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By a quirk of book availability, I’ve just finished reading 2 autobiographies, more or less one after the other. I tend to steer clear of autobiographies on a “never meet your heroes” basis, but neither of the two men featured - Bill Drummond and Chris Donald - can really be classed as heroes of mine, and there were no other books in the house.
Drummond, for those who don’t know, is former rock manager (responsible for Echo and the Bunnymen), pop star (KLF, The Timelords) and art anarchist (most famously when his K Foundation burnt £1,000,000 of their own money). His 1998 book takes the form of various essays about his early career, K Foundation capers, and increasingly (toward the end) Drummond’s own introspective musings. Once he’s got some of his pent-up bombast and wackier ideas out of the way - ley lines, for instance - he writes with wit, intelligence and great insight. You even end up feeling that this “art terrorist” who mutilated animals, mocked the pop charts and splurged huge amounts of money in the cause of nothing in particular, might actually be a very nice bloke. The rock world doesn’t throw up creative people like Drummond any more.
On the other hand, Chris Donald - ex-editor of Viz - writes a dull, sour little book which spends most of its time blaming other people (especially publisher John Brown) for things that went wrong with the publication. Donald comes across as a class A nerd who just struck lucky.
Conclusion - if I had my time again, I’d listen to KLF records rather than reading Viz..
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 9:28 am and is filed under General, or uncategorized due to sloppy editing, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
….hmmmm…. reading between the lines I’d say you’ve probably got some KLF stock that you can’t shift, possibly even some *rare* items…… this shameless attempt to stimulate demand won’t wash with me young shittamelad…
… trust me, I dabbled with both and neither was really worth the effort..
Pal - great comment, I agree entirely - though equally I’m respectful of the time, energy and research put into this particular (riveting) topic by the mighty S.Sandwich esq (may he be praised).
You’re right, of course, Pal - I should be genuflecting to acknowledge your generous provision of any kind of comment at all to my extremely dull initial post.