Bill Drummond

Bill’s music career began in the late 1970s alongside Holly Johnson and Ian Broudie in the band, Big in Japan. After the band’s demise, Bill formed Zoo Records and later went on to manage Echo and the Bunnymen – sending them to tour destinations so obscure that he was forced to admit, “If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour is in the shape of rabbit’s ears.” Towards the end of the 1980s, he joined forces with kindred spirit, Jimmy Cauty and they formed the Timelords — reaching No 1 with the novelty single, ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’. This led the duo to write their first book together, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).

The duo later regrouped as KLF and achieved major fame and fortune culminating with a Brit Award for Best British Group in 1992. Yet, from the top of the musical summit, KLF controversially announced their immediate retirement from music and deleted their entire back catalogue. Whilst the music industry digested the bitter aftertaste of lost revenue, Bill and Jimmy set up the K Foundation and entered the art world. Their most notable performance was burning a million quid on the Scottish island of Jura. In a money-obsessed world, such an act has immortalised Bill… but this shouldn’t deflect from the talents of a cult musician, prophetic thinker and a visionary artist.

In recent years, Bill has written a number of other books, including How To Be An Artist (2002), Wild Highway (with Mark Manning, 2005), Scores 18-76 (2006), 17 (2008) and $20,000 (2010).

Bill Drummond’s website

“We wanted the money, but we wanted to burn it more!”
Bill Drummond

“Like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Drummond has always been a step ahead of human evolution, guiding us on.”
Select Magazine

“You can’t fail to be struck by what an agreeably sane and reasonable figure he cuts, given the extreme and eccentric nature of so much of what he has done.”
The Daily Telegraph

Links:

• Interview with Bill Drummond in The Telegraph
• 12 Things You Never Knew About The KLF … or more precisely, Bill Drummond
• The library of Mu — archived press releases and articles connected to KLF

KLF Music — The Last Train to Trancentral

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty talk about their reasons for burning a million quid