Credo: Bill Drummond

Writer, musician, artist and co-founder of the KLF and the K Foundation, 55

Iain Aitch
Sunday 03 August 2008 00:00 BST
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I believe...

Recorded music is a creative dead-end, fit only for the makers of advertising jingles, ringtones and movie soundtracks. Its sheer ubiquity will inspire music-makers to explore different ways of creating music, away from something that can be captured on a CD or downloaded.

Most guys in a band want to be taken seriously, but when Jimmy Cauty and I were doing the KLF, we didn't care. Humour is associated with trashy pop, but that didn't matter to us. I'm an overtly serious person. I'm dour. That is my make-up. But I know I cannot help humour coming through.

God exists in everything, even though my eight-year-old son tells me it is all made-up stories.

Leaving a front door unlocked promotes trust. But now I have moved into London, living with my 21-year-old son, I lock it.

Music seems more powerful when you hear it accidentally. I hardly ever listen to music any more and on the whole that is fine with me. It seems more powerful to me when you go in somewhere and they're playing, say, Roy Orbison – that's always more enjoyable than putting on a Roy Orbison record at home.

Nothing is worse than it was. I hate the idea that there was this golden period sometime, somewhere, in records or whatever. So many people get to a certain point in life and stop taking things on board. I have friends who are in their early thirties who are consumed with the late 1980s. Why give up?

The K Foundation has cast a shadow over anything else I might do. We agreed not to talk about burning the money for 23 years [Cauty and Drummond burnt £1m in 1994, but never explained why]. I can tell you that it is difficult for my family, because they still get a lot of grief.

'17' by Bill Drummond (£12.99, Beautiful Books), which tells the story of an unrecorded choral project, is out now

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