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Portrait of a Real Rock Rebel: Bill Drummond

By Dan Zambonini, June 20, 2010, 6:15 pm in Art, Business, Culture, Music, Past

Twinned With Your Darkest Thought - sign by Bill Drummond

It’s frustrating how the media, hungry to fill their 24-hour schedule for thousands of television and online outlets, so easily present the hissy-fits and staged faux dissention of music celebrities as acts of rebellion.

I’d like to highlight some of the exploits of a real revolutionary: Bill Drummond. Sure, much – if not all – of what he did and does is for the same self-serving publicity purposes, but at least he does it with style and originality. And above all, he takes risks – the real mark of a rebel.

Sources for the following information include Wikipedia, The Independent, The Telegraph, KLF.de and Drummond’s Penkiln Burn website.

  • 1977: Recording debut as guitar player with Big in Japan, alongside members Holly Johnson (Frankie Goes to Hollywood) and Ian Broudie (The Lightning Seeds). Later sets up Zoo Records, before becoming an A&R executive for Warners.
  • Late 1970s: As manager for Echo & The Bunnymen (EATB), Drummond books tour venues based on the shape they make, “If you look at a map of the world, the whole tour’s in the shape of a rabbit’s ears.”
  • 1980s: Ian Curtis, of Joy Division, commits suicide, sending their sales rocketing. Noticing this, Drummond tries to convince the EATB singer to kill himself (Note: another source relays this same story with Julian Cope, rather than EATB, possibly via Drummond’s solo song “Julian Cope is Dead”).
  • 1980s: Drummond believes there’s a line of cosmic energy that bounced off Iceland, was channelled down a manhole in Merseyside (England), and exited the other side in Papua New Guinea. He tests this theory by getting EATB to play in Reykjavik while he stands on the manhole cover.
  • 1986: Resigns from Warners via a press release, which states that he is nearly 33⅓ years old (33⅓ RPM being the speed at which vinyl albums revolve).
  • 1987: Forms the group The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu with Jimmy Cauty (later, of The Orb), whose first single All You Need Is Love is recorded in a week. The song, and later album (1987), makes blatant use of copyrighted samples, taking “plagiarism to its absurd conclusion”.
  • 1987: After a legal conflict with ABBA regarding samples, the 1987 album is forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travel to Sweden hoping to talk to ABBA. Unable to get in contact with ABBA, they present the gold disc of the album to a prostitute, who they pretend is Agnetha “fallen on hard times”.
  • 1987: Re-releases the 1987 album as “1987: The JAMs 45 Edits”, with all unauthorised samples removed, leaving long periods of protracted silence, and less than 25 minutes of music.
  • 1988: Achieves a number one novelty hit, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” under the name The Timelords (with Cauty). It sells over a million copies.
  • 1988: Co-writes the book, “The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way)” with Cauty, detailing instructions on how to create a novelty number one record. This later gets translated into a German stage musical.
  • 1988: Drummond and Cauty form The KLF, who go on to pioneer ambient and trance electronic music.
  • 1991: The KLF become the biggest-selling singles act of the year.
  • 1992: Having received the Best British Group award, KLF perform at the Brit Awards with hardcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror, fire machine gun blanks into the industry-executive-filled audience, and dump a dead sheep at the aftershow party.
  • 1992: At their peak, The KLF announce their retirement from the music industry and proceed to delete their entire back catalogue, ensuring no future revenue could be earned from it.
  • 1993: Establishes the art foundation, “The K Foundation”, which awards a “worst artist of the year” award to Rachel Whiteread, the same winner of that year’s Turner Prize. Whiteread refuses to collect the £40,000 award – double that of the Turner Prize – until Drummond threatens to set fire to it outside the Tate.
  • 1994: The K Foundation withdraws £1 million in cash, the remaining earnings from KLF. After failing to sell it (nailed to a board) to the Tate Gallery for £750,000, they burn it. Drummond later comments, “Our accountant couldn’t write it off as an artistic statement. We had to pay £330,000 extra. Which was unexpected”.
  • 1995: Drummond buys A Smell of Sulphur in the Wind by his favourite artist, Richard Long, for $20,000. Six years later, he cuts it into 20,000 pieces (4mm x 11mm each) and sells each for $1.
  • 1995: Drives around London on Christmas Eve, distributing over 6,000 cans of lager to the homeless and street-drinkers.
  • 1999: Plans to destroy Stonehenge (but doesn’t).
  • 2002: Puts up 100 posters in Liverpool, offering to have sex with anyone for £10,000, with a signed testimonial.
  • 2003: Launches mydeath.net – a website where you can make preparations for your own death – with the tagline, “Prepare To Die”.
  • 2003: Launches youwhores.com, a site for you to “advertise what you are willing to do and the price you are willing to do it for”.
  • 2004: Devises an imaginary line from Belfast to Nottingham called “The Soup Line”. If anyone who lives in a town on the line asks him, he will visit and make a hearty vegetable broth.

For more information about Bill Drummond’s latest activities (including The17 Choir), see the Penkiln Burn website.

Photograph of Bill Drummond’s Twinned With Your Darkest Thought sign by Flickr User Squirmelia, under a Creative Commons license.

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Using Starbucks Stores to Model Retail Gravitation

By Dan Zambonini, May 18, 2010, 8:01 pm in Business, Culture, Present, Psychology

Retail Gravitation Breakpoint for Manchester and London

You live the same distance away from two cities and decide to go shopping – which do you go to; the one with the most stores, right? What if you didn’t live the same distance away from each city – how far would you have to be away from the larger one, in order to decide that it’s easier just to go to the smaller, closer one?

That question is the crux of William J. Reilly’s 1931 Law of Retail Gravitation. He asserted that:

the Break Point (BP) [from city p2] is equal to the Distance (d) between two places, divided by the following: 1 plus the Square Root of, the size of Place One (p1) divided by the size of Place Two (p2). (slightly paraphrased from the previous Wikipedia link)

The “size” of a place is a little arbitrary, but you could use figures such as the total square-footage of retail space, or the total number of unique stores. Either way, this data is fairly difficult to track down.

Luckily, ubiquitous stores like Starbucks are a good indicator of the larger retail environment, so we can use their UK Store Locator to count the total number of Starbucks stores in each city, and use this as a good estimate for ‘Retail Size’.

Retail Break Points for UK Cities, compared with London

Obviously the Break Point figure, in miles, will be larger for the cities that are further away from London, such as the Scottish cities. Therefore a more interesting statistic is the Break Point distance in terms of percentage of the total distance (the green line in the graph above). This demonstrates the relative ‘pull’ of each city, influenced by the number of Starbucks (which, remember, we’re using to represent the total number of stores). Looking at these figures, we can see how the lack of Starbucks in Liverpool is causing a relatively low ‘retail pull’ towards the city, whereas the additional Starbucks stores in Manchester give it almost the same relative ‘pull’ as the much farther away Edinburgh.

Just because I had the data, here’s a bonus graph of People per Starbucks for each city:

People per Starbucks Store, for UK Cities

Looks like Liverpool and Birmingham need a few more stores.

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Flowchart: In-Person or Online? Which Communication Method To Use

By Dan Zambonini, May 5, 2010, 12:01 am in Business, Culture, Present

Flowchart: In-Person or Online? How Should You Communicate?

Click the image above for the full-size flowchart. This is a draft attempt to document the best communication method/channel for various situations (face to face, email, phone, instant messenger/skype, or conference call). Please add your thoughts and suggestions to this post, and we’ll update the flow chart accordingly.

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Why Are Post-it Notes Yellow?

By Dan Zambonini, February 25, 2010, 8:27 pm in Business, Design, History, Present

A thought occurred to me as I stared at the Post-it notes on my desk: why are they yellow? I turned to Google, but could find no answer on the web. On the off-chance, I decided to ask 3M – inventors of the Post-it – via Twitter.

After much effort on their part, I received a detailed response via email, which included a transcription of an interview that had been conducted to specifically answer my question:

TRANSCRIPT OF DISCUSSION BETWEEN HUGH MURPHY (BUSINESS MANAGER, E-CHANNELS) AND DR GEOFF NICHOLSON (RETIRED, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT TECHNICAL OPERATIONS), 3M RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT
(23rd February 2010)
HM: Why were Post-it Notes originally yellow?
GN: “Great question – fantastic question. “
“Guess what – we were in the labs and if you imagine, this is my lab here, and then there’s a corridor, and then there’s another lab. They happened to have some scrap yellow paper – laughs – it’s absolutely true. “
“Now afterwards we had a lot of people who said well it’s got a good emotional connection or…” (pauses) “that’s a load of … whatever.”
“They had some scrap yellow paper – that’s why they were yellow; and when we went back and said ‘hey guys, you got any more scrap yellow paper?’ they said ‘you want any more go buy it yourself’, and that’s what we did, and that’s why they were yellow.”
“To me it was another one of those incredible accidents. It was not thought out; nobody said they’d better be yellow rather than white because they would blend in - it was a pure accident.”
“Just like the adhesive was a pure accident. They are the best kinds of accidents to have, but you have to recognise it – which we did.”
HM: “So who actually invented the Post-it note?”
GN: “There were three people. Spence Silver invented the adhesive by accident. He was trying to make – he was in the business of trying to make stronger better adhesives to stick aeroplanes together –  and we do stick aeroplanes together.”
“He came to my office about 48 hours after I joined the commercial tapes division from the overhead projectors part of the business.”
“I’d been made the new products laboratory manager, and they hadn’t had any new products in about 15 years. They hadn’t had a new product since magic tape, and magic tape was about 15 years old.”
“So he knocked on my door. There were two guys – Spence Silver and another guy called Bob Oliveira. They had discovered this adhesive in 1968 – that’s when the patent was filed – and here we are five years later in 1973.”
“He’s saying ‘Geoff would you be interested in this adhesive?’ And I said yes. Why? Because I’m naïve – I’m naïve about adhesives. I don’t know much about it. And I also believe a certain naivety is important. He asked me if I was interested.”
“He had been trying for 5 years to get any business unit interested in this adhesive so he gave me samples and we started playing with things and we started making bulletin boards. “
“As we were making bulletin boards, and tapes and things like that, another guy who worked for me was Art Fry. He was making tapes for skis – ski tape – things like book arranging tape- Things that you’d put on a bookshelf and it would hold books in place”.
“And he said ‘why are you putting the adhesive on a bulletin board. Why don’t you put it on a piece of paper and then we can stick it to anything.’”
“You know – and that was the three of us that came good. And I was in a management role primarily to defend and go fighting for it”.
“When you get down to it with innovation – a lot of people are required to make it successful. Marketing sales, even the accountants.”
“But you sometimes have to fight for it – and that’s inevitable in something that changes the basis of competition. People resist change.”

So there you have it. Not just a fascinating piece of history, but evidence of a company that are willing to go above-and-beyond for no immediate profit or benefit to themselves. 3M (and Hugh in particular), you rock.

Post-it image by Flickr user zarprey

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Apple Tablet: Historic Predecessors

By Dan Zambonini, January 25, 2010, 9:05 pm in Business, Design, Past

Apple Tablet Predecessors

Details of the Apple Tablet will be released this week. A quick Google Patent search throws up a number of predecessors, though hopefully Apple’s attempt will be more portable than the 1964 version (left), and more stylish than IBM’s early 90s tablets (middle and right).

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