 | |
| Author | Bill Drummond |
|---|---|
| Country | UK |
| Language | English |
| Published | 2000 |
| Publisher | Little, Brown |
| Pages | 368 |
| ISBN | 0-316-85385-2 |
| OCLC | 42913110 |
45 is a non-fiction book by Bill Drummond published by Little, Brown in 2000. It collects various essays written by Drummond in 1997 and 1998.
45 was widely reviewed in the British press. The Times said that "It is usually a disaster when pop stars write books.... But Bill Drummond was never your average rock star", describing the book as "A series of loosely related vignettes forming the rambling diary of one year, it initially feels far removed from the scam-mongering stunts that we have come to expect. Drummond portrays himself as a shambling, absurd figure, saddled with the twin obsessions of pop music and art.... [he] has the inimitable wisdom of a true maverick." [1] if Charles Shaar Murray wrote in The Independent that "[Bill] Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes - one example is described as "a private joke that's so private I don't even get it myself" - involve symbolically weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician, and 45 is his logbook." [2] A second review in The Independent added that "despite all the half-truths and self-effacing irony, and what Drummond calls "the incessant self- mythologising vanity", the stories in 45 strike me as peculiarly and sometimes painfully honest. It appears that, after all this time, he's decided it would be nice if his motives were understood. By himself at least. And if I'm wrong about that, 45 is still worth reading for the daft aphorisms - "Down escalators are one of the greatest inventions ever" - and all the situationist pranks involving dead cows, Stonehenge and money that never quite made the transition from Drummond's imagination to the real world." [3]
The Guardian's Saturday Pages books section called 45 a "charmingly barking [mad] memoir". [4] Steven Poole wrote in the same newspaper that "45 is a further attempt to bury the myth [of The KLF]. Throughout, Drummond poses as an ordinary middle-aged man who lives in the country, drinks lots of tea and spends his mornings in the nearest library, with coffee breaks in the shopping centre. Yet the myth motors on, pitilessly. When he goes to Serbia to appear on an underground music station, he brings a recording of an unreleased KLF song called The Magnificent. Soon it `had not only become the theme tune of the station [B92], but the anthem of the democracy movement . . . A track we recorded in a day, never released as a single, thought was crap and had forgotten about had taken on a meaning, an importance in a 'far-off land'.'" In summary, Poole said, "At its best [45] has flashes of twisted brilliance reminiscent of Iain Sinclair or Will Self, but the majority is most interesting because the author was one half of the KLF. Of course, that is more than enough glory for one lifetime. Yet the fact remains that this book will forever labour under the shadow of those horned men and their gleefully apocalyptic music." [5]
K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was a work of performance art executed and filmed on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation, an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, burned £1 million in the back of a disused boathouse on the Ardfin Estate on the Scottish island of Jura. The money represented the bulk of the K Foundation's funds that had been previously earned by Drummond and Cauty as the KLF.
William Ernest Drummond is a Scottish 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 famously burned £1 million in 1994.
James Francis Cauty, also known as Rockman Rock, is an English artist and musician, best known as one-half of the duo the KLF, co-founder of the Orb and as the man who burnt £1 million.
The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a 1988 book by "The Timelords" (Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond), better known as The KLF. It is a step-by-step guide to achieving a No. 1 single with no money or musical skills, and a case study of the duo's UK novelty pop No. 1 "Doctorin' the Tardis".
"3 a.m. Eternal" is a song by British acid house group the KLF, taken from their fourth and final studio album, The White Room (1991). Numerous versions of the song were released as singles between 1989 and 1992 by their label KLF Communications. In January 1991, an acid house pop version of the song became an international top ten hit single, reaching number-one on the UK Singles Chart, number two on the UK Dance Singles Chart and number five on the US Billboard Hot 100, and leading to the KLF becoming the internationally biggest-selling singles band of 1991.
Disco 2000 was a British pop band, a side project of The KLF. Vocals were handled by Cress, then-wife of KLF co-founder Jimmy Cauty, and "Mo". Between 1987 and 1989, Disco 2000 released three singles on the KLF Communications label, none of which entered the top 75 of the UK Singles Chart.
1987 is the debut studio album by British electronic band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, later known as the KLF. 1987 was produced using extensive unauthorised samples that plagiarised a wide range of musical works, continuing a theme begun in the JAMs' debut single "All You Need Is Love". These samples provided a deliberately provocative backdrop for beatbox rhythms and cryptic, political raps.
"What Time Is Love?" is a song released, in different mixes, as a series of singles by the British electronic music band the KLF. It featured prominently and repeatedly in their output from 1988 to 1992 and, under the moniker of 2K, in 1997. In its original form, the track was an instrumental electronic dance anthem; subsequent reworkings, with vocals and additional instrumentation, yielded the international hit singles "What Time Is Love? " (1990), and "America: What Time Is Love?" (1991), which respectively reached number five and number four on the UK Singles Chart, and introduced the KLF to a mainstream international audience.
"Justified & Ancient" is a song by British band the KLF. It was featured on their 1991 album, The White Room, but its origins date back to the duo's debut album, 1987 .
Brilliant were a British pop/rock group active in the 1980s. Although not commercially successful and mauled by the critics, they remain notable because of the personnel involved – Martin Glover a.k.a. Youth of Killing Joke and subsequently a top producer/remixer; Jimmy Cauty, later to find fame and fortune as one half of The KLF; and Ben Watkins a.k.a. Juno Reactor. Equally notable was their management, their record company A&R manager, and songwriting and production team.
"Doctorin' the Tardis" is a novelty single by the Timelords. The song is predominantly a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music and Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll" with sections from "Block Buster!" by The Sweet. The single was not well received by critics but was a commercial success, hitting number one on the UK and New Zealand singles charts, and reaching the top 10 in Australia, Finland, Ireland and Norway.
The Man is an album recorded and released by Scottish musician and music industry figure Bill Drummond in 1986.
"Whitney Joins the JAMs" is a song and 1987 single by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. The song, released on the JAMs' independent label KLF Communications, is built around plagiarised samples of Whitney Houston in which—thanks to studio technology—she "joins the JAMs".
"Down Town" was a 1987 release by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. The song is gospel music driven by house music rhythms, incorporating a sample of Petula Clark's 1964 single "Downtown".
The KLF are a British electronic band who originated in Liverpool and London in the late 1980s. Scottish musician Bill Drummond and English musician Jimmy Cauty began by releasing hip hop-inspired and sample-heavy records as the JAMs. As the Timelords, they recorded the British number-one single "Doctorin' the Tardis", and documented the process of making a hit record in a book The Manual . As the KLF, Drummond and Cauty pioneered stadium house and, with their 1990 LP Chill Out, the ambient house genre. The KLF released a series of international hits on their own KLF Communications record label and became the biggest selling singles act in the world in 1991.
"Fuck the Millennium", sometimes spelled "***k the Millennium", is a protest song by the band 2K—Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty—better known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu or the KLF. The song was inspired musically by Jeremy Deller's "Acid Brass" project, where a traditional brass band plays acid house classics; these include the KLF's "What Time Is Love?". They were also inspired topically by the then-forthcoming end of the second millennium and the plans to celebrate it.
"The Magnificent" is a 1995 song by the One World Orchestra, recorded for the War Child charity compilation, The Help Album, which was released to raise funds for children affected by the Bosnian War. As with the other contributions to the album, it was recorded on 4 September 1995 and released five days later. It coincided with the screening of Drummond and Cauty's film about the K Foundation's burning of one-million British pounds, and the duo fielded questions from audiences relating the subjects.
2023: A Trilogy is a book by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond writing as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. The book was published in 2017, 23 years after the duo had burnt one million British pounds they earned in the music industry as The KLF.
Welcome to the Dark Ages was a three-day event organised by The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, held in Liverpool in August 2017. The event heralded a revival of the creative partnership between Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, under the name with which they first recorded and released music together in 1987. The duo had last worked together in 1997, when, as 2K, they staged an art performance and released a single, "Fuck the Millennium", and, as K2 Plant Hire Ltd, hatched a plan to build a "People's Pyramid" to celebrate the new millennium.