All recorded music is dead, stale and irrelevant. Bill Drummond is a man whose is prone to making bold statements. His career spans decades and in the golden age of google it’s recommended that you pursue his name a little further. As it stands he was an integral part of this year’s Vocal Invention weekend at Norwich Arts Centre - speaking about his ideas of what the future of music holds, upsetting one or two people, and conducting a performance of the17.

Despite the confrontational nature of Drummond’s polemic he is a gentle and sensitive interviewee. The first question to come out of his mouth was whether UK hip-hop had peaked four years back. Given that Drummond is old enough to be my father, this is a staggeringly weird opening gambit, but if anything it shows how deep his passion for music runs. Yet he is frank about his view of the place of recorded music in contemporary society, that it is making itself obsolete by its increasing abundance:

“Wrongly or rightly, I know when I was a kid I would buy an album - and when I got that album home I knew that I spent that money and I was going to get into it. It takes 7 or 8 listens to really hear something properly. I’m not saying that it was a good thing or a bad thing, but my 9 year-old daughter has got all this stuff on her iPod and it has become a very different way of listening. Now, musicians will look at that and realise no-one is going to sit there with an album and consume it in the same way.

"When your making music you have to give it your everything, but always in the back of your head will be this idea that people will just be flicking through their iPods. It undermines something about what you are doing.

"The 19 year-olds, the 20 year-olds, they are not going to want to make their presence felt in the same way. Also, if I was a fan 20 years from now I wouldn’t want to just download a band’s track off the internet, I would want to have to go somewhere to get it.” So there you have it. The notion of the17 is to somehow create an experience, an active investment for the listener/performer. the17 are a choir composed entirely of the audience, Drummond demonstrating the power of communal singing by getting them to create and record a one-off piece that never leaves the auditorium – being deleted moments after its first playback. It is a weirdly powerful and engaging concept, and not one that befits a lengthy explanation. Drummond is frank though about the role of the17: “I don’t see the17 as the future of music - I see it as a thing for me, for me re-engaging with music.”

When asked whether he envisioned the17 running without his involvement he responds, “I’ve given myself until 2011 and then I’m stopping to pursue other things. Theoretically it could do - and in a lot of ways I’d like it to.”

It could be a criticism levelled at the17, that the whole thing is supported by Drummond’s charisma and energy – when actually he goes to great lengths to make the whole process about something other than his former career. Very little is made of his time in the music industry during the performance; the stories he tells are not celebrity-gossip, rather a personal account of how music affected him. Even the book of the17, which arguably was one of the most thought-provoking pieces of writing about music in 2008, skirts round Drummond’s previous life as Pop Agitator.

“I’ve got no idea of telling how many people have read the book or whether they know what it’s about before I start - but then they don’t need to know who I am. Personally I’d always like it if they didn’t know who the fuck I am, and then what it comes down to is what I can get over to them there and then, to try and break down the barriers so that they can take away what they want to.”

Talk turns to the resurgence of live music, and in particular the increasingly high prices people are prepared to see ‘classic’ acts: “My father, he would of have been 96 this year- and his relationship to music was very different to ours. The whole thing about buying a ticket for £100 for a concert - you can be very cynical about that - but there is also the elation at having invested in the occasion.”

As is his wont, Drummond almost immediately reviews what he’s said and then reconsiders - it’s a common trait of his, and impressive to see someone unafraid to contradict what he’s just said without any sense of embarrassment. “I’ve never been a fan of this idea that every band that has ever existed exists now - so for instance, paying money to see the Specials or whoever reform is not something that interests me.”

Despite the streak of idealism Drummond demonstrates when talking about the future of music, he manages to retain a pragmatic sense of the past: “The commercial structures often define things. With the evolution of the gramophone record there was a business. Artists and art evolved and adapted to that, not just because there was money to made out of these things – but it somehow it does lead us.” Again, he pauses – then announces: “Jimi Hendrix did not invent the electric guitar, hip-hop artists did not invent the drum machine - it was invented for a practical reason - and it was the artist who came along and manipulated and played with that. It’s important to remember that.”

“I’ve stopped listening to records completely. My 9 year-old loves Guitar Hero. I’ve been sitting with her, looking up all these bands like Slayer and AC/DC on Youtube and learning how to play all these songs on the guitar. I hadn’t anticipated that when I started the17”

And perhaps that is the point all along. The curve of the future is something that can’t always be anticipated, but it can be greeted with genuine enthusiasm. And no one seems happier to welcome it then Drummond himself.

Words > Andy Spragg