AN INTRODUCTION TO THE17

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and all music had disappeared.
All musical instruments and all forms of recorded music, gone.
A world without music.
What is more, you cannot even remember what music sounded like or how
it was made.
You can only remember that it had existed and that it had been important to you and your
civilisation.
And you long to hear it once more.

I have written variations of this statement in notebooks and diaries on numerous occasions over the last 13 years. Recently I have taken to adding this:

Then imagine people coming together to make music with nothing but their voices but with no knowledge of what music should sound like.

I’m sure we all have recurring clean-slate fantasies, where the baggage of our past life can be deleted and we can start afresh. This is one version about music that I indulge in.

When I was a teenager and trying to learn to play the guitar, none of my friends were interested in forming bands, so I put together fantasy bands instead. I would daydream about the songs these bands would write and how they would be performed and what the album sleeves would look like and what we would say in interviews and how we would change the cultural landscape of Western civilisation in the process. These daydreams would take place mostly when I was supposed to be doing my homework.

I was always in at least three of these fantasy bands at any one time and their careers carried on for years. I was still in one of them in the early 1990s when I was in a real band that was having global success. In fact the real band was far more commercially successful than the fantasy band. That particular fantasy band had been soldiering on for over 25 years. I had a sort of deal going with these bands that I was never to discuss their details with anybody else. It is difficult enough to go public about their existence now, but I would still never divulge what they were called or the titles of their albums. What I can tell you is that they have usually been far better than any real band that I have been in and I’ve often ripped them off for ideas to be used in the proper bands I worked with.

By 1992 these fantasy bands seemed to have faded from my imagination. I thought I was cured from this somewhat juvenile pastime. For a few years I was left to ponder on more mature topics but then in 1998 it all started up again. This time it was not a band but a choir. As a lad, before my voice broke, I had sung in church and school choirs; after it broke my voice was useless – couldn’t hold a note. But all that time I had a thing for choral music. My tastes were broad, it could be those Bulgarian women’s choirs, Bach’s Saint Matthew’s Passion, Avro Pärt stuff and of course the Red Army Choir. It all worked for me. I reckon part of what drew me to choral music was – and maybe it is what draws any of us – that you are not confronted by the individual ego. Instead you get the shared soul of mankind.

So it was back in 1998 when I started having these fantasies about the choir. It would happen mainly when I was driving my Land Rover, all these voices in my head singing along with the rumble of the diesel engine, the wind through the wing mirrors and the various rattles and hums. It was a wild and uncontrollable sound. It was huge and sprawling. There was never any melody as such and definitely no words but I loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it. This choir had a name  – The17. Now is not the time to go into why the choir was called that, it just was.

The trouble with this fantasy was that it wanted to become a reality. The urge was too strong to resist. But we all know there is nowt so risible as someone who has had a bit of success in popular music thinking they can turn their hand to classical music, or poetry, or painting, or saving the world or even editing a national newspaper for the day. A deal had to be done with this 17 in my head. The deal went something like this – The17 would have to wait until I was 60 years old before I would attempt to make it a reality.

My hope was that by the time I reached 60 I would be wise enough to know better, or if I wasn’t, nobody would remember that I had ever been involved with popular music. But in the summer of 2004 I reneged on the deal. I was working on this art film, which included footage of the Land Rover being driven from one end of the M62 to the other. I needed this choir in my head on the soundtrack. I couldn’t stop myself: I went public and told friends and colleagues about The17.

Friend and colleague Kev Reverb and I got 17 blokes who could sing together in his studio in Leicester and I read them this statement:

The17 is a choir.
Their music has no history, follows no traditions, recognises no contemporaries.
The17 has many voices.
They use no libretto, lyrics or words; no time signatures, rhythm or beats;
And have no knowledge of melody, counterpoint or harmony.
The17 struggle with the dark and respond to the light.

Luckily for me they seemed to understand what I was on about and we got to work. What we did that night sounded as huge and sprawling, as wild and uncontrollable as anything I had ever heard in my head when driving the Land Rover. But then ideas started to evolve, from thinking that these seventeen blokes in Leicester would form the basis of The17 to thinking that The17 could be any 17 people brought together to perform one of the simple text scores that I had started to write.

I attempted one short public performance of The17, but it felt completely wrong. The very act of The17 performing to an audience undermined something central to what made it work when it was only 17 people singing together for no one but themselves. An extension to this idea that I liked meant The17 would never be recorded for posterity; no cds, downloads or broadcasts. You have to be part of it to hear it.

Since the beginning of this year I’ve been exploring ways in which The17 can work. This has been done in various cities across Europe, including Stockholm, Vienna, Moscow and St Petersburg. Only 17 tickets are made available for each performance and each one begins with me saying ‘Good Evening, my name is Bill Drummond and you are The17.’ I won’t tell you any more about how the evening works, but each time it has worked better than I could ever have expected, except for the once that it was a disaster. It doesn’t matter whether those taking part have not sung since they mumbled along in school assemblies or whether they are opera divas. The music The17 make is always the fulfillment of my desire for music to be starting all over again. This is a contradiction in terms, I know, but it is one that I am willing to live with.

Later this month I will be at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival. Every day through the week I will be hosting events by The17, except on 21 November for – as I am sure you already know – 21 November is No Music Day. To know more about The17 and No Music Day, visit the17.org and nomusicday.com.