Artist Bill Drummond has been thinking about music since 17 March 1967, when he first lifted the lid on the family Dansette record player. In his numerous musical incarnations - as manager of Echo & The Bunnymen, as co-founder of the multi-million-selling band The KLF etc - Drummond has combined global commercial success with a fiercely independent slant. As an artist his work, over the past thirty odd years, has examined the cultural landscape through a diverse array of methods ranging from the written word, in the form of books and websites, to performance and events. Much of his work is released by him anonymously, unrecorded and often without any traditional art contextualisation.In "17", Drummond analyses the past, present and possible future of music and the ways in which we hear and relate to it. He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound, introducing us throughout this provocative and superbly written book to his current work, "The 17".A time has arrived where we can listen to any recorded music, from the entire history of recorded music, wherever, whenever, while doing whatever we want.
This has meant our relationship with music is rapidly and fundamentally changing, faster than it has done for many decades. This is good for numerous reasons. But a by-product of this is that recorded music will no longer contain the meaning it once held for us. The era of recorded music is now passing and within the next decade it will begin to look and sound like a dated medium. Recorded music will be perceived as an art form very much of the 20th century. These notions excite me. This excitement has brought about "The17".