Bill Drummond contests that all recorded music is redundant and uses this premise to launch a performance art choir concept called The17, the members of which at any given time are any seventeen people willing to be involved.
This book is mostly Drummond's diary from March 2006 to June 2007 as he launches the choir and uses his existing notoriety to help tour it across arts festivals and into schools. Meanwhile and in no particular order he also looks back on his own life association with music, from the first record he ever bought through to his 1980s jobs working with Stock Aitken Waterman and as a tour manager for Echo & The Bunnymen.
The sections about The17 are typical of Drummond's writing- prosaic yet sometimes aimless, stream of consciousness thoughts. Drummond insists on writing using pen and paper and often his attitude and opinions at the end of a chapter are very different from how that chapter began. As the 'scores' (written lists of instructions) for The17 become more and more grandiose and unrealisable the choir seems to be more of a struggle than a joy. It's difficult to be captivated by The17 concept- Drummond has to admit it's not totally original and since there will never be any available recordings of the choir, you find yourself wishing Drummond could concentrate on describing the sound a bit more.
As usual though Drummond uses his art as a starting block to talk about himself, especially when The17 is less successful. To quote him out of context, "it's more about [his] own shortcomings than about the failings the target of [his] projections may have." And Bill Drummond is a difficult character and not always likeable- he's very unapologetic about all sorts of damage he has caused.
And yet it's actually in the openly autobiographical sections that this book is at its most interesting. The anecdotes about his involvement in the Liverpool music scene in the late 70s and early 80s should really be a whole book in their own right, full of comic rock & roll stories that out-do Spinal Tap, and the few pages about what it was like working with Pete Waterman in his heyday are absolutely great. Drummond avoids going into any detail about his work with Jimmy Cauty, and suggests that that is also another books' worth of material in it's own right.
In a final slightly arsey twist Drummond gets three students from the Royal College of Art to add annotations to his book. This should be the height of unreadable pretension but in fact the comments are refreshingly honest and help ground the whole text a bit more. The most accurate of these is:
"I think [the17]'s just an interesting idea for a project that has turned into a bigger book because he can use it as a way to wax lyrical on his more general gripes with the music industry."
...which sums it up very well.
PS. Better than "45".
Amazon Home
