Mr Bill Drummond on Film in Dumfries

an EXCLUSIVE from our friends over at The Commonty:

Last week we posted a wee film by John Wallace about his attempts to discover what Bill Drummond said in Dumfries when he performed his lecture 'Why Andy Warhol is Shite' at Greyfriars Church on November 8th as part of The Stove's Inbetween:Dumfries event. Bill Drummond is notoriously camera shy (as John found out) - but today The Commonty received an anonymous package containing film footage of Bill Drummond apparently on the Auld Brig in Dumfries.....there is no explanation with the footage and we can only assume that either Bill was practicing for his performance, or that this was one of his legendary acts of contrariness to give a filmed interview to a stranger (or even one of the things a previous audience had voted that he should do?)

Either which way, we are truly grateful to our anonymous film-maker and present for your pleasure - exclusive footage of Mr Bill Drummond telling us why he believes Andy Warhol is Shite:

Bill Drummond on the Auld Brig in Dumfries in November 2012

More on what Bill Drummond was doing in Dumfries this month - here

Greyfriars 2

Highlights of Greyfriars 2 now on flickr

TONIGHT - Bill Drummond and the Lost Supper

Even though it sounds like some some of cruise ship dinner band - Bill Drummond and the Lost Supper, in fact, promises to be one of the most extraordinary evening seen in Dumfries....well, ever.

Two halves - the Lost Supper begin proceedings with 4 iconic international contemporaries of Rabbie Burns lead a discussion about erm 'town planning' - but like you've never seen before and there is free food to boot.

Bill Drummond grew up in Newton Stewart before achieving international megastardom in a variety of guises (just google him .....I'm out of time here). Bill presents a one-off performance lecture called 'Why Andy Warhol is Shite' - this is the current state of an essay he has been working on since he was at art school in the early 70's.

6PM - Greyfriars Church, Dumfries (the tall church on Burns Statue Square....where the buses stop at the bottom of High St)

 

FREE EVENT - 8th November Bill Drummond + The Lost Supper

More on Bill Drummond at The Stove - here  and Bill's own Penkiln Burn site - here

More on the Lost Supper at The Stove - here and more - here

Galloway and Me by Bill Drummond

Written specially for The Stove:

GALLOWAY & ME

My childhood was spent in Galloway. Its hills, rivers, tidal flats formed my understanding and love of the natural world. The Biblical stories I learnt before I could read mixed freely with the tales and legends learnt about the land around me to the point that Galilee and Galloway were one and the same. Was it the Boy David who confronted Goliath at Loch Trool or was it Robert the Bruce who faced the Philistines on the banks of the Jordan? When I learnt about Saint Ninian landing at the Isle of Whithorn bringing Christianity to our heathen forefathers, I assumed he was one of the Apostles and that he had just sailed across that Sea of Galilee. As for Tam o’Shanter, was he Old or New Testament?

At the age of 11 my family moved away. But that heady brew of wild landscape, Biblical stories, poetry, a sense that one was put on earth to do the right thing and the temptations of the flesh were always at hand has infiltrated and informed everything that I have done or attempted to do since. And then of course there was the work ethic.

And on the subject of work, everything I have done since the late 1990s has been framed within the context of The Penkiln Burn. This in one sense is an old fashioned publishing house and in another an online brand as artwork. The Penkiln Burn is also a small river that rises in the Galloway Hills and flows down into the River Cree at Minnigaff. It was on the banks of the Penkiln Burn that many of my boyhood adventures took place, a place that still fires my imagination to this day.

I am aware that if had spent my teenage years in Galloway my sense of it would be totally different, and that I would have probably viewed it as a cultural backwater that I could not wait to escape. But that was not the case.

As for Dumfries, that was another country altogether.

Bill Drummond 3 October 2012

Truly memorable film of Parton to Kirkcowan by way of Newton Stewart aboard a steam train way back in 1965 - accompanied by the track Madruga Eterna

Bill Drummond in Dumfries

Why Andy Warhol Is Shite

In 1973 Bill Drummond was coming to the end of his first academic year at Liverpool School of Art. He was studying painting. He loved painting. He wanted to spend the rest of his life painting. But something was troubling him. He thought even if he became a successful painter, even a great painter, all it would mean that his paintings would hang on the walls of a rich man apartment in New York.

The young and idealistic Drummond instinctively felt that this is not what art should be about. He put down his paint brush, walked away from the easel and out into the streets of Liverpool, in the hope that he could discover a way of making art that… The rest of his professional life to date has been about trying to work out what the “that” might be.

Some months before he laid down his paintbrush, he had visited the first Andy Warhol retrospective in the UK. It was at The Tate (Britain). The exhibition had blown him away. But over the next twelve months what had initially done the blowing, began to trouble him. The troubling progressed to the point that he thought what Andy Warhol represented was everything that was wrong with Art in the world at that time.

All the first year fine art students were expected to write a 4,000 word history of art essay on a topic of their choice. This essay was to be handed in by the end of the first academic year. Although he had a title for the essay he was unable to put any more than a few unconnected words on the page.

Most of the several hundred thousand words that Drummond has written and published since the summer of ’73 have been a continuation of this uncompleted essay. What he hopes to present in Dumfries will be 45 minute performance lecture based on where he is at with the essay at the moment. The working title is, as it was then, the now rather naïve Why Andy Warhol is Shite.

Mr Drummond standing in the Penkiln Burn (nr Newton Stewart) with a salmon and bluebells

 Answer 2) Bill Drummond's life - here

You can be part of the audience for Bill's lecture 'Why Andy Warhol is Shite' by coming to Greyfriars Church (DG1 1DF) at 6pm on Thursday 8th November (free).

More details and complete programme - here