THE MOST BEAUTIFUL EXPERIENCE OF MY LIFE

26 March 2006

‘That was the most beautiful experience of my life.’ The speaker of this sentence then outstretched her hand for me to shake and went off into the night with her boyfriend. Sod knows what he thought of her being so free and easy with her compliments. She might say this kind of thing all the time, but right now, and for some time to come, I’m going to hold on to what she said to help me through the moments of extreme self-doubt.

She had just been listening to the playback of the recording of the score AGE which she had taken part in making as a member of The17 before John Hirst clicked apple+delete and it was gone forever. Never to be heard again.

That was the night before last. We are now on the ferry back from Gothenburg to Newcastle. The17 is now fully fledged and happening and out there in the real world. The night in question was the last of nine sessions of what could best be titled as an Introduction To The17 With Bill Drummond.

As I want to keep this text brief I won’t go into a full description of Fylkingen and all the bollocks that happened while we were in Stockholm. At 7.10 on each of those nine nights I would walk out of my dressing room into the main auditorium, a room in almost pitch-blackness which could hold 200 but would only have 17 seated punters. On three of the walls hung the 17 scores illuminated in very low light. I would cross from the back of the room and sit on a piano stool in front of the audience. At my right-hand side was a top-of-the-range brand-spanking-new Yamaha grand, lid up. The faces of the audience were unseen in the darkness. I could only vaguely make out their silhouettes. I was not lit either.

To my left was a table. Behind the table sat John Hirst, on it his Apple Powerbook would be open and his face up-lit from the screen. Also on the table would be some of the other bits of technology for the job in hand.

I’d peer into the gloom. ‘Good evening. My name is Bill Drummond and you are The17 …’ for the next 40 minutes I would not move from the piano stool while telling my story. Attempting to use all the power at my disposal to explain and illustrate why recorded music is now a dead art form, a relic of the 20th century and then seduce these 17 strangers in front of me into being committed lifetime members of The17.

Equal measures of honesty, deceit, arrogance and effrontery, peppered with assorted self-effacing asides formed my armoury. The story I told included much of what was written on my outward-bound journey.

There was then a ten-minute break. People could get a drink from the foyer bar, take a piss, buy a pair of badges or go out for a fag. Sweden is already no smoking almost everywhere, which I, of course, appreciate.

Then it was down to the business of performing the score AGE. It’s the one requiring a building with five floors and five lots of 17 people of varying ages. As there is no five storey building to hand and only 17 people of whatever ages they are, compromises had to be made and improvisation used to make the score happen. John Hirst and I would get to work, recording The17 taking on the roles of all five groups of 17, one after the other, starting with them being The17 over 70, drawing upon the wisdom of their years, finishing with them imagining being 17 people under the age of 12, drawing upon the innocence of their years.

After the five recordings were done there was another ten-minute break. Then I would summon The17 back into the auditorium to listen to the playback of what they had performed.

After the first of the nine nights I thought the whole event was a winner. The performance of the score AGE played back to us sounded breathtaking. Over the run of nine nights the events differed in subtle and less subtle ways, but every time it was very much the same piece and worked as such. I won’t try to explain why I think such a seemingly simple musical composition should work so well and be so moving. If I tried, I would be in danger of sounding very pretentious. Some evenings after the playback I found myself telling The17 that what they had just listened to was the collective subconscious soul of the 17 performers in the room. The performance would end with John Hirst calling for silence so we could hear the short whirring sound his laptop makes as the recording was deleted.

Maybe not one of the other 16 people who took part in these nine events would express their reaction to it in the same words as the girl at the beginning of this text, and maybe those who thought it was shite would leave at the end saying nothing. But the feeling I got was that most were pretty moved. I know I’m in no position to be my own critic but here goes anyway: I think it is the purest and most stimulating musical thing I have ever been involved with. If music were to start all over again, I wouldn’t mind it starting out sounding like that. I also know that as a piece of recorded music to be played on your MP3 player or as a CD or even on Late Junction on Radio 3, it would be boring pretentious shite.

As well as these ‘Introductions To The17 With Bill Drummond’ I visited seven schools in and around Stockholm twice. This was to perform the score COLLABORATE. We visited each of the seven schools in the first week to have a bit of a chat and to record their parts in the overall score. In the second week we went back to them all to play the finished piece and have a further chat. Although the performance of this score was carried out far more to the letter than AGE it was, in practice, far less successful.

The school children involved varied in age from eight to 17. The 13-year-old ones were the most difficult. I ended up telling one particularly troublesome 13-year-old lad to ‘Shut the fuck up or get out the fucking room before we fucking start.’ He left with his posse of mates and I felt pathetic for picking on a 13-year-old.

I don’t know what any of them got out of it, if anything. I had the feeling that some of the classes had been told that a pop star was turning up and they were going to be involved in the making of his new record. They must have been disappointed when I shuffled in with my theories about all known music being dead, when they are just starting on their voyage into music and were hearing everything for the first time. Some of the pupils who seemed to be the most apathetic on my first visit were the most animated after hearing the outcome on my second visit.

Although all the schools were state schools, the children were quite a mixture from mainly mixed race and immigrant kids into rap in a school in the suburbs, to a bunch of predominantly white middle-class ones doing dance in an arts academy.

The ones doing dance were most at ease with performing. They were also most critical of what they heard back. To them it did not seem that dissimilar to some of the things they already did in improvisation classes where one of the class stands in the middle while the rest of them sit in a circle around them. Those sitting in the circle have to start improvising oral noise for the one in the middle to dance to.

When I do this score again in the northeast of England come April/May (2006) I hope to have found ways of making it work better and be more rewarding for those taking part and for the final playing of the track before its deletion, more stunning.

I asked one bunch of students if they thought it sounded like the first vocal music ever performed many thousands of years ago. A girl among them said ‘No. The first music would have been a mother singing her baby to sleep.’ She made me think it probably was. Women invented music. It’s official. You read it here first, unless some feminist has already claimed it as her profound insight into the cultural evolution of (Wo)Man.

A lad called Eric, not one of the school lads but a lad in his 20s who came along to one of the first events at Fylkingen, introduced himself to me as a film maker, or at least a part-time but would be full-time film maker. He was a teacher of autistic kids in his day job. He wanted to make a film about The17. I said that he could but that he could not use any film or sound recordings of the various 17s performing. He said he already understood this and was keener on filming people’s responses to being involved.

Eric sorted out some leave from his teaching job and spent the best part of our stay in Stockholm filming at the various schools as well as at Fylkingen. I have no idea if any of the stuff he has filmed will hang together and will be of interest to anybody but him. He seemed very excited about what he had already got when he filmed our departure yesterday. He asked me whom I’d choose if I could have anybody in the world to take part in The17 but not somebody from music. I couldn’t think of anybody so I said David Beckham. Eric thought my answer amusing, I thought it lacked imagination. I should have said Eric Cantona. Eric (not Cantona) will have started editing his footage as I write these words out on the North Sea.

Now this text is done I have to start rewriting some of the scores, moving their order around and dumping a couple to make way for new ones.

Tomorrow after we dock we will be heading into Newcastle for a couple of meetings in the hope we can reduce the number of places available for each performance – cut from 34 to 17 – and that we can arrange for the room where we are doing it in the Hatton Gallery to be painted black.

I will end this text in the same way as I began it by quoting again the woman who said ‘That was the most beautiful experience of my life.’