Bill Drummond/The17 (exclusive UK Debut)

Widely recognised for for his time as half of the KLF (What Time Is Love, Last Train To Trancentral etc) The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, The Timelords and famous for his contribution to The K Foundation (Burning A Million Quid, The Manual, etc) Bill Drummond has developed and refined his approach to life, art and music, publishing books (45 and 17) and creating No Music Day and a choir simply called The17.

He says: “Before the invention of the technology to record music, all music celebrated time, place and/or occasion. There was music that was only heard or performed in the home or workplace, or the Saturday night dance or in church on Sunday morning, or to mark the time of year, or even the march into war. Much of the time we were involved in the making of the music ourselves, however unmusical we were. As the technology to record music evolved throughout the 20th century it seduced all forms of music before it. All music wanted to be recorded so that it could be bought and sold. And we loved it. You didn’t have to be in La Scala or New Orleans or in the Cavern Club. You could be in your very own front room or even in your bedroom. Total democratisation is what I thought. Andy Warhol could not buy a better copy of Strawberry Fields by The Beatles than the copy I had – which was the basis of an essay that I wrote in art school back in 1973. And this recording technology was the inspiration for music to be dreamed up and turned into reality. Because the technology was there to do it. As we got deeper into the second half of the 20th century, recorded music became an art form in itself. What we might have thought of as classical or folk or jazz (or whatever), in reality had all morphed into one over-arching musical genre of the age - the genre of recorded music. This new genre had very little to do with time, place and occasion and nothing whatsoever to do with you or me taking part in the making of it. What defined this genre was that it was made by folk who were not like you. It could be bought and sold. It made people into stars and it came out of speakers.

And so I viewed the advent of the iPod and all the file-sharing as the curtain coming down on the greatest art form of the 20th century – recorded music. Some art forms die, overnight, like the silent movie with the advent of the talkies. Others take a few decades. People with vested interests do not want to see their business model crumble and fall, so they keep trying to patch it up. But it is over, well and truly over. And I wanted to dance on its grave.  A new dawn.  Music could be free and once again be able to celebrate time, place and occasion and have nothing to do with something trapped in the iPod in your pocket. But the new music would not be going back to the music of the pre-recorded music age, it would be looking to the future and using everything at its disposal.”

The idea that 17 strangers could come together having never met and instantly become a choir who on the spot would create arrangements that would be sung just once and then lost to the ether is as challenging as anything that Bill Drummond has attempted before and his ambitions for the project are awe inspiring.  

In 2008 The17 began a tour that will take up to five years to complete, taking in 20 different performances in this country that would be twinned with another choir somewhere else in the world.  Past events have seen a concert in Northampton twinned with one in Beijing, one in Derby twinned with one in Jerusalem and to date thousands of individuals have been involved which makes it all the more special that this astonishing project has chosen Camp Bestival for one of it’s extraordinary performances.