Best Before Death. (15.)
Directed by Paul Duane.
Featuring Bill Drummond, Tam Dean Burn, Avijit Halder, Charlie Sellers, Tracy Moberly. Out on Blu-ray from Anti-Worlds. 93 mins.
A dab hand in the music biz and the world of conceptual art, Bill Drummond has excelled in two of the major arenas of chancer attainment. He just needs to write a children's book and he'll have the full set. Working alongside Jimmy Cauty in his various music biz alter-egos, The KLF, the JAMMs, The K Foundation, he made mediocre to poor dance music that was somehow passed off as avant-garde.* He also made one of the worst records ever to get to No 1, Doctorin The Tardis**, awarded Rachel Whiteread a £40,000 anti-Turner prize for being the year's worst artist and burnt a million pounds on a remote Scottish island, which is probably all people remember him for now.
His latest project is much like all his others – doing crap, boring, ordinary things and then leaving it for other people to make sense of. The 25 Paintings World Tour (2014-25), is a kind of pretentious penitence. Over 12 years he will visit one town/ city in one country for two weeks and perform a series of tasks: shine shoes, make a bed from local wood, make soup, make six cakes to be given away to strangers. Duane's film covers the first two years, in Kolcata, India and Lexington, USA.
Which sounds sort of interesting, but quickly reveals itself not to be. There really is nothing to it. The only interesting parts of the films are the locals that interact with him. Lexington is rust belt poor and backward, but the people take him at face value, play along with him. Drummond offers up no explanation or purpose for the project, which is a perfectly legitimate stance, but means he spends most of the film explaining to local collaborators and passersby how he isn't going to explain what he's doing.
He bristles with humility, avoids talking about his music biz past and is constantly giving it the Big I Ain't as if that will somehow obscure the total self-obsession of this project. He claims not to know what the project is about and speculates that perhaps the reason for doing it will occur to him at the end of the 12 years when he's 72. Maybe he'll wake up then and realize - “Oh God, I've just wasted my whole life being wacky.”
*Except the one with Tammy Wynette, that was pretty good.
**A terrible record even before we learnt that it contained a sample from the paedophile Gary Glitter.
Directed by Paul Duane.
Featuring Bill Drummond, Tam Dean Burn, Avijit Halder, Charlie Sellers, Tracy Moberly. Out on Blu-ray from Anti-Worlds. 93 mins.
A dab hand in the music biz and the world of conceptual art, Bill Drummond has excelled in two of the major arenas of chancer attainment. He just needs to write a children's book and he'll have the full set. Working alongside Jimmy Cauty in his various music biz alter-egos, The KLF, the JAMMs, The K Foundation, he made mediocre to poor dance music that was somehow passed off as avant-garde.* He also made one of the worst records ever to get to No 1, Doctorin The Tardis**, awarded Rachel Whiteread a £40,000 anti-Turner prize for being the year's worst artist and burnt a million pounds on a remote Scottish island, which is probably all people remember him for now.
His latest project is much like all his others – doing crap, boring, ordinary things and then leaving it for other people to make sense of. The 25 Paintings World Tour (2014-25), is a kind of pretentious penitence. Over 12 years he will visit one town/ city in one country for two weeks and perform a series of tasks: shine shoes, make a bed from local wood, make soup, make six cakes to be given away to strangers. Duane's film covers the first two years, in Kolcata, India and Lexington, USA.
Which sounds sort of interesting, but quickly reveals itself not to be. There really is nothing to it. The only interesting parts of the films are the locals that interact with him. Lexington is rust belt poor and backward, but the people take him at face value, play along with him. Drummond offers up no explanation or purpose for the project, which is a perfectly legitimate stance, but means he spends most of the film explaining to local collaborators and passersby how he isn't going to explain what he's doing.
He bristles with humility, avoids talking about his music biz past and is constantly giving it the Big I Ain't as if that will somehow obscure the total self-obsession of this project. He claims not to know what the project is about and speculates that perhaps the reason for doing it will occur to him at the end of the 12 years when he's 72. Maybe he'll wake up then and realize - “Oh God, I've just wasted my whole life being wacky.”
*Except the one with Tammy Wynette, that was pretty good.
**A terrible record even before we learnt that it contained a sample from the paedophile Gary Glitter.
