WHO IS LUKE HAINES?
22 November 2006

On the earliest train out of King’s Cross heading north. Change at Wakefield and I’ll be in Huddersfield before 8.00 and then to our lodgings to pick up John Hirst. Then we’re off to whatever school we are working with this morning.

But for now I’m on the train. It’s not even 6.00. Outside the flatlands of the Fens are flashing by in a blackness as black as their soil. Is Fenland soil blacker than the bible-black of Dylan Thomas’ Llareggub? Don’t answer that.

Yesterday was the second No Music Day. Already my head is teaming with conflicting thoughts. What went wrong? What could be done better next year? What changes need to be made to the website? When can I get breakfast? And who is Luke Haines?

I will attempt to respond to the last question first. Sometime in the last month there was a response to the No Music Day site proclaiming that ‘Bill Drummond was just ripping off Luke Haines’ Pop Strike of a few years earlier.’ Now I had never heard of Luke Haines or his Pop Strike but I wasn’t surprised at getting this email. Over the years I have had many emails, letters, phone calls and stuff in the media informing me that I was ripping something off or at least borrowing it, or if not borrowing at least making an ironic nod towards something. In the vast amount of these cases I’m not; and if a crime is being committed, it is out of ignorance. Usually I’m inspired to find out more about whatever it is I’ve been linked with. This I have discussed in earlier chapters about Fluxus, Stockhausen and Cage.

Since getting that first email referring to me ripping off Luke Haines I’ve had several more in a similar tone. A couple of days ago I put ‘Luke Haines’ and ‘Pop Strike’ into Google to see what would come up. I learnt that Luke Haines was the main man in a band called The Auteurs who invented Britpop in the early nineties and that he was also in a band called Black Box Recorder – I remember once hearing a track by them – and that he called his Pop Strike in June 2001, the same week that he was releasing a new album. I read an online interview with him and discovered he was a very bright man with a bittersweet wit. He said a number of the things I agreed with but the subtext of it all was that he thought he should be getting a lot more recognition than he was. But maybe that is the subtext of so much of what us creative types get up to. With footballers, it is all very straightforward: there are no excuses. If you are any good, you rise to the top. With artists there are always a million excuses we can give to excuse our non-star status: how we didn’t get the breaks, how we were misunderstood, unfairly reviewed.

And I also learned that Luke Haines is a friend of Stewart Home. Stewart Home called an art strike in 1990. It lasted almost three years. In 1993 Jimmy Cauty and I launched our ‘Abandon All Art’ full-page adverts in the national press. At that time, neither of us had ever heard of Stewart Home or his Art Strike. I subsequently met Stewart Home in a club called Disobey in London in the mid 1990s. I think he thought we had ripped his Art Strike off. Stewart Home and I became friends. It’s strange how things like that work out.

And now to try and answer my other questions … what went wrong? Not much really. Other than the fact that I’m sure on a global scale there was no dip in the amount of music broadcast, sold, downloaded, listened to or consumed in any other ways that music can be consumed. I even heard music. It’s not as if I’m going to hide myself away up on the Yorkshire moors for the day.

What could be done better next year? What I don’t want to get into with No Music Day is that it has to be somehow bigger and bigger each year. I don’t want to be scrabbling around each November trying to come up with stunts and events to capture the media’s attention. I will leave that to the likes of Red Nose Day, an event saddled with the problem that if it cannot be bigger and raise more money than it did the previous year, it will be deemed a failure. For me, having one almost symbolic act happen each year is enough. That could be as small a thing as switching off the jukebox in one particular pub for the day. Mind you, if iTunes offered to shut up shop for the day, I won’t deny I’d be cock-a-hoop.

The idea that has been brewing in my mind for next year’s No Music Day is to screen a film that is well known for its musical score without it. I don’t mean a musical like The Sound Of Music or Grease. That would be pointless. The songs in these films carry the plot. What I mean is a regular drama with all the dialogue and sound effects but none of the musical soundtrack. There have been plenty of films where I have loved the soundtrack but at some point in the past few years something flipped in me. So often when I watch a film now the soundtrack becomes intrusive. It appears to me as an easy (if not cheap) trick to work on our emotions. Every time I hear those welling strings or that hit from yesteryear used over a scene, I start to imagine the scene without it. I try to imagine how well the camerawork and dialogue could carry things if the music was not there.

Last year I saw Hitchcock’s The Birds again. It had never been a particular favourite of mine. I had no sympathy for the two lead characters, but what held my attention all the way through the film was the nonexistence of any musical score. It is this lack of music that gives the film so much of its tension. It has since been pointed out to me that there are bird sounds used throughout the film created by the electronic composers, Remi Gausmann and Oskar Sala (note: not Hitchcock’s usual composer, Bernhard Herrmann) so it could be argued that the film does have a musical score.

Once I had the idea to screen a film famous for its soundtrack without the soundtrack, the film I instantly wanted was Apocalypse Now. Where I get confused is with my motivation. Do I want to show this (or any) film without its soundtrack to show how shit and limp it is without it or because I think it could be an even more intense experience without the comfort zone provided by the music?

Earlier this year I was approached by David McGuinness who is putting together a 50-episode history of Scottish music for BBC Radio Scotland. It is to cover rather bravely the last 5000 years of Scottish music. I have no idea how anybody could know what people were listening to 1000 years ago, let alone 5000. David McGuinness was keen to have me interviewed for the series. When we were talking and he learnt about No Music Day he thought that it would be a good thing for BBC Radio Scotland to embrace on 21 November 2007. He went to the director of the station and he was up for it too. I was pleased, even delighted. But there was a downside. I had already done the radio thing this year, as in yesterday with Resonance FM. I wanted 2007 to be about film but BBC Radio Scotland has thousands and thousands of listeners. Not just the few oddbods like me, who tune into Resonance FM.

Instead of looking this gifthorse in the mouth I gratefully accepted the offer and decided that I would make Edinburgh the centre of operations for No Music Day 2007. Whatever film was to be screened could be screened in Edinburgh.  I was still imagining using Apocalypse Now but my colleague, Cally suggested Trainspotting instead. This seemed perfect. One of the most iconic films of the 1990s, an international hit set in Edinburgh and a soundtrack considered by most people to be a classic. And here comes the irony. Jimmy Cauty and I were asked in 1996 by Danny Boyle to compose and record the soundtrack to the film A Life Less Ordinary, the film that was Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Trainspotting. Jimmy and I went to see the film in a viewing theatre in Soho. What we saw was a roughcut of the final film without the soundtrack. We turned the offer down. Not because we thought the film was shite or the money not good enough, but because it wasn’t where we were at then.

Mind you, this is all just talk as I have no idea how easy it is to get hold of a film without the score and, if you could, whether the film-maker would want their film shown naked.

Next question. What changes need to be made to the website? The format of nomusicday.com was pretty much exactly the same in 2006 as it was in 2005. Anybody visiting the site was asked to complete the following two statements.

I will be observing No Music Day by:

and

I am observing No Music Day because:

I like simple and to-the-point websites but maybe this was too dictatorial. It allowed little room for those who thought it was a pile of shite, no platform for people to comment on how they got on with attempting a day without music. Some thought needs to be given to this.

Last question is to be answered as the train pulls out of Doncaster. When can I get breakfast? Well there will be no proper breakfast as there is no dining carriage on this train, so it’s a trip to the buffet car for a croissant and tea.