Throwing down the gauntlet

Sep 19 2008 by Vicky Anderson, Liverpool Daily Post

‘ALL recorded music has run its course. It has been consumed, traded, downloaded, understood, heard before, sampled, learned, revived, judged and found wanting.

“Dispense with all forms of music and music-making and start again.”

So begins the rally cry of The 17, the new part memoir-part polemic by Bill Drummond.

It charts the evolution of his latest project, the eponymous choir with an ever-changing line-up of groups of 17 ordinary people, that make noise like music might sound if music never existed, listen back to it once, and delete it forever.

“I’m not interested in making a piece of music that’s listened to by hundreds of thousands of people,” he says.

“Recording technology seduced musicians into creating a business model that is all about selling records to as many people as possible.

“The whole thing with The 17 evolved four or five years ago. To begin with, I was scared about dragging it out of my head and making it a shared reality.

“In 2006, I started going out with it and experimenting with it, but not in the UK, because I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of anybody.”

Bill Drummond – he of KLF, Big in Japan, K Foundation, founder of No Music Day – has never been afraid to stick his head over the parapet, so this seems something of a strange admission.

“Because I have some sort of reputation, and because people think there’s nothing worse than somebody who’s had a bit of pop success trying their hand at anything – editing a daily newspaper for a day, writing a concerto or saving the world.

“I wanted this to work for anyone that accidentally became involved, whether or not they had ever thought about that before I wanted them to get something emotional from it.

“I had no real expectations.”

The 17 began, Drummond admits, as an imaginary concept, as he began to believe all recorded music was quickly becoming irrelevant.

“It was the iPod that brought the change home to me about our relationship with music. Every tune I’ve ever wanted to hear is in my pocket, and I found myself just skipping them. In the future, the creative and interesting music makers won’t be making music that people want to skip over.”

It’s easier said than done, Drummond is the first to admit. He will discuss how jazz music, now a subject of academia, is completely dead and has no reason to still exist, but will still snap up tickets to see John Zorn.

“I have ideals, and I don’t live up to those ideals,” he says. “If I walk down the street and hear Phil Spector, or Tamla Motown, or punk, or the Human League, I think that’s great.

“But it’s nostalgia, and that’s the killer. It means you may as well be dead.”

Ah, the N-word.

Drummond has innumerable links with Liverpool since coming to study at Liverpool Art School in the 1970s.

Last year, he said he had apprehensions the city would blow its chance to make a proper impression with its Capital of Culture year.

“I always wanted Liverpool to do something for Capital of Culture that was them, that wasn’t shut in, wasn’t something looking back,” he says. “One thing that gets me angry about Liverpool is that it is so into nostalgia, yearning for the past.

“It’s the one English city I feel more for than any other. I mean, I loathe Manchester, but it hasn’t done what they have done – Liverpool needs to embrace the future.”

There’ll be representations of a few faces familiar to Drummond and his city heyday (he managed Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes) when Eric’s – The Musical opens next week, so what does he think of that?

“It was always going to happen. It’s part of the sickness of Liverpool,” he says, although not unkindly. He even says he’ll be going to see it. But, like everything else, he argues, the city’s music needs to move forward.

“What The Beatles were about was revolution, not politically but through different ideas and ways of doing things.

“I like The Coral and The Zutons but it’s nothing new. All the time I’m waiting to hear this music coming out of Liverpool that will really show the rest of the country. Maybe I’m missing it.”

Drummond worked as a set designer with the late experimental theatre legend Ken Campbell on his notorious 12-hour Illuminatus! trilogy, as part of his Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool.

He minces no words in calling him “the most influential person in my life”.

“Ken taught me how anything is possible.”

He tells a tale of how they were discussing a show with a part for an Asian woman and were wondering who to cast.

“He asked me at the time who the most famous Oriental woman in the world was.

“He had Yoko Ono on the phone in half an hour. She didn’t do it, but he was making the point to me about saying things and how to make things happen.”

So does he approach The 17 as a musician, an artist, or even philosopher?

“I never really thought of myself as a musician. I can play guitar and sit at a keyboard and play – but most people can cook a meal, doesn’t mean they’re a chef.

“People can define me how they want. But I suppose, if someone calls me a ‘prankster’, or says I do stunts . . . that’s the thing that makes me go ‘aargh, that’s not what I am!’ I’ve never done a prank or a stunt. There’s humour in the things I do, but it’s never just some kind of media performance.

“I’m throwing down the gauntlet with The 17,” he says. “I know the book isn’t going to be a best-seller, but at the same time it contains a lot of ideas I wanted to get out there.

“I’m not going to be doing this for the rest of my life. Life is short, it gets shorter by the day, but I hope, within two or three years, most people who take an interest in what’s going on culturally will know about The 17 and have an opinion. Even if they think it’s ludicrous.”

BILL DRUMMOND will be signing copies of The 17 at Waterstones, on Bold Street, on Wednesday, September 24, from 1pm.