There are too many ghosts. Curt Finks. Ian Macpherson. Roger Eagle. Myself.
And too many islands. 6000 in the Atlantic Archipelago, according to Bill Drummond. Not quite Ursula’s 11,000 virgins.
And there are too many blank or empty pages in any of our imagined memoirs. Nonetheless, one of the GANTOB project’s missions is to fill the nine undocumented years in Bill Drummond’s conscious/ subconscious. This is not for Drummond’s hive-sourced memoir The Life Model. There is nothing official about this. It is for GANTOB’s 52 Pamphlets(+).
I, The Observer, will fill the gap for the subconscious part of 29th of April 2011 to 28th of April 2012 (AKA “I am Fifty-Eight” in The Life Model). The average lifespan for a southern royal albatross is 58 years. I did not make it even halfway, squashed by an SUV in central Edinburgh, August 2023, at the age of 23. I was distracted by GANTOB, The Benefaktor and a paper plane. Such is life.
When I was a fledgling albatross at the turn of the century I had great aspirations. I would travel the world. Escape the wings of my overbearing parents. I made my way to the post office at Stanley and completed a form to serve a year on Gruinard Island. I left the Falklands the following week and was deposited on “Anthrax Island” after a couple of months of travel and induction.
Over the following decade, after my duty had been served, I travelled the north Atlantic, keeping a low profile, hanging with Arctic terns, miscellaneous geese, ospreys and fulmars.
In late 2011 I encountered Drummond’s subconscious occasionally between Islay and Mull, and once over a mug of soup in Campbeltown. But the winds were too strong to flutter around these musings too long.
In March 2012, however, I was able to spend a few weeks on Mull, nesting close to an osprey family along from Fionnphort. I was out riding the thermals, playing tricks on the tourist guides who were rehearsing their scripts on dress rehearsals for coach tours, preparing for the season ahead. And there was Drummond’s subconscious, waiting for the ferry to Iona. Geese were foraging in the fields – Barnacle, Greylag and Canada. There was a lot of metaphorical spitting coming from the direction of the “under” Drummond. It was thinking back to Drummond’s first art book: “How to be an artist” (2002). A beautiful slab of grey. A serious piece of work.
A promising thermal disappoints. I plunge tens of feet, frightening some pied wagtails. Drummond’s subconscious is looking green. A heart sink moment. It is recalling the moment when Drummond (the man) realised that there was a missing page in his 2002 book. Not a blank page, or an empty page. A missing page. The Last Page. Oh dear.
Drummond’s unconscious is swearing. Not rhythmically, or knowingly, like Beyonce. But explosively, emotionally, authentically butchering the surrounding air. Why do thoughts like this appear to spoil the peace, it wonders. Think about Iona. A liminal place. A point in the Atlantic Archipelago. It stops for a piece of cake and a cup of tea at the St Columba Hotel. The sea is calm. The water clear and blue, the seaweed sweeping the sand below.
From 2002 to 2012, in idle moments, Bill Drummond’s subconscious had an oscillating relationship with the chicanery of that missing page. When it can bear to think about it, it remembers the following words: “In that instant all my emotions were wiped clean to be replaced by a love for a flag that didn’t, as yet, exist. This flag would have no red, white or blue. And there would be no room for the secondary colours of orange, green or purple. That just leaves yellow and black….You might be thinking that flags are the last thing a UK’n* should want. Flags are about tribalism, kings and queens, going to war. Well, no, ‘The Old Chevron’, as I now call it, is the opposite to that.”
And Drummond’s subconscious is plotting how to bring that missing page to life. Not in the form of a pamphlet# that inserts the words back into the book. Or in the form of a reissue of that book. That has already been done. No, it will be in the form of physical flags, planted into the soil. On the short ferry trip from coast to coast, island to island, Drummond’s subconscious sees rooks flying overhead, coming to land somewhere near Iona Abbey. One of Drummond’s Sixteen Rookeries perhaps.
Rooks and their thieving ways. Drummond and his questionable relationship with copyright. But these days are long past.
Drummond’s subconscious is focusing on entirely new performances. Art that cannot be captured on a slab of vinyl, or on the page. Art that cannot be sold. Instead, it will be the dancing of a flag in an Atlantic storm, in the web of connections that can be drawn between Forty Islands. I would need a calculator to work out the number of permutations. Maybe Mull and Iona are two of Drummond’s Forty Islands. The subconscious cannot carry flags. Drummond, the man, will need to come to plant two of his Forty Flags in person.
Artists will sometimes dream of flags. Another boat faring artist mentioned in earlier GANTOB posts – Hundertwasser (1928-2000) – also made a flag, in 1983. A koru, as a proposed secondary flag for New Zealand. A stripe of black: a traditional Māori colour. Green and white spirals, a shape beloved of Hundertwasser and also representing the Māori fern. And I note that an updated version of the flag submitted by another artist “was initially selected for inclusion in the long list of 40 designs for the 2015-16 New Zealand flag referendums, but was removed due to a copyright claim by the Hundertwasser Foundation.” I wonder whether the flag committee had forgotten Hundertwasser’s original, or if too much time had elapsed for it to be relevant. More forties. More thievery. More forgetting.
In those early months of 2012 I encountered Drummond’s subconscious on many islands and outcrops. I am not convinced, however, that it identified all forty. Curiously, I never saw the man himself over that period, on Mull, Iona or any of the other islands of the west of Scotland or out towards the Faroe Islands or Iceland. I heard of sightings of The Old Chevron on Matthias Road, London, and on the Isle of Thanet, but they are off my patch. I have never been to New Zealand, though that is the more traditional realm of the southern royal albatross, so I have not seen Hundertwasser’s koru either. Off limits for me of course as I did not visit in life. As a ghost, I am unfortunately tied to rules of time and place.
We leave Drummond’s subconscious on the return journey from Iona, standing on the tiny ferry, looking up to the sky. There is a V shape of geese above, honking away. Adjusting glasses to peer through the correct part of its varifocals Drummond’s subconscious is convinced that it is a chevron of greylags. Definitely greylags. His favourite colour.
THE OBSERVER, 1 April 2024
Number 23 of the 52 Pamphlets
If you would like to contribute a pamphlet, visit the 52 Pamphlets page.
+ Read more about the 9 Missing Years project
* Drummond explains in the book “How to be an artist” that the “’n” should be pronounced as in Canadian.
# Also a number 23 pamphlet.
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