"I'm not sure I completely like the new world": Extract from forthcoming book The Music of the Future at Repeater Blog

An extract from my forthcoming Repeater book, The Music of the Future has been published at the Repeater Books blog.

In Praise of Ukip Poster Vandals

“As I strolled along Heath Mill Lane towards Eastside Projects, I was confronted with a billboard that offended me in so many ways … that billboard in Heath Mill Lane that was very cynically trying to pander to us at our most vulnerable and negative and not to our better selves … This billboard not only offended me morally and aesthetically it also went against everything that I feel political discourse should be about.

“Thus there was nothing for it, after my train pulled into Moor Street, I picked up my last remaining tins of Drummond’s International Grey and got to work.”

– Bill Drummond, writing in The Birmingham Post

Before

After

Nor is Drummond alone. As Glaswegian rapper tom dissonance recently posted on Twitter, Ukip are “certainly showing that grassroots art vandalism is alive and well in this country.”

A dedicated Tumblr blog, Destroyed Ukip Billboards, has even sprung up to exhibit the best examples.

I have a soft spot for this Stezaker-esque collage, which seems to transform Farage’s party’s simple-minded far-right populism into an obscure metaphysical enquiry…

Keep up the good work.

Piano Smashing: A Brief History

1. Franz Liszt (1811—1886)

“Beethoven’s piano famously spewed broken strings out of its case in his more ferocious moments, but Liszt apparently broke the cases themselves. After one of his opera paraphrases the heaving, trembling instrument would be at his feet, utterly spent, and a new one would have to be carried out on to the stage from the wings. Those early, wooden-framed pianos simply could not cope with playing which now flowed in energy and force from shoulder and back, rather than merely with the earlier wrist and forearm technique of a Hummel or a Czerny.”

– from Stephen Hough, ‘Liszt: The Man Who Broke Pianos’

2. Alberto Savinio (1891—1952)

“Savinio’s performance techniques included smashing the piano with his fists and dragging a board up and down the keys. The results were predictable but exciting. After one concert André Billy recalls hearing Apollinaire exclaim: ‘He broke the piano! Now that’s what I call a musician!’ In a written review of the same concert, Apollinaire goes further: ‘I believe that within two years he will have broken all the pianos existing in Paris, after which he might leave to traverse the world and break all the pianos existing in the universe. This will perhaps be a good riddance.’”

– from Christopher Schiff, ‘Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism’

3. Jerry Lee Lewis (1935+)

“He had the crowd screaming and rushing the stage, and when it seemed that the screams had grown loudest and the rushing most chaotic, he stood, licked the piano stool away with violence, and broke into ‘Great Balls of Fire’. As the screaming chaos grew suddenly and sublimely greater, he drew from his jacket a Coke bottle full of gasoline, and he doused the piano with one hand as the other banged out the song; and he struck a wooden match and he set the piano aflame, and his hands, like the hands of a madman, did not quit the blazing keys, but kept pounding, until all became unknown tongues and holiness and fire, and the kids went utterly, magically berserk with the frenzy of it all … ”

– from Nick Tosches, Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story

4. Piano Smashing Contests (UK, 1950s–60s)

“It was a strange time to start learning the piano. In the 1950s, when I was a boy, it was the fashion in England to hold piano smashing competitions. Because television had arrived. The piano in the front parlor in most houses became suddenly redundant. And there was little or no demand for secondhand pianos. So all around the country, at school fêtes and country fairs, an orgy of piano smashing broke out. On village greens, on football pitches, teams of men with sledge hammers, axes, hacksaws and crowbars attacked upright pianos and reduced them to debris that had to pass through a hoop about two inches in diameter, to verify that the destruction was whole-hearted and thorough.”

“I witnessed a piano-smashing only once. I was shocked by it. To see two teams of grown men wantonly laying in to two defenceless uprights, to see felted hammers flying everywhere, tangles of springy piano wire, splintered wood and the black and white ivories lying slaughtered on the green grass. Now, years later, I think that it was possibly also a symbolic act, the ritual destruction of repressive Victorian values, embodied in the piano, which deserved to be taken out on to the village green by right-thinking English yeomen and smashed. Decades of primness, prudery and piety in the parlor, of hypocrisy and violence, of empire, wars and colonialism. All this projected on to the piano, around which families prayed and sang hymns and parlor songs of fervent faith and patriotism. But the craft that went into an upright piano! All gone in a twinkling. And a tinkling. How very sad it was.”

– from Anthony Marshall, ‘Still Life with Goanna?’

“Some time in the mid 1960s, by which time I’d been doing my head in the piano thing for a few years, I saw a feature on telly about people smashing up a piano with sledgehammers. It not only looked fantastic, it also sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. What I wanted to do was get a sledgehammer and smash up our piano just to hear those sounds at close quarters for myself.”

“At that time the country was full of old pianos that nobody could play anymore. They were all left over from a time before radios and record players, when people had to make their own music. To be able to play the piano was a social skill that many a young man aspired to. Every pub had one. But you know that, you’ve seen enough old films. There was another problem for these old pianos. Central heating. When it came in for the masses in the 1960s. central heating completely fucked these pianos. Buckled their frames, made them impossible to keep in tune.”

“After this one showing of a piano being smashed on telly, piano smashing swept the country. No village fete was complete without a piano smashing contest. Soon all the pianos available for smashing in the country had been smashed. So piano-smashing faded from the place it held for a few years in the public imagination and popular culture. Except I kept dreaming of smashing our piano.”

– from Bill Drummond, The 17

5. ‘Piano Activities’ by Philip Corner (as performed at the Wiesbaden Fluxus Festival, 1962)

“In Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, performed in 1962 at the first Fluxus-titled festival in Wiesbaden, Germany, Dick Higgins, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, and Emmett Williams engaged in the apparent destruction of an old, unplayable piano belonging to the Kunstverein. They did destroy the instrument, but not haphazardly … the careful rubbing of a brick over the strings, the patient waiting for the right moment to use a hammer.” 

– from Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience

“The work was not originally intended to include the destruction of the instrument, although in this performance the activities were interpreted as such and the piano was taken apart violently with crowbars, saws, and hammers. Corner was against any wanton destruction, but when informed that the parts had been turned into sculptures he understood that the piano had been positively transformed by its breakdown.”

– from Caleb Kelly, Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction

6. Annea Lockwood (1939+)

“Set upright piano (not a grand) in an open space with the lid closed.

Spill a little lighter fluid on a twist of paper and place inside, near the pedals.

 Light it.

 Balloons may be stapled to the piano.

 Play whatever pleases you for as long as you can.”

– score to ‘Piano Burning’ (1968)

Enjoy The Silence: Bill Drummond interview from Plan B magazine on The 17, No Music Day, and the end of music

While Bill Drummond punts daffodils beneath Spaghetti Junction, I thought I’d post this interview I conducted with the man for Plan B magazine, November 2006. The photo (above) is from the original copy, taken by Eva Edsjö.

Bill Drummond, formerly one half of arch-pop provocateurs The KLF, has been having fantasies again. Throughout his teenage years, he would dream up fantasy bands. He didn’t need to write the music but he knew what it would sound like; he knew what they would say in interviews; he knew the stage act and where they would perform it. Years later, as a record producer in the Eighties, he would rip off his own fantasies to inform the real bands he was working with.

Over the last few years Bill’s fantasies have taken a darker turn – but also, perhaps, a more profound one. Inspired by Oxford University’s early music Choir Of The Sixteen (“If I’m being flippant I’ll say that I want to go one better”) and a childhood spent singing in Presbyterian church choirs, Bill Drummond has started dreaming of a fantasy choir, led by text-based scores, called The17. And that’s just the beginning. A literal beginning in fact: a Year Zero, a return to first principles. Rip it up and start again.

Imagine if all music had disappeared...


Bill Drummond: “Wouldn’t it be great if we knew music had existed, but the CDs were blank. You’d go to the piano and you can’t do anything, drum kits don’t work, it’s all gone. We’ve still got the emotional need to make music but it cannot be done on any instrument.

“So that’s kind of where thinking about the voice came from. I wrote this score and, the way it’s written, any 17 people could get together and do it. But as soon as I did it as a performance in front of an audience I realised that isn’t the way it works. Having an audience, it suddenly becomes show business. What had worked really well was just the group of 17 people doing it together. So it’s evolved from that, this thing in my head: not just wanting it to be any 17 people that would do it, but – this is the ideal – it should be done with non-musical people.”


So why The17?

“I always knew this fantasy choir was going to be called The17. I remember hearing that Beatles song with the line, “She was just 17/You know what I mean” on the radio when I was about 11, and I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what you mean’ – well, years later, obviously I knew what it meant! From that point something clicked in my head whenever I’d hear ‘17’ in the lyric of a song. And the age of 17 is quite a strange age, this dark era – well, it was for me – when you’re into dark music, whether that’s Shostakovich or Nirvana.

“I remember, five years ago, being on Oxford Street, and I thought I’d pop into HMV. I remember just walking through the door and I felt such a dread. There’s aisle upon aisle of CDs, in every genre possible, and I just thought, I know whatever I get here, it’s not going to open another door in my head. That night, I got home, I did some email, and – it was about the time Napster was at its full fame – I remember feeling incredibly depressed. It was as if every piece of recorded music from the whole history of recorded music was behind that computer screen laughing at me. It was saying, ‘Go on, download us!’ I could have it all now, just download it and listen to it, and this, for some reason, really depressed me.

“So I tried an idea the next day, whereby I’d only listen to new music – music made by people this year and who had never made music before. That’s what I did for nearly a year, and I did it religiously.

“Every weekend I’d look at the music pages of the Sunday paper and pick something new – whatever genre – it didn’t matter, it just had to be new. And my thinking was: if you can’t say it in the first album then you can’t say it.

“And most of the time I’d just say to myself, ‘This is shit, this was done before, 10, 15, 20 or even 40 years ago.’ The music wasn’t opening any new doors in my head. It just wasn’t new enough.”


So tell me about No Music Day – it’s presented on the website as a score like those for The17... 

“I wanted to see if I could go a week without hearing music. At all. And I never even attempted it, because the idea was that if you start on Monday, and then late Tuesday you hear a piece of music, even unintentionally, you had to start the seven days all over again. I realised it was just impossible. I mean, I live with a family. This cannot be done unless I go away and block myself off in the mountains. Then I brought it down to one day and I thought, OK, there’ll be one day and it’s No Music Day.”


One of the things I found interesting about the website were the little personal testimonies by people saying that once they’d stopped listening to records and CDs, they started to find all sorts of other things musical and started to wonder to themselves, ‘Am I breaking the rules by paying attention to the music in the sound of the rain?’ 

Was that ever part of the idea from the beginning, to raise this question of the nature of music and how to define it, where its borders are?

“No. I’m not saying, listen to the sound of the rain. That’s not the score. Mine is: give yourself a day off. See if you can go a day without actually hearing anything musically and actually think for yourself what it is you want from music, instead of just accepting it.”


Something that struck me about The17 is that each piece is in a sense both a score and a manifesto. The Manual that you wrote many years ago [with Jimmy Cauty], How To Have a Number One The Easy Way, is also both a score and a manifesto. They’re both: anyone can do it, go out and get a bunch of people together... 

“Basically, I’ve had one idea, and I’m aware of that now. Christ, I’m 30 years older and I’m still doing the same thing. But the main thing for me, the main message that I’ve wanted to put out, is: don’t wait to be asked. If you want to do something, go and do it. Whatever it is.”

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

December 1956 saw the first meeting of the BBC’s new Electrophonic Effects Committee to discuss a proposal to set up a studio for the production of electronic sounds and music for use in radio drama. A month later they would realise that the term ‘electrophonic’ had already been taken by the field of audiometrics and soon changed it to Radiophonic. Electrophonic audiometry involves the playing of electronic tones at different frequencies - on an audiometer, a device credited to Bell Labs employee Harvey Fletcher - to test the subject’s hearing. The first time Desmond Briscoe remembered hearing electronic sounds it was coming from an audiometer, performing hearing tests on soldiers during wartime. Briscoe spent most of World War Two in the army educational corps running a course on music appreciation, teaching soldiers how to listen to modern music. In later life, he had a way of saying the words ‘music’ and ‘composer’ precisely as though they were doomed to hide under inverted commas, veiled by a slight ironic distance.

Daphne Oram, it is said, secretly enjoyed the war for the opportunities it provided for women in the typically male world of sound engineering. She had joined the BBC in 1943 in the music department, balancing sound output levels. In the mid-1950s Oram would petition her superiors to open a dedicated electronic music studio, staying late at night at the BBC after everyone had left to push tape machines from different studios together and experiment with electronic sounds and concrète techniques. Seemingly unaffected by the newfound pressures of competition, the music department of the BBC was intent on pursuing its policy of ‘serious’ music. Unfortunately for Oram, the music department’s idea of ‘serious’ seemed to consist largely of ‘opera and ballet.’

To many British people today, when asked about their earliest memories of electronic sounds, they may well think of something produced at the Radiophonic Workshop. Perhaps for the majority (including, most famously, the Queen), they will think of Delia Derbyshire’s theme to Doctor Who. Bill Drummond, formerly of the group, the KLF, remembers it as “like no other piece of music, and it affected me in a way that no other piece of music affected me. It did a whole generation.” In the BBC radio play about the life of Delia Derbyshire, Blue Veils and Golden Sands, electronic composer and musician Pete Kember (of Spaceman 3, Experimental Audio Research and Spectrum), who plays himself, cites a list of contemporary electronic artists in whose music he can hear the influence of Delia’s music from the Workshop: Aphex Twin, Orbital, Add N to (X). MMS, a poster on the Dissensus web forum claims the Workshop’s output is responsible for acclimatising the British public to an otherworldly sound world, “the sonics of abstract electronic music has seeped through British culture as a vast hopeful but irrational spectre,” from groups that might self-consciously reference analogue experimentation, like Stereolab, through to hardcore and rave. Another poster, calling himself Blunt, agrees, adding, "when the means of production began to be opened up to the masses in the late 80s and early 90s, it was British musicians and bedroom producers that blazed the trail” in electronic pop and dance music.

In the years 1957 and ’58, electronic music studios opened in Warsaw, Munich, Stockholm and Eindhoven, some were privately owned by electronics manufacturers like Philips and Siemens (Eindhoven and Munich, respectively) others were part of national broadcast stations, but none were quite like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Due to its institutional position and demanding remit, the Workshop is both inside and outside the history of electronic music, often summarily excluded from books on the subject or dismissed out of hand by commentators and other composers. Nonetheless, the Workshop is, in a certain sense, at the very heart of the development of electronic music, as its obscene core or uncanny double.