Bill Drummond
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Bill Drummond talking in closing event of No Music Day 2009 in Linz, Austria
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| Background information | |
| Birth name | William Ernest Drummond[1] |
| Also known as | King Boy D Time Boy Penkiln Burn |
| Origin | Newton Stewart, Scotland |
| Occupation(s) | Artist Writer Musician Music industry manager |
| Instrument(s) | Vocals, guitar, bass, synthesizers, keyboards |
| Years active | 1977– |
| Labels | Zoo Records WEA KLF Communications |
| Website | Penklinburn
The17 |
William Ernest Drummond (born 29 April 1953, Butterworth, South Africa) is a Scottish artist, musician, writer and record producer. He was the co-founder of late 1980s avant-garde pop group The KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with which he burned a million pounds in 1994. More recent art activities, carried out under Drummond's chosen banner of the Penkiln Burn, include making and distributing cakes, soup, flowers, beds and shoe-shines. More recent music projects include No Music Day, and the international tour of a choir called The17. Drummond is the author of several books about art and music.
Bill Drummond was born to Scottish parents in Butterworth, South Africa, where his father was a minister[4] for the Church of Scotland. His family moved back to Scotland when he was 18 months old, and his early years were spent in the town of Newton Stewart, moving on to Corby in Northamptonshire at the age of 11. It was here he first became involved in performing as a musician working initially with school friends including Gary Carson and Chris Ward.[5] He attended Northampton and Liverpool Schools of Art from 1970 to 1973. Following this, he decided that "art should use everything, be everywhere and that as an artist he would use whatever medium is to hand".[6] He then spent two years doing various jobs including being a milkman, gardener, steel worker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter and scene painter.
In 1975 Drummond was involved with the set design for the first stage production of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a 12-hour performance which opened on 23 November 1976, and which was staged by Ken Campbell's "Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool".[7][8] According to Campbell, Drummond became known as "the man who went for Araldite": "In the middle of a tour, Drummond announced he was popping out to get some glue - and never returned."[9]
Drummond's musical career began in 1977 with Big in Japan, a band whose membership also included future luminaries Holly Johnson, Budgie, Jayne Casey and Ian Broudie.[10] After the band's demise, Drummond and another member David Balfe started Zoo Records, their first release being Big in Japan's posthumous EP, From Y To Z and Never Again. They went on to act as producers of the debut singles by Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, both of which Drummond would later manage somewhat idiosyncratically. With Zoo Music Ltd, Drummond and Balfe were also music publishers for Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction and The Proclaimers. The production team of Drummond and Balfe was christened The Chameleons, who recorded the single "Touch" together with a female singer as Lori and the Chameleons.[11]
Drummond later took a job in the mainstream music business as an A&R consultant for the label WEA working with Strawberry Switchblade and Brilliant. In July 1986, on his 33 and a third birthday, Drummond repented his corporate involvement and resigned his job by way of a "ringingly quixotic press release": "I will be 33.5 (sic) years old in September, a time for a revolution in my life. There is a mountain to climb the hard way, and I want to see the world from the top..."[12] (In an interview in December 1990, Drummond recalled spending half a million pounds at WEA on the band Brilliant - for whom he envisioned massive worldwide success - only for them to completely flop. "At that point I thought 'What am I doing this for?' and I got out."[13])
Drummond was "obviously very sharp," said WEA chairman Rob Dickens, "and he knew the business. But he was too radical to be happy inside a corporate structure. He was better off working as an outsider."[14]
Later in the year, Drummond issued a solo album, The Man, a country/folk music recording, backed by Australian rock group The Triffids. The album was perhaps most notable for the sardonic "Julian Cope Is Dead", where he outlined his fantasy of shooting the Teardrop Explodes frontman in the head to ensure the band's early demise and subsequent legendary status. The song has commonly been seen as a reply to the Cope song "Bill Drummond Said".[15] As a B-side, Drummond wrote and recorded "The Manager" in which he lamented the state of the music industry and offered his services to help fix it.
The Man received positive reviews - including 4 stars from Q Magazine;[16] and 5 from Sounds Magazine who called the album a "touching if idiosyncratic biographical statement".[17] Drummond intended to focus on writing books once The Man had been issued but, as he recalled in 1990, "That only lasted three months, until I had an[other] idea for a record and got dragged back into it all".[13]
While out walking on New Years Day 1987, Drummond formulated a plan to make a hip-hop record. However, "I wasn't brave enough to go and do it myself", he said. "...although I can play the guitar, and I can knock out a few things on the piano, I knew nothing, personally, about the technology. And, I thought, I knew Jimmy [Cauty], I knew he was a like spirit, we share similar tastes and backgrounds in music and things. So I phoned him up that day and said "Let's form a band called The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu". And he knew exactly, to coin a phrase, "where I was coming from"."[18]
Drummond and Cauty (who Drummond had signed to Food/WEA as a member of Brilliant) released their first single, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu's "All You Need Is Love", in March 1987. This was followed by an album - 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) - in June of the same year, and a high-profile copyright dispute with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society.[19] A second and final album by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) - Who Killed The JAMs? was released in February 1988.
Later in 1988, Drummond and Cauty released a 'novelty' pop single, "Doctorin' the Tardis" as The Timelords. The song reached number one in the UK Singles Chart on 12 June, and charted highly in Australia and New Zealand. On the back of this success, the duo self-published a book, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).
In March 1988, the duo regrouped as The KLF and released their first singles under this moniker, "Burn the Bastards" and "Burn the Beat". (From late 1987, Drummond and Cauty's independent record label had been named "KLF Communications".) As The KLF, Drummond and Cauty would amass fame and fortune. "What Time Is Love?" - a signature song which they would revisit and revitalise several times in the coming years - saw its first release in July 1988, and its success spawned an album, The "What Time Is Love?" Story, in September 1989. Chill Out, an ambient house album which had its roots in Cauty's chill-out sessions with The Orb's Alex Paterson, was released in February 1990. Described by The Times as "The KLF's comedown classic",[20] Chill Out was named the fifth best dance album of all time in a 1996 Mixmag feature.[21]
The KLF's commercial success peaked in 1991, with The White Room album and the accompanying "Stadium House" singles, remixes of 1988's "What Time Is Love?", 1989's "3 a.m. Eternal", 1990's "Last Train to Trancentral"; and "Justified and Ancient", a new song based on a sample from 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?).
In 1992, The KLF were awarded the "Best British group" BRIT Award. With grindcore group Extreme Noise Terror, The KLF performed a live "violently antagonistic performance" of "3 a.m. Eternal" at the BRIT Awards ceremony in front of "a stunned music-business audience".[22] Later in the evening Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep with the message『I died for ewe—bon appetit [sic]』tied around its waist at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties.[23] NME listed this appearance at number 4 in their "top 100 rock moments",[24] and, in 2003, The Observer named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.[25]
On 14 May 1992, The KLF announced their immediate retirement from the music industry and the deletion of their entire back catalogue, an act which associate Scott Piering described as "[throwing] away a fortune".[26] As when he left WEA, Drummond issued an enigmatic press release, this time talking of a "wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path" he and Cauty had been following "...these past five years. The last two of which has [sic] led us up onto the commercial high ground—we are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what."[27][28] There have been numerous suggestions that in 1992 Drummond was at the edge of a nervous breakdown.[26][29] Vox Magazine wrote, for example, that 1992 was "the year of Bill's 'breakdown', when The KLF, perched on the peak of greater-than-ever success, quit the music business, ... [and] machine gunned the tuxedo'd twats in the front row of that year's BRIT Awards ceremony."[30] Drummond himself said that he was on the edge of the "abyss".[31]
Despite The KLF's retirement from the music business, Drummond's involvement with Jimmy Cauty was far from over. In 1993, the pair regrouped as the K Foundation, ostensibly a foundation for the arts. They established the K Foundation art award for the "worst artist of the year". The award, worth £40,000, was presented to Rachel Whiteread on 23 November 1993 outside London's Tate Gallery. Ms Whiteread had just accepted the £20,000 1993 Turner Prize award for best British Contemporary artist inside the gallery.[32] The K Foundation award attracted huge interest from the British broadsheet newspapers.[33]
Infamy followed when, on 23 August 1994, the K Foundation burnt what remained of The KLF's earnings - one million pounds sterling - at a boathouse on the Scottish islandofJura.[34] A film of the event - Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid - was taken on tour, with Drummond and Cauty discussing the incineration with members of the public after each screening. In 2004 Drummond admitted to the BBC that he now regretted burning the money.[35] "It's a hard one to explain to your kids and it doesn't get any easier. I wish I could explain why I did it so people would understand."[36]
On 4 September 1995 the duo recorded "The Magnificent" for The Help Album. In 1997, Drummond and Cauty briefly re-emerged as 2K and K2 Plant Hire Ltd. with various plans to "Fuck the Millennium". K2 Plant Hire's published aim was to "build a massive pyramid containing one brick for every person born in the UK during the 20th century"[37] Members of the public were urged to donate bricks, with 1.5 bricks per Briton being needed to complete the project.[38] Drummond also contributed a short story titled『Let’s Grind, or How K2 Plant Hire Ltd Went to Work』to the book "Disco 2000".[39]
Drummond studied painting at Liverpool School of Art from 1972 to 1973. Following that, he decided that instead of limiting his practice to paint and canvas, as an artist he would use any medium that came to hand. He has said that much of his work since - including the pop-music, book-writing, and The17 choir - has been done as art.[40]
From 1998, Drummond's art activities have been carried out using the brand-name of the Penkiln Burn. This is the name of the river in Scotland upon the banks of which he played and fished as a boy.
In 1995, Drummond bought A Smell of Sulphur in the WindbyRichard Long, for $20,000. In Drummond’s own words, he ‘fell in love with Richard Long’s work because’ “it was art by walking and doing things on his walks.” [41] Five years later, Drummond felt that he was no longer "getting his money's worth" from the photograph.[42] He decided to try to sell it by placing a series of placards around the country. When this failed to result in its sale, in 2001 he cut the photograph and mounting card into 20,000 pieces to sell for $1 each. His plan, upon retrieving the $20,000 in cash, is to walk with it to the remote place in Iceland where Richard Long had made the photograph and bury it in a box beneath the stone circle. He will then take his own photograph of the site, bring it home, frame it, hang it in the same place in his bedroom where the Richard Long hung, and call the new work The Smell of Money Underground. Drummond's books How to be an Artist and a later soft-bound edition titled $20,000 recounts this story. [43][44]
In 2002, Drummond was involved in a controversial exhibition at the deconsecrated St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church, Liverpool. Drummond contributed a guestbook which asked visitors "Is God a Cunt?".[45] It was later reported that the artwork had been stolen and a £1000 reward offered for its return.[46][47] Drummond himself said that he would answer "no" to his own question: "God is responsible for all the things I love, the speckles on a brown trout; the sound of Angus Young's guitar, the nape of my girlfriend's neck, the song of the blackcap when he returns in Spring. I never blame God for all the shit, for the baby Rwandan slaughtered in a casual genocide, the ever-present wars, drudgery and misery that fills most of our lives."[48]
Several Penkiln Burn projects involve making things and then distributing them. Drummond has created a Soup Line drawn across a map going through Belfast and Nottingham to the edges of the British Isles. Anyone living on the Soup Line may contact Drummond to come to their house and make soup for them, their family and friends. Drummond has also constructed - and encourages others to construct - Cake Circles drawn on maps. Cakes are then made and delivered to people who live within the circle with the words "I have baked you a cake, here it is".[49] Other projects involve Drummond building beds from timber in public places which are then raffled off. In 2011, for the Venice Biennale, Drummond took up shoe-shining on the streets of Venice. Each spring, Drummond gives away 40 bunches of daffodils to strangers on the street in different cities.[50]
Drummond's web-based projects include MyDeath.net, where people can plan their own funeral.[51] Another site, youwhores.com, was meant for anyone to advertise any kind of service at their own set price. Due to misuse though, youwhores.com has become archival only. Still open for contributions is Drummond's website www.openmanifesto.com which "exists to define what art is and art is not." [52] The Open Manifesto site invites definitions of art in 100 words or less.
Drummond was a Director of The Foundry, an arts centre in Shoreditch, London which closed in 2010. [53] He is also owner of The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland.[54] Via an arts trust called In You We Trust, the Curfew Tower acts as an artists' residency. [54][55]
