Bill Drummond
William Ernest Drummond is a British artist, musician, writer, and record producer. He was a co-founder of the late-1980s avant-garde pop group the KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with which he burned £1 million in 1994.
During their career, the KLF released four studio albums – 1987 , Who Killed The JAMs?, Chill Out and their most commercially successful album, The White Room, which spawned internationally successful singles such as re–worked versions of "What Time Is Love?", "3 a.m. Eternal", "Last Train to Trancentral" and a new track, "Justified & Ancient" which featured American country singer Tammy Wynette.
Following their performance at the 1992 BRIT Awards, the KLF announced their departure from the music business and, in May of that year, they deleted their entire back-catalogue. Although the duo remained true to their word of May 1992, with the KLF Communications catalogue remaining deleted, they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, the One World Orchestra, and in 1997, as 2K. Drummond and Jimmy Cauty reappeared in 2017 as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, releasing the novel 2023, and rebooting an earlier campaign to build a "People's Pyramid". In January 2021, the band began uploading their previously deleted catalogue onto streaming services, in compilations.
More recent art activities, carried out under Drummond's banner of 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 The 17. Drummond is the author of several books about art and music.
Background
William Ernest Drummond was born in Butterworth, South Africa, where his father was a minister for the Church of Scotland. His family moved to the UK when he was 18 months old, and his early years were spent in the town of Newton Stewart.He moved to Corby, Northamptonshire at the age of 11. It was here that he first became involved in performing as a musician, initially working with school friends such as Gary Carson and Chris Ward.
He lived on the Beanfield Estate, where his father was the priest of the St Peter and St Andrew church. He attended Beanfield Secondary Modern School gaining four O-levels, and the sixth form of Kingswood School, where he was expelled in the sixth form.
He attended the University of Northampton and the Art and Design Academy from 1970 to 1973. He later decided that "art should use everything, be everywhere" and that, as an artist, he would "use whatever medium is to hand". He spent two years working as a milkman, gardener, steel worker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter, and scene painter. Drummond also worked on a trawler.
Personal life
Drummond is a fan of Dumfriesshire football club Queen of the South, which he says is due to their proximity to his home town of Newton Stewart. "Queen of the South" is also the title of the sixth track on his 1986 album, The Man.Career
1970s: ''Illuminatus'', Big in Japan, and Zoo
In 1975 Drummond began working at the Everyman Theatre, Liverpool as a carpenter and scene painter. In 1976 he was the set designer 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". The production transferred to the National Theatre, and then the Roundhouse, in London. 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." Drummond later wrote that none of his career would have happened as it did if not for what he learnt from Campbell, starting with the advice "Bill, don't bother doing anything unless it is heroic!"After absconding from the Illuminatus! production in London, Drummond returned to Liverpool and co-founded the band Big in Japan. Other members included Holly Johnson, Budgie, Jayne Casey and Ian Broudie. After the band's demise, Drummond and another member, his best friend David Balfe, founded Zoo Records. Zoo's first release was Big in Japan's posthumous EP, From Y To Z and Never Again. They went on to act as producers of the debut albums 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 and The Love Reaction and The Proclaimers. The production team of Drummond and Balfe was christened The Chameleons, who recorded the single "Touch" together with singer Lori Lartey as Lori and the Chameleons and were involved with the production on Echo & the Bunnymen's debut album, released on the Korova label.
1980s: A&R man & solo recording artist
Drummond later took a job in the mainstream music business as an A&R consultant for the label WEA working with, amongst others, 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 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..."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."
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 released on Creation Records and included 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". Drummond wrote and performed "The Manager", filmed by Bill Butt in which he lamented the state of the music industry and offered his services at £100 a time to help fix it; one of his complaints was about remixes: "songs have to be written, not layered". The spoken-word recording also appeared as a B-side, and on some compilations as "The Manager's Speech".
The Man received positive reviews – including 4 stars from Q Magazine; and 5 from Sounds Magazine who called the album a "touching if idiosyncratic biographical statement". 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 idea for a record and got dragged back into it all".
1987–1992: The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Timelords and the KLF
While out walking on New Year's 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, 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'".Drummond and Cauty 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 – in June of the same year, and a high-profile copyright dispute with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society. A second album – Who Killed The JAMs?, also the last album under the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu name, 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 . In late 1988, the duo released their first singles under the moniker the KLF, "Burn the Bastards" and "Burn the Beat". 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", Chill Out was named the fifth best dance album of all time in a 1996 Mixmag feature.
File:Tammy Wynette.JPG|thumb|left|180px|The KLF collaborated with Tammy Wynette on "Justified & Ancient", released in 1991 and became an international success
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 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". Later in the evening Drummond and Cauty dumped a dead sheep at the entrance to one of the post-ceremony parties. NME listed this appearance at number 4 in their "top 100 rock moments", and, in 2003, The Observer named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.
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 " away a fortune". 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 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." There have been numerous suggestions that in 1992 Drummond was at the edge of a nervous breakdown. 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,... machine gunned the tuxedo'd twats in the front row of that year's BRIT Awards ceremony." Drummond himself said that he was on the edge of the "abyss".