MARMALADE ON TOAST
18 November 2006

The bacon, egg, black pudding, mushrooms and grilled tomatoes have arrived. So have the hash browns that I did not ask for. The tablecloth is white linen, as is the napkin. The Royal Swan, where we are staying, does not do breakfast, so I have taken myself out on to the streets of Huddersfield to find a place open that does a full English. I am now sitting in the George Hotel’s breakfast room, The George being the posh hotel that we are not staying in. It’s 7.32. I’ve left John Hirst and Gimpo snoring and farting in their single beds. The first of the seven events by The17 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival will be this afternoon.

At one of the other tables are four people, I assume they are The Smith Quartet. The Smith Quartet are currently my favourite contemporary string quartet in the world. They piss all over the Brodsky Quartet, who, in my eyes, cheapen themselves by doing all sorts of publicity-seeking collaborations with pop stars and world-music types. There is no messing with The Smiths (which is how, I am afraid, they are rather cringingly referred to in some circles.)

Over the past few years I have often had fantasies of The Smith Quartet doing a version of The KLF’s What Time Is Love. This version by The Smiths would be a faithful interpretation of the original version that Jimmy Cauty and I did before we started throwing all the pop and rap rubbish in to it.

The Smith Quartet, like The17, are performing at the festival all week. There is no way I am going to go over and introduce myself and there is even less chance that I would ever ask them if they would be interested in doing a version of What Time Is Love. That is just not the sort of thing they would do. That would be the sort of sell-out thing The Brodsky Quartet would do.

Before the breakfast arrived I was reading the piece that I had written about The17 for yesterday’s Guardian. Yes, I know the rereading of a piece I wrote myself once it is on the published page is an obvious and risible vanity but I can’t stop myself. For me the best thing about it is that it is on the classical music page. It is the Guardian’s lead feature on the Huddersfield Festival. From screaming ‘Big in Japan, we’re big in Japan’ into the mic at Bretton Hall in May 1977 to the classical music page in The Guardian via Doctorin’ The Tardis by The Timelords seems like the perfect arc of a career. My pride is fit for bursting. So if you have a pin at hand, feel free.

The full English has been eaten and it’s now time for the toast and marmalade and pot of Assam. And I bet those other two fuckers are still snoring.

There was a reason for bringing the notebook, pencil and yesterday’s Guardian out with me on my search for breakfast. I was woken in the night by the youth of Huddersfield brawling and screaming in the street outside. While I lay there awake, I was filled with the urge to get up, get dressed, go out to the Land Rover, drive to a long stretch of wall that I had seen earlier, a wall at the side of the Huddersfield inner ringroad. Once there, I wanted to get out my large tub of white paint and large brush and paint one long line of graffiti. This graffiti would be made up of exactly 90 words. The trouble was, the urge had to be thwarted as I remembered we had taken the paint and brush out of the back of the Land Rover when we were loading it up to drive to Huddersfield.

The 90 words that I wanted to disfigure/enhance this wall with were the first 90 words that I used in the piece in The Guardian. They are also the main body of text in the newest score written for The17. As a score I have given it pole position: it is score 1. It is the first you would be presented with if you were to visit the17.org or the exhibition that Gimpo, John Hirst and myself hung yesterday at the North Light Gallery where The17 are to be based for the week.

Over the past few months I have written these 90 words numerous times. The wording evolves slightly with each writing. I assumed that now they had made it on to a poster, framed and hanging in a gallery for all the world to see, the urge to keep writing them down would have dried up. Not so. The urge has just risen to another level.

The urge to commit graffiti is one that I have had to live with for a long time. Other than a few minor incidents, I have been able to kerb this urge since being up in front of the beak in Liverpool in early 2000. Then I was handed down a moderate fine and made to pay the costs of having the wall cleaned. At that time the boss man on the bench was able to make me feel like a rather pathetic middle-aged man who had maybe suffered from a momentary lapse of sanity that would not happen again. I thanked him and told him it wouldn’t happen again. But of course I knew these urges were not that easily thwarted. I imagined it must be the same with those who have Tourette’s or a mass-murdering syndrome, you know it’s silly and does nobody any good but you just can’t stop yourself.

The words I want to paint in large white letters along the wall on the Huddersfield ring road are:

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning and all music has 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. Then imagine people coming together to make music with nothing but their voices, and with no knowledge of what music should sound like.

I can’t stop thinking how great they would look and about all the people stuck in their cars in the morning rush-hour traffic jam, finding their eyes drawn to it for it is the only thing for their eyes to be looking at that wasn’t there yesterday and every other day that they have been stuck in exactly the same place on their way to do the same job. Would they question the validity of the ASBOs being handed out to teenagers, would they think that something should be done about it? Or would they imagine a world without music? Whatever the source of that urge I had in the middle of the night and still have now as I spread the marmalade on to my third slice of toast, I can’t stop the persuasive argument tempting me now. It goes something like this. As a score printed on a poster, framed in a tasteful oak frame, hung on the wall of a well lit gallery, those 90 words have very little power. It’s like they have been neutered. Had their balls cut off. No one gets to read them other than those it could not affect. It is the same with so much art. As soon as it is in an art gallery, it is tamed. Safe. Just there as light entertainment for those who like the idea for those who like the idea of being interested in art and ideas.

If the paint and brush had been in the Land Rover, I would have gone and done it. B&Q would soon be open. Maybe I should go down there after breakfast and get supplies. But as I write these words and bite into that third slice of toast and marmalade I remember the verbal agreement that I had made with Graham McKenzie some months ago.

Before becoming director of the Huddersfield Festival he had been the director of the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Glasgow. At some point in the mid 1990s, Jimmy Cauty and I walked into the CCA, set up a 16mm projector and showed the film of us burning the million quid. An instant audience gathered to watch the film. We had not sought permission for this impromptu screening. It caused a kerfuffle and tempers were lost.

Some years later the CCA’s new head of new media and performance was interested in me being part of an exhibition about Scotland by Scottish artists. At the time I had a habit of stealing motorway signs. On crossing the border into Scotland at the top end of the M6, just south of Gretna, there is a huge ‘Welcome To Scotland’ sign. My proposal was that I would brazenly remove this sign, replace it with a hand-painted one, then take the original ‘Welcome To Scotland’sign in the back of a van up to Glasgow and hang it in the CCA within two hours of having removed it from the roadside.

As a youth I had been much taken by the story of four Scottish students in 1950 who had removed the Stone Of Destiny from under the throne in Westminster Abbey and returned it to Scotland where it belonged. Once the authorities got hold of it, it was taken back to London where it stayed until 1996 when it was finally officiallyreturned to Scotland after being in captivity for more than 600 years.

Now, nicking a motorway sign is nowhere near as heroic as removing the Stone of Destiny, but somewhere in my head there was a parallel. Especially as I knew the motorway sign would only be left hanging on the CCA walls for a few hours before it would be removed by the authorities and taken back down to the border.

The new head of new media and performance liked my idea but the others in senior positions at the CCA thought otherwise. At my first meeting with Graham McKenzie earlier this year (2006) he reminded me of this proposal and informed me that it was him who had put a stop to it happening. He also told me that he had not forgotten about the impromptu film screening. He then went on to tell me that he would be more than pleased to have The17 at this year’s festival but he didn’t want any ‘high jinx’ from me. I had given him my word that there would be no high jinx and that in fact any high jinx would undermine what I was trying to do with The17. He accepted my word and we shook hands on a deal.

But the urge is still there.
‘Come on, Bill, man or mouse? Do you believe in this thing or not?’

And now, as the fourth slice of toast is spread with marmalade, I can hear John Hirst’s voice in my head reminding me that doing something like a major graffiti would be the last thing that I need. It would just confirm all the prejudices held by those who think I am nothing more than a prankster. But the urge to get down to B&Q as soon as this fourth slice of toast has been dealt with and get a tin of white paint and a brush is still strong.

I do a deal with the urge. I will refrain from doing the graffiti on the Huddersfield inner ring road in exchange for doing it at an undisclosed date on a particular stretch of the North Circular in London.

Fourth slice is done with and washed down by the last gulp of Assam. As I put my bits away in my bag I notice that The Smith Quartet have already upped and left. I wonder what urges they have to strike deals with.