You say ‘allowing myself to do the paintings’ and you do often seem to structure work around a dogma or set of rules − allowance and denial.
‘It’s not like I’m “into denial” like some sexual or perverse thing … It’s like when I was making three and a half minute pop records; there’s no point making them longer than three and a half minutes. The way that these things are communicated to people is via radio, initially, and radio stations don’t want to play anything longer than three and a half minutes. If it is, they start fading it or talking over it. Also, with a pop record, any record, any recorded music, you can only have it within so many megahertz − you can’t have really high sounds or really low sounds because it can’t exist on a piece of vinyl or an mp3.’
You see a beauty in restriction?
‘Yeah. Like, with oil paints – not that I use oil paints now – you know that this colour and that colour, they can’t mix chemically – so you’re always aware of it.
Doing the posters over the years, I always thought, “Trim it down. Trim it down.” Whereas they started off a lot wordier and there wasn’t much difference between the posters and the writing in the book.’
Are you happy with the term ‘artist’?
‘I’m never happy with that at heart, no, but anything else I try to come up with, it doesn’t work. There was a time when I thought, “No, I’m a poet, that’s what I am, just so happens I don’t use words …” and I tried to convince myself of that but I knew it was even more pretentious and would need even more explaining. There was a period when I was reading more poetry than I was looking at or thinking about art … I don’t know, saying you’re an artist has always had, maybe should have, that pretension. “Oh, you’re an artist are you? That what you think you are? You’re an artist now?” Pop record making was only (holds up thumb and index finger) that much of my life. There was a lot before and after that.’
The advent of The17 seemed to coincide with a shift in popular music away from the single voice to a more choral sound.
‘I think it’s a zeitgeist thing. I think I’m just part of a … this didn’t come into The17 book but I could have started from another point of view:
I buy an iPod. Theoretically, I can have every piece of music that I have ever wanted to listen to on there and I can listen to it when I want. So I get all these tracks and I start flicking through, this one, this one, this one − that’s just me though, jaded − but then I notice my thirteen-year-old doing the same thing, “flick, flick, flick, flick”, or she hears something on an advert, likes it, types it into Google, downloads it − whoosh, she has the band’s whole everything. She doesn’t know what decade they’re from, where they’re from but she’s got it all and maybe listens to it for a week and then it’s gone. Bang.
Next week it’s something else.
‘Something has vastly changed, really hugely changed. When I was a kid, to have an album cost you quite a bit of money. You invested in it. When you got it, if you didn’t like it, you accepted there were maybe only two tracks you liked but you worked at it and you ended up liking it, learnt to like it − that’s not going to happen now, it’s different and I’m not saying anything’s better or worse, it’s just changed. What’s happened since the whole downloading thing has kicked in big time is the live side − going to see the act live is far more important; last year with Leonard Cohen over here − whole generations said, “We’ve got to go and see Leonard Cohen.”
It doesn’t matter if they buy the album …’
It’s the event.
‘The event, yes. Look at the rise and rise of the amount of festivals. It may be a bubble that’s going to burst but it’s now about time, place and occasion – all of those things that I’m dealing with in a different way with The17 – that is what people are going for. It’s no longer contained within the recording.
Some people now, people more of your generation, fetishise vinyl and it’s young people who are buying into a want, a need for music to be more solid, the sleeves bigger …
So those are all reflections of that thing. Of course I hear Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes and I love it but that’s just me, that’s because of my age and the way it reminds me of things from other times.
I didn’t bring it up this afternoon but I know, over the years, any time I’ve heard choral singing music my ears have gone out to it and that’ll be because I sang in choirs as a kid.’
Perhaps part of the magic of singing in church as a child is that you’re unaware of what you’re singing about.
‘It’s just the sounds, yes, and I’ve read recently how − I can’t remember the composer − he wanted less words, more long vowels and more harmonies because that’s what’s really being communicated. That’s what has the power in religious music. It’s not the words, it’s the sounds, it’s the voices.’
Are you finding that many members of The17 are being affected by the experience?
‘I don’t know. I don’t know enough people … I’ll go and do something like today but I don’t know what the long-term effect is. I’ve got no idea.’
• • • • •
Stoke Newington, London
March 2010
Bill is sitting on his roof − the roof where he writes, weather permitting.
It was here, surrounded by the ambient noise of outer London, that he wrote much of his book about The17*.
Earlier in the day, when I expressed concern that the portrait we’re here to take might look contrived, Bill patiently pointed out that, since he wasn’t in the habit of writing on his ledge with other people looming over him, it was contrived whether I liked it or not and we should probably just make the best of a contrived situation and not worry about it. So we do; Bill with his notebook and tea, Lucy and I teetering precariously above the guttering and the drop, trying to frame the shots.*
We speak about Lady Gaga. Bill loves Lady Gaga; loves her complete ease and ownership of pop. She has compromised nothing, he says, she has created a whole universe and now straddles it, unsurpassed.
Bill tells us that, for a few weeks last year, he and fellow ex-KLFer Jimmy Cauty were in agreement that the only thing which would tempt them back to pop music would be to work with Lady Gaga.
‘Jimmy said he was surprised she’s not telephoned us yet.’
• • • • •
After leaving Bill’s house, I’m struck by the thought that the way he records and narrates his work, however unreliably, may be a stratagem to buttress and bolster its shape – for himself as much as the layman. His world of mad doings only lines up in retrospect when viewed from the justified headlands of 17, How To Be An Artist and the other written records of his work. His books are accepted histories of a lifetime of tangential missions into the unknown and he takes such care to define the narrative path because he knows the chaotic abyss that lurks either side of his stated methodology.
Even the story that there’s no story – no meaning behind a decision – ‘Nothing to see here’, is a sleight of hand way of working.
He generates the story and embodies it, but sometimes his stories are not enough, the wilfulness of his acts too great to be constrained within the books, films, music and statements he makes in their wake – as with THE MONEY – and long shadows threaten to swallow him up … but he writes and talks his way out of it, making something new from the fallout; forms a new plan; invokes a new dialectic and moves on.
RICHARD