His best-known actions include burning £1m, firing blanks at the 1992 Brit awards and dropping a dead sheep on the red carpet of a luxury hotel as a member of the KLF. But Bill Drummond’s latest public display is more sedate: on Good Friday, he will stand on the Irish border, handing out homemade hot cross buns and conducting an informal referendum.
Between 10am and 12pm on 19 April, Drummond will ask the first 40 people who cross the border between Derry and Donegal whether they agree or disagree with adding a clause of his creation to the Good Friday agreement:
If either the Government of Ireland or the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland were ever to instigate their own country leaving the European Union, both governments would guarantee that as long as the island of Ireland existed, the border crossing between County Derry and County Donegal on the Culmore Road, would remain freely open for all those that wished to cross it, in either direction.
The 40 participants in Drummond’s referendum will receive a mug emblazoned with the words “The very Good Friday agreement”, and a hot cross bun, made to his “After Delia” recipe – or rather, Tenzing Scott Brown’s play After Delia, which stipulates: “Each of the 40 hot cross buns must be given to 40 individuals in exchange for social or unsocial change.”
Drummond and Jimmy Cauty reunited as the KLF in 2017, for a three-day series of events in Liverpool. The pair arrived in a customised ice-cream van and claimed they would discuss, for the first time, the motivations behind burning £1m in 1994. (When questioned, their answer was: “Whatever.”) They also published a book, 2023: A Trilogy By the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.
Drummond will present the only screening this year of his 2015 documentary, Imagine Waking Up Tomorrow and All Music Has Disappeared, on 28 April at the Shetland arts festival. The film, in which he stars, is shown once a year on 28 April in the Atlantic archipelago where one of nine distinct languages are spoken: Norn, Gaelic, Scots, Manx, Irish, English, Romani, Welsh and Cornish. The 2018 screening was held in Falmouth, Cornwall.
