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Bill and 2’s bogusjourney
Last heard of torching a million quid with the K Foundation, Bill Drummond is up to his old tricks
again. This time he has joined forces with Mark Manning for an expedition to the North Pole and a tale of debauchery. They speak to Brian Donaldson before heading for Glasgow’s National Review of Live Art.
14 The List '1 8-31 Oct 1996
ou’re only as good as your last
game/film/album . . . So what if, in
the name of art, you have spent the
last couple of years burning a
million quid on Jura, chucking a car
off a cliff at Faraid Head, planting an icon of Elvis at the North Pole and sailing up the Congo on a barge in search of Satan. What next?
‘Where is the ultimate place you want to go when you’re six or seven years old?’ asks Bill Drummond, ex-KLF, ex- Teardrops/Echo And The Bunnymen boss and, in the eyes of a cynical and mocking media, stuntman par excellence. ‘The moon. To leave the planet, that’s what the century is going to be remembered for. Not the atomic bomb, this was the century when man first left the earth.’
And what of a time-scale? ‘2001 is when we leave the earth,’ replies his current business partner Mark Manning, alias Z, creator and former t'rontman of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction. ‘We’ve yet to think of the
‘2001 Is when we leave the earth.’
Mark Mannlng
practicalities,’ adds Drummond. ‘We’ll have to cadge a lift or something,’
Another scam to set journos scampen‘ng for their thesaurus to find other words for ‘weird’, ‘prank’ or ‘why?’ ‘To a degree, ifyou’re trying to communicate anything you’re going to be regarded as a Stuntman because you are a stuntman,’ retorts Manning. ‘lt’s not just you and a guy in a pub, you’re on a stage and that in itself is a stunt. But these are not pranks, we’re trying to communicate even if we don’t know ourselves what it is we’re trying to communicate.’ Drummond adds: ‘Most people want to undermine the way we work.’
This is hardly a new experience for Drummond, whose work has frequently come under attack. Having established himself as a guru of the Liverpool music scene in the early 805, he went on to form off-kilter pop bands under the guises of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and the KLF. And work with Tammy Wynette. Turning his back on the music