Bill Drummond

Drummond reunited with Jimmy Cauty in 2017. They returned as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, with a novel - 2023: A Trilogy - and a 3-day festival, "Welcome to the Dark Ages". Cauty confirmed that the duo's work is an ongoing project.

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." 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, ... [and] 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".

In February 2014, Drummond announced plans for a world tour, beginning under Spaghetti Junction in Birmingham on 13 March 2014 and ending at the same place on 28 April 2025. Taking in twelve cities in twelve different countries, each leg of the tour will last three months, during which he will produce 25 paintings whilst working on other art projects.

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[other] idea for a record and got dragged back into it all".

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". 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.

On 28 April 2013, the day before his 60th birthday, Drummond took part in what has been billed as the last performance of The17. A seventeen-hour version of Score 1: IMAGINE was performed while standing on a manhole cover at the bottom of Mathew Street in Liverpool.

A performance of The17's SURROUND, originally planned to take place in Damascus, Syria, will take place in London on 18 March 2012. Drummond explains in his essay for Treuchet Magazine: 'it would best for all concerned if the Syrian leg of the tri-nation festival was postponed for a few weeks or maybe months, when things would have undoubtedly settled down'.

Drummond was a Director of The Foundry, an arts centre in Shoreditch, London which closed in 2010. He is also owner of The Curfew Tower in Cushendall, Northern Ireland. Via an arts trust called In You We Trust, the Curfew Tower acts as an artists' residency.

The17 now has several thousand members who have carried out performances on Drummond's Coast-to-Coast tour across the UK, and a World Tour which has included Jerusalem, Beijing, Port-au-Prince and Gothenburg. The17 is the subject of the 2008 book 17 published by Beautiful Books. Performances, scores, tours and Drummond's related graffiti are documented on a website: the17.org.

In 2006, Drummond's book 45 was ranked 21 in the Observer's list of "The 50 greatest music books ever". Kitty Empire of the Guardian included 45 in her list of "10 best music memoirs". in 2010. 45 also featured in a 2010 book list compiled by Belle & Sebastian.

BBC Radio 1 in 2006 included Drummond in a survey of "Most Punk Persons". Virgin Media ranked Drummond at number 8 in a list of "Most Eccentric Musicians".

In 2005, Drummond announced an annual No Music Day on 21 November. The 22 November is Saint Cecilia day – the Patron Saint of Music – so No Music Day represents a fast before the feast. No Music Day was held between 2005 and 2010. In this time, BBC Radio Scotland observed it by broadcasting no music, including jingles, for 24 hours. Radio Resonance FM also acknowledged it. In 2009 the entire city of Linz, Austria observed No Music Day with the backing of the city mayor; music was not played on local radio stations or in shops, and the cinemas only showed films without music soundtracks. No Music Day is documented at www.nomusicday.com

Drummond's most recent music project is a choir called The17. His first formal performance of The17 was staged with 16 other men in a studio in Leicester in 2004. It followed thoughts about music that Drummond had been having for many years. With the advent of recorded music via the internet, iPods and MP3 players etc. Drummond proclaims that "all recorded music has run its course." The17 creates music that follows no musical history, or necessarily has words, melodies or rhythms. It may be made up of many human voices or none. Performances may only be recorded and played back once and then deleted. The17 can be made up of as many people who want to be a part of it at the time of a performance; they are all then lifetime members.

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.

Art Review's artworld "Power 100" listed Drummond as number 98 in 2003.

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?". It was later reported that the artwork had been stolen and a £1000 reward offered for its return. 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."

In 2001, NME readers voted "the KLF's Art Terrorism" at the Brit Awards in 1992 at number 4 in the "top 100 Rock moments of all time." NME also ranked Drummond as number 17 in its 20 "Greatest Cult Heroes" in 2010.

In 2000, Drummond released 45, a book consisting of a "series of loosely related vignettes forming the rambling diary of one year." 45 also explored Drummond's KLF legacy, and was well received by the press.

Julian Cope said in 2000, "I have no relationship with this guy. He burned a million pounds which was not all his, and some of it was mine. People should pay off their creditors before they pull intellectual dry-wank stunts like that."

In 1998, the Scottish Football Association invited Drummond to write and record a theme song for the Scotland national football team's 1998 FIFA World Cup campaign. Drummond decided against doing it (Del Amitri got the job) but he wondered if he had twisted fate by declining, because the other major football songs of that year were made by associates of his: Keith Allen ("Vindaloo") and Ian Broudie ("Three Lions"), two men he had met on the same day when working on Illuminatus! in 1976, and former protege Ian McCulloch.

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.

Drummond's involvement in the music industry has been minimal since his final collaboration with Jimmy Cauty as 2K in 1997.

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" Members of the public were urged to donate bricks, with 1.5 bricks per Briton being needed to complete the project. Drummond also contributed a short story titled "Let’s Grind, or How K2 Plant Hire Ltd Went to Work" to the book "Disco 2000".

In 1995, Drummond bought A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by Richard 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." Five years later, Drummond felt that he was no longer "getting his money's worth" from the photograph. 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.

Infamy followed when, on 23 August 1994, the K Foundation burnt what remained of The KLF's earnings, one million pounds, at a boathouse on the Scottish island of Jura. 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. "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."

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. The K Foundation award attracted huge interest from the British broadsheet newspapers.

In 1993, Select magazine published a list of the 100 Coolest People in Pop. Drummond was number one on the list. "What has this giant of coolness not achieved?", they asked: "Like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Drummond has always been a step ahead of human evolution, guiding us on. Manager of The Teardrop Explodes, co-inventor of ambient and trance house, number one pop star, situationist pagan, folk troubadour, pan-dimensional zenarchist gentleman of leisure...and then, ladies and gentlemen, he THROWS IT ALL AWAY, machine-guns the audience and dumps a dead sheep on the doorstep of the Brit Awards and vanishes to build dry-stone walls. His new 'band' The K Foundation make records but say they won't release them at all until world peace is established. Deranged, inspired, intensely cool."

Also in 1993, an NME piece about the K Foundation found much to praise in Drummond's career, from Zoo Records through to the K Foundation art award: "Bill Drummond's career is like no other... there's been cynicism... and there's been care (no one who didn't love pop music could have made a record so commercial and so Pet Shop Boys-lovely as 'Kylie Said to Jason', or the madly wonderful 'Last Train to Trancentral', or the Tammy Wynette version of 'Justified and Ancient'). There's been mysticism... But most of all there's been a belief that, both in music and life, there's something more."

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".

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".

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?)

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.

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 late 1988, the duo and released their first singles under the moniker The KLF, "Burn the Bastards" and "Burn the Beat" (both taken from the JAMs' last album). (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.

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 [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'".

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. A second album – Who Killed The JAMs?, also the last album under the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) name, was released in February 1988.

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 (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..." (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.")

Drummond's 1986 solo album The Man is among Uncut Magazine's 2010 list of "Greatest Lost Albums".

Bill Drummond is a fan of Scottish 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 6th track on his 1986 album The Man.

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!"

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.

William Ernest Drummond was born in Transkei, South Africa, where his father was a minister 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. 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 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.

William Ernest Drummond (born 29 April 1953) 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 famously burned £1 million 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.