", "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.
[1] More recent art activities, carried out under Drummond's banner of Penkiln Burn, include making and distributing cakes, soup, flowers, beds, and shoe-shines.
William Ernest Drummond[n 1] was born in Butterworth, South Africa,[3][n 2] where his father was a minister for the Church of Scotland.
[5] His family moved back to Scotland when he was 18 months old, and his early years were spent in the town of Newton Stewart.
[9] He spent two years working as a milkman, gardener, steel worker, nursing assistant, theatre carpenter, and scene painter.
"[13][19] 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!
[13][14] 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).
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..."[n 3] (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.
"[23] 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[24] 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.
[30] 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".
[citation needed] 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.
[34] 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?
[10] NME listed this appearance at number 4 in their "top 100 rock moments",[36] and, in 2003, The Observer named it the fifth greatest "publicity stunt" in the history of popular music.
[37] 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".
[38] 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.
[53] Drummond featured on Seeming's 2020 album The Birdwatcher's Guide to Atrocity, performing the spoken-word portion of "Learn to Vanish".
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.
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.
Drummond has created a Soup Line drawn across a map going through Belfast and Nottingham to the edges of the British Isles.
Performances and actions in Port-au-Prince for the Ghetto Biennale at the end of 2009 preceded the January Haitian earthquake, and the habitual graffito "Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow And All Music Has Disappeared" took on a new resonance in a city with no electricity or infrastructure, rendered suddenly -relatively – musicless.
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'.
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.
So far the 25 Paintings Tour has travelled to: 2014: Birmingham, UK 2015: Belgrade, Serbia 2016: Kolkata, India 2018: Lexington, North Carolina, USA and will conclude in 2027: Damascus, Syria A film Best Before Death covering the actions (jobs) Bang Drum, Man Made Bed, Make Soup and Man Shines Shoes during the 2016 Kolkata, India and 2018 Lexington, North Carolina, legs of the world tour was made by Paul Duane, Robbie Ryan (Kolkata) and Patrick Jordan (Lexington).
"[81] 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').
Many of his schemes... involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades.
Bill Drummond is a cultural magician..."[82] 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.