It's been a while since he heard news of pop-art svengali Bill Drummond, but nice to see he's up to his old media manipulation tricks. In the 1980's Drummond was an early manager of Liverpool post-punk psych legends Echo and the Bunnymen as well as the Teardrop Explodes, trying to come up with various ways to make them both bigger than the Beatles (though disastrous business ventures like buying one large PA for both bands to share didn't help matters). In the late 80's after working A&R for WEA, Drummond wrote a sprite little pop-folk record called The Man, which featured a song calling for the death of the ex-Teardrop Julian Cope in order to sell more records. Meanwhile, he also became a below-the-radar pioneer in post-Eno ambient music with his group the KLF, also headed the Timelords, who had a huge hit chart hit based around the Dr. Who theme. Another outfit, the Justified Ancients of MuMu, made headlines by getting sued for sampling Abba only to park outside the quartet's offices blasting the music accompanied by a prostitute that looked like Agnetha, and they also drafted Tammy Wynette to sing on a techno track (she also performed with them on TV). At the height of success the KLF said goodbye to the music business by performing death metal in front of industry bigwigs on a TV stage culminating in Drummond spraying fake machine gun fire at everyone. Oh, and they allegedly burned a million pounds in cash at an abandoned boathouse in front of a journalist.
Drummond has returned with his group The 17, descibed as a choir of trained and untrained vocalists, follow no rules, make no recordings, nor perform in front of an audience. According to their site, "all known music has run its course. It has all been consumed, traded, downloaded, understood, heard before, sampled, learned, revived, judged and found wanting." Scores express details on how they go about performing their non-performances (which take place at hospitals, schools, prisons and anywhere else), and a series of these non-performances are actually scheduled from March 13-19 via Leif Elggren's Fylkingen providing a base for their workshop.
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