound like… Wooooosh.
And that is when my mind became totally freaked out. After 34 tracks of strange ramblings and unaccompanied songs, there is this huge fully produced psychedelic rock song with Wild Man singing. It sounds brilliant and beautiful and yes I am freaked out. Totally and utterly. No other album has freaked me out in this way before or since. When I was involved in making records I would often wonder if I would ever get the chance to be part of a record that could have that affect on a listener. Where the listener is so freaked that they feel that this particular record should not exist.
I have just put Wild Man Fisher into Wikipedia to find out what else he did or if he was still alive. The first thing I learn is that he is still alive (65) and at the age of 16 he was institutionalized for attacking his mother with a knife. That the An Evening With Wild Man Fisher, has never been made available as a CD as the Frank Zappa estate who owns the recordings have refused to as Wild Man once attacked Zappa’s daughter Moon Unit. And Wild Man has recorded some subsequent albums for Rhino Records.
On the side bar of this Wikipedia page it defined the music that Wild Man Fisher made as ‘outsider’. I was somewhat disappointed to find that what he did had been codified and pigeon holed. I have long held with the belief, that as soon as music can be defined as a certain genre it is dead. It is no longer fluid. It becomes just a style that can be defined and copied. As soon as people were making the decision to form a punk rock band and they knew what a punk rock band should sound like, whatever punk rock had been was over. It had become merely a genre.
What I also learnt on the Wikipedia page was that An Evening With Wild Man Fisher now goes for a fortune on eBay and Amazon. Along with Green River by Creedence and all my other old records, I gave my Wild Man Fisher album away to Oxfam in 2005 when I was clearing all the clutter out of my life. I hope who has ever got now got as freaked out by it as me and for them it is not just some curio from the late sixties that they can sell for a small fortune on eBay.
Belfast is the earliest city that I can remember.
When I was a young lad living in Newton Stewart in Galloway, south West Scotland between 1955 and 1964 it seemed easier for us to get to Belfast than it was to Glasgow or Edinburgh. We could just hop on the train to Stranraer, then the ferry across to Larne and then the train down into Belfast. There were no direct trains from Newton Stewart to Glasgow or Edinburgh.
Going to Belfast was a day trip. That said sometimes the crossing was rough. And when mid channel the swell started to rise I would pray that the ferry would not go down like it did in that fateful night back in ’53.
My memory of arriving in Belfast was as if we were arriving into metropolis – pavements thronging with people, streets full of cars, buses, lorries and even such exotica as traffic lights and zebra crossings. And then there were the shops overflowing with everything the Empire had to offer. Shops so big they were on four floors with escalators to take you from one level of abundance to the next of excess. This was all a bit much for a small Presbyterian boy in the late fifties.
The winter of 62/63 was considered the worst winter in living memory. It went on and on and on. Not that I was complaining when my school had to be closed for a whole week.
It was still snowing at Easter, when I got taken to Belfast for a week with my Dad and his scout troop. Thankfully we were not going to be camping but sleeping on the floor of a church hall in our sleeping bags.
On the train down from Larne into Belfast I noticed that the sky was blue and when we got off the train and walked out of the station into the street I felt the warmth of the sun hit my cheeks. The first warm rays of sun in months. Over the week we saw lions and tigers at the zoo. We walked up to Strormont, to me it looked like the whole of the sun never setting empire was run from this place. Never before or since has a building seemed so big and important. But the highlight of our week was to be a trip to see this new picture that was just out – The Longest Day. It starred every Hollywood leading man. Going to see it was the talk of the scout troop.
Most of us had still not got TV sets at home. Going to the pictures was our window to the big wide world.
The picture house in Newton Stewart was the only one that I had ever been to. I assumed all were of the same size and style. Thus nothing had prepared me for the picture house we went to in Belfast. It was palatial. Pharaoh’s Egypt could have nothing to compare with the grandeur of the place.
Back home, us boys sat on cold wooden seats – in Belfast the seats were cushioned and upholstered in deep crimson velvet.
I assumed that when Brigitte Bardot went to the pictures she probably came here.
Beyond all of this, it was the massive drapes that hung unopened infront of the screen, before the picture started that inflamed my imagination. But it was not their size that left the lasting impression. On them twinkled thousands upon thousands of stars. A whole universe. Nothing before or since has ever been more glamorous than those drapes.
Catalyst Arts is an artist led organisation based in Belfast. It exists to promote the practice of artists working in the city, putting on exhibitions of members work and bringing interesting and challenging international artist who might not fit the remit of the cities big public galleries or museum.
In 1996, Mark Manning and I had given our Bad Wisdom spoken word performance at Catalyst. Bad Wisdom was the name of a book the we had written together and Penguin had just published. It told the story of our ill feted journey to the North Pole with an icon of Elvis Presley, which we were planning on leaving at the Pole to leak love and good-vibrations down the longitudes and out across the latitudes, thus causing an outbreak of world peace. What better place to come than Belfast to tell this story.
The crossing from Stranraer to Larne had been as rough as it ever was, but the performance we had in Belfast was a wild success and the night that followed was uproarious on all fronts. What sleep we had was in a large red brick Victorian building called College Green House.
Over the coming months I started to receive correspondence that seemed to indicate that I had become an honorary member of Catalyst Arts. Each year Catalyst had a member’s exhibition. I had not responded to the invitations to take part in of these to date, that was until 2002. The theme of that year’s exhibition was to be public signs. The invitation ignited something in me.
When I was a teenager, the town I was then living in was twinned with a similar sized town in Germany. There were always stories in the local paper about our football team going over to play theirs, or First World War veterans from both sides getting together. I even went over to stay with a family there for a couple of weeks. All these twinning activities appealed to something in me.
In the 80s, when over in Belfast with Echo & The Bunnymen and staying at the Europa Hotel, I learnt that Belfast was twinned with Beirut. At the time it seemed obvious they should be twinned – they both began with B; were capital cities and both were locations of choice for those in the car bomb trade.
It was some time before I learnt they were not twinned and this was just a sick joke. And I learnt that Belfast was in fact not twinned with anywhere or anybody. I instantly felt sorry for the place. I assumed (wrongly) that because of Belfast’s international reputation, no other city would want to be twinned with Belfast – even Beirut.
It was going to be down to me to twin Belfast. So back to this invitation from Catalyst, the idea of what I wanted to do for the public signs exhibition came fully formed. On the motorway from Belfast International Airport into the city, one passes a large WELCOME TO BELFAST sign. It was all smiley and happy. A sign that did everything that it could to contradict most newcomers’ preconceptions about the place. I loved this sign for all sorts of reasons. The only thing missing from it, was a TWINNED WITH sign below it. I found a company that made motorway signs, told them what I wanted, agreed a price and a week or so later I was the proud owner of my very own motorway sign that adhered to all the government specifications that motorway signs should adhere to.
Strapped to the roof of my Land Rover I drove to Belfast and with the help of a couple of local comrades, we fitted the new sign to the posts holding up the WELCOME TO BELFAST one. Numerous police patrol cars and highway maintenance vehicles passed us while we were at work. None stopped to enquire what we were up; I assume that they assumed that we must be about proper business.
After it was fitted, I stood back to admire our work. It looked splendid. No artwork in all of Ireland could have looked better at that very moment. People driving down into Belfast on the motorway could now read – WELCOME TO BELFAST – TWINNED WITH YOUR WILDEST DREAM.
Of course the sign was only up for a couple of weeks before the authorities had it removed. But by then the myth of Belfast being twinned with Beirut was beginning to fade to be replaced with the legend of it being twinned with your wildest dreams. As to why Belfast should be twinned with your wildest dreams – no other city deserves the honour.
The answer to both sides of this question is the same – SOUP.
In 2003, I was invited back to College Green House, the venue of the uproarious night back in ’96. Every artist that had ever stayed in the house, however briefly, was being invited back to take part in an exhibition. And legend had it that these artists included Oscar Wilde and Errol Flynn. It seemed the place had a history of uproarious nights stretching back over a hundred years. Instead of making a physical object to be hung inside the fridge door or positioned under a bed, I decided to go over and make soup for everybody and anybody who turned up for the opening night.
On the day of the soup making, I got all my ingredients from the local shops. Two massive vats of soup were made and over 100 folk turned up. Each of them was invited to stir the soup once and make a wish while doing so. The soup was so thick that you could stand the wooden spoon up in it. Along with a hunk of bread and a chunk of cheese, it was a meal in its self. The night was considered a great success and there was a lot of washing up to do in the morning.
A few months later I was doing an interview for a Nottingham based listings magazine, I was to be taking part in a performance art festival in the city. There was to be a competition to go with the article. I was supposed to provide the winning prize – a signed poster or something. Instead I offered the prize of me coming around to the winner’s house to make them, their family and whatever friends they care to invite, soup. There was a winner. There was soup made. It was another great night. After the drive back home from Nottingham, I’m sitting in my kitchen having a cup of tea at about 3 in the morning. There is a map of the British Isles on our larder door; I imagine a strait line diagonally across it. A line that goes through Belfast and through Nottingham. And in my imagination this line carries on off the map and right around the world and finally hits the map again somewhere off the north coast of Donegal, skims the top of Stroke City, through Dungiven and Maghera and back to Belfast. And this line is the Soup Line. And anybody who lives on the line (within reason) is entitled to invite me around to there place to make soup.
Then in 2004, I was asked to be the artist in residence for the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast. I proposed that for my weeks residency in the city, anybody whose home was bang on the Soup Line, as it cut through the city could invite me around to their place to make soup for them, their family and whatever friends turned up. I ended up making soup at lunch times and evenings every day for a week. This included a major soup making at the City Hall for all sorts of foreign dignitaries.
Thus what I have given Belfast is soup. I have made more soup in Belfast than anywhere else in the world. What Belfast has given me is the opportunity to make soup in homes all around the world.
The answers to the above three questions were all written while I waited in the departure lounge of Stansted Airport and on the EasyJet to Belfast, where I was to be met by the Rachel Hooper the producer of the radio show that I was to take part in. By the time that I met her, I had only got the first three questions answered. I had promised her that I would have all four done. She had wanted to record me reading them out on the bus from the airport into the city. So I had to cheat by coming up with a one-word answer for it. That word was EXCITEMENT! Rachel seemed happy with that, maybe more relieved due to its lack of verbosity.
It was 36 hours later as I sat in the departure lounge of Belfast International waiting for my flight back to Stansted, after having spent the two days recording the programme with her, that I realised there was more I wanted to add to the word EXCITEMENT! For a start there were words like INSPIRATION or POSSIBILITIES. But more importantly there is the fact that no other city in the world, other than Liverpool, has had as much influence on my work and the way I think. No Scottish city comes close. Over the past ten years there have been a number of things that have grown to become a major or significant part of my practice as an artist that began life within Belfast. The Soup Line I have already covered above. From twinning Belfast with Your Wildest Dreams has grown the Intercontinental Twinning Association. The grandly entitled association of just me, has given me licence to twin what ever I want. Thus I have continuously twinned places, concepts and performances with other places, concepts and performances. The17 is part way through a 40-date world tour. 20 of the performances take place in the British Isles. Each of these individual dates is twinned with a date in some far-flung corner of the globe. Even I, as an individual artist, have found myself becoming twinned with an artist in Leeds called Iona Smith. She also is in the habit of twinning things.
My Death is a web site that I set up in the early 2000s. It exists as a place that you can put up what you want done, said, sung, played etc at your funeral. The reason for wanting to do this site is because I had been to a couple of funerals of friends of mine, where the funeral did not reflect the life of the friend in any sort of way. The site www.mydeath.net was launched at the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in 2000.
The score that I consider to be the most important of all those I have written for The17 - and has already been translated into 13 languages, is called IMAGINE. And if you do not know what The17 is visit www.the17.org. Anyway this IMAGINE started life in the John Hewitt bar on Donegall Street on the edge of the city centre. It grew out of a conversation that I was having with Vinny Peculiar and John Hirst. There was some musicians in the bar having a session, playing traditional Irish music. Now this is where some might take issue with me – wherever you go on the island of Ireland there is always a bunch of musicians having a session, playing traditional Irish music. As much as I can applaud a culture being in touch with its routes, in Ireland it can become a bit obsessive. The heritage industry that goes with this music, and that Ireland exports to the rest of the world, becomes a tad tiresome. Its as if they expect the rest of the world to be in the thrall of their airs and jigs and… There is no denying that Ireland is a very musical country, but the discussion we were having that night in the John Hewitt led us to wonder. What would it be like if tomorrow morning all Ireland woke up to find that they could no longer remember any of those airs and jigs? All of their traditional music gone. As a people they still had all their musicality and a need for that musicality to find expression, but suddenly they were relieved of having to rely on everything that had gone before. They had a blank slate. They could start again.
This notion of a year zero with music became a very seductive one for me. The words to the IMAGINE score that I wrote over the following days went like this:
Imagine waking up tomorrow morning
and all music has disappeared
All musical instruments and all forms
of recorded music, gone
A world without music
What is more, you cannot even remember
what music sounded like or how it was made
You can only remember that it had existed and that it
had been important to you and your civilisation
And you long to hear it once more
Then imagine people coming together to make music
with nothing but their voices, and with no knowledge of
what music should sound like
The music they would make is that of The17
Wherever The17 perform in the world, I have this score translated into the home language. I then paint a graffiti on a local wall. The words of the graffiti are translated from and edited version of the opening line IMAGINE WAKING UP TOMORROW & ALL MUSIC HAS DISAPPEARED. The last place I did this was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti the week before Christmas.
Three weeks after me painting this graffiti, they had their earthquake. For the days and weeks following the earthquake, Port-au-Prince fell silent of music. All the usual sources of recorded music had been silenced by the lack of electricity. Musician did not want to play. And no one wanted to listen to music anyway.
The wall where I had done my graffiti was left standing, while all the surrounding walls had crumbled. Amongst some of the people a myth started to spread that what had been written on the wall was a prophesy of the earthquake to come. For them it was like the writing on the wall in the Book of Daniel foretelling the fall of Babylon. Thus what had started as a light hearted banter in the John Hewitt had ended up some years later as a prophesy of an earthquake that was going to reap tens-upon-tens of thousands of lives in a far off country.
Making seemingly flippant claims like the above is bordering on the distasteful, if not blasphemous, but that does not stop these thoughts and emotions weaving into my personal history I have tied up in what Belfast means to me.
We are now all aboard the EasyJet waiting to taxi to the runway. Outside it is dark and the rain is coming down but from my seat I can see three words writ-large in blue neon lighting. These three words stretch across the outside wall of the terminal building. They read WELCOME TO BELFAST. They look magnificent. There is only one thing missing, underneath them should be the words TWINNED WITH YOUR WILDEST DREAMS also in neon.
This afternoon we met up with Sean Kelly, who has run the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival since its inception back in 2000. He was telling me I should come back and do The17 in Belfast as part of the festival. It is only now as I am staring out the EasyJet window at the neon lighting that a plan of action falls together in my head. I will have the IMAGINE score translated in to Gaelic and into Ulster Scots (you do know what Ulster Scots is?). I will then, with the help of local artists, paint a perfect copy of the IMAGINE score in Gaelic on the gable end of a house off the Falls Road. And follow that up with the same score done in the same way but in Ulster Scots on the gable end of a house off the Shankill Road. Then do a performance of SURROUND, but instead of just 100 people taking part on a circle with a circumference of five kilometres, it should be done with 1,000 people and the circumference is 25 kilometres. But to top all that I would want to get that TWINNED WITH YOUR WILDEST DREAMS neon lighting up on Belfast International terminal buildings. And there they will stay. Once I get back home I will put a proposal together and send it to Sean.
I have now been coming to Belfast for over 50 years and in that time I have never spent more than a few days in a row here. Never had to put up with the monotony of everyday life here. It has never been more than an affair. Be it one that has lasted decades. I no longer see it as the glamorous metropolis of my childhood. Or the city under siege, which I would visit in the early 80s when Echo & The Bunnymen would receive raptous receptions in the Ulster Hall. Or even the hotbed of Bohemianism that it offered in the mid nineties. What I see now is a moderate size, western European city struggling to reinvent itself for the century ahead.
But down through those decades I have known the place; there has always been an energy to the city, a vital life force that is missing in so many other places around the globe that I have worked in over the years. For me Belfast will always be a place where the imagination can take flight, where things can happen. And it will forever be twinned with my very own wildest dreams.
Post Script: And I wanted to leave it there on an upbeat high. But there are some other thoughts and emotions, tied up with my imaginings about Belfast. They are nagging to get down my right arm, down through the pencil I am clutching and onto to this open page.
Our flight has now hauled itself up into the night sky. Below I can see the lights of Belfast fading into the distance as we head out over the North Channel, that small strip of water that lies between counties Down & Antrim and southern Scotland. I alluded, in one of my earlier answers, how this small strip of water can be rougher than any other stretch of sea around our islands. The reason for this heaving and tossing is straightforward enough. In this channel, two currents of water hit each other head on. One is coming around the top of Ireland from the Atlantic; it then wants to squeeze itself down through the narrow strip. The other has also come from the Atlantic but around the bottom of Ireland and up. What is driving both flows of water is the North Atlantic Drift. Flying over the North Channel in the daylight hours you can look down at these two opposing forces of water battling it out. This battle has been for many years interpreted in my imagination as a very symbolic struggle.
I have no vested interest in the small town turf wars that have gone on in Belfast since the late 60s. I cling to neither of the versions of history that are celebrated on the competing estates. I might know the dates and the battles and the reasons given and what every little sign means. And I might know the line taken by each and every one (well almost) of the scores of local newspapers across the Province. And I do know how and in which way every word, name and available brand is loaded with meaning and tell tale significance. I have followed the politics of Northern Ireland more closely than I have ever followed the politics of whatever constituency I have currently resided in. I hope I have never got vicarious kicks from it all. Or found myself glamorising the violence. And I find it difficult the way the gable end paintings are being turned into tourist attractions. But maybe that is all part of the process of turning swords into plough shears.
Yes, I know I was born to one side of the divide and have many of the personality traits that are traditionally associated with it. Being the son of a Presbyterian manse it would be a pretty hard to shake off those personality traits.
So the reason why I have started on this tack is because all of this is about something else far deeper in the human psyche. And for some reason this corner of the Emerald Isle has found itself perched on a fault line of the human soul. There are two opposing forces in each and every one of us. One force coming up from the bottom of our soul, a force that says ‘I am me and nobody will tell me what to do or think. There is no one greater than me, or for that matter lesser than me. No one has a better understanding of who or what God is, how He works or even if He exists at all. And if my rational mind leads me to reason that God is there by the grace of Me, then so be it. And if there is any forgiving to be done, I will do it myself.
Then there is that part of us that knows that we are just a small part of a far greater whole. That of course we cannot know all there is to know and that for society to work we have to accept that it is structured. That everything comes down from God, or the centralised command or Stalin or… And I am here by the Grace of God. And can please some one forgive me?
And by now, you must be thinking – ‘What is Drummond going on about now?’ And I am thinking I should not have given into those thoughts that were nagging to get down my arm and out through the pencil onto the open page. Why not just sit back, enjoy a beer and an over priced snack from the trolley and take it easy until touch down at Stansted. The trouble is, it is those two opposing forces that are going on right now in that small strip of sea below this plane and has been writ large over the six counties for as many decades as you care to remember (or forget), that are going on in me as I struggle with these words. It is what makes us human and makes us do the in human things we do.
‘Would you like anything from the trolley sir?’
‘Yes please. I will have a…’
I will begin with responding to your first sentence. Maybe add something to what you might already know. 200 years ago all music existed as something that had to be experienced as it happened. While the visual arts was a physical thing whose life existed and was experienced after it happened?
With the advent of recording technology, music became more like the visual arts; we could experience it after it had happened. As recording technology evolved, more and more time, effort and creativity was devoted to this recording, this documentation. It became the thing that we bought and sold. The thing that reputations were based on and the history of 20th-century music was judged. That is until we got the iPod at the beginning of the 21st-century and everything started to change again.
Over that same period, what had been strictly the visual arts took a different path. Bit by bit the visual arts aspired to the position held by music before the age of recording technology. It wanted to become about the event, the moment in time and space; something that could only be held in the memory or in the telling of it; something that could take on the power of myth. Myth is a very powerful colour to have on your palette.
But right from the early years of the 20th-century, as the visual arts took those tentative steps towards being about time, place and occasion, the still young craft of photography was on hand to document these events. Back then no one considered these photographs to be creatively of much importance. But it was not only the more avant-garde event based art that could gain permanence through photography, all the traditional visual arts fell under the gaze of the photographer’s lens.
Soon we all knew what the Mona Lisa looked like, even though very few of us had actually seen her. I will ignore the fact that my next statement may seem to contradict something I have said above. We learnt through documentation how the real power of an artwork could be realised and exploited.
Since those innocent days in the early decades of the last century, things have changed. And now that we are well and truly into the digital age we have the technology for our every breath, thought, blink of an eye to be documented.
We can take a thousand times a thousand photographs and show them to the world, with more ease than it took us to take one photograph, have it printed and framed and hanging in a provincial gallery, only a score of years ago.
We can blog, twitter, YouTube every passing moment.
We are now in a time where the vast majority of the ‘visual’ arts no longer need to be a physical object that exists for us to visit, stand in front of and appreciate (or not). The majority of artists, curators, gallerists want to make, create and promote work that is about time, place, and occasion. In this way the artwork can become a news story. An artwork becoming a news story is how it is validated in the public’s imagination. In many cases the only reason to have a physical artwork, is to have something to sell to the wealthy art collector. The real artwork exists in the news story, and subsequently in the conversations we have between each other.
In my own practice I am very aware that I spend more time writing about what I do than actually doing it. I spend more creative energy in having my paintings photographed than painting them. If my 25 Paintings are to have any power it will not reside in the reality of them but in their legend. Their legend can only begin to exist in their documentation.
It was an accident. Jimmy had just recently bought himself a video camera. He handed it to Gimpo just before we struck the first match. We asked him to film whatever was about to happen. Gimpo had no idea of what we were going to do. And he had never filmed anything in his life. We had brought him with us to be a witness. We were probably naive in automatically wanting to film the burning, that said the filming had never been a big part of the planning. Maybe it was a mistake. It might have retained more power if the film had not existed.
After the burning I thought nothing of the film. I was in a state of shock for some months to come. What do you do with your life after you have burnt a million quid? It was almost a year after the event that we saw Gimpo’s film. It was so shockingly dull, but this very dullness gave it some sort of mesmeric quality.
The film answered neither of the questions that most people wanted an answer to – Was it real money? And – Why?
The ashes got made into a brick.
On the morning of the performance (Saturday 20 February 2010), I will be on a train from Oslo to Stockholm. On that train I hope to formulate the content of the evenings performance.
What I do know (or at least hope) will happen is, I will be met at the station in Stockholm by the Swedish artist Olle Essvik. He will have with him 40 copies of poster. Printed on these poster will be the Swedish translation of the first score written (2005) to be performed by The17
After checking into the hotel, I will then take the 40 poster and put them up on walls and bars and cafes around Stockholm city centre. After that I will find the Supermarket, where I am to give my performance/lecture.
The lecture part may draw upon my experiences of leading a performance by The17 in Haiti the week before Christmas, it may also draw upon things from my childhood, it might even draw upon attempting to put up 40 posters in the centre of Stockholm in the previous two hours. Or I may just make things up.
There will then be some other aspects to the evening’s performance.
But the real performance that I hope to leave in Stockholm will be found in the private thoughts or conversations between friends and colleagues, after they have seen and read one of the 40 posters
36: About your ancient conflict with ABBA. How did that story really end – is it true that you went to Sweden and tried to find Agnetha or is that just a myth?
In early summer of 1987 Jimmy Cauty and I, realised our album 1987 – What The Fuck Is Going On? It gained instant infamy status due to our wholesale use of sampling. None of which we had sought to get permission. We were artist and artist have the rite to use what ever they can lay their hands on to make their art – was our rational. One of the tracks used whole chunks of one of the greatest pop records ever made, Dancing Queen by ABBA.
ABBA’s publishers took exception to this and requested that we destroy all copies of our album immediately, or they would take legal action against us. Jimmy and I thought we should sit down with Benny and Bjorn and have a discussion artist to artist. Our argument was - what we had done was no different to what they had done a decade or so earlier by borrowing the chord structures and language of pop, from America and the UK. It is how music evolves and artists have always worked. It just so happens that we now had the technology to sample direct. Benny and Bjorn did not respond to our FAXs or return our phone calls so we decided to drive to Sweden in our ancient American cop car and meet them there. We got the ferry across the North Sea, landed at Gothenberg/Göteborg and headed east. We got to Stockholm around midnight. We found Polar Studios where ABBA had recorded many of their greatest works. But Benny and Bjorn were not at work; in fact the place was locked up. We had brought with us a gold disc of our 1987 album. We wanted to present to them
In the street outside Polar Studios was a blonde prostitute. We rather shamefully decided to pretend that she was Agnetha fallen on hard times. We came to a small financial arrangement with the “Agnetha” and presented her with the gold album. Then we started the drive back to Göteborg. As dawn broke we pulled up into a field. In the boot of the cop car we had all the remaining copies of 1987. The plan had been that we were going to give them to Benny and Bjorn. But seeing as that plan had been thwarted we made a pile of the records in the field and set light to them. A photo of these burning albums was used on the cover of our next album.
We then continued on our journey home. The only trouble was that the cop car broke down before we got to Göteborg, thus we had to be towed all the way home. Karma of sorts for our arrogance.
Because this question was basically the same as question I have already been asked I have just cut and pasted what I said there and stuck it in here and then stuck on the end the ten things you should know about The17 that I use for the press.
I was in Port-au-Prince the week before Christmas leading a performance of The17 at a school in the middle of the cities slums. It was part of The17’s Coast-to-Coast world tour. It was in the poorest area of the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The performance involved over 70 of the schools pupils. It was the greatest performance that The17 had ever given. Within less than three weeks after my return to the UK the earthquake happened. We know that numerous of the young folk we were working with were killed immediately, others lost limbs; others have subsequently died due to lack of medication. None of them will ever be the same again. It will take years for the city to be rebuilt.
When I heard about the earthquake, I was numb for the first few days. Felt completely helpless. I have always been cynical of ‘celebrities’ involvement with charities, but when I got asked to be the patron of a large fundraising concert at the Roundhouse in London, I felt that I had to involve myself. It happens on the 25 February just after I get back to the UK from working in Scandanavia. I am currently in daily contact with people in Port-au-Prince.
And if you do not know what The17 is here are ten facts that should clear up your ignorance:
The17 is a choir
The17 make music using no words, rhythm or melody
The17 make music that celebrates time, place and occasion
The17 have different singers every time they perform
The17 can be anyone, of any age from anywhere and you
The17 has never been recorded for posterity
The17 will never be heard on TV, radio or the Internet
The17 has no audience, other than those taking part
The17 have performed around the world more than 250 times since 2006
The 17 welcome the future.If you need to know more visit www.the17.org
I will be on stage for 10 minutes or less. In that time I will tell the audience about the time we spent in Port-au-Prince. About the energy of the city. About the creativivity of the people. A creative force that exudes from everything they do. About the welcome that we had at the school we were working in. About what The17 is and why. About how those 70-odd kids we were working with gave the greatest performance ever given by The17. How they looked. How they smiled. How they gave. And how they gave more. And then even more. About the other performance given by The17 in the Grande Rue, in down town Port-au-Prince. How this second performance was given by 100 street kids, voodoo priest, old men, and some very desirable ladies. And how this 100 newly enrolled choiristers stood at 50 metre intervals around a block of streets. Each individual one, insight and of the fellow member to the left and right of them. And at a given signal the first one cried out ‘Way-ho’ at the top of their voice in the direction of the member in the anti-clockwise direction. And then that one make the same cry to his or her next one. And that the cry carried from one to the next all the way around the block of streets, not just once but five times.
And how after that the cry was taken up by all and how it spread out across the city. And how throngs of people would spontaneously burst into full throated cries of ‘Way-ho’. That gangs of youths would compete with each other from oppisite sides of the Grand Rue, to see who could deliver the loudest, or longest, or most soulful performance of ‘Way-ho’.
I will then attempt to seduce the audience in the Roundhouse into becoming members of The17 there and then by getting them to deliver a full throated and passionate rendition of the cry. Once they have got it, I will divide the audience in two and get them to compete with each other. I will then invite them to take this cry with them out into the streets of London where it can spread out across the city.
As for what the other artists are will be doing on the night, it better be good or I will have words with them.
I give sod all to charity. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you anyway. As for the burning of a million quid, myself and fellow trustee of The K Foundation, Jimmy Cauty, made a pact to not talk about the burning for a period of 23 years. All that people wanted to ask us was - ‘Was the money real?’ and ‘Why?’ Whatever answer we gave was never good enough for whoever was asking. A colleague suggested that we should refrain from attempting to answer these questions and turn them around and instead ask all those who hear about our action – ‘Why would two supposedly rational men decide to burn one million pounds of their own money?’ Then in the year 2017 we, The K Foundation, will be ready to listen and respond to the answers that people are willing to give. In the mean time it has been pointed out to me by others, that as a work of art it only cost £1,000,000 to make and many works of art, be they films, stage shows, diamond encrusted skulls, cost considerably more than £1,000,000 to make. And that as a work of art, the burning has certainly provided more than £1,000,000 worth of discussion, debate, entertainment, anger, laughter, disbelief, jealousy and wonder. It has also been pointed out to us, that it now holds its place in the cannon of major artworks of the closing decades of the 20th-century. It has also been pointed out to us that after the burning there were still as many fish in the sea, apples on the tree, corn in the field. And that the only thing that it removed from the sum total of the earth’s wealth was a pile of paper.
It has recently also been pointed out that the burning did slightly enlarge our carbon footprint.
At times my children do not have such a detached appreciation of this particular work of art.
One Haitian artist who I met in December, boasted – if it had been him he’d have burned two million.
As for regret, it depends on which way the wind is blowing.
If you have never robbed a bank, I advise you to have a go. If you get caught, it will still be one of the most profound experiences of your life. One that you will learn more about yourself than going on a gap year ever will. If you succeed and get away with it, donate half the money you’ve taken to the charity Action Aid – anonymously of course.
If you do not fancy the bank robbing business, I suggest you decide what worthwhile talent you may have, that can be put to good use in a developing country and donate a year of your life to it. A friend of mine has recently spent four months working in a Sudanese refugee camp, it has given her life meaning and direction. It also helped her to give up smoking. I do not know what it did for those still stuck in the refugee camp.
If neither of the above tickle your fancy, I have one other suggestion to make – Put together a tribute version of the Haiti Earthquake Fundraiser @ The Roundhouse gig, in your front room. And charge your friends and family forty quid (or nearest offer) to come and watch. Then donate the takings to the Haiti charity of your choice.
You may consider all three of my suggestions somewhat flippant. If that is the case, come up with three better ones yourself and make them happen.
Of the art projects you’ve worked on with Tracey, which have you enjoyed the most and why?
We have now worked on numerous projects, all I am proud of. All are on going and will probably take some years if ever to reach fruition. I have worked in creative partnership with a number of people in the past and learnt it brings lots out in me that would not emerge if solely working on my own. Tracey is the first woman I have ever worked in this way with, to any depth. The difference in our sexes brings a completely different dynamics to the working relationship.
One of the ongoing projects is a series of radio programmes called – Let Me Take You To… Each one we record in a different town or part of the world. We only do them very occasionally. The plan is for them not to be broadcast until after we are both dead. Not that we say are do anything compromising in these programmes. But this knowledge does add something interesting to the framing of them. It frees us up. I do not have to take into consideration how the broadcast of these programmes might affect whatever else I am doing in my work. I can get away with saying the most outlandish of things with none of the come back. When we were in Wales down a disused coal mine, I was able to express my feelings that Thatcher closing doing the mines was one of a great and liberating thing for all concerned. There is no way I would dare say that in public if I knew people would hear it.
With each of the programmes to date we will start with a vague theme, some key words. The first thing that we do when we arrive in our town of choice is hit the charity shops. Here we will buy ourselves a whole new wardrobe for our stay. And then we assume new names. In this way we explore the town in a different way than we would ever do as our normal selves. We will go and play bingo, drink in bars that we would never set foot in, back horses that could never win, only eat what we have not eaten before. Open conversation with total strangers. In this way the chosen town will open itself up to us in the most un-expected of ways.
The day’s activities are not recorded as they happen. The recording equipment would only get in the way. Inhibit ourselves and those that we met. Instead we retire to wherever we are staying and record ourselves recounting the day’s activities.
These recordings are then edited down at a later stage to make a 55-minute programme. Whether these programmes ever get broadcast or anybody actually listens to them is almost irrelevant.
I do not know if I have enjoyed the making of these radio programmes more than our other joint projects but in a sense they have been the most challenging. And that is from every angle that I can think of.
We have an un-written agreement – I do what she says and she does what I say. But then she tells me that I promised to do something. And I tell her – ‘what you talking about? I never promised to do anything of the sort. That was just an idea of yours that you mentioned in passing. And to be polite, I might have said, “That sounds like a good idea, Tracey” I never said that I would…’ And before I can finish my sentence, she will steam in with – ‘I never forget anything and you promised me that you would bake me a chocolate cake every week for a year and deliver it to my house.’ Or something.
Actually I try do engineer disagreements with her in the hope she will give me a break. I value my Tracey free weeks. Some people count their days since they touched a drop. I count the days I have not had a text from Tracey. But those counted days fly past too fast and that text arrives – ‘How dare you go to the South Pole without me… You know you promised we would… And anyway it was my idea in the first place.’ If I were to dare mention that Captain Scott had the idea sometime before her, it would only make matters worse.
She sometimes tries to tell me that I will miss her when she is gone. And one day she will be just up and off to her new life in Siberia, hunting sabre toothed tigers with her crossbow and bare teeth. I tell her she should just go now and quit all the shilly-shallying.
She also tries to trick me into doing projects with her. Tries to convince me all I have to do is say yes and the time will be found. We will be able to squeeze it in between our other commitments. The thing is I am already committed to enough projects to last several life times. And some of those are the joint projects with her.
All this aside we do work very well together. Once we start on something she always gives 100%. Works all the hours. Puts up with any physical discomforts for the sake of the job in hand. Never cuts corners for the sake of an easier ride. Her mind is always open to the possibilities that may be thrown up by new technology. Always ready to embrace the unexpected. Most folk hit a certain age and without realising it start to cling to the values and certainties of their youth. Not our Tracey.
Tracey and her work are often one and the same. I’ve decided to come up with a whole list of four words that could either describe Tracey or her work. I have tried to give this as little thought as possible. Choose what you want:
Better than Tracey Emin. It’s all about people
It’s all about cancer
He’s got Hepatitis C
Valley girl goes global
Free estrogen on tap
Greatest living Welsh artist
Better than my art
Pink, Red & Black
Louder than the rest
Should not be allowed
Harder Faster, Faster Harder
She always looks good
It always looks great
She is the artIt seems more like 27 years. But hey how times flies when… Or… Anyway changes? The usual ones you find in a women when they get to a certain age – the roots need tending; their actual age gets a bit vague, more of a rumour than a certainty. But snide remarks aside, Tracey’s appetite for life remains undimmed. She has never been known to flag. Most folk, whatever they proclaim, are wanting to settle down by the age their 40-somethings are looming, content to do a bit of coke sniffing at the weekends to make them feel still the young rebel, but not Tracey. She has never knowingly needed artificial stimulants. To use the half remembered and over quoted line of Dylan Thomas – Do not go gently into the night, but rage, rage, rage against the dying embers of the day – or something.
Tracey is never-not wild. She is forever the young mare that will not be broke. Mustang Tracey is the name of the song that Wilson Pickett should have sung. The night is still always young with Tracey. But you should see her in the morning, but nothing that mascara and lipstick can’t rescue – and she is ready for another day. All comers better beware, Tracey is on the warpath. Wouldn’t it be good if it could be a peace-path, or a love-path? Mind you Tracey on the love-path might be scarier than her being on the warpath.
- William Ernest Drummond, but you can call me Bill.
- The answer has been forgotten. To find out why please read the Super TV Read More option.
- The answer has been forgotten. To find out why please read the Super TV Read More option.
- The answer has been forgotten. To find out why please read the Super TV Read More option.
I have no idea what observations can be made or not. But seeing as I have requested questions I have not been asked before and even though I do not feel at all qualified to have even half baked opinions on the subject I am going to dive in and let my subjective whims have their sway. Here goes:
And from here on in I will use the language of illegal drug categorization. Sometimes we Class A upload and sometimes we just Class C upload. Class A upload, is to set up your own website; Class B upload is to do a blog and Class C upload is just to update your Face Book status or your My Space page.
I guess I am a complete Class A user. I set up websites in the hope that people respond to them, in the same way as I might have put records out in the past and still publish printed books. I would not imagine keeping a blog, and if I were to, it would be on my own site and not on a site set up for people to blog on. I do not have a Face Book or My Space, although I have been considering having a Face Book group for The17.
As a Class A user I may find myself looking down on the Class B user. So much of the blogging that I come across seems to be just wittering into the vast emptiness of the blogosphere. For us in the developed parts of the world we can now all have our blog and give reign to all our half-baked opinions about everything and anything. It almost does not matter to us if anybody is out there reading what we have to say. Hardly a day goes past without someone sending me a link to some blog or other, and 90% of these blogs have zero comments in the comment box below. Blogging seems to be the best platform for men of a certain age who feel that the world has not listened to them enough, that life should have dealt them a better hand of cards, that they have been passed by and did not get the breaks they deserved. But he may as well be sitting in the corner of an empty pub muttering under his breath. That said there are the superstars of the Blogoshphere, the ones that end up getting tens of thousands of readers, who have something to say and the blog is the perfect media for it. A shining example of this is Riverbend, the young Iraqi woman who blogged from her home in Baghdad from August 2003 until her family escaped to Syria in September 2007. Riverbend would never have had a voice if it were not for her access to blogging. Some might make a parallel between what Riverbend did and what Ann Frank did with her diary. Thankfully we understand that Riverbend lived.
And so to the Class C user, those that are updating their Face Book status daily or letting the world know where they have been and where they are going. This is something that I have never done and do not know what it is or why people do it. But I fear that a line has been drawn in my life and I am of a generation that will never use Face Book. I give my reasons as to why I do not use Face Book, as my life is too complicated anyway and have no interest in keeping up with scores of other people and I am not that interested in having a social life anyway.
But to step back from my own place in this all and look at the bigger picture, I guess it is a well accepted fact that in the world that we have been living in over the first ten years of the new Millennium, it is those that control Amazon, Yahoo, Google, iTunes, eBay, You Tube & Wikipedia that control the way we live today.
In 1992 when I was writing my half of Bad Wisdom (Penguin 1996) I predicted the United States was going to crumble as the super power that it had been and Japan was going to rise and rise (‘Big, Like the Rising Sun’). It was Japan that seemed to understand what was needed and wanted from the brands of the future. At the time the American brands of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Ford, Disney, Warner Brothers, Levi’s, Fender, Gibson, General Motors all seemed old and worn out and all the Japanese brands seemed far more geared up for the fast dawning digital age. Sony, Nintendo, Toyota, Sega, Ibanez, Yamaha, Mitsubishi all seemed like the brands of the future. And the music technology that the Japanese had been developing was defining all the music that the world wanted to hear. They made the drum machines, samplers, CD players and Walkmans. Thus they facilitated the sound of the music and the way we listened to it, even if they did not make the content. And in Bad Wisdom, I spent pages explaining how Sonic The Hedgehog was to be the new icon for the coming century replacing Mickey Mouse, Elvis and the Statue of Liberty in one fell swoop.
But I was wrong. Within ten years, the United States had recovered their position as rulers of the world. We may want to laugh at their politics and resent their bullying but they were the first to realise the possibilities of this new universe that was opening up infront of us, this Cyberspace, this Internet, this World Wide Web. And in only a matter of months they took control of it all, there weren’t even any Red Indians to get in the way, no Sitting Bull to challenge them, no Battle of Little Bighorn to bring them even momentarily to their knees. It was all theirs, from sea to shining sea.
And if you control the Internet you control all of the known future. Or at least that is the way it seems from where I am sitting at my keyboard staring at my screen, on this grey miserable back end of March 2010 day.
It took the freethinking, risking taking Americans almost a century, after they had swept over the ‘empty’ and virgin lands of their great country, giving birth to global brands and new religions as they went, to wonder what they should do once they got to the Pacific Coast and found they could go no further. Maybe the West Coast was their Promised Land, but there is only so much milk and honey you can take before you get restless. Ok, they invented the alternative universe of Hollywood, while they wondered what to do and where to go next.
It was those spoilt younger siblings of the baby boomers, those children of sixties, who were brought up to think laterally, and who like the rest of us were getting board of all those old American brands, that first saw this huge and empty wilderness of Cyberspace opening up before them as something that could be explored and exploited.
The Japanese mind set, that had done so well for their island race, in the post war decades, was anything but lateral thinking. They had the work ethic of the Americans but they were still using the same power structures that had stood them in good stead over the past few hundred years. After their failure in the World War Two, the most they could do was shift their loyalty from Emperor to the company they worked for. But this was still all centralized, top down management, thus no room for lateral thinking. And it was that much needed lateral thinking that gave us Amazon, Yahoo, Google, iTunes, eBay, You Tube & Wikipedia etc.
So to get back to my illegal substances analogies, which I am now going to slightly change to suit the point that I am now wanting to make. Me with my little web sites am no more than a lad in the corner of the school playground selling some weed. There are the big kids out on the street corner selling some white powders and maybe driving a black Merc’ or BMW. But it is those American brands of the New Millennium that are the major drug barons and cartels of the world.
It has never been the ones that grow the stuff at one end of the chain, or even the ones selling it in the school playground at the other end of the chain that have the power or are making the real money. It is those that are in control of the chain. Those American brands neither grow the stuff that they are selling or are on the street corner handing it over to you. But they control the whole fucking thing.
And this has been the same all the way through history. To go back to one of the themes that I was exploring in Bad Wisdom back in 1992; any successful empire has to be in control of who and what Gods are being worshiped within their empire. This is something that the Roman Empire did very well, first with the old pantheon and when that started to ware a bit thin they even more than successfully did it with Jesus Christ. And as I pointed out in Bad Wisdom, this was a thing that America did incredibly well in the 20th-century with Hollywood providing and ever shifting pantheon for the rest of the world to worship. I thought the gods of Hollywood were going to crumble with the dawning of the age of interactive computer games, thus my naming of Sonic the Hedgehog as the new mega icon, if not quite a messiah, for the new century.
Rome was not interested in growing and manufacturing the produce that was needed for the Empire, but what they did was create and then control the means of communication across their growing empire. That is what America has now done with the Internet.
So to get back to the basics of your question and for me to try and answer it as clearly as possible – both the uploaders and the downloaders may have different characters, but both are the little people, compared to the people that are in control of what we are uploading to, or downloading from. They are the ones that could pull the plug at any time and then we would be all fucked.
I pity the poor person who has been reading this in the hope that I would deliver some anecdotes about the time me and Jimmy stole a articulated lorry and then drove it off the White Cliffs of Dover or something.
So I have side stepped answering the first question properly, just like a politician does, when they ignore the journalist question by saying – ‘I think that the real question that needs to be answered is…’
But anyway, we are onto the next question now. The first part of it first, us being more culturally aware - I have six children in all, the oldest is 27 the youngest just turned ten. The older three had a childhood before the Internet took hold, the younger three have never known anything but the Internet. The knowledge and understanding my youngest three have of the wider world via the Internet, multi channel TV etc is amazing. They are part of and in tune with a culture that did not exist when I was their age. They have access to all information, as I to now have. I mean when attempting to answer the question above, I could not remember the name of the battle where General Custard had his last stand, but by sticking his name into Wikipedia, I was soon reminded that it was the Battle of Little Bighorn and of course I went on to read the whole page about the battle and how the American people (the white ones) responded to this massacre.
In my little corner of Scotland where I had my childhood, I had very little access to knowing what was going on in the rest of the world. What little I knew came from the four volumes of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, a box of old copies of the National Geographic, and the films shown at the local picture house. But this did not mean that there was this huge vacuum left in my imagination that was waiting for the Internet and multi-channel TV to be invented then fill. What I had, and in turn everybody that has ever lived in the world before the discovery of the Internet, was an imagination and brain and soul, far more plugged into and part of the culture that was living and breathing and all around them. This was a culture they were all part of. This was culture before culture became a product that could be bought and sold. Where we end up as just the consumers of. If culture is just something that we consume, then it is not culture at all, it is just product masquerading as culture.
In my ideal world, and this maybe goes back to the heart of the first question, culture is something that we are all equally involved with. Maybe each in our own way, but still equally. Thus there would be no uploaders versus downloaders, just people making and doing stuff together. And of course there would be those that would be better at playing the fiddle or the guitar or whatever, than others. But if there was no one in the room to dance to the music they made or clap their hands in time, or sing-a-long, the music would not be complete.
I am not a natural consumer. I find it difficult to just sit down and watch TV, or watch a football match. Even when going to watch my ten-year-old son play with his team I find it difficult not to run onto the pitch and join in.
One of the things that the Internet has been supposedly good for is the democratization of ideas. We now all have access to the distribution of whatever we want to say or express. No one has the excuse anymore that they didn’t get the breaks. If you have a book in you, you can write it and stick it up on the Internet, or your music on MySpace, or your film on You Tube. And if it’s any good and audience will find it. But most of us have still got that 20th-century mindset, where we think that this could in some way lead to a life of fame and fortune. In fact, quite the opposite. It means we are stepping back into a somewhat pre 20th-century type era, where ideas are shared and free flowing like folk songs would have been and stories and poems.
The copyright laws that grew up over the last couple of hundred years and insured those that owned the copyrights could earn fortunes are beginning to make less sense now. Thus all the intellectual property debates that are going on at the moment. I would be totally out of my depth to comment on any of this. That said I am as likely to get riled as the next man when I discover stuff that I have done, is now being sold as an APP by some company on the other side of the world and no one asked me if they could.
And now I am getting closer to the nub of your question. We are all warned that we should not take the information we get from Wikipedia as gospel. On a personal level, I am aware that the Bill Drummond Wikipedia page has numerous mistakes on it. This is a page I did not write, have no idea who did write it and for some reason, do not feel it is my place to correct it. But it does mean that anytime I do an interview and certain questions come up, I know the interviewer has based much of their questioning on having just read the Bill Drummond Wikipedia page. But this does not stop me using Wikipedia all the time. I heard a defense of Wikipedia by some one who was saying that there are just as many mistakes and inaccuracies in the Encyclopedia Britannica and those mistakes have to stay uncorrected until the next edition of the Britannica is published and that could take years. Whereas a Wikipedia page with a mistake on it, can be corrected by the next day.
I’ve also heard, thus not my own observation, that every time those that have important information about society and the state of the world, global warming etc will have snapping at their heals every special interest group, extremist party, flat earth society. The Internet has provided them with an equal platform to make their voice heard.
In the past, new scientific ideas had to go through all sorts of rigorous challenges before being accepted as part of the cannon of ideas. Those that were providing the rigorous challenges would be other men and woman who would have equal standing or credentials within that branch of the sciences. This ensured the debate was valid and could be trusted. It worked in the same way as our Parliamentary democracy is supposed to work. But now a scientist who might have spent years developing and testing a new set of theories before publishing his/her paper to be then scrutinized and tested by all his/her rivals and colleagues in the academy, has to now run the public gauntlet made up of extreme creationist, conspiracy theorists or just plain politically barmy.
So I guess it is all those ‘extreme creationist, conspiracy theorists or just plain politically barmy’ that we have to be aware of on the Internet. The amount of times that I have been sent a link by a friend or colleague and find myself spending half an hour reading some conspiracy theory about something before realizing that it was the work of someone who would never be given the time of day, if they had not got the easy access to the platform that the Internet gives them. Does this make the world a more dangerous place that these untested and extreme ideas can spread across continents and inspire young men to turn themselves into suicide bombers? I am not the one to ask. I just listen to the news.
But is this not how it has always been? Men and women are programmed different. We men are programmed to go out and hunt and find new lands for our families to live safely and prosper on. And we have to then guard these lands, from other men who are also seeking new lands, for the very same reasons. And when we go out and do these things, we leave our sent, our markers and even our seed. At the end of the day we are still animals and there is little difference between us, and the tomcat, on his mid-night ramble, spraying his musk.
The female is programmed differently, her driving purpose is to give birth and care and nurture her offspring. Us men have a very different attitude to children, as it is a lot easier for us to have them and have as many of them as we can find partners willing to bare them. I have argued in the past that it is men that have produced so much of the creative stuff in the world, not solely because of the perceived inequalities but woman are not that bothered. And the reason for them being not that bothered is because they like God are able to bring forth real living life from themselves, thus the ultimate creative act. No work of art by whatever strutting genius has ever come close to the miracle and magic of a newborn baby.
The Internet has been no different than any other Promised Land that men have fought there way across to conquer, and tame, and put fences on, and sink oil wells into, and dig out gold, and plant their seed in. It is what we do. It is what I am doing right now as I write these words.
Women are far more likely to use the Internet to chat with friends than do what I am doing. But that ‘chatting with friends’ is equally important in the great scheme of survival. It is through merely ‘chatting with friends’ that the bonds are built. Those are bonds that are needed through the difficulties of motherhood and daughterhood and wifedom. It is ‘chatting with friends’ she learns how to deal with the over bearing in laws and the useless drunken partner who yet again has not brought anything home from the hunt and the house is being repossessed.
And it is through the Internet that we men have found the perfect vehicle to mask our impotence.
And anyway most women can see through men, this male-skewed version of the world, is no different than anything else over the past few thousand years that women have learnt to see through.
Wild Hypothesis & Even Wilder Conjecture will be the title of my answer to this last question posed by the Institute of Social Hypocrisy
The one great failure of the Third Reich was its ability to create gods that all of Europe wanted to bow down and worship. One little man with a silly moustache strutting around a huge stage was never going to be enough. It is the mistake that all dictators make. They think that having grabbed power they are all the god their people need. Napoleon and Stalin both made this mistake before them, as did many lesser dictators. It is a problem of the male ego. If they had come up with the right gods we would have all willingly worshipped and there would have been no need for World War Two.
When Joseph Goebbels got his job as Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, he must have known in his heart, that for all Hitler’s strengths, he did not have the lasting qualities required by a god fit for the masses. Goebbels should have known that coming up with the new gods that people would want to worship, emulate, dream about was all part of his job. And not just the German people, but the people of all Europe. The Nazi party did great uniforms, you could not fault the graphics, even the architecture looked ok if a bit cheep, but it all relied too much on fear, and as I said in the opening paragraph Hitler was the only god on offer and he just was not up to the job. I know they tried re-instating the old gods, the ones that Wagner used, but that was just not going to wash with the modern folk of Greater German let alone us in the rest of Europe.
This is where the American Revolution got it right. Washington never set himself up as a god. The office of the president was and still is far more important than the man who is sitting in the Oval Office at any one time. Only being able to run for office twice was also a smart move.
But the smartest move that the Americans ever did was come up with Hollywood. With Hollywood, they came up with an ever-shifting pantheon of gods that would have the world in their thrall. And with these gods you did not have to forsake all other gods before them, you could carry on with whatever other regional gods you had going. You did not have to prey so many times a day. You did not even have to do good things to honour them. And even though you worshiped them in all sorts of little ways and followed what they had to say, you never really knew you were doing it. And they had gods for all occasions and types. No one was excluded. And they were just so sexy and so like us but totally of another world. And all this religion required of you was to keep consuming.
It made everybody around the world want to be American. And in a similar way this is what the Romans had achieved for a few hundred years across their empire a couple of thousand years ago.
When Brutus sunk his knife into Julius Caesar’s chest, he knew he was doing the right thing for the greater and continued glory of Rome. Without ‘Et tu, Brute?’ there could have been no continued Roman Empire, it would have only lasted as long as the life of one man with his over inflated sense of self. Just like Hitler and Napoleon, Julius Caesar, thought he was the only god his people needed.
If only Joseph Goebbels had known what Brutus knew. And if only on the night of the 30 June 1934 Goebbels had sunk his Long Knife into Hitler’s chest and we could have heard the cry ‘Et tu Goebbels?’ we might all be living under a peaceful United States of Europe, (from the Urals to the Galway Bay) with the Mark as our currency and not the Euro. And of course we would have a Chancellor who could run for no more than two periods of office.
And after he had got Hitler out of the way, and they had got some sort of quasi-democratic process going, he should have sorted things out with the Jews. It does not take much knowledge of our combined history, to know that the Jews are the best people when coming up with gods that both work and last. For a start they came up with the biggest one of all time, not just a god amongst many but thee God. A God fit not only for the Jews, but the Christians and Muslims and any number other religions and peoples, who wanted the idea of just one god, or for at least on the Sabbath. Secondly they came up with Jesus, strangely they did not want him for themselves, but as a God the Son messiah type, he has been the biggest so far. Then after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 and they got kicked out of their little patch of desert and spent the next almost 2,000 years wandering the Globe they get to their Promised Land another little patch of desert, but this time in Southern California and set up Hollywood. But it was while they spent there all most 2,000 years in the wilderness they came up with another of there gods, an incredibly successful god, but one that got them into a spot of bother with the German folk, thus their fall from favour with the likes of Hitler. This god that dare not speak its name is Banking. What was so great about this god was all you had to do, to be rich forever, is keeping believing in it and keep paying the interest. If you stop doing either this god will punish you like no other. As Greeks and Icelanders and Subprimers are having to deal with right now as I write this Wild Hypothesis & Even Wilder Conjecture
In this brief summary of the gods the Jewish people have given the world, I am obviously not wanting to give much attention to the one they came up with who failed – Karl Marx. But you never know he may be just the right god that is needed for another age yet to come.
All of these gods have worked in different ways and can work at the same time and do not particularly cancel each other out. Even though the God one, the one with the capital G, is proclaimed to be the most jealous, it is in fact Karl Marx that was the most jealous. I guess that is why he failed; Marx wanted us to dispense with our other gods, especially the God, Jesus and Banking ones and I guess he would have felt the same way about Hollywood.
Anyway, back to Goebbels. So in 1934 after he had sunk his Long Knife into the chest of Hitler and got down to some sweet-talking with the Jews, explained it was all some horrible misunderstanding, he should have then encouraged them to stay and write musicals and produce films. The Jews knew how to right songs that we all wanted to sing. And these films could have starred folk with the right Aryan good looks or whatever, like they had already been doing in Hollywood.
He should then have had a quiet word with Lutz (Johann Ludwig "Lutz" Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, the Third Reich’s minister of finance). This quiet word should have been about letting the Jews have control again, of that other god of theirs – Banking. Of course there would have to be some more regulations than there had been, but having the rest of the world believing in the illusion of boundless wealth, while having them in complete hock is got to be one of the greatest methods of control that man has ever come up with. No wonder the Muslims are against it.
And so back to the question – how the Internet may have served Goebbels for his propaganda in the Second World War. It would have only worked well for him and the Third Reich, if he had followed my other advice above. He would have had to have a hand off approach to it. If he tried to mediate the information that was flowing through the Internet, as the Chinese are currently trying, it would not have worked. For it to work the rest of the world has to see it as a wonderful thing, something that enriches their lives, and can hardly imagine what life would have been like before the World Wide Web. If the people sensed that the information was being overtly monitored and controlled and subject censorship, it would have been only a matter of months before they rose up against it
Fear can only keep people down for so long.
I am aware that my own practise is riddled with contradictions. Since the early days of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu back in 1987 I started to trot out a mantra that went – Accept the Contradictions. I would use it any time I felt somebody might point out the obvious flaws and contradictions in what ever we were stating or making. In a way it became our motto and we held onto it through whatever we were doing. It became what we called our Liberation Loophole. The trouble is I have held onto it ever sense. But why should anybody accept mine or for that matter anybodies contradictions? We would throw politicians out of office if they asked us to accept their contradictions. We would change bank if we thought they were peddling us contradictions. And we certainly would never go back to a doctor who asked us to accept her or his contradictions.
Being an artist, maybe I hoped I would be given that licence. For me this accepting the contradictions, allowed me to go with my hunches and gut instincts, it let something germinate and grow before I brought in my objective and critical mind. I learnt very early on that if you bring in the ‘objective and critical mind’ too soon on in the development of an idea or piece, all you would learn is all its faults and weakness and all the reasons why you should not be doing it. At the outset of any undertaking there is always more reasons for not doing it, than for doing it.
For decades now, I have been aware that a vague idea will start in my head, just an unfocused urge to do something. And if this urge persists, I will write down some perimeters, get some basic ground rules set before I allow the urge to start becoming a reality. With The17 there was this urge to make a very crude sort of choral music and there was also this hunch that recorded music was a medium of the 20th-century - a medium now in it’s dieing throws. So before I allowed myself to progress too far with The17, I made some these ground rules. These became the text that I used on the All Recorded Music poster http://www.the17.org/notice_home.php?lang=e
At the age of 17 I made a decision to dedicate the rest of my life to painting. When I was 19, I came to the realisation that it was wrong to make art whose only purpose was to hang on a rich man’s wall. If I ever became any good at painting my success could only be measured in the amount of rich men with my paintings hanging on their walls. Thus I made the decision that as an artist working in the modern world of 1973, I should only make work that could be mass-produced cheaply, thus available for all who may be interested. So I walked away from what I loved doing most – painting. And ever since then I have had to battle with the urge to pick up a paintbrush and start making paintings again. I gave into this urge in 2002. But before I did I set out the ground rules, these can be found on another of my posters http://www.penkilnburn.com/poster.php?poster=169.gif&painting=paint
The reason for the dimensions is that I had recently got into this way of thinking - nobody should make any art any bigger than themselves. This came from me observing how so much art relied on its size to impress us. I would find myself standing infront of a large work of art and trying to imagine if it would still have the power to impress or move me, if it were no bigger than me. If I thought it could not stand up to my reduction in size test, I would right it off in my head. So when I allowed myself to start making paintings again, one of the rules I employed was, they could be no bigger than myself. The 1,910 dimension of these paintings is 5mm shorter than my height.
So back to trying to answer your question as directly as I can – In my ideal world I would only make work that had no physical presence, that only existed in the here and now. And from then on you carried it as a memory. There were no reproductions of any kind, be they books that I write documenting it, or the poster, or the paintings or any of the other trail of stuff that I leave in my wake in the hope that some one will be impressed. Thus no paintings to hang on rich men’s walls or mass-produced products. My ultimate aim as an artist would be to inspire people to think, feel and do. The last thing I want to do is to be responsible for the making of more things for other people just to consume. At just a cursory glance over my continued practice, it is obvious – I continue to fail.
It takes ten years for Odysseus to return home from the Trojan Wars to Ithaca and the beautiful Penelope. It is the ‘process’ of that journey home that has tumbled down through the centuries holding the imaginations of whoever has heard the stories. In Jack Kerouac’s On The Road he never quite knows where he is going, the destination just out of sight over the horizon, but again it is the process of the journey that holds the treasure and reveals the truth. But in both cases there needs to be a destination – even if vague and over the horizon. The destination gives purpose. Ask any pilgrim, from any faith. It is on the pilgrimage that God reveals Himself, not at the arrival of the holy well or mountain or whatever one was journeying towards.
It has always been the process of making something, be that a book, a record, a painting, a meal, an event, a journey that I find the most rewarding. Once it is done I have little interest in it. When I made records, once released I never listened to them again. I have no copies of them even if I wanted to listen. There are numerous books I have written that I do not have. At times I find I have to go on eBay and bid for one of my own books or records if I need to get one to refer to for something else I am working on. In 1986 I made a short film called The Manager, the spoken word soundtrack of this film was released as the B side to a 12” single. I had neither a copy of the film or the record, but for something that I was doing last year I wanted to be able to quote from what I had written for this film. I went on eBay and paid over the odds for a copy of this record from some one in Slovakia. The only reason why I bring that up as an example is because it is sitting on my desk as I write this answer.
That said, while making those records, or writing the books or putting on an exhibition, I put everything I can into making the finished work as perfect and as complete as I can. I do not want there to be one bit of whatever it is to not dazzle in its completeness. But I do know it is the process of getting to that finished object or event that is the real artwork, the thing that fired me, made me roll about the floor while screaming in laughter at the sheer wonderfulness of it all. For artistic reward, nothing will ever beat the process of making Doctorin’ The Tardis by The Timelords. Of course we knew it could not be truly complete as an artwork until we were on Top-of-the-Pops performing it the week that it was number one. That is when we knew it was done and dusted and ready for whatever cannon of artworks that wanted to claim it for its own.
There is nearly always an end point insight with each of the things that I have worked on over the decades. With the Echo & The Bunnymen it was to be the perfect symmetry of their first four albums. With The KLF it was winning a Brit for being best British act of the 1991 and selling more singles in one year than anybody else in the world, while attempting to re-invent what it was to be a pop group.
With nearly everything that I do within the Penkiln Burn there is an end point. With the Smell of Sulphur In The Wind, there is very much an end point, to get all the 20,000 fractions sold, return to Iceland, bury the $20,000, return home, make the Smell of Money Underground work and then hang it on my wall. Job done. Yeah well of course there will be the coffee table book afterwards that documents the whole thing and maybe the film. But…
And with the paintings there are only 25 of them even if they keep getting repainted. As for the Soup Line and the giving away 40 bunches of daffodils to complete strangers once a year, they are both limited by the length of my life. Once I am dead both are complete. But yes, it is the process of doing them that interests me.
When I used to paint in my late teens I would always get more from the working drawings of Rembrandt than from his finished paintings. It was his process that made him my favourite painter, but without the paintings as a destination there would have been not been the working drawings.
My theme tune is called True To The Trail. It is an instrumental Country Music toe-tapper I wrote and recorded in 1986. The title is a quote from the poem Land Of Beyond by Robert Service. True To The Trail is what I would like played as my coffins slides into the furnace. The Trail in question, I guess is the process of life.
I do not set out to make confrontational work. I do not employ shock tactics. I have never knowingly taken the rebels stance. Hollywood and rock’n’roll have often used what they think as confrontational in the creation of product. This being done, I guess because so many of us want to get our confrontational kicks vicariously, while we sit safely in cinema seats or while listening to our iPods.
I have never used sex or violence in my work, they being the two most obvious means to create confrontation. I keep my sex and violence for real life.
I am aware that once an idea starts to push itself into my consciousness and then starts to clamber for attention and finally demand that I turn it into a reality; I will end up paying some sort of emotional, if not physical, price.
I do not push things for the sake of the violent or emotional reactions it might generate. There are plenty of performance artists willing to do all sorts of things to themselves to get a reaction. For me that sort of work can impress me in the moment, but after the moment of shock has passed, I am not left with much lasting relationship with the work. I am not that interested in mere sensation with or without a capital S. I want stuff that stays with me, that works on my brain that keeps prodding away days later. I guess, ideally that is what I want from what I do. Or for how I want people to respond to what I do. Most of the time I am not bothered if people know what they have witnessed, or taken part in or even bought, is art. But it is important to me that they may think about it days, weeks or in even years to come. Not in some big profound way, but maybe in some small way, like they may remember the day there was a man standing in their street giving away 40 bunches of daffodils for no apparent reason at all. And on that subject I will be going to Hungerford tomorrow to do my annual giving away of 40 bunches of daffodils to complete strangers.
But back to confrontation – I think that the most confrontational thing that I do is the constructing of Cake Circles. In the construction of a Cake Circle, I have to knock on doors, and if someone answers, I have to say – ‘I have baked you a cake, here it is.’ We are more prepared for the Jehovah Witnesses knocking on the door wanting to sell us their religion than a strange man knocking on your door telling you he has just baked you a cake. Why would he do that? Is he trying to sell me something? Is he a nutter? Is this some sort of a stunt for reality TV? Has it got poison in it? And if you accept it, how do you tell your family or friends? How will they judge you for accepting it? And if you are brave or foolish or just trusting enough to eat a slice of it and it tastes good and there are no ill affects, what are you then supposed to think? Where do you place the memory of this thing that has happened to you that does not seem to fit into any other category of events that are supposed to happen in your normal day-to-day life? And if you were told it was art, would you think – ‘Oh well that is OK then, that explains it. Artists do a lot of silly things these days in an attempt to get famous.’
I have never knowingly been aware of what I am doing as radical. Whatever I do always seems to be the most obvious thing to be doing. Usually I will be thinking that it is so obvious that I expect everybody else to be doing the same thing as I am at the same time. That has definitely been the case with The17, once I got to the point of starting to do The17, I assumed there must be 100s of other people out there starting there own choirs that would never be recorded. For me it seemed like the obvious response to where we had arrived at with our relationship to music, now that we could all download everything that had ever been recorded onto our iPod and listen to it wherever, whenever, while doing almost whatever. What creative music maker, wouldn’t want to make music that existed outside of where everything else in that tired old 20th-century had arrived at.
We live in a time when we are scared of any type of extremism. We clamber for the middle ground in politics and life. Religion is only acceptable if it is moderate. Modern society attempts to protect itself by discouraging ‘ideas taken to their logical conclusions.’ The only thing that most men can believe in or stay faithful to is a football team.
This is the hardest of the four questions that have been posed for me by BLOWN (a great name for a magazine I think). When I first started to read the question, I thought it was going to be about my carbon footprint. And seeing as I use my Land Rover for a lot of the things I do and they do not do that many miles to the gallon, and I am always flying off to places to do events of some sort, then my carbon footprint must be pretty big.
My home for the past four years has been a flat in London. It is as empty as I can get it. I hate owning things. I hate being given objects. For Christmas and birthdays I am always hoping for something that can be used up, like food or a bunch of flowers. The only thing that gets collected in my flat is dust.
But I know this says something negative about me, that in some way I am trying to protect myself from the responsibility of owning or of losing things. I guess it comes from having been through relationships where I have allowed my self to put down roots only to find that it all falls apart.
Because of an incident, a non-relationship related one that happened in my late teens, I’ve always dreamt of being able to walk out of any situation with just my haversack on my back. And in the haversack would be a sleeping bag, passport, pyjamas, toothbrush, pencil and notebook. Nowadays I would reluctantly add to that short list a mobile phone, laptop and credit card.
But I have always been jealous of artists like Donald Judd with his place in Marfa, Texas or Ian Hamilton Findlay and his Little Sparta in Scotland. I would have loved to have a place that was mine and that is where I did all my work and it is where it stayed. If people had wanted to experience it, they would have had to travel there. For a post life career, it is the best move for an artist to make. It means that your body of work can become a tourist destination. Damien Hirst sussed this out some time ago; this I guess is why he has bought himself Boddingtons Manor near Cheltenham and is stuffing it with all his own works. In 200 years time, people will still be flocking to it. There will be a major Damien Hirst industry going on for as long as that building stands. And it being Grade 1 listed building, it will stand for at least 1,000 years. It will be standing there full of his art long after all this digital stuff that we do now has gone. It is the way things work.
If the question is more about an artist being somehow responsible for creating work that stays routed in their own region, there is no way that I can do that. I was born in the Transkei of South Africa, my folks then moved back to Scotland when I was 18 months old, but to a part of Scotland that they had not come from before. Then at the age of 11 we moved to Corby in the English east midlands. Then I went to Liverpool at 19, where I lived on and off for a few years. The most I have lived in one area is in mid Buckinghamshire (1983 – 2005) but I do not feel connected to that place emotionally in any way. When people need to put a label on me, because of something that I am doing, they often want to put – writer/musician or musician/artist or even artist/musician/writer and I always say please can you put just artist. But if pushed I sometimes say Scottish artists. But I am hardly Scottish, I wasn’t born there, I have not lived there since 1964 and only one of my parents was
Scottish anyway. And I distrust nationalism of any sort. Welsh and Scottish nationalism are quite harmless as neither country has any power to wield and abuse. But any sort of nationalism or even regionalism is something we use to hide behind. When I allow the words ‘Scottish artist’ to be used next to my name, I know I am hiding behind something.
But the contradiction in this is, I have always applauded regionalism in the arts. I think it is great that a certain sound or way of thinking about making records or paintings or poetry develops in a certain region. And that this sound or way of thinking is markedly different to what is going on the cultural capital of the day.
In one of my parallel lives I do have a place that I live and work in, it’s a cottage on the banks of the Penkiln Burn in Galloway. And there is a garden I tend and there is workshop with all the work that I have done over the years for people to come and look at and they can have a mug of tea and ask questions and maybe even have a bowl of soup if its dinner time. And my children and friends can come and stay. And there and I will carry on living and working until I die. But as of now I feel like the Wandering Jew, and look what happened when he got his Promised Land.
1968:
January and February 1968 were dark months, but March, April and May were even darker. I was 14 going on 15. Reinhardt Alders had come around to mine, with the jar of chloroform that he had nicked from the Biology laboratory at school, a week or so ago. I hadn’t tried it yet but Pete, Donald and Gary all had and said that it was good. None of us had even come close to trying real drugs yet. Real drugs were exotic. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones took real drugs not ordinary kids like us who lived on the estates in Corby.
In my bedroom Reinhardt removed the lid of the jam jar he had the chloroform in, pored some of the liquid onto his hanky and then some onto mine. Reinhardt explained that I should now lie down on my bed with the hanky over my face and he would do the same lying on the floor. Soon the walls started to throb and after a while time seemed to slow down. This was good.
The next thing that I can remember was being in the back of an ambulance and the blue lights flashing. By the time we were in the Accident & Emergency at Kettering General I was coming around proper, and was soon discharged. They kept Reinhardt in over night.
Next morning in school assembly, words were spoken. Mr Bradley, the headmaster, explained how two boys (un-named) in the fourth form, had seriously endangered their lives by inhaling a substance stolen from the Biology Lab. One of the boys was still in hospital. I expected the school to come down heavy on us, but no action was taken.
A few days later I was sitting in the Maths class, Miss Bevin the deputy head, was our maths teacher. I was not listening; instead I was using a drill bit that I kept in my pocket, to drill a hole through the top of the desk. I hated Miss Bevin and she hated me. I never did any work in her lessons even though I both liked and was good at maths.
Later in the day I was called to Miss Bevin’s office, she asked me to empty my pockets and put the contents on her desk. This I did, the contents included my knife, a snotty hanky, some fish hooks, and my drill bit. She asked me if I had been responsible for the hole that had been drilled in the desk where I had been sitting this morning during her maths lesson. I said yes. She told me that I did not deserve to be at this school and that she was going to punish me as severely as she could. I expected the chloroform incident to be mentioned but it wasn’t, it was as if it had never happened.
Mr Tuffin was called in, I liked Mr Tuffin, he was our metalwork teacher and had also been our maths teacher the year before. Miss Bevin asked him if this drill bit on her table might have been stolen from the metalwork shop. He said it could have been as there were ones that size missing. I had not stolen the drill bit, it was mine, bought with my own money. I liked drill bits, I liked drilling, still do.
That evening there was a knock at our door. It was Mr Tuffin and my form master. They asked my parents for permission to search my bedroom. They were interested to see if I had a stash of all the other tools that had been going missing from the metalwork shop. I had numerous tools in my bedroom; chisels, hammers, saws and drills. I liked tools; I liked banging and sawing, still do. But none of these tools had been stolen from the metalwork shop and Mr Tuffin knew this.
The next morning I was called back into Miss Bevin’s study, and accused by her of stealing not only a drill bit but also numerous other tools from the metalwork shop. This was not the first time I had been accused of doing things that I had not done, nor the last. I was put on detention for the rest of the term.
Some evenings later I was watching the TV news. French students were rioting in the streets of Paris. They were upturning cars and setting fire to them. They were pulling up the cobblestones from the boulevard and hurling them at the massed ranks of Gendarmes. I had no idea what they were rioting about, but it looked good to me. But there was something else that they were doing that really caught my imagination – they were getting pots of paint and large brushes and daubing words and slogans on walls and shop windows. I knew sod all French, but this looked like a very great thing to be doing.
In bed that night I hatched a plan. Our school had a central block, four stories high. On the north side of the block was four large rectangles of brickwork, one above the other. So the plan was, I would get a big pot of white paint and paintbrush and on each of these rectangles of brickwork I would paint a huge letter. Once I had got all four letters done, they would make a word and this word would be seen, not only by all the school kids and the teachers coming in the next morning, but everybody driving up Gainsborough Road out of Corby, heading towards Great Oakley and Kettering. I mean this would be hundreds of people, maybe thousands. And they would all see what I had written and nobody would know it was me. The four letters that I planned to paint, starting from the top floor were, F, U, C and K.
By the next night, I had the paint and the brush and under the cover of darkness I went up to the school. Remember this is decades before CCTV. But what I had not taken into account in my detailed planning was how I was going to do this painting right down the outside of a four story building. This chronic lack of foresight on my part did not quash my ardour. Instead I went down to the school next door (across the playing fields), Pope John the 23rd. Here I was able to clamber up onto a first floor roof, via a fire escape ladder. Here I was hidden from the road and I got to work. Instead of the letters that I originally planned to daub down the side of my school, I painted the slogan MISS BEVAN IS A CUNT. This felt good. Very good indeed. It did not matter to me that what I painted, could not be seen by all the kids or teachers on their way to school, the next morning or by anybody driving up Gainsborough Road.
That night I lay in bed, with a big smile on my face. The dark months were over. A job well done!
That story above is my answer to first of these four questions; interpret it, as you will.
1969:
A year and a couple of months later, Ian Fordyce and I get the train down to London. It is Saturday 5th July 1969. We are off to see the Rolling Stones in Hyde Park. I had missed both The Doors at the Roundhouse the previous September and Blind Faith, also in the park, a few weeks earlier (6 June 1969). Ian was in my class but had not been caught up in the chloroform-sniffing fad.
We got the tube from St Pancras to Oxford Circus and then walked along Oxford Street towards Hyde Park. It was down in the tube station at Oxford Circus that I saw the first one. Then walking along Oxford Street I saw a couple daubed onto doors between the shops. Then there was one daubed onto the back of a lad’s donkey jacket. All had been done in white paint and all were made up of the same three words – CLAPTON IS GOD. Now anybody of my generation knew the Clapton in question was Eric. Back in ’69, Eric Clapton, late of the The Blues Breakers and Cream and currently of Blind Faith, was not the safe middle of the road singer songwriter he was to become, but he was our original guitar hero. Most of us would not have doubted his God like genius, but what would motivate somebody to want to go and get a pot of paint and paint brush and paint this statement on a wall?
I bet, whatever those French students in Paris were daubing on the walls of their city, was a lot more important and exciting than proclaiming Clapton was God in London. I should have asked the lad with it on his donkey jacket, but we were already running late.
By the way the Stones were rubbish and we left before the end.
1973:
Four years later when I was coming to my end at art school (Liverpool) and becoming disillusioned by everything that was being done within art schools and even more disillusioned with what I had been doing there – I started to feel the urge to get a tin of household paint and a broad brush and head out into the streets and make my mark. I have written about this at length elsewhere, so for the sake of this answer I will keep it short. The urge was to paint on doors and walls and any place else across the streets of Liverpool just two words – I HATE. I did not know what I hated or why I should hate it so much. The trouble is I never acted on this impulse, just left the urge repressed and festering. Instead I got some planks of wood out of a skip and nailed them together. On this I painted the words IS CLAPTON STILL GOD? This was the only work that I put in the end of year show. Fuck knows why I needed to ask the question, but if it needed to be asked I should have done it in huge letters along the wall of the Mersey Tunnel and not in some pathetic little art student exhibition.
1975:
Over the summer of ’75, I had done a lot of hitching around the country looking for something, and everywhere I went there seemed to be the same crudely painted words on walls and bridges – GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT. This George Davis was some East End gangster who had got banged up for a crime he had not supposedly committed and a mate of his had taken it upon himself to go around the country painting this slogan wherever he thought appropriate. Now I couldn’t have given a sod if this George Davis was innocent or not, but I loved the fact that whoever had done this graffiti had gone to the effort of going all around the country doing it, to the point that it had entered the general public’s imagination. It had become a legend.
Back then felt tip pens were not yet on the market and aerosol spray paint cans were not comparatively cheap. Thus the easy to purchase and use tools to make your mark on urban walls were not readily to hand. To carry a pot of paint and paintbrush was a lot more of an investment of time and energy and you stood a good chance of getting your clothes splattered if not ruined. Thus our walls were as yet not covered in graffiti. Thus when you saw some it had a far greater impact than it could ever do now.
Late in ’75, I was back in Liverpool, working at the Everyman Theatre building the stage sets. The artistic director at the at the Everyman decided to turn Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest into a stage play. This was before the film starring Jack Nicholson was out. I had loved this book in my late teens. Another book I loved from the same cannon of the new American Literature was Fear & Loathing by Hunter S. Thompson. It was as much for the scrawled and splattered cartoons that appeared throughout Fear & Loathing as the actual text. These cartoons were done by a Ralph Steadman. Thus I was more than pleasantly surprised to learn that the artistic director of the Everyman had invited Steadman to do the stage designs for the play.
Steadman and I spent an evening together, he had given me a stack of his splatter like cartoons that we were somehow to interpret and turn into working drawings to build a stage set from. This was all a welcome challenge, but the greatest thing that I got from the evening I spent with Steadman was his stories of what he and Hunter S. Thompson had got up to. The story that stuck in my head above all the others was the one of when the pair of them were in New York. It so happened that the Pope was making a Papal visit to the city. They, Steadman & Thompson and not the Pope, got a small boat, and under the cover of darkness, rowed out into the harbour beside a well chosen ship and painted FUCK THE POPE down its side, using paint rollers on telescopic handles. The next morning the Mayor of New York City was doing some big welcome to the Pope occasion in the open air, a live on prime time TV event – a sweeping view of the River Hudson as the backdrop, the Statue of Liberty on the horizon, all adding to the grandeur of the occasion. Then one particular ship sails down the Hudson, behind the Mayor and the Pope and across the nations TV screens. Now I have nothing personally against the Pope or the mayor of New York, but as a fuck you to authority and everything that tries to control us and keep us down and make us feel rubbish, this seemed to the then 22 year old me to have been a great and liberating thing to have done.
There was something else that I started to notice in Liverpool. The bus I took to the Everyman Theatre each day would go down Princess Avenue. This was a wide tree lined boulevard about half a mile long. At one end was a statue. On the plinth of the statue someone had daubed the words NEVER WORK. I would see this on the way to work in the morning. On my way back from work in the evening I would pass another statue at the other end of Princess Avenue, on that one the same hand had daubed DRIFT AROUND. I had no real idea what was meant by these two statements or why somebody would have been motivated to do them, but for some reason they cast a spell on me. To paint MISS BEVIN IS A CUNT or GEORGE DAVIS IS INNOCENT or even FUCK THE POPE made sense but NEVER WORK and DRIFT AROUND seemed more oblique, even mysterious. I liked this. Every morning and every evening, I looked forward to seeing them and turning the words around in my head. Sitting on the top deck of a bus is one of the best ways to view graffiti.
If you had asked me then, where the line between art and vandalism lay? I would have not been able to answer you. To make that judgement, you would first have been able to define what vandalism was and what art is. I could not have made neither of those judgements. As to the 56 year old me that is attempting to answer these questions in 2010, I can still not make those sort of judgements. You might think I am trying to side step the question, but… The trouble is I have always been drawn to the more visceral kind of ART, the sort of art that you have to get out there and do. The sort of art that does not exist in galleries or that can not be bought and sold and owned and discussed properly and understood and valued and does not even know it is art and does not give a sod anyway. That is my favourite sort of ART. But there again if somebody came along and painted a giant toaster on the side of my flat I would be totally pissed off. So what does that say about me?
Post Script: I have never seen or heard of the FUCK THE POPE graffiti done by Steadman & Thompson since. I have just done a check on Google and nothing came up. Thus I have no proof it ever happened. This lack of proof has not stopped it from being a hugely inspirational event for me, ever since Ralph Steadman told me about it in 1975. But somehow, not as inspiring as the NEVER WORK and DRIFT AROUND ones.
This urge to make your mark on a wall or door, out in a public space, comes from somewhere very deep and primal. For me it is not about wanting to make something that is pleasing to the eye, or to impress the passer by, or even as a career move. And definitely not something to brighten up the neighbourhood. I do not even want to make something that is obviously understandable.
It is far darker than that. In the story of the Passover in the book of Exodus, God says to Moses - ‘Go tell the Children of Israel that each family is to slaughter a male lamb and to take the blood of that lamb and daub the side posts and the lintel of the door of their houses and in that way the Angel of Death will know to fly over that house and not take the first born boy.’ Or something like that. And that is what happened.
When I first saw Ralph Steadman’s splatterings across the pages of Fear & Loathing, it reminded me of that lambs blood daubed on the doorposts and lintels in the story from Exodus. Don’t ask me to qualify the connection. But both had the same sort of urgency that need to make your mark or die.
In a lot of my work, be it posters, paintings, pamphlets or books, I try to make everything as simple, clean and direct as possible. I keep everything down to two typefaces, ones with as little character as a typeface can have. I want things to look as non-designed as possible, thus no illustrations or graphics. This I hope gives the words far more room to do their job. That said Cally and I have worked long and hard at attempting to achieve this affect. Cally being the designer I have worked with over the past 12 years.
Thus when I end up finding myself on a dark winter’s night, with the pot of paint in one hand and brush in the other, the last thing I want to be doing is making something aesthetically pleasing to the eye of the passer by. Our urban streets are full of cars that I hate the look of, all around us are billboard advertisements that reek of everything I loathe in society, and 99% of the buildings going up are as equally offensive to my eye. And all are trying to seduce us with design. They are all desperately seeking our approval. Doing everything they can to get in our knickers or taking whatever is left in our wallets. And they do this at the same time as lying to us at some very deep level. It is rape masquerading as seduction. And we just accept it. We lie down and take those adverts, because it is the way that it has always been through our lives. We can even think we like it at times. I mean this is the free world where we can choose what we want. I understand the logic. I too have put my X in the box. I know that I am just as much part of this system as whoever I may be pointing my finger at. Give me your hand and I will bite it now, just to prove this point. But this does not stop me seething inside and wanting to rip the whole lot down. Pass me a tin of paraffin and let me be the first to strike the match.
A picture can grab our attention but it is words that can start a revolution. Not that I have ever set out to start a revolution. But you know what I mean?
Some looking back first then I will try and focus in on the question.
1987 – 1992:
When Jimmy Cauty and I started to work together in early 1987, we found we both had had this similar need to make marks on walls. Thus it was only natural for it to become part of the other things we were doing together. Thus the lift shaft block on the top of numerous high rise flats across South London, began to have The JAMS or 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On? painted on them in large white letters. They could be seen for miles. Then we did the north side of the fly tower of the National Theatre on the Southbank, with a massive 1987 and to the side a small The JAMS. We used paint rollers with telescopic handles just like Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson. When we went back the next morning we were disappointed with how small it looked from the other side of the Thames. We promised ourselves we would come back in ten years and do it again but bigger. We did do it in 1997, it was on the night of our Fuck The Millennium performance at the Barbican Theatre, but it too seemed a bit pathetic, as if we were doing it by numbers or as performing monkeys. We always planned to do it properly in 2007, but by then (post 9/11) the security on public buildings like the National Theatre made it impossible. But back in ’87 we also started to deface billboard advertisements. Some of these got picked up by the press others didn’t. The best one we did was on a billboard for the New Statesman. In the advertisement they had used that photograph from the Vietnam War of the terrified naked girl running towards the camera to escape a napalm attack. This was maybe the most iconic photograph taken during that war. We painted a crude speech bubble coming out of her mouth, with the words ‘Merry Xmas from The JAMS.’ You would have been hard pushed to do something more crass than that. I was perfect.
We some how justified what we were doing as promotion for the records we were putting out. But we knew in ourselves that the graffiti was about something else altogether and equally as important as anything else we were doing.
2000:
After we stopped making records and my practice as an artist became a lot less definable, there yet again was no good justifiable excuse for doing the graffiti. I was by now a grown man in my 40s with numerous family responsibilities. But for the first time in my life, I had my own transport, a Land Rover. It was not long before I had a 10 litre tub of white emulsion and a sic inch brush in the back of the Land Rover with me at all times, just incase. I mean what was the harm? And anyway I had it basically under control. There was never anything that big or too blatant. I made sure very little of what I did was documented.
But then it all came to a head in the year 2000 when the police knocked on my door. Standing before them was this mild looking middle aged man, thus they started by apologizing for disturbing me, as they assumed there must be some mistake, but it was their duty to follow up the leads they were given. Basically the number of my Land Rover had been taken down while a man in Liverpool had painted the words DEAD WHITE MAN in large letters on the outside of a casino in broad day light. I told them I was the man they were looking for and that I would come quietly. So I was up infront of the beak without any sort of defence that I could articulate. The chairman of the magistrates made some remarks about me being an otherwise upstanding member of the community and had obviously only had a momentarily lapse of reason, and as it was a first time offence he only gave me a fine of a few hundred pounds plus costs. This amounted to a bit more than a £1,000 all told. After this, for the sake of my family, I tried to keep things under control. Well as much as I could.
Sometime in the early 2000s I read a biography of the French Situationist, Guy Debord. It dealt with his influence on the rioting students in Paris ’68. The ones I had admired on TV as they splattered slogans on the walls and doors of their city. In the book there were photos of their graffiti, there was also translations of what these slogans were. One was NEVER WORK and another was DRIFT AROUND.
2008:
I was in Derby doing a massed version of The17, involving 1,700 of the citizens of the city. This was something that I had been commissioned to do to celebrate the opening of a multi-million pound arts centre. This was high profile establishment stuff. It had taken months of putting it together. And it had all gone well. The people in power and who wrote the cheques were pleased with the results. But then I had to go and spoil it all (like Frank & Nancy). Close to Derby city centre underneath a bridge over the River Derwent, that I regularly walked under, there was this spot that was a natural for graffiti. There was already a few generations of tagging on a grand scale there, but nothing too fresh. In my head I could see the job that needed to be done. I chose a night when it was pissing down, thus there was nobody about. Under the bridge it was dry and I could get on with the work. It only took just over two hours. Each of the letters were a couple of metres high and all told the graffiti was about 30 metres long. It read: IMAGINE WAKING UP TOMORROW & ALL MUSIC HAD DISSAPEARED. The next morning I came back, it looked brilliant. The words referenced something that I was doing with The17, too long for me to go into here. And anyway, like most of the graffiti that I have done over the decades it makes no direct sense, I am more interested in people wondering what the sod was meant by the words and it some how playing on their minds for sometime, as opposed to it being an obvious one line type statement or joke thing.
And because I judged this graffiti in Derby to be a grand success I made the decision that I would repeat the same graffiti in every location around the world that The17 performed on their world tour. And in each country I would have the line translated into the local language. And if the language uses a different alphabet or characters then I use the local ones. This world tour goes on until 2013, thus there is a lot more to get done. It also means that my habit is under control and reasonably well focused. Doing it in China last autumn was the first time out of Europe. Using Chinese characters was very exciting. Then I was in Port-au-Prince in Haiti the week before Christmas (2009). There I did in Haitian Kreyòl. The earthquake happened three weeks after my return. The wall that my graffiti was on was one of the only walls left standing in that part of the city. I have been in almost daily contact with some friends and colleagues in Haiti since the earthquake. What I have learnt from them is that a myth has built up around the graffiti that I did. The myth being that my graffiti was a prophesy about the earthquake. That I had somehow, foretold the act of God to come. In the aftermath of the earthquake there was no music in the city. And since learning this I have lost all desire and compulsion to make graffiti. This I know will not last. It never does.
So onto the evolution and increased commercialisation part of the question:
Over the past 30 years I have been daubing paint on walls and doors, I have seen graffiti that has been done all over the world. And I still see stuff that excites me. Stuff that makes me think, that is why we make these marks in the night, why we risk climbing over gates and fences and up fire escapes and across roofs, dodging the CCTV cameras and the security guards.
It is usually in the most unlikely places, way out in the middle of nowhere or maybe can only be seen from the window of a plane. I love the ones that you get in railway tunnels that can only be seen from the light of the window as the train speeds by. And it is always great to see them on the outside of bridges high above motorways or rivers or rail lines. I like to feel the urgency, that desperate need, with no obvious reward or return for the effort put in.
When I was driving through the former Eastern Germany and Poland just a few years after the collapse of communism, there was all this graffiti on the side of crumbling factories in the remotest of regions. It was the same when I was working in Siberia a couple of years ago. Whoever is doing these graffiti is not thinking about careers as artists, exhibiting in galleries and selling works for thousand and thousand. They are making their mark ’cause they have to, and there is no other way that they can. And for me it is still potent. Still makes me go – you soddin’ show them. I would have no interest meeting those that have done these graffiti, it is more than enough to know that they are out there doing it.
I was in Sao Paulo in Brazil, doing No Music Day back in November 2008; there was some great graffiti there, mainly under the flyovers and along the side of the freeways. This was colourful stuff, very creative in a way that I am not usually bothered about. But there was a wildness to it that redeemed any of its artiness in my judgement.
I have never been interested in the ‘street art’ that is sponsored by local councils to try and make their borough seem more inclusive. Or for that matter special places designated by local councils for teenagers to go with their spray cans and stencils. Once something like graffiti is validated by the art world or patronising local councils, its like it has had its bollocks cut off. It no longer does the job it is supposed to be doing.
As for the stuff you see around Shoreditch and Hoxton nowadays. This on the whole does not excite me. It seems too self-aware. Too trying to be part of a career path. It lacks that dark and primal thing. I know it is obvious for someone like me to have a go at any of the post BANKSY generations of wannabees. But to me, what they are doing is the complete opposite of what excited me about graffiti in the first place. To me they are the ones that I was wanting to have nothing to do with, when I was back in art school in 1973. It’s as if they are part of that ‘creatives’ world, part of the world that designs cars and billboard advertisement and all the other shit that is clambering for our attention. That said I still wholeheartedly go along with the sentiment of taking art out of the galleries and onto the street where it can be for everyone and does not have to have price tags or be written about in ‘art speak’ ways. Just don’t put an email address at the bottom of it. And now that brands of vodka are using graffiti to try and hip themselves up you know it is time to move on.
For most people that do graffiti it is just a phase they pass through. Maybe an intense phase, but a phase all the same. I realise with myself it is here for the long haul. It will be something that I will never grow out of. It is not like I do it to define who I am, being a ‘street artist’ is the last thing I am or have ever aspired to be. I never feel I should go and do some graffiti ’cause I have not done any this month. Sometimes I get through a couple of years without doing any. Then some words will come into my head, words that might not make any obvious sense, even to myself and they will start to gnaw away at my resistance. And it always ends in the same way with me going off into the night with the paint pot and brush. Afterwards I still get that sense of release sweeping over me. I guess it is more of an illness than a form of self-expression. The trouble is I am getting no younger, the arthritis in my left knee is beginning to get to me, but even in my old age I sense it will be an urge that I will have to deal with and let it find its outlet.
Any suggestions?
I can never remember a time in my life when maps were not in it.
Hanging on the wall in the house where I lived as a child (2 – 11) was a framed map of Wigtownshire (one half of Galloway) the most southwesterly county in Scotland. Wigtownshire was also the county where we lived. It was an original print and at least three hundred years old. This was the first map I ever saw and I must have spent hours and hours staring at it.
I guess it was growing up in a religious house that led me to believe that God had, obviously made this map. Who else could look down upon the world and know what it looked like. This map of Wigtownshire still hangs in my parents’ house.
When I was a little older and knew it was the hands of men and not God Himself who had made this map. This knowledge did not diminish its capacity to fill me with wonder. I also learnt the place names of the small towns and the hills and the bays and the lochs around where we lived and how some of these names had changed over those three hundred years. Then there were all the river names the Bladnoch, the Cree, the Luce… And those two little islands out in the Luce Bay. And how the county was divided up into the Machars, The Rhins and the Moors. This map will forever hold a very special place in my personal history.
At the age of about seven I became aware that my father had these other maps called Ordnance Survey (OS) maps. When he took us out on Sunday afternoons for walks to standing stones, or up to Glen Trool or down to the Mull of Galloway he would always have one of his Ordnance Survey maps with him. And on these walks we would come across trig points that we learnt were used in the making of these very maps. I assumed that the trig points contained similar mystical powers as the standing stones once contained. My father’s maps obviously contained guarded and secret information. To me this information was of far more interest than anything I could read in books. They marked the spots where Robert the Bruce had his battles, where castles, unseen from the road, were located, where hidden lochs and burns that could be fished in were to be found.
I’d ‘borrow’ these maps from a shelf in my father’s bookcase and head out on my pushbike on an adventure to find out where Stewart Castle was and what it looked like. Or if the day was raining I could spend hours pouring over one of these one-inch-to-the-mile, cloth backed Ordnance Survey maps in my bedroom.
Life was never dull with a map. That sense of wonder, of being able to look down on earth from the vantage point of God has never left me.
As indicated in my answer to question one, maps have been a part of what I’ve done since childhood. They were the way I discovered the world around me. From back then to the present day I have drawn lines or shapes or just my name Bill on OS maps and then walk out on the landscape what I had drawn on the map. By doing this I have always discovered things that I would never have come across. The most mundane of locations will reveal hidden treasures using this process.
At school, any excuse to draw a map as part of the homework and I’d do it. And usually that’s all that would get done. In my second year at Secondary Modern, we were learning about the William the Conqueror’s Doomsday Book. The one where he wanted to ascertain the wealth of the county he had just conquered. We were given a project to do, something similar to the Doomsday Book, but just based on our own street. I spent the whole of my Easter holidays mapping out our square on the council estate in Corby where we then lived. Doing at least a half a dozen maps each one revealing different information. One about what was growing in the gardens, another about what the jobs that the dads did (mainly in the steel works), another for how many children in each house, all were carefully colour coded. As far as I’m concerned it was the most rewarding thing I ever did at school.
It was around this time that I discovered geological maps. The colours and patterns blew my tender mind. OS did two geological maps of the UK, one for the top half and the other for the bottom. I pinned them on my bedroom wall, one above the other. I would just lie on my bed and stare at the colours and patterns. There is nothing worth knowing that cannot be told by a map. And even if it was not worth knowing I still wanted to know.
If I had been clever enough I would have liked to have gone to university and do Geography. As it happens my big sister did and she has spent all her professional life in mapping and photogrammetry. Thus I was not the only one in the family to fall under the spell of maps
Being not clever enough meant I ended up going to art-school at the age of 17. I attempted to put maps behind me and fell in love with painting instead. As far as I knew maps and art had nothing to do with each other. That was my problem and there was no excuse for me making the mistake. By the end of my time at art-school the pull of maps was too strong, I was spending more time wandering the streets of Liverpool map in hand, discovering the lost, the hidden the magical and the… Well whatever, standing in front of an easel, paint brush in hand, could not compete with what I was doing out on the streets of Liverpool with a map. Maps were my mistresses.
The trouble is, at the time I never thought of what I was doing, out in the streets of Liverpool with map in hand, as Art.
In the summer of ’73 I got a one-month Euro-rail ticket and set off drawing this huge arc across the a map of Europe, using the railway lines as my pencil. The arc began in the port of Piraeus in Greece and ended as far north as trains could go in a place called Narvik. This was well inside the artic circle in northern Norway. It was while drawing this arc across the maps of Europe that I decided to quit art-school and begin my wandering years.
During ’77 & ’78 when I was in the band Big in Japan, as well as being a guitarist, I also drove the van. Thus I was in charge of the route. I was always looking for alternative and more interesting routes to take. The post gig drive back from Sheffield to Liverpool, in the early hours, via Snake Pass was always my favourite.
Then through my years as manger of Echo & The Bunnymen, the plotting of tours and one off events, always involved the use of maps in a less than strait forward way. We did an event in Buxton, Derbyshire. It was called Shine So Hard. The tickets went on sale without actually saying where the concert was to be held. There were just certain clues. Fans who had bought tickets had to use maps to work out where the event was to be. Then a couple of years later we did a series of shows starting in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis and ending at the Royal Albert Hall, in London. All the performances were on a gently curving line down a map of the Great Britain, between Stornoway and the Albert Hall.
The last major event I did with The Bunnymen was in Liverpool. It was called A Crystal Day. There was a whole day of events scattered across the city. Each of them plotted on my Ordnance Survey map of Merseyside. It was about then that I began to realise that whatever I thought I had been doing, or whatever other people thought I was doing, was not really what I had been doing. I was not a proper manager at all. What I was doing was using their career, or the early first four albums part of their career that I was involved with, as an artist. Their career was my canvas. Using it as something I could make work from and in turn express myself through. It was the height of indulgence on my part. I was definitely not the sort of manager making good and profitable decisions on the bands behalf. Not that they were my puppets in any way. That would have never worked. It was a lot subtler than any of that boy band nonsense.
It was also around this time I discovered the work of Richard Long, there were so many parallels in what he was doing and what I could only have dreamt about. Long was a few years older than me, but from the off back in the late 60s he was using walking and maps and especially OS maps in his practise. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I wish I had realised that maps and what you can do with them was as valid as pushing paint around on a canvas, when I was 18. That was my loss.
For all my adult life I had a fantasy, if I ever did something on my own I would use the name The Penkiln Burn, as some sort of all encompassing title for whatever that was to be. The Penkiln Burn is a small river in southwest Scotland; it is where I used to play and fish as a kid. It was my magical kingdom and it has retained that status in my mind all my life. But between the age of 20 and my mid 40s, the most I had done about this was buy a six-inch-to-the-mile OS sheet that had the Penkiln on it from its source to where it ran into the River Cree, 8 and a half miles down stream. I framed this map and hung it on the walls of wherever I have lived over the decades. One day, one day.
It was in the late 90s, I finally started to make my Penkiln Burn a reality. Within in it I wanted to embrace all of my interests, responsibilities and ambitions. Be that somebody who cooks, writes, loves, walks, fathers, draws on maps, drives, publishes, thinks about music, does things that do not make sense, makes mistakes or even makes paintings.
Thus when the Soup Line and the Cake Circles emerged as something I found myself doing I did not suppress them. For me the strait line and the perfect circle are the two most powerful marks you can make on a map. One the ultimate symbol of male, the other of female. I guess my Soup Line across the British Isles is the biggest phallic symbol that I will ever need to make. When you have a Soup Line you do not need an Aston Martin.
Back in 2005 I ordered from Stanford’s (you do know Stanford’s?) all the unfolded 1/25,000 OS maps that the Soup Line cuts through across England. When they arrived I sellotaped them together. From some beach just north of Formby to Felixstowe on the Suffolk coast. With all the maps stuck together this English section of the line was over 30 feet long. With the help of a pulled tight string, I drew the line across it using a 2B pencil. I found it difficult to contain my pride at looking at all these maps stretched across my workshop’s floor, with my line running through them.
How the Soup Line originally came about is something that I discussed in one of my Belfast answers (Q & A 31).
As for the more feminine Cake Circles, I am in the process of constructing a large one at the moment in London. On an OS map of London I have drawn a circle. My flat in London is at the centre of the circle. The edge of the circle cuts through the Foundry, which is an institution I have been involved with over the previous ten years, but no longer. I will bake a cake in my flat then travel to the edge of the circle. Knock on some ones door who’s house is on the circle and if they answer, I will say – ‘I have baked you a cake, here it is.’ Throughout this year (2010) I hope to be delivering 50 cakes to different people living on the Cake Circle, the last to be delivered on the 31 December. After which the London Cake Circle will be considered constructed. There will be a far more moderate sized Cake Circle that I will be constructing in Gothenburg, Sweden over a period of a week in June or July 2010.
I’m not particularly in the business of trying to explain all the whys and wherefores and the motivations behind what I do. Not even to myself. But I guess Cake Circles have got something to do with trust between strangers and my love of leaving a layer of meaning on a map and the unseen history of the landscape once the Cake Circle has been constructed upon it. And then there are the stories that might happen and spread after a strange man turns up on your doorstep offering you a freshly baked cake. I also like baking cakes.
And why do I use the word constructing in association with Cake Circles? Its not as if there is anything physical left behind.
The most epic use of maps in what I do was done with two of my older children. They were both born in the mid 80s and in the same maternity wing, of the now shut down Royal Bucks Hospital. At some point in the mid 90s we decided to go on a journey. This journey was to head east, following the exact latitude that they were both born on (51 degrees 49.3’ North), all the way around the globe. Each year I would order from Stanford’s the largest scale maps they could source, for the part of the world that we next planned to cross. We would then spend a week or so, driving the tracks and minor roads across where ever that was. This was slow going. We would take days to cover the distance that it would only take hours if we were sticking to motorways.
One of the children would be doing the map reading and every time the road or track actually crossed the exact latitude, we would stop the Land Rover and the other child not doing the map reading, would get out and take a photograph of due east. Once we had covered one map from west to east, they would swap duties. I did the driving and followed their navigational directions.
The first part of the heading in an easterly direction journey, was simple enough, it took us from the steps of the now closed Royal Bucks in Aylesbury to the beach of Clacton-on-Sea. Our next leg was from a wind swept beach in the Netherlands to the German border. Then across Germany, through Poland all the way to the border of Belarus. This was done over a period of three years. But here we hit a brick wall. We could get no further than the Belarus border. There were no maps available to the public of Belarus, other than the most basic of ones. The military in Belarus were in charge of map making and assumed that the only reason why members of the public would want to own a map is to start a civil war. This made me appreciate our Ordnance Survey’s independence from politics and the military.
So for our next week-or-so long journeys, in the next two school holidays we headed south, keeping strictly to the longitude they were born on (0 degrees 48.8’ West). The first short section led us to a beach near East Wittering. The next leg of the journey began on the beaches of the Normandy, where the Allies had landed 50 odd years earlier. Then down through France and over the Pyrenees. And down through Spain, until we hit the Mediterranean at a place called Cartagena. This was where Hannibal had landed with his troops and elephants back in 228 BC, when he was planning taking the on the whole of the Roman Empire.
But we were heading in the opposite direction to Hannibal. We wanted to cross the sea from Cartagena to Algeria. But again we had a problem. Like the maps of Belarus, the maps for Algeria were under the jealous control of their army. And anyway Algeria, unlike their neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, was not interested in ‘tourists’. Being a responsible father, I felt I should not risk my children’s life and freedom, by heading out into the Sahara, without maps or visas. Foiled again. This southerly attempt of the journey was done over two separate weeks in two years.
So it was back to the latitude, but this time heading west. The New World beckoned. The line of latitude hit the Canadian mainland on the coast of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, Quebec. But as it turned out there was only one road in the whole of Quebec that crossed the desired latitude. It took us almost two weeks to get one photograph of some pines trees, before it was time to head home.
By now these two children of mine were in their mid-to-late teens and going on these road trips with their father, no longer was the thing they wanted to be doing (if it ever had). What I am left with are boxes and boxes of the largest scale maps that I could get. All with a pencil line drawn across them, with crosses, times and dates on it marking where we had stopped to take photographs. And then there are the boxes and boxes and boxes of the photos, none of them digital.
All of this for what? There was certainly no Richard Long type business model to exploit.
I used to dream that we would make it right the way around the globe. And after that had been done, we could Sellotape all the maps together and stick all the photos up on a wall, for people to look at. Dream on Bill.
I have used maps in other ways over these past few years, including the Silent Protest playing cards, but I now I try to keep my map urges under control. The Soup Line and the Cake Circles are about as far as I will let this map problem, take me. But I do hope they are both projects I will carry on doing as long as I’m physically able.
It would be too easy to put it down to nostalgia for those far off days in the late 50s, heading off into the Galloway hills with my father clutching his well-worn inch-to-the-mile.
But as the decades have taken their toll, I’ve sadly learnt that no other country has a mapping set up that can compete with what the OS does. At each step in the evolution of what they do, they never seem to put a foot wrong. Or at least for me the punter buying the maps, they don’t. The Ordnance Survey is up there with the BBC as one of the things we should be most proud of as a nation. And we have access to it all.
I’ve been buying OS maps for almost 40 years now, and like Depeche Mode, I just can’t enough. There is nothing else in life where my appetite for something has so consistently continued. Even my sexual desires have evolved and changed more than my desire to pick up and OS map in a shop, open it up and devour the minutia of information contained within it.
There is layer upon layer upon layer and then there are all the new layers that we can add to it. There are all the obvious and much discussed ones, the history, language evolution and physicality of the landscape that can be garnered from an OS map. But then there is all what we can add to it, be it simply marking on it the walks you have done in the area. Or, as I did when living in Buckinghamshire between 1983 and 2004, which was mark the spot of every wild Damson tree across mid Bucks’. But to explain what this was about would take too long now. All you need know is that the Damson is the greatest fruit to grow wild on these islands and that my own hand written cookery book is called Damsons In Distress.
A novel is an end in itself. There is very little you can add to a novel once you have read it. Whereas a map is always a starting point, where the unknown can begin to happen.
If Irvin Yalom was to answer this question, which theoretically he could as, as of now (12 April 2010) he is not yet dead; he might remind us that not only Death but Freedom, Meaning and Loneliness are also the great stokers of neurosis. But seeing as he is not here I will make the case myself.
Freedom, Meaning, Loneliness & Death are what lie behind all neurosis. They are also what lie behind all culture. At different stages in our life each of these four have more pull on us as individuals. When we are young Freedom is by far the most important. When we are young, as in childhood and adolescents, it may feel like we are going to live forever and death is just a tiny spec on the horizon, what drives us is that longing for individual Freedom. This is Freedom from family, teachers, the boss, the rulling classes, the political system, sexual constraints, history and religion. It is this urge towards individual Freedom that lies behind most of the art, politics, spirituality, neurosis’ and general culture made and stimulated by the young.
At times through history there would be outbursts of collective Freedom – the Israelites from Egypt, the Scots from the English, the slaves from the plantation owners, the proletariat from the bourgeois etc, etc, etc. The collective dream of Freedom and the sometime brief historical realisation of it have been part of the myths and religions of all peoples and cultures. With a bit of distance we can see this urge towards collective Freedom is needed as part of the checks and balances within the ongoing evolution of a healthy society. All of the great and successful religions have embraced this notion of occasional surges towards collective Freedom.
The urge towards individual Freedom that rages in the heart of children and adolescents is something else. This is something that had to be suppressed at almost all costs in all cultures and religions around the globe since history started. Culture was so structured so as to suppress it almost completely in children and as soon as they had passed puberty, to lock them up in the next stage of life where Meaning, Loneliness and Death were all looked after and managed. This urge towards individual Freedom was subconsciously viewed as threatening and destructive to the survival of collective society.
That was until the 1950s and then only in the west. In the 50s the case for individual Freedom began to get a foothold, and only then because the market place learnt that it could make a lot of money from exploiting our innate urge towards individual Freedom. It was this fast expanding global market place that was replacing religion, ideology and nationalism in the shaping and running of society and culture. It was in the interest of this new expanding market place, to extend that period of life where our urge towards individual Freedom could be exploited. It fanned the flames of this urge instead of suppressing it. Our lust to see, read, eat, wear or fuck what we wanted was only sanctioned because it was now the market place that governed our culture, made it tick and put bread on the table. And for us that live in such cultures (and I guess that means anybody who is reading this), we have a tendency to view all previous cultures before, where individual Freedom was not promoted as backward, oppressive and un-liberated. We have been totally seduced by the market place to view this urge towards individual Freedom as a morally good thing. In a couple of hundred years time we may look back at us know and wonder how we could have been so naïve. How could we have not known that individual Freedom would be the wrecker of society at all levels?
But back to the here and now, this extending the Freedom period of our life comes at a cost. To make room for more individual Freedom, the urge for Meaning as had to be suppressed. You would be hard pushed to find a brand or political manifesto that would use the word Meaning in their name, strap-line or mission statement, whereas the word Freedom is used with abandon all over the place.
We are living through a time where the market place is so reliant on our ever expanding appetite for individual Freedom, that all other forms of culture that did not or do not embrace this appetite are seen as barbaric and primitive.
Whether the market place likes it or not, as we get deeper into life, what we seek is Meaning. We no longer measure our success by the string of boyfriends we may have had or for that matter the birds we have pulled, but if we are able to establish a meaningful relationship with one individual. Meaning cannot be provided by a choice of unlimited TV channels, more isles in the super market, even further holiday destinations. Meaning requires commitment, and as much as we need Meaning, it is a hard thing to achieve after you have spent the first few decades of your life aspiring to more and more Freedom. To a large extent we have lost our capacity to find and then hold onto Meaning. And the market place does not help us, as it finds it hard to exploit our need for Meaning. They attempt to sort of offer it in exchange for brand loyalty. But they know that we know, that when push comes to shove we will always switch brands if the price is right.
One of the few rare areas that the market place has been able to exploit our need for Meaning is within football and the English Premiership League in particular. Supporting a football team gives an ersatz form of Meaning in your life by the spade full. The more commitment you give to one club the more Meaning you seem to get back. In the modern day childhood, young boys and girls are welcomed into this feeding frenzy of Meaning and the exploitation provided by commitment to one club. It does not take much to see that this childhood initiation by the market place is done for the same underlying reasons as religions did with Christenings, Barmitzvahs etc.
In our late teens and twenties when the urge towards individual Freedom is being given full reign, the Meaning given in exchange for commitment to a particular football team is less needed. But then at some point in our late 30s when the urge for Meaning in our lives can no longer be repressed and we have lost the capacity to have it in our relationships or religion we seek it again in commitment to a football team. The support of a football team binds us together and gives us a sense of common purpose. And it is so easy to do. And we like things to be easy.
The pursuit of wealth is another tempting shortcut to getting more Meaning into life. Wealth may give you more access to choice thus more individual Freedom, but it does not give you the Meaning that at a deeper level you need and want. Thus, for those that are seeking Meaning through the acquisition of wealth they can never get enough money.
This urge for Meaning in our lives has given human kind some of its greatest culture. Both stories and architecture are superb givers of Meaning to life. And it is where religion comes massively into its own. The success of any religion is largely dependent on the Meaning it can deliver to its followers. If its delivery of Meaning to a society, for whatever reason, begins to wane, that particular religion will start to die. This has been the case with all religions in the West. That is apart from the USA where the market place has allowed Christianity to evolve in a way that it can still deliver Meaning for its followers without challenging the controlling influence of the market.
If we were to cast our gaze over the past few hundred-thousand years, it is quite easy to see that the most reliable way of holding Meaning in your life is to be in a deep and lasting relationship; to have a family to nurture, provide, defend and care for; to have a valued position in your society, and this can be at any level within the society from ploughboy to a King, and off course a have a solid religious faith. You may have next to no Freedom, but with all that Meaning, your life will not be unfulfilled. Of course there is not much in a lot of this for the market place, so it will whisper in our ears the word Freedom over and over again, attempting to seduce us away from all of this Meaning. The neurosis that haunts most of us in our late thirties and forties is based on the lack of Meaning in our lives. There is one other thing that provides Meaning by the truck load – WAR.
Anyway enough of Freedom & Meaning and onto Loneliness: Loneliness is always with us, from cradle to grave it is our constant companion. We use all sorts of methods to try and keep Loneliness at bay. It creeps up on us when we are least expecting, when the party is in full swing, when things could be getting no better, there is Loneliness our only true companion. And without Loneliness there would be so much less culture. We read books, listen to music, watch TV, eat chocolate all in a huge part to keep Loneliness at bay. And of course religion in the past was a great bulwark against it. And today the market place is always there to offer us something new to ward of unwanted Loneliness. Thus, now we have Face Book, you need never let Loneliness into your life again.
And so to Death, that speck on the horizon. When does death start? As in, at what age do we learn the reality of life? As in, we all die. I guess it is a gradual thing. I am going to bring my experience of life directly into the answering of this question. I cannot remember a time when I did not know about Death. But to date I have had a pretty Death free life. My mother did not die in childbirth. None of my siblings died in infancy of smallpox. I did not get killed in the trenches. Nor did the mothers of my six children die in childbirth. None of my ex-partners have committed suicide – yet. None of those six children have died in gang knifings, joy riding accidents or drug overdoses. My mother is still alive. And my father only died last year but he was 96, a good innings by all counts, if not quite the century. That said I worked in the Death business for almost a year in my early 20s, dealing with the dying and the dead. I mean I know all there is to know about the laying out of a body (circa 1974).
I am not an anti religious person and not even unreligious myself, but the promise of the after life does not hold much store with me on a personal level. I have been lucky enough in my life to have as much Freedom and Meaning as one man can take. My work, family life and open attitude to religion at the same time my general cavalier attitude to this and that, have stood me in good stead. Loneliness can still come skulking in leaving the door open and an unwelcome cold draft to follow, but there is always the Internet and the voices on the radio or even this writing I am doing now, to ward Loneliness away.
But Death? There is no doubt that my own imminent Death is fast becoming my greatest motivator and inspiration. ‘Life is short and every day it is getting shorter’ is a cliché that I repeat to myself almost daily. It is what gets me up out of bed every morning with a new relish and spring in my arthritic step. So much to get done before the curtain comes down. And there are no encores. No second house. No after show party! This is it. And this is what I will be judged on. And to swiftly change analogies, I am now on the home strait, it is time to start sprinting or the race will be lost.
Since turning 50 I have begun to feel the changes in my body. A passing short skirt or glimpse of cleavage may still set the pulse racing but it has been some time since I have had the need to spill my seed five times in one night. My body is beginning to fall to bits. The aches and pains are not just there after a long and hard day pushing pencil across the open page but still with me when I wake rested the following morning. And the aforementioned arthritis is a constant in my left knee.
So to now try and return to the question that was posed. I hope I have been able to give good witness as to why Freedom, Meaning & Loneliness are as much the architects of neurosis as is the terror of Death. And no, not all human culture is merely an attempt to nail this trapdoor shut. Freedom, Meaning & Loneliness all have there equal part to play in the some total of human culture. But I admit Death may be the greatest motivator in my work from now until that trapdoor opens and I drop.
Well I have used up the bulk of my word count in responding to the first question. I guess I could have written a few thousand more words on that particular topic. But anyway on to the subject of Diana and her death: The death of Elvis and John Lennon are the only two other deaths that I know exactly where I was when I heard the news. With the death of Diana I was in a cottage on the Sussex coast with my then partner.
I am unable to give a detached overview answer to this question. The reason being was that I too was somehow swept up in it all. We had heard about the accident late the night before, but at that point it was reported that she was only seriously injured. Then at about six in the morning my would-be mother-in-law burst into our room telling us that Diana was dead. I immediately felt that this was going to be a massive thing. We spent most of the day driving aimlessly around country lanes wondering what was going to happen, how is the nation going to cope with this. The People’s Princess is dead long live the… But the trouble was there was no other People’s Princess to do the replacing. On a personal level I responded to these unfocused emotions in me by writing a song for one of the then fantasy bands that existed inside my head. This fantasy band were a punk rock group from Finland called The Fuckers, the song that I wrote for them was called One Less Slag.
Whatever Diana symbolised to the nation, I am not the person to answer that question, I am sure a few million words have been written about that already by people far more qualified than me. What I do know is that through the 20th-century we have more and more relied on getting our emotional highs and lows vicariously. We would always rather watch somebody do the real thing than do it ourselves. Spectator sport, Hollywood, television, computer games etc are all about providing us with vicarious emotions without us having to do anything but sit and watch (or press a few buttons). This has made it a lot harder to deal with real emotions.
Our relationship with Diana was a vicarious one, as was our response to her death. Our national psyche was far more practised at dealing with her death than some one genuinely close to us. On a personal level, I am far more likely to cry at the death of Bambi’s mother than the death of my own mother. This is fucked up, but it is where we are at. I can take personal responsibility for my own emotional shortcomings in this, but if I detach myself from those, I can see that the market place has had a hand at steering things this way. The market place can make far greater a profit from us experiencing our emotional highs and lows from providing them for us in bite size vicarious forms.
My guess is that the ‘uprising of public grief around the death of Diana’ was not a ‘genuine shift towards a more honest, vulnerable national psyche’. I think it said something sick about this vicarious world that we are currently living in. The derided stiff upper lip of previous generations may be understandably mocked, but maybe our forebears experienced the emotional highs and lows of life in a far more genuine way and they also learnt how to deal with them.
Like most of the things that Timothy Leary had to say, we should also ignore anything he had to say about the afterlife. Leary was a charlatan driven by his own rampant ego. There is no place for aristocracies in our society today, thus anytime I have been party to rock stars willingly accepting a role in some new version of the aristocracy, it makes me want to through a brick through a window or at least my toys out of the pram. From all my readings on Timothy Leary he seemed to be a man, for all his intelligence, and for all the shit he went through on a personal level, as someone who wanted to revel in his position within the aristocracy of the alternative world. His pedestal never seemed high enough, for his own liking.
But hey, enough of my own prejudices: Just accept, you are going to die and learn how to deal with it. As for afterlives, religious or the promises made by those peddling cryogenics, I find neither tempting. Maybe if I had a partner or child die, the afterlife promised by religion would be a great comforter. As for cryogenics, is seems to me like just another way for the market place to try and edge its way into making big bucks from the allusion that death can be cheated.
But maybe the question is referring to the second life that the Internet can now offer you as an avatar. I have no interest in anything that is not real. And you know what I mean by real.
I am going to take the opportunity to indulge in a bit of flippancy here. My perfect death would be for Jimmy Cauty and I to announce a performance. There would be no indication in the media as to what sort of performance it was to be. And cometh the hour we walk onto the stage. Open a case of duelling pistols. Taking a mother-of-pearl handled revolver each. Face the audience. Put the respective guns to our respective heads and on the count of three, blow our brains out. The perfect end to a not quite perfect career. It would grantee us three score years and ten of afterlife infamy, that’s if we were lucky.
And look who is despairing now. Ozymandias is writhing in his tomb with jealousy, if only he had thought this to be one of his works.
In question 36 The City a Stockholm based newspaper asked a very similar question. Use what you like from that answer. So as you do not need to refer back to it here is the question followed by my answer:
36: About your ancient conflict with ABBA. How did that story really end – is it true that you went to Sweden and tried to find Agnetha or is that just a myth?
In early summer of 1987 Jimmy Cauty and I, released our album 1987 – What The Fuck Is Going On? It gained instant infamy status due to our wholesale use of sampling. None of which we had sought to get permission. We were artist and artist have the rite to use what ever they can lay their hands on to make their art – was our rational. One of the tracks used whole chunks of one of the greatest pop records ever made, Dancing Queen by ABBA.
ABBA’s publishers took exception to this and requested that we destroy all copies of our album immediately, or they would take legal action against us. Jimmy and I thought we should sit down with Benny and Bjorn and have a discussion artist to artist. Our argument was - what we had done was no different to what they had done a decade or so earlier by borrowing the chord structures and language of pop, from America and the UK. It is how music evolves and artists have always worked. It just so happens that we now had the technology to sample direct. Benny and Bjorn did not respond to our FAXs or return our phone calls so we decided to drive to Sweden in our ancient American cop car and meet them there. We got the ferry across the North Sea, landed at Gothenberg/Göteborg and headed east. We got to Stockholm around midnight. We found Polar Studios where ABBA had recorded many of their greatest works. But Benny and Bjorn were not at work; in fact the place was locked up. We had brought with us a gold disc of our 1987 album. We wanted to present to them
In the street outside Polar Studios was a blonde prostitute. We rather shamefully decided to pretend that she was Agnetha fallen on hard times. We came to a small financial arrangement with the “Agnetha” and presented her with the gold album. Then we started the drive back to Göteborg. As dawn broke we pulled up into a field. In the boot of the cop car we had all the remaining copies of 1987. The plan had been that we were going to give them to Benny and Bjorn. But seeing as that plan had been thwarted we made a pile of the records in the field and set light to them. A photo of these burning albums was used on the cover of our next album.
We then continued on our journey home. The only trouble was that the cop car broke down before we got to Göteborg, thus we had to be towed all the way home. Karma of sorts for our arrogance.
It was for neither them being high profile or for pure, personal amusement. The reasons they were picked were far more prosaic. In 1987 we did not have the digital technology where you could either change the speed of a track without changing its pitch or change the pitch of a track without changing its speed. This restricted what tunes you could use to collage (or ‘mash-up’ to use modern parlance) with each other. To collage two tracks together successfully they had to be both exactly the same pitch and BPM (beats per minute).
I went through the whole of my record collection working out and noting down what key and BPM every track was. I used my piano as a reference to what keys the tracks were in and the second-hand on my kitchen clock to work out the BPM. I then cross-referenced all the tracks to find which ones were in the same key and had the same BPM. Only those could be used. This cleared out the vast majority of the tracks that I had in my collection.
We wanted to attempt to make an album that in someway would be a British response to what Hip-Hop artist were doing in the States. We did not want mimic American Hip-Hop album, we could have only failed. British musician always fail when attempting to carbon copy American music. We have only ever succeeded artistically when we allow our British sensibilities to have their way and we only use American music as a thing to react to.
That said, we knew that these American Hip-Hop records only worked within certain BPMs. At the time this was roughly between 90 and 110 beats per minute. Any faster or any slower and the raps did not work and the rhymes fell apart. This was pretty slow by today’s standards. But all those Run DMC tracks never got about 110.
Thus, in my notebook all the tracks that were slower than 90 BPM or faster than 110 BPM got crossed out. What was left is what we use.
This process of elimination using the second hand of the kitchen clock took longer than the album took to record. Making any sort of record that works is 99% craft and hard graft. But it is the remaining 1% that can turn it into a thing of wonder. People might not want to read about the craft that goes into making a record preferring to hear about the anecdotes of wild abandon and sticking two fingers up to everything and anything.
But… Anyway onto the next question, before I bore you with the whole musoishness of it all.
I just wished it had been a massive bonfire – hundreds of thousands of our records all going up in flames. Instead we just had a couple of boxes with us and even then some of them we forgot about. We didn’t discover that last box until we were back on the North Sea on the ferry home. We had to throw them of the back. Burial at sea is never as good as proper funeral pyre. The Vikings had the right idea by combining the both.
Mind you the trouble with fires you always want them to be bigger. So even if we had got the hundreds of thousands, I would have wanted it to be millions and billions. Like bonfire night when I was a kid – never big enough – and every year I would promise myself we would build a bigger one next year.
When Jimmy Cauty and I were doing the K Foundation, Jimmy did some brilliant drawings of a huge art burning, that was to happen in the middle of London, where all the old art and all the Brit Art and all the other art, could be brought out the galleries and museums to be thrown on the fire.
Since I first read about it as a teenager, I have been a fan of Girolamo Savonarola’s 1497 falò delle vanità (bonfire of vanities) in Florence. Nothing beats a good burning, be it books, vanities, witches, or just boring old vinyl records. When I was 12 I watched a church burn down, it was epic.
Yep, nothing like a fire guarantees complete purity. The trouble is you get up the next morning and the purification process starts all over again.
When I first read this question this morning, I did not know what the fuck was being referred to. I could remember nothing about a Fall track remaining on the Edits version of the album, or even that we had used a Fall track in the first place.
I have never had any personal contact with Mark E. Smith. Used to love the attitude for all those wrong reasons, and the first half dozen singles, including Totally Wired were brilliant. But for me it wore a bit thin by the time he started to turn into for real bitter and twisted old codger he had spent those early years feigning to be. As I said, I have never met the man in person and there is nothing worse than us having opinions about people we have only met via the media.
My ex-partner reckoned he had a great arse, but I do not think this had any influence on the track staying on the Edits version of 1987.
It was over my lunch (a tin of pilchards on toast) that I remembered what the answer was. Totally Wired had been released on Rough Trade records back in 1980 or something. I went and asked Geoff Travis if we could use a sample from Totally Wired and he said ‘Yeah’. Rough Trade were going to be distributing our record. We never thought about even attempting to get permission for any of the other tracks. Nobody would have been interested anyway. Nowadays I understand there is a whole section of the industry based on dealing with the ‘clearance’ of samples. Back then they would have just said no.
I Put A Spell On You as performed by Creedence Clearwater Revival
Who Knows Where The Time Goes by Fairport Convention
Wild Mountain Thyme as performed by The Dubliners
Harlem Shuffle by Bob & Earl
$20,000 is not a critique of the modern art world. It is an exploration of my relationship with what we in the west called art in the closing decade of last century and the opening decade of this century. Or at least that part of Western art that falls under the vague definition of visual contemporary art. Art has been a huge all encompassing part of my life every since I went to art school at the age of 17 in September 1970. That is 40 years that these internal arguments have been going on in me. And over those decades I have gone from trying to remove every stain of it from being to accepting that is the only thing that matters in my life, the only thing that I get up for in the morning, the only thing that I think about for any length of time. It is a force of nature in me as much as my need to fuck and eat. The fact that I was never that good at painting and drawing, even though for a time in my late teens, that is what I thought I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to has maybe, in the long run been a good thing for me. Maybe if I had been good at painting and drawing I would have felt the pressure, externally and internally, to carry on ploughing that furrow. The fact that it turned out that I was never much good at any one particular craft, be that a musician, writer, conceiver or visual communicator, has freed me up to be an artist in another way. This other way is far less definable and at times has made me doubt its value. What I have never doubted is my need to carry on doing it, in whatever way that I can.
As for music – I have never felt myself as being a musician or even somebody who was in the music business. My musical skills are pretty much on parr with my drawing abilities – I know how to pick up a guitar and strum some chords and put a song together, but so could 50% of teenage lads of my generation. As a teenager I never dreamt of being a rock star. I knew enough on the guitar and keyboard to be able to work out how I wanted the song that I/we were working on to go that was enough for me. I have the type of mind that can dissect any pop record (whatever the genre) and work out why it works, how it could work better and what all the component parts are attempting to do.
As an artist, I used the music business as my canvas. This was in the various roles that I played in it. Be it, as a guitarist in Big In Japan, the manager and part time producer of Echo & The Bunnymen and as one half of The KLF (and all its off shoots).
Although I now have very little interest in recorded music and see it as a dying art form left over from the 20th-century, my interest in music will never die. This has obviously led to what I have been exploring with The17. For me removing the idea of music being something that is experienced through the recorded medium, has freed the possibilities up for me to re-engage with it in a completely different way.
Neither the art world nor the music industry riles me in any huge way. On the whole I have just ignored them and got on with what I want to be doing. And at times I have used the art world and the music industry as part of the canvas. My sleepless nights have never been caused by my thoughts about the art world or the music business.
In the new edition of the How To Be An Artist – now entitled $20,000 – I write about how Richard Long came along to one of my early performance of it in the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol. I think he assumed, before witnessing the performance, that I was using the whole thing to have a go at him and or the art world and understandably he felt very defensive. From watching the show he learnt that I was a big fan of his work and that me wanting to cut up a work of his, that I had bought for $20,000 into 20,000 fractions and sell them off at a dollar a time, was about something else altogether.
At the end of 2005 I decided to take a break from exhibiting and performing How To Be An Artist. I had been doing it for three years strait and I did not want it to go stale. I also wanted to make time to explore what The17 could be. At the time of taking my extended sabbatical from How To Be An Artist I had only sold off just under 10,000 of the fractions, thus I still have over half way to go before I will be heading off to Iceland with 20,000 dollar bills in my backpack. I am committed to be doing The17 up until the 28 April 2013. On the 29 April 2013, I turn 60. The plan then is to get back to selling off all the reaming fractions of the Richard Long work and then heading off to Iceland and get the job done before I get too much older. Already I can feel that my knee joints are beginning to give out, so I better not take too long about it.
As for the Icelandic financial situation - I guess they will have that all under control by the time I get there. And anyway, where I will be burying the money is in the middle of now where, I guess only Richard Long and I will know where the money is buried.
This is my favourite of your four questions. I get very little pleasure out of the craft of putting words together. For me it is always a struggle. I have to give myself word count goals to get the writing done. So many words and I will reward myself with a cup of tea or click on Send & Receive to see if I have any emails.
When I was 19 and was in the throws of jacking in painting and leaving art school, I imagined I was going to dedicate my life to writing. I thought all I had to do was experience as much as life had to offer and then write about it. The thing is although I must have written millions of words over the past 40 years and had numerous books published, I have never thought of myself as a writer. This is in the same way, as I never thought of myself as a musician even though I made and played on loads of records. I am very aware that I have always approached writing and the making of music as someone who was very influenced by what happened to them and what they learnt in those three years that I was at art school.
It was not reading novels that made me want to write; it was reading Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller. The lives they led were the art works, what they wrote was just the documentation. Actually that is a gross simplification of what they did. They used the writing to explore what was happening in their lives. To get a better understanding of the times and the places they were living in. For me that has always been what I have used writing for.
As for approaching books conceptually – I guess I am guilty of this. It is not that I set out to write a book and know exactly what it is that I want to say before starting to write it. For me the writing is always an exploration of an idea. Often I am not that sure of what the idea is before I start to explore it.
But I would be lying if I did not admit to you that I know the basic outline of all the other books that I would like to get written before I die. On my shelf there is a row of Black n’ Red ruled notebooks, with only blank pages inside. But on each of them is the title of one of these books that I would like to get written. If that is not tempting fete I do not know what is.
Post Script: Something that may seem to contradict much of what I have said above is – I believe most of what I have done using the written word or music or visual art is down to the time and energy that I have put into the craft of it. Of attempting to get every little bit just right.
Post Post Script: Now that I have responded to the above four questions, if not answered them fully, I have just re-read the original four questions, the ones that I was so snooty about yesterday. The thing is, I feel totally different about them today. If I had read them today for the first time, I would have just answered them without all that ‘could have been asked these 20 years ago bollocks. In fact I am a bit disappointed that I did not write answers to them. Now I will never get my chance to write about the Big In Japan petition and just for the record I did sigh it.
From when The Zoo started in the second half of 1978 until after the first Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen albums were released in 1980, David Balfe and I chose and booked all the studios that were used by us and the bands, with a couple of exceptions. The first studio that we worked in was a four-track above the Open Eye Gallery in the MVCU, Liverpool, this was run by Noddy Knowler and it is where Big In Japan had recorded some of our later tracks that were included on Y to Z and Never Again EP that was our first release on The Zoo. It is also where we recorded Sleeping Gas by The Teardrop Explodes and a couple of other songs. For Echo & The Bunnymen’s first single we tried out a place called August Studio, which was next to the dole office off Renshaw Street. This was a step up for us as it was an eight-track. It was also the first time that we recorded at night and had all the lights dimmed as we got on with the job in hand.
We were aware that there were these studios out on an industrial estate in Kirkby called Amazon. We did Bouncing Babies the second Teardrop Explodes single there. That was in their eight-track studio. They also had a 24-track studio, David Balfe and I were shown this, it seemed like another world, we had never seen a 24-track desk before. To us it looked like something from the Starship Enterprise. When Dave and I decided to make our first Lori & The Chameleons record we pooled all our funds and booked a day in Amazon’s 24 track to make Touch.
The Teardrop Explodes third single was going to be a song called Treason. We asked Clive Langer to produce it. Clive had been the guitarist with the Liverpool band Deaf School but he had moved back to London and was now forging a career as a producer. He chose to use a studio in Fulham, London called TW. This was a studio that Big In Japan had recorded some track in late ’77.
David Balfe and I signed Echo & The Bunnymen to Sire Records in 1979. The first two tracks that they recorded for Sire were to be produced by Ian Broudie, who had been the other guitarist with me, in Big In Japan. Broudie is and was and is a brilliant musician and arranger. He had recently formed a band called The Original Mirrors with Steve Allan. Steve as Enrico Cadillac had been the front man of Deaf School. Although both Ian and Steve were Liverpudlians they moved to London in an effort to make The Original Mirrors break through. Ian chose a studio in London to work with the Bunnymen. I cannot remember what the studio was; it could have been TW again.
It was then decided that Balfe and I should produce the Bunnymen’s debut album, but the record company wanted us to demo all the songs first. Balfe had very clear ideas about how the dynamics of each of the songs should work. We spent weeks rehearsing and arranging the songs with the Bunnymen in Yorkie’s basement. Yorkie, being another one of the numerous would be musicians on the then Liverpool scene, but back then he was only about 17. Yorkie lived in a large rambling house with his mum Gladys Palmer. Gladys had been a singer in the Liverpool clubs. The house had a basement; Yorkie and Gladys let the Teardrops and the Bunnymen use it for rehearsals. Gladys used to bring mugs of tea and biscuits on a tray down for us. She was a great supporter of both the Bunnymen and the Teardrops; she would come to many of the bands gigs. Yorkie would later be the bass and keyboard player with Liverpool band Space, who had success in the mid 90s.
Someone had told us about this studio called Cargo over in Rochdale. This was deep into woolly back land as far as folk from Liverpool were concerned. Not the sort of place that Liverpudlians would feel comfortable going to. It could have been Tony Wilson from Factory, who I would talk to on the phone on numerous occasions, who recommended Cargo. Or it could have been Andy McCluskey from Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, who was a friend of Balfe’s from over the water (The Wirral). Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had recently signed to Factory Records and I think had done some recording at Cargo. We learnt that Cargo was a 16-track studio, we could not afford to go 24 tracks for the demos but we wanted something better than the eight track studios available in Liverpool. So that is why Cargo was chosen.
We spent a few days over at Cargo sometime in 1979, recording all the songs that were to be later recorded for the Bunnymen’s Crocodiles album. We would drive over and back each day in Les Pattinson’s mini bus. It was during these sessions that I began to think that the Bunnymen had something special. We later went onto record all the songs again in Rockfield Studios near Monmouth in South Wales. What we had recorded in two or three nights we spent a month recording in Rockfield’s internationally acclaimed 24 track studios.
Although Crocodiles went on to be both a critically and commercially successful album, setting the Bunnymen up to be one of the great bands of the first half of the 1980s, I always harboured a dark suspicion. This dark suspicion was that what we had recorded with the Bunnymen in Cargo was by far and away superior to what we had done with them in Rockfield. What we did in Rockfield sounded cold and calculated compared to the wall of sound that we recorded in Cargo. The thing is I never dared to listen to the Cargo recordings again. I did not want to confront the fact that we may have made some terrible mistake that could never be undone. My memory of those Cargo recordings was that they had a depth and urgency, a howl of despair and a sense that everything had to be done before the world ended at the break of day.
Tony Wilson would harangue me on the phone, to not sign the Bunnymen or the Teardrops to major labels down in London. He insisted that we could do everything those bastards could do but better. And that we should stick together, maybe not go into a Zoo/Factory partnership but form some sort of Liverpool Manchester alliance. My retort to Tony was that, it was ok for him to take the moral high ground ’cause he had a well paid day job as a presenter on Granada TV, whereas we were all on the dole.
Tony was also Oxbridge educated; he had a swagger and a confidence that you could never get from a Secondary Modern, or even from my three failed years at art school. As much as David Balfe and I had dreams of what we wanted Zoo to be, we knew we were going to need them financed. Tony would tell me that those cunts in London were just moneylenders anyway, and the rates that they were lending at, were far in excess of what you could get at the Nat West. I had no knowledge about going into a bank and presenting them with a business plan and acting cocky and getting a loan to front the costs of making an album.
Much of my inspiration for wanting to have a record label did not come from the punk ethos of ’77 but from the R&B singles that I had been buying in the early 70s. All of these seemed to be on different labels that I had never heard of. And all of them had interesting if crude looking label artwork. I loved them.
But once Balfe and I started to put records out ourselves, we became part of this whole burgeoning network of independent record labels around the country. At the time there was no proper national distribution for independent records. This meant that Balfe and I would get in the car he had inherited from his dad (The Balfemobile) and drive around the country to different record shops, trying to persuade them to buy a box of Pictures On My Wall by the Bunnymen or whatever. From this we learnt that a number of the other then independent labels were ran as offshoots from record shops, like Small Wonder in Walthamstow, Rough Trade in Notting Hill and Beggar’s Banquet in west London. This meant they already had a basic coal face understanding of how the music industry worked. Also some of the other labels were being run by local business men who knew about VAT and bookkeeping and the keeping bank managers sweet and all that stuff. We knew fuck all about any of this, we just wanted to make the best records we could and turn our bands into great bands and do exciting things that had never been done before and make art and films and pyramids and shag girls. Or something like that.
I do not think we had these huge puritan ideals just huge dreams of what could be created if no one tried to stop us. The trouble is the dole cheque never stretched far enough to allow us to finance anything more than a few seven-inch singles, before we had to sign both the Teardrops and the Bunnymen to major labels down in London.
And from then on that particular dream was over and I had to get on with trying to be a manager and use the Bunnymen as my secret canvas.
A lot of what I learnt in the late 70s and early 80s came in very handy when Jimmy Cauty and I were doing our own record label for The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and the myriad of offshoots. It also stood Dave Balfe in good stead for when he launched Food Records.
As for them having a limited life span, so many of those labels like Factory in Manchester, Fast in Edinburgh, Good Vibrations in Belfast and Post Card in Glasgow were of their time and that’s maybe how it should be. Better that, than them being around today making records for middle aged, 40-something Mojo readers, harking back to the days when music was real and the NME meant something and how Iggy Pop should be shot for doing an advert for an insurance company and… Well anyway.
This is a very simple question for me to answer. And before answering it I will say it was the one record on Zoo that I had nothing whatsoever to do with other than putting it out. It is Revolutionary Spirit by The Wild Swans. The record was also the last record that we ever released. We agreed to do it more as a favour to Pete De Freitas, than us thinking The Wild Swans may do something interesting or they may be the next big thing out of Liverpool. In fact I had no fucking idea what they were going to sound like until the recording had already been done.
The Wild Swans were fronted by Paul Simpson. Paul had been the keyboard player with The Teardrop Explodes but although I liked him as a person and thought he had great ideas and an even better haircut, he was a shit musician. On the original version of Sleeping Gas by the Teardrops that was released as a single of Zoo in ’79, he can be heard going completely out of time with the rest of the track. My memory was that he could only play the keyboards with two fingers anyway. And then a couple of days before the Teardrops were about to start their first national tour supporting Patrick Fitzgerald, Simpson decided to quit the band on artistic grounds. This was a massive deal for us, major national exposure and Simpson can’t be arsed to do it because of… Anyway Dave Balfe had to deputise for him, he learnt all the parts in ten minutes and did the tour. After the tour we got this bloke called Ged Quinn, who could play the piano properly using all his fingers to be the bands full time keyboard player. Some time later Ged Quinn got forced out by Balfe so that Balfe could once again be the keyboard player and gets to shag all the girls, or something like that.
So when I heard that Paul Simpson and Ged Quinn had got together to form this band called The Wild Swans, I thought nothing of it. One instinctively knew that Paul had talent, and it was not for just having the best haircut on Merseyside, maybe he was a writer or a poet or something but definitely not a musician. And anyway it was all too late. Whatever that Liverpool scene we had all been part of (and that we had all denied it had ever existed while it was happening) was well and truly over by 1982, when Pete De Freitas told me he was going to go in the studio to record a couple of tracks with Simpson’s band. It was Pete’s money, that was going to pay for the studio time, so who was I to argue. Pete was also going to be playing drums on the tracks, as The Wild Swans did not have a permanent drummer.
Nothing could have prepared me for what Pete De Freitas played me a couple of weeks later. It pissed all over everything that the Bunnymen and the Teardrops released. Both tracks rushed and soared and careered over mountains and across the sea and through the clouds. They were big and beautiful the way the best music should always be. You thought Joy Division reached new depths in the soul of the northern young man with poetry in his heart and suicide on his mind, well those Mancs were going to be the mere John the Baptists compared to the real deal that was to be The Wild Swans. This had the depth of Blake’s words and the sweep of Turner’s skies. It had the grounding of Wordsworth, Shelley and Coleridge and the glorious pretensions of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. And all of this with chord changes and melodies and a fantastic unstoppable beat.
Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode could all fuckin’ piss off now back to their soft southern housing estates. As for U2, just get out of the way. Nothing is going to stop this revolutionary spirit from spreading out across the land and over the seas. This was why we were doing what we were doing. This justified all the fuck ups and compromises and near misses. This will show those cunts, whoever they are and wherever they are hiding.
But almost before the record was released, Simpson decides that artistically things are not right and he wants to go in a different direction so he splits the band. Paul is still one of the great artists from that generation to come out of Liverpool. But The Wild Swans could have been so much more than this single and their various reformations. That said I would not be surprised if one day they were to return taking all before them and grabbing the their rightful crown.
That about says it all then.
When I bought A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by Richard Long in 1995 for $20,000, I was as pleased as a man can be. Nowhere in the world on that particular day could there have been a $20,000 better spent. I, Bill Drummond owned a work of art by my all time favourite living artist. This I knew was to be a once in a lifetime thing. Even if funds were allowing, I was not about to embark on a career as an art collector. Once I got it home and unwrapped it from the brown paper (tied up with string), I hung it on the wall of my bedroom. This was something I didn’t want to share with anybody who came around to the house. This was going to be a private affair. And it was.
Richard Long makes work by walking and sometimes doing things on these walks. If things have to be genre-fied then the work of Richard Long gets called land art. This A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind was defined on the back of the frame as a ‘Photography and Text work’. The photography element to the work was of a stone circle that Richard Long had built at a point on a walk that he had done from the top of Iceland to the bottom. A walk that I had attempted to do with my sister, back in 1970 and failed. The text element to the work was the title and some other words that Long had written, in pencil, on the mounting card. Thus, this was not just a photograph, it was a one off and it had been touched by the hand of the artist.
It was in late ’97 that I started to become aware something was amiss. Each morning I’d wake up and look out the window at the view across the Vale of Aylesbury. Whatever the season, whatever the weather, I never tired of this view. It never failed to make me feel part of creation and fill me with gratitude for being alive. The trouble was, by then I hardly ever took any notice of A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by my all time favourite living artist. What had cost me $20,000 could not compete with the view from my window that cost me nothing. It was as if I had just squandered the money on sod all. I mean what had I got for my $20,000? There was nothing on the receipt that I had kept, guaranteeing me any sort of satisfaction. If you had spent that much on a washing machine, there would be all sorts of guarantees.
These thoughts were not shared with even my nearest and dearest. I did not want to look like a total mug. There is a lot else a young family could think of spending the money on, one of those garden trampolines for a start, or maybe a climbing frame. And of course there is always the holiday of a lifetime.
It was in January ’98 that I came to the decision to sell the work for the $20,000 I had paid for it. Then go back to Iceland; start walking across the island from the top to the bottom; bury the 20,000 one dollar bills in the middle of whatever remained of Richard Long’s stone circle; take a photo of the now enriched stone circle; complete the walk across the island; return back home; develop the photograph; have it printed and mounted and framed in an identical way to the Richard Long; entitle the new work A Smell of Money Underground and hang it on my wall. All of this in the hope that my relationship with the work would be re-invigorated and I would start to get my $20,000 worth of whatever it is you are supposed to get from art. But I did not act fast enough on the impulse. I let things drift.
It was a couple of years after this, in the early hours of 14 August 2001, to be precise; that what happened that could not be un-happened, happened. And I climbed out of my bed; lifted the Richard Long from the wall; took it down stairs to the kitchen; put it on the table; got my tools and started to take the frame apart. What I was hoping to find I am not that sure of, but what ever it was I could not find it. Hang on a minute; I know exactly what I was looking for. What I was looking for was the art - the $20,000 worth of art. Where was it hiding? What did it smell like? I wanted to touch it, even taste it. But all I found was some mounting card with writing on it, a sheet of used photography paper, some bits of wood that had been made into a frame, and some Perspex. What had I actually bought? Certainly not the stone circle or even the walk across Iceland. I could not eat this stuff, or wear it, or fuck it. The only real worth it maybe had was as fuel, it I put it on a fire it could probably keep me warm for a few minutes and that was about it.
It was there and then that I came to the conclusion that I should grid the whole thing up. I divided its across width into 100 equal measures and then down the side into 200 equal measures and then started to grid it up. It took me a couple of hours to get the gridding done. And once it was done, there were twenty thousand small rectangles drawn on the work, each measuring 11.2 mm by 4.05 mm. The plan being that I would sell off each of these fractions at a dollar a time. Every time I had a buyer they would pay me $1 and I would cut a bit out for them and we would shake hands on the deal.
On that night, there were a number of things that I had not taken into consideration. The first and foremost being, it was going to take a long time to find 20,000 different people who may want to buy one of these bits, before I could have my $20,000 in one dollar bills and head back to Iceland. As far as my family were concerned, they knew I had destroyed a ‘work of art’ that the day before had a market value of considerably more than the $20,000 I had originally paid for it, but today was now valueless.
So now to the crux of the question - I felt no guilt towards the work of art or even Richard Long. I knew what I had destroyed was only a print and a bit of handwriting. If Richard Long had wanted to, seeing as he still owned the negative, he could always print up another photograph, mount it in exactly the same way and put the same text on it. There was no art in what I had bought, it may have been a lot of other things and maybe it said a lot about the business model used to finance the making of art and the vanities of the people who want to buy art. No, the art existed in the walk that Richard Long had done and in the stone circle he had built and in the idea of what he was doing. The fact that this was a limited edition of only one did not make it any more of a work of art. But as soon as I started to grid it up and then start the whole process of selling it off one bit at a time, it became for me something that I had a far stronger relationship with than any piece of art that I could buy. It released something in me. It gave me permission. And over these eight years and counting that I have been selling the bits off, it has become the greatest work of art that I am ever likely to own. Even on a purely aesthetic level it looks more beautiful, challenging and real than it could have ever been before. It’s as if I have taken the pin out of the butterfly collector’s prized specimen and it has now taken flight. To never be caught in the butterfly collector’s net again,
Post Script: Distrust those bearing analogies. They hardly ever stand up to close scrutiny.
I have always distrusted ‘aura’, be that of a political leader, movie star, rock legend, sporting hero or work of art. The ‘aura’ is always a lie. By lending something ‘aura’ we give something of ourselves away leaving ourselves open to exploitation and servitude.
As a specious, we evolved the idea of ‘aura’ for the sake of our survival. By giving ‘aura’ to a chosen individual who we could gather around and he would be our chief, would help bind our extended family, clan or tribe together, meant our chance of survival was better. And society evolved by us lending this ‘aura’ not only to the strong charismatic man who should defend our small tribe, but also to objects and concepts, thus religion grew. And as the age of mechanical reproduction started to gather a pace in the early years of the 20th-century, business models evolved where our need to lend ‘aura’ to mere individual could be exploited, thus the movie stars, rock gods, sporting heroes, Picasso and all the rest.
Thus through the 20th-century much of our need to lend ‘aura’ to warriors, kings & Queens, religions has been transferred onto ‘stars’ (sporting, music, film, art etc) and latterly brands. Our need to lend ‘aura’ is one of our greatest weakness as a specious, but it is so deeply ingrained (like wanking) we may never be able to grow out of it.
So now that I have got that rant out of the way, I can start to focus on the actual question. The ‘aura’ that you refer to that we lend an ‘original’ work of art is something that has only fully developed in the age of reproduction. We will probably have seen Munch’s Scream or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers a thousand times before we are likely to see the dimly lit, highly protected original. It is all those reproductions that allowed the original its ‘aura’. Same goes for the artist super stars of the 20th-century. It was the photographs and the written stories about Picasso, Dali & Warhol as much as the actual work that ordained them with ‘aura’.
Before the age or reproduction, an artist was no more than a craftsman. Maybe a highly regarded craftsman, but a craftsman all the same. With the age of reproduction both the work of art and the artists himself (very few herselfs) could be anointed with ‘aura’ and become stars.
If because of certain mechanical developments, it becomes harder for us to lend ‘aura’ to an art object, we will certainly find other ways to do it. And if we don’t those in the business of developing new business models will certainly do it for us. Because real human beings have a tendency to fuck up and age, those in charge of the business models have learnt that they are better of promoting brands that we can do the lend of ‘aura’ to. Brands like gods and the Simpson’s do not need to age, just be made over ever so often.
As much as I have attempted to batter this need to lend ‘aura’ out of myself, I seem to keep persisting to fail.
Post Script: What I have understood to be the definition of the word ‘aura’ as used in the question may be different to the person who set the question. If that is the case then all I have written may be irrelevant. And seeing as I have just made it all up off the top of my head it may not matter one-way or the other.
Post Post Script: Your task for the week is to come up with a wholly new meaning to the word ‘aura’.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin
Süddeutsche Zeitung is the largest selling German national subscription newspaper. The following four questions were asked by Thomas Bärnthaler for an end of year article published in the magazine section of the paper on 31 December 2009. http://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/texte/anzeigen/32031
Love is Eternal - Money is Worthless
Ana “Hyaena Reich” Cordeiro Reis is a Portugese composer who is doing a thesis on The KLF entitled Love is Eternal – Money is Worthless. To this end she requested an interview with Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond. She posed eight questions, it was agreed that Cauty and Drummond would randomly select four of these questions each. Drummond responded to these questions on 31 December 2009.
The Times: 30 years of the Brit Awards
Journalist Craig McLean was writing a feature for The Times (London) about to coincide with the up and coming Brit Awards. The feature was to focus on the Brits 30 year history and include quotes from various people who had been involved at key moments in that history. McLean was keen for Drummond to have an input in this feature and agreed to pose him four questions, but with the remit that the combined word count of his answer be little more than 300 words.
DAGBLADET
Dagbladet is a Norwegian mass circulation daily newspaper. The following four questions were asked by journalist Simen V. Gonsholt. The questions and the answers given were to form part of a feature that he was doing on Bill Drummond. The feature was published on the 19 February 2010, to tie in with a performance/lecture Drummond was giving at the 2010 by:Larm festival in Oslo, Norway. Drummond’s remit was that his answer would be no more than 3,000 characters.
KERRY & KEVIN
In late December 2009, Bill Drummond received an envelope in the post. Inside the envelope was a card. On one side of the card was printed the words SAY YES, big and bold. And on the other there was some text. The text was written in a mild form of art-speak. This is some of it:
This project started in December 2009 with the intention of combining different processes and opinions in response to the issue of social inclusion. For example: how do people experience inclusion and exclusion on a social, everyday level; what are the social consequences of inclusion; how can we make people aware of others; offer support systems and understand individual needs and behaviour. I have invited 41 practitioners from a range of disciplines to contribute due to their expertise, methodology and subject knowledge, I have asked them for some of their time, conversation and participation. This project will evolve from Kerry and Kevin's discussions and interactions, and the outcomes will vary from a chat, a workshop, a written statement to sharing an existing piece of work.
It was also and invitation to Bill Drummond to take part in this project - for Drummond to become one of the Kevins. It ended with stating that Kerry wanted to ask Drummond three question. Drummond responded by saying that he would only take part on the understanding that Kerry would ask him not three questions but four. And that these questions and answers would be part of his 100 Questions project. Kerry agreed. And on the 7 January 2010 Kerry emailed the four questions. Drummond liked the questions, as they were not the sort that he usually got asked. They are:
MEMORY TIME MUSIC
Daniel Hartley is a postgraduate researcher at Liverpool University Management School. He is researching the evolution of business models within the music industry over the past decades. He is focusing his research on five different subjects. One of those subjects is Bill Drummond and the way that Drummond has worked in and out of music for the past 33 & a third years. Hartley’s blog based on his research is at danielhartley.blogspot.com
The Offline People
The Offline People wanted to ask 20 questions. What or who the Offline People are, is somewhat unclear, but this is their blog:
theofflinepeople.blogspot.com
They then learnt that they could only ask four questions. These are they.
TWINNED WITH YOUR WILDEST DREAMS
Bill Drummond got an email on the 4 March 2010 from a Rachel Hooper asking him to front a radio programme about Belfast. Bill Drummond did not know who Rachel Hooper was. She was a senior producer for BBC Radio 4 and the proposed programme was to last 30 minutes and be entitled Belfast - Re-imagining The City. Drummond said yes if she could send him four questions that he could answer and the questions and answers could act as the four pillars for the programme. Rachel Hooper said yes, if he agreed to record the programme within the next two weeks as it was scheduled to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the 9 March 2010. Both parties were in agreement and the programme was recorded in Belfast over the 15 & 16 February. The first three of the answers were written on the journey over to Belfast in the early morning of the 15th. The fourth answer was only fully written on the journey back from Belfast on the evening of the 16th. Rachel Hooper also thought it a good idea that these four questions and answers could be used on the BBC webpage for the programme.
The CITY
The CITY is a daily paper in Stockholm, Sweden. The CITY has a daily circulation of over 600,000. Bill Drummond had been invited to give a performance/lecture at the Supermarket art fair in Stockholm on the 20 February 2010. Supermarket is an international artist-run art fair in Stockholm. Supermarket began in 2006 but back then it was called Minimarket and had been launched in response to the recently launched mainstream art fair in the city called MARKET. Journalist, Natalia Kazmierska was asked by her editor, to email Bill Drummond four questions and that if he were to answer these four questions they should be used in a feature that she had been commissioned to write about him and his appearance at Supermarket. The theme for the Supermarket Talks was Documentation / Non-Documentation. What follows are the question and the answers.
The Telegraph (London)
The online version of The Daily/Sunday Telegraph (London), have a podcast section. Bill Drummond was invited to make a contribution to one of these podcasts by answering some questions about his involvement with the Haiti Earthquake Fundraiser @ The Roundhouse on the 25 February 2010. What follows are the written versions of his answers for the podcast. These four questions were asked by Clive Morgan.
TRACEY TRACEY
Tracey Moberly is many things. Included in those many things are being a friend of and sometime collaborator with Bill Drummond. Helen Glaberson is a trainee/Freelance Journalist studying at the School of Journalism, Cardiff University. As a project and as part of her training, she has decided to do a feature on the Welsh artist Tracey Moberly. For this feature Helen Glaberson wanted to interview a number of Tracey Moberly’s friends and colleagues. Bill Drummond was one of these. He stated that he would not speak to her on the phone for a few minutes as she first suggested, but instead if she emailed him four question regarding Tracey, he would answer them as fast as possible thus before objective considerations got in the way, then email them back to her. The Questions and Answers to them are as follows:
Super TV
Bill Drummond is sitting in the office of Supermarket – the independent and artist run art fair in Stockholm - he is trying to make a decision about putting up 40 posters on walls, bars and cafes around the centre of Stockholm. Posters that he should have put up the night before, if the train had not been so late in getting into Stockholm from Oslo.
Before a decision is arrived at, a woman enters the room and introduces herself as Helena Burman. She is tall, striking looking with imposing spectacles. She tells Drummond that she is going to interview him for SUPER TV and that it will only take 90 seconds. Drummond tells the woman he will only agree to the interview if she asks him four questions - no more, no less. This seems to fluster her. She finds a piece of paper and borrows a pen off Drummond, then spends about ten minutes writing out the four questions. Then the interview starts.
To Drummond’s surprise she is filming it on her iPhone. The first question was easy to answer. The second question was more difficult. When he said he would like to attempt to answer it again, she said it was too late as the interview was being streamed live. He carried on and answered her next two questions.
After the interview he learnt that there was no documentation of the interview, it is not on some hard drive anywhere. It went out live and that was it. Drummond kind of liked this, although it meant there would be no record of three of the questions or whatever his answers were. Thus nothing to add to this section of the 100 Questions. As Documentation / Non – Documentation being theme of the festival, he guessed that this was the perfect interview to give.
He then decided it was too cold to put up the 40 posters.
To know more about Super TV click here:
The Institute of Social Hypocrisy
The Institute of Social Hypocrisy is a Paris based independent artist’s project. You can find out what they do and are about by visiting their web site http://theinstituteofsocialhypocrisy.com/ . they contacted Bill Drummond inviting him to contribute an essay for their planned publication The Sound of Downloading Makes Me Want to Upload. Drummond responded by sending them the following email:
Dear Lauren,
Thank you for your email and invitation. I have had a look around your website and enjoyed your empty rooms and your flag and your piles of printed matter. You are obviously a proper organisation with important things to do.
So
I will agree to your request.
But
These are my terms:
Please go to the Penkiln Burn site www.penkilnburn.com And click on ASK FOUR QUESTIONS
Then read the NOTICE
Then click on LEARN MORE
Then click on Q & As
Then come up with four questions for me.
I would like one question each from
Victor Boullet
Anna Franck
Sophia Sampson
&
Yourself
And I would like those questions to have no direct link to my practice to date.
EG Not “Can you tell us about the time you...?”
Or
You could elicit four question from strangers in the street outside your offices.
The answers to your four questions will be the essay you require.
I look forward to hearing back from you.
Yours,
Bill Drummond
The Institute of Social Hypocrisy responded to this email by emailing back the following four questions:
BLOWN
BLOWN is an arts and culture magazine based in South Wales.
Richard Huw Morgan is the magazine’s Performance Director. In the mid 90s, Huw Morgan, in his capacity as a member of the performance group good cop bad cop, worked with Drummond. Huw Morgan contacted Drummond in February 2010 requesting he take part in an issue of BLOWN. The magazine were specifically interested in ‘eliciting artist’s opinions of the relationship between live performance and documentation - be that prior publicity, or legacy.’
On doing some research on what BLOWN was about, Drummond came across the following words:
‘BLOWN will seek to investigate and interrogate the nature of, and representation of, ‘Performance’ in relation to the media and the general public/audiences. They are interested in developing an understanding of ‘Performance’ that incorporates the artistic, social and political practices of cultures in an inclusive and holistic way, rather than as a narrowly defined specialism.’
What follows are the four questions that have been set for Drummond to respond to
LSD - London Street-Art Design
LSD – London Street-Art Design is an online publication, this is the blurb on their home page:
The magazine will be bringing the concepts and currents behind the art alive, reflecting and helping to generate the creativity so vibrant in our streets today. Intuition and insight served up like you never thought of it but always knew it. Our culture crystallised online with contributions from writers, street artists, poets, DJ's, urban philosophers, producers, the odd visionary genius and all round geezas…
www.londonstreetartdesign.com
Back in mid 2009 Bill Drummond was invited to take part in an interview with LSD. Drummond did not respond to this request until early January 2010. What follows are the four questions LSD posed for Drummond to answer.
ON THE MAP
On The Map is a series of 10, 15-minute programmes for BBC Radio 4. The programme is presented by Mike Parker, author of the book Map Addict. The programmes will be (or were) broadcast between Monday to Friday at 3.45pm in the weeks beginning 22nd and 29th March 2010. And to quote the blurb:
‘The series looks at maps and map-making since the beginning of the twentieth century and will cover the use of maps for everything from leisure and motoring to propaganda and story-telling. It will also include the different approaches which have been taken to the mapping of cities, the use of maps during war, the creation of atlases and the political agendas behind different maps. And it looks at the future of cartography as digital technology opens up mapping to everyone.’
Bill Drummond is Mike Parker’s guest for the first of these programmes. Drummond requested that Parker and the programmes producer Jeremy Grange, should pose four questions for him to answer in writing before they met up to record the programme on the 5 March 2010. Drummond hoped that in answering these questions it would focus his mind on what maps have meant to him.
What follows are the questions and their answers.
The Natural Death Handbook
Ru Callender is an alternative undertaker. He is also editing the fifth edition of the Natural Death Handbook. In this capacity he approached Bill Drummond to write and essay for this new edition of the book. Ru Callender may have approached Drummond because he has written on death in the past and that he set up the web site www.mydeath.net. Drummond responded by saying that if Callender were to ask him four questions, his answers would be the essay. Callender claimed he had been checkmated by Drummond, and thus agreed to set him four questions, as long as the sum total of words used in all four answers did not exceed 3,000. Drummond agreed to this constraint.
After the questions had been sent Callender followed up with another email wishing he had been able to ask a question about Elvis.
Ru Callender can be contacted via enquiry@thegreenfuneralcompany.co.uk
UNCUT
UNCUT is a UK based monthly magazine specialising in music and film. Its demographics are men of a certain age. They were planning a feature and cover story titled Great Lost Albums. They wanted ten minutes on the phone with Bill Drummond to get a couple of quotes from him as to why the album 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) by The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu (The JAMS), is not available and has not been for over 22 years and will not be ever be legally available again.
Drummond had been a member of The JAMS. Drummond said he would not talk on the phone but he would answer four questions in writing. He received the email containing the questions on 2 March 2010. They wanted the answers the following day. He emailed them back saying he could not give them the answers until 5 March, due to being up on the Pennines doing something else.
Stanley Donwood & IdN Magazine
Bill Drummond got the following email:
Dear Bill,
Hello, how are you?
We are IdN magazine an international design magazine based in Hong
Kong. Our v174 (August / September) issue is going to be our
100th issue, thus in order to celebrate that we are going to
make one of our biggest feature article titling: 10 Designers, 10 Curators.
We had invite 10 well-known creatives, beside featuring their works
but also ask them to be curator provide us a list of creatives from varies fields whose works are admire and wish to be seen in our magazine.
Stanley Donwood is one of the 10 creatives and your name is listed in his recommendation list.
Thus, it would be wonderful if we could have your participation in our 100th issue.
If this sounds interest to you, please kindly give us a reply.
Thanks so much for your kind attention and really looking forward hearing from you.
Here is som information about what we do, you could also visit our
official web site www.idnworld.com
if you would like to know more about us.
IdN (International designers Network) is published bi-monthly and targets digital designers, photographers, art directors, pre-press and creative professionals throughout the world. We regularly organize design awards and events with a view to fostering a greater sense of community within the creative industry. The magazine is currently available in two languages, English and Chinese, and in five editions: International, Asia-Pacific, Australia/New Zealand, Hong Kong/China, Taiwan and Spanish.
Warm regards
Alva Wong
Features Editor
Drummond responded by sending the following email:
Dear Alva,
Thank you for your invitation.
I would be pleased to participate in your 100th issue.
But these are my stipulations:
Stanley Donwood is to ask me four questions.
He can stipulate how I answer the questions.
He could request that my answers be just one word per
question.
Or one photograph per question.
Or many words.
Or... The choice is his.
Once I have responded to his questions he and you can use
my responses in what ever way fits with the 100th issue of
the magazine.
In turn I will use the four questions set by Stanley
Dunwood
And my four answers as part of my 100 Questions project.
Yours,
Bill Drummond
Stanley Donwood responded with the following email:
dearbill
sorry its taken a while. im not used to asking questions. except maybe
where did i put my keys?
and
the tories arent going to get in are they?
so anyway. this is what ive come up with:
1: of all that youve given away, what would you take back?
2: do you view your approaching death with fear or relief?
3: which place makes you feel the most melancholic?
4: what is the point of art when music does it so much better?
ok thats it. that was hard. like thinking of titles for things. i would like it if you could answer with photographs and text. in the style of wg sebald.
hows that?
thank you for your time.
stanley
Drummond was surprised and relieved that he answered the questions in the way that he did. He thought long and hard about his replies and hopes you listen to them all in full.
Apollo Magazine (Belgium)
Bill Drummond received the following four questions from Sid Meuris who was planning on writing an article about Drummond for the Belgium magazine Apollo:
1: It is legend that the only band that used "The Manual" to fabricate a hit single was the Swiss band Edelweiss, with their
novelty single "Bring Me Edelweiss". Not exactly a number one smash though. Is it possible that your manual lacks something? Or have other artists used it as well? Do you think maybe Puff Daddy and other musicians who've used large samples of other's people's music to create their own hits took a page out of your book, so to speak?
2: Did you sign the anti-Big In Japan petition, as started by Pete Wylie, personally as well? Was this petition really started in hatred, or do you think it was more something of a prank? Is this where your love for things that could be perceived as pranks -but which have serious thought behind them as well as repercussions – comes from? Does it bother you, by the way, that you're often perceived as a sort of prankster? What if they add the word 'Situationists' to it?
3: Do you think it's remarkable that, in spite of your many differences, both you and Julian Cope have turned out to be very keen writers? It is of course possibly mere coincidence. But seeing how you’re both non-fiction writers, do you think there's possibly a kindred fascination with reality and it's perception? The wanting to define everything on one's personal terms, in clearly defined, non-interpretable prose?
4: Could you explain the why and the how of The KLF working with Tammy Wynette again? I think it's remarkable how no one has asked about it yet, seeing how it is by far your strangest collaboration yet.
Drummond responded by emailing Sid Meuris back saying that he could have been asked these four questions 20 years ago (almost) and that he only wanted to respond to questions that could have only been asked in 2010.
Sid Meuris responded by sending the following email:
OK.
Seeing how mr Drummond didn't really think much of the previous questions, I've recuperated a few of the ones I had prepared in the possibility of a bigger interview.
1: Is the $20,000 book a critique on the modern art world? What is it with the art world that riles you so much, because with the music business you had no problem at all to turn your back to it – and music is supposed to be one of the greatest passions of your life.
2: How did Richard Long feel about you ripping up his picture? And does that matter to you? Someone who bought a piece of the work for one dollar uttered how he wasn't quite sure whether he bought a piece of Long's art or a piece of your art.
3: Have you made the journey back to Iceland yet, to bury the $20,000? What do you hope to achieve with this? Seeing the current financial climate in Iceland, do you think it'll stay buried long?
4: Do you approach writing books totally conceptually - are the words a means to an end as opposed to getting pleasure out of the craft of putting them together?
Is this more like it?
Cheers,
Sid Meuris
Apollo Magazine
Belgium
Drummond responded by saying – these questions I love and look forward to answering them.
CARGO (Rochdale)
CARGO was a recording studio that existed in Rochdale, Lancashire, England between 1977 and 1984. Certain recordings now considered historic by certain men of a certain age, were recorded there. In the process of writing a book about the studio Chris Connelly wanted to ask Bill Drummond seven questions. Drummond said – send me four and I will answer them as fully as I can. The book will be published by Columbus but as of now the date of publication is not known.
British Journal of Photography
The British Journal of Photography (BJP) is the world’s longest running photography magazine, having started out in 1854. The four questions that it has asked Bill Drummond were prompted by the publication of his book $20,000
The back cover blurb on $20,000 reads:
THIS BOOK IS ABOUT:
UNCERAINTY, MOTORWAYS, MONEY, MEETING STRANGERS, MISSING THE POINT, A DRIVE UP BRITIAN, A WALK ACROSS ICELAND, BILL DRUMMOND, SITTING IN CAFES, STARING OUR OF WINDOWS, THE UNKNOWN, FINDING OUT, CONFUSION, MUSIC, DOING THINGS, RICHARD LONG, CUTTING UP & MAKING A SALES PITCH.
It is also about:
Why we make art
And what we want from it
And what it’s worth
And why we think about it
And where it is going
And is it ever too big?
And is it getting better?
And why we buy it
And why it can make us angry
And why do people have to write about it?
And what it is for
And is it important?
And why sometimes we want to destroy it
And is my art better than your art?WARNING: To avoid disappointment read the following words before purchase:
This is the second edition of this book, the paperback version. The first edition was titled How To Be An Artist. It was hardback, clothbound and landscape in proportion. It had 90 colour plates and the paper was of superior quality. It was an object of desire and indulgence. It was also only available in specialist art bookshops and it was published in 2002. This edition is cheaper and easier to hold, shelve and use. It has no colour plates and the paper is pulp. Three paragraphs that appeared in the hardback have been deleted, as they are now irrelevant, some factual mistakes have been corrected. It also brings the story up to date, with 15,304 brand new words. The third edition will have yet another title, lots of photographs, more words and be vastly more expensive. The third edition will not be published for some years.