William Ernest Drummond (born 29 April 1953) 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 burned £1 million in 1994.
During their career, the KLF released four studio albums: 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) (1987), Who Killed The JAMs? (1988), Chill Out (1990) and their most commercially successful album, The White Room (1991), which spawned internationally successful singles such as re–worked versions of "What Time Is Love?", "3 a.m. Eternal", "Last Train to Trancentral" and a new track, "Justified & Ancient" which featured American country singer Tammy Wynette.
Following their performance at the 1992 BRIT Awards, the KLF announced their departure from the music business and, in May of that year, they deleted their entire back catalogue. Although the duo remained true to their word of May 1992, with the KLF Communications catalogue remaining deleted, they have released a small number of new tracks since then, as the K Foundation, the One World Orchestra, and in 1997, as 2K. Drummond and Jimmy Cauty reappeared in 2017 as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, releasing the novel 2023, and rebooting an earlier campaign to build a "People's Pyramid". In January 2021, the band began uploading their previously deleted catalogue onto streaming services, in compilations.
More recent art activities, carried out under Drummond's banner of 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 The 17. Drummond is the author of several books about art and music.
Early and personal life William Ernest Drummond was born in Butterworth, South Africa,Confirmed by Drummond's official website (link ) where his father was a minister for the Church of Scotland. His family moved 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 schoolfriends such as Gary Carson and Chris Ward.
Drummond lived on the Beanfield Estate, where his father was the Minister of St. Ninian's Church of Scotland church. He attended Beanfield Secondary Modern School, gaining four O-levels, and later the sixth form of Kingswood School, from which he was expelled.Wellingborough Herald & Post, 21 March 1991, p. 7 He attended the Northampton School of Art 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, steelworker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter, and scene painter. He also worked on a trawler.
Drummond is a fan of Dumfriesshire 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 sixth track on his 1986 album, The Man.
Music career
1970s: Illuminatus, Big in Japan, and Zoo In 1975, Drummond began working at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool as a carpenter and scene painter. In the following year 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!"
After absconding from the Illuminatus! production in London, Drummond returned to Liverpool and co-founded the band Big in Japan. Other members included Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood), Budgie (Siouxsie and the Banshees), Jayne Casey (Pink Military/Pink Industry) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). After the band's demise, Drummond and another member, his best friend David Balfe, founded Zoo Records. Zoo's first release was Big in Japan's posthumous EP, From Y To Z and Never Again. They went on to act as producers of the debut albums by Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, both of which Drummond would later manage somewhat idiosyncratically. With Zoo Music Ltd, Drummond and Balfe were also music publishers for Zodiac Mindwarp and The Love Reaction and The Proclaimers. The production team of Drummond and Balfe was christened The Chameleons, who recorded the single "Touch" together with singer Lori Lartey as Lori and the Chameleons passim. and were involved with the production on Echo & the Bunnymen's debut album, released on the Korova label.
1980s: A&R & solo artist 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 was "obviously very sharp," said WEA chairman Rob Dickins, "and he knew the business. But he was too radical to be happy inside a corporate structure. He was better off working as an outsider."
Later in the year, Drummond issued a solo album, The Man, a country/folk music recording, backed by Australian rock group The Triffids. The album was released on Creation Records and included the sardonic "Julian Cope Is Dead", where he outlined his fantasy of shooting the Teardrop Explodes frontman in the head, to ensure the band's early demise and subsequent legendary status. The song has commonly been seen as a reply to the Cope song "Bill Drummond Said". Drummond wrote and performed "The Manager", filmed by Bill Butt in which he lamented the state of the music industry and offered his services at £100 a time to help fix it; one of his complaints was about remixes: "songs have to be written, not layered". The spoken-word recording also appeared as a B-side, and on some compilations as "The Manager's Speech".
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".
1987–1992: Commercial prominence and the KLF
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, 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'". First broadcast in 1994, per
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."Thank You for the Music", New Musical Express, 17 October 1987. 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.
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 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.
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",Fields, Paddy, "And you thought they were dead", The Times (London) ISSN 0140-0460, 4 May 2001, Features p2. Chill Out was named the fifth best dance album of all time in a 1996 Mixmag feature.
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?) 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". 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","100 Rock Moments" , NME.com. Retrieved 21 April 2006. and, in 2003, The Observer named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.Thompson, B. "The 10 greatest publicity stunts", The Observer, 27 September 2003 (link)