''45'' is a non-fiction book by
Bill Drummond
William Ernest Drummond (born 29 April 1953) is a Scottish artist, musician, writer, and record producer. He was a co-founder of the late-1980s avant-garde pop group the KLF and its 1990s media-manipulating successor, the K Foundation, with wh ...
published by
Little, Brown
Little, Brown and Company is an American publishing company founded in 1837 by Charles Coffin Little and James Brown (publisher), James Brown in Boston. For close to two centuries it has published fiction and nonfiction by American authors. Ear ...
in 2000. It collects various essays written by Drummond in 1997 and 1998.
Reviews
''45'' was widely reviewed in the British press. ''
The Times
''The Times'' is a British daily national newspaper based in London. It began in 1785 under the title ''The Daily Universal Register'', adopting its current name on 1 January 1788. ''The Times'' and its sister paper ''The Sunday Times'' (fou ...
'' said that "It is usually a disaster when pop stars write books.... But Bill Drummond was never your average rock star", describing the book as "A series of loosely related
vignettes
Vignette may refer to:
* Vignette (entertainment), a sketch in a sketch comedy
* Vignette (graphic design), decorative designs in books (originally in the form of leaves and vines) to separate sections or chapters
* Vignette (literature), short, i ...
forming the rambling diary of one year, it initially feels far removed from the scam-mongering stunts that we have come to expect. Drummond portrays himself as a shambling, absurd figure, saddled with the twin obsessions of
pop music
Pop music is a genre of popular music that originated in its modern form during the mid-1950s in the United States and the United Kingdom. The terms ''popular music'' and ''pop music'' are often used interchangeably, although the former describe ...
and
art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
....
ehas the inimitable wisdom of a true maverick."
if
Charles Shaar Murray
Charles Shaar Murray (born Charles Maximillian Murray; 27 June 1951) is an English music journalist and broadcaster. He has worked on the ''New Musical Express'' and many other magazines and newspapers, and has been interviewed for a number of ...
wrote in ''
The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was publis ...
'' that "
ill ILL may refer to:
* '' I Love Lucy'', a landmark American television sitcom
* Illorsuit Heliport (location identifier: ILL), a heliport in Illorsuit, Greenland
* Institut Laue–Langevin, an internationally financed scientific facility
* Interlibra ...
Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a
magician. Many of his schemes - one example is described as "a private joke that's so private I don't even get it myself" - involve symbolically weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician, and 45 is his logbook." A second review in ''The Independent'' added that "despite all the half-truths and self-effacing irony, and what Drummond calls "the incessant self- mythologising vanity", the stories in 45 strike me as peculiarly and sometimes painfully honest. It appears that, after all this time, he's decided it would be nice if his motives were understood. By himself at least. And if I'm wrong about that, 45 is still worth reading for the daft aphorisms - "Down escalators are one of the greatest inventions ever" - and all the situationist pranks involving dead cows,
Stonehenge
Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, west of Amesbury. It consists of an outer ring of vertical sarsen standing stones, each around high, wide, and weighing around 25 tons, topped by connectin ...
and money that never quite made the transition from Drummond's imagination to the real world."
''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
s Saturday Pages books section called ''45'' a "charmingly barking
admemoir".
Steven Poole
Steven Poole (born 1972) is a British author and journalist. He particularly concerns himself with the abuse of language and has written two books on the subject: ''Unspeak'' (2006) and ''Who Touched Base In My Thought Shower?'' (2013).
Biograph ...
wrote in the same newspaper that "45 is a further attempt to bury the myth
f The KLF Throughout, Drummond poses as an ordinary middle-aged man who lives in the country, drinks lots of tea and spends his mornings in the nearest library, with coffee breaks in the shopping centre. Yet the myth motors on, pitilessly. When he goes to
Serbia
Serbia (, ; Serbian language, Serbian: , , ), officially the Republic of Serbia (Serbian language, Serbian: , , ), is a landlocked country in Southeast Europe, Southeastern and Central Europe, situated at the crossroads of the Pannonian Bas ...
to appear on an underground music station, he brings a recording of an unreleased KLF song called
The Magnificent. Soon it `had not only become the theme tune of the station
">92 but the anthem of the democracy movement . . . A track we recorded in a day, never released as a single, thought was crap and had forgotten about had taken on a meaning, an importance in a 'far-off land'.'" In summary, Poole said, "At its best
5has flashes of twisted brilliance reminiscent of
Iain Sinclair
Iain Sinclair FRSL (born 11 June 1943) is a writer and filmmaker. Much of his work is rooted in London, recently within the influences of psychogeography. Biography Education
Sinclair was born in Cardiff in 1943. From 1956 to 1961, he was educate ...
or
Will Self
William Woodard Self (born 26 September 1961) is an English author, journalist, political commentator and broadcaster. He has written 11 novels, five collections of shorter fiction, three novellas and nine collections of non-fiction writing. Sel ...
, but the majority is most interesting because the author was one half of the KLF. Of course, that is more than enough glory for one lifetime. Yet the fact remains that this book will forever labour under the shadow of those horned men and their gleefully apocalyptic music."
Editions
* (2000)
* (2001, reprinted 2006)
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:45 (Book)
Books by Bill Drummond
The KLF