Some further discoveries in this pamphlet, with contributions from Pete and NIk. It’s worth reading right to the end…
Unofficially filling a gap in Bill Drummond’s memoir THE LIFE MODEL
I Am Forty-One, April 29th 1994 to April 28th 1995 (Under)
[GANTOB: To be imagined narrated in the voice of Tam Dean Burn, channelling his inner Bill Drummond].
April 29th, Midnight. On my 34th birthday (see The Goddess of Vinyl chapter of The Life Model) I had black candles on my cake. This year they were pure GOLD, all forty-one of them. Why? Because for these seven years, everything we touched turned to gold.
My 41st birthday was one vast Glitter Ball at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel. We had posted Golden Tickets to the entire music industry. None dared to come, fearing they might be showered in sheep’s blood, or forced into some fiery Hebridean ritual. So we ended up with those who get hold of unwanted corporate tickets: personal assistants, hustlers, pushers, escorts, cleaners and wannabes. We hired lookalikes to play ourselves, undetectable behind horns and robes, and watched on CCTV from the Royal Suite.
Todd Terry was MC, and the after-midnight “special” was Kylie performing Je T’aime with her new beau, Jean-Claude Van Damme. I had commissioned a pair of gold lamé hotpants for Kylie, and they were the main focus of attention until they were discarded. Then – at precisely 3am – Kylie went off-script. She stood up, wrapped herself in Jean-Claude’s karate jacket and announced “I’m gonna leave this party now…” and marched straight out of the Ballroom.
We rushed to the lift, caught up with Kylie in the Foyer, ushered her to our gold limo, woke the driver, and asked Kylie, “Where?”.
“Bank of England”. She handed us each a tiny gold tablet. “Let it dissolve under your tongue”. By the time we reached our destination, everything was dissolving. The three of us tumbled out and Kylie politely dismissed limo and driver. Threadneedle Street?
I am holding a sewing needle between finger and thumb, watching a camel and a rich man fighting to pass through its eye. Oh shit, I’ve pricked my finger. The eye in the needle becomes the Eye in the Pyramid. On every dollar bill. Bill. Bill… I’m walking through a cemetery and I think I recognise the gardener. Peter Green?? That greatest ever triptych of singles: Albatross, Man of the World and Oh Well. The eyes have it – it is he. Hesitantly, I ask, “Who is The Green Manalishi?”.1 He smiles, “The Two-Pronged Crown! The Dollar. The two lines through the ‘S’. The Greenback monster that makes us do things we don’t wanna do! I slayed it. I gave it all away. But I should have burnt it”. He called after me, “Stay true to the trail. You’ll be OK”.
Kylie slaps my face. “For God’s sake Bill, keep it together”. I come round, but now I’m staring at the statue of a man on a horse outside the Bank. It is labelled WELLINGTON. Wellington? Napoleon! Waterloo! Waterloo, for fuck’s sake. Their breakthough hit. Then they learned to alchemise Gunnarsson’s bass grooves into gold. Gold: the greatest Greatest Hits album ever. I am on that ferry back from Sweden crying to the seagulls, “Abba, Abba, why hast thou forsaken me!”.
“Bill!”, breathes Kylie in my ear, “Now where have you gone?! Tap your heels together and say ‘I’ve been a miner for a Heart of Gold’”. She squeezes my hand. “You’re on your own now. You can keep the pants”. Kylie and Rockman have gone.
I awake in The Vault. SHE stands before me. A Being formed entirely of rippling, living gold.
“I am the Goddess of Gold. How I appear to you reveals the state of your Soul. To most, I am a pile of metallic blocks. But you see me true. Tell me, I see fear in your heart?”
“Yes, ma’am, I am afraid. Seven years ago I had this dream. The inventor of the Pop Chart appeared as a Wizard and said he would grant all my wishes if I made a Number One Hit. So I got together with Rockman, we combined every pop cliche imaginable and created a Frankenstein’s Monster of a Number One. I never saw the Wizard again, but after that everything we touched turned to gold. Ma’am, I’m the Son of a Preacher Man. I fear I conjured all this Fame and Fortune by black magic”.
She smiles.
“The last man who saw me true was called Jon Smiff. 158 years ago. He searched the sewers of London for things to sell to feed his family. He accidentally found his way into my Vault. He could have quietly become a millionaire. Instead, he wrote to the Bank and told them!”
“Now hear me: A few weeks from now, a dark spell will be cast upon the people of Britain. On May 25th a Vampire named ‘Camelot’ will launch ‘The Lottery’. This deadly tax on the poor is the final act of the Dark Ones to reduce everything sacred to a ‘product’ and everything human to a ‘consumer’. After the first draw is held on November 19th, you will begin to hear this sad mantra: ‘If I won the lottery, I could…’. No! All free spirits and pure artists work despite their lack of wealth and comfort! Worse, the Lottery Fund will promise to fund people’s projects, but applicants will discover they must sterilise their work to be acceptable”.
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make a Burnt Offering precisely between these two dates2, on the night of August 23rd. Burn The Lot”.
“Only a dying civilisation would imprison this most beautiful, malleable, conductive and noncorrosive substance in a dungeon. The Golden Age will be precisely that: the time the gold pours back to humanity in a billion radiant artifacts. Bill, help break the spell. Set me free”.
And so it came to pass.
Postscript:
I kept the gold lamé hotpants until I hit a marital “hotspot” at which point I agreed they could go to charity. Incredibly, they were found by a friend of Kylie “at a flea market for 50p”, and starred in her Spinning Around video. They are now valued in the millions. So it is that Kylie’s ass turned base desires into gold.
PETE ANDREW, 7 April 2024
One of the 9 Missing Years
Inspiration for Question 6 of the 23 Questions
Pete emailed GANTOB on 3 April to reserve the missing year 41, and sent the finished piece at 11:00 on 7 April. I really enjoyed both The Goddess of Vinyl and The Goddess of Gold, and was delighted to add the latter to the GANTOB canon. I took the PDF that Pete had sent me and forwarded it to the GANTOB Pamphlet Committee for fuller consideration.
In order to fully explore the themes in Pete’s piece the GPC asked me to add a new entry to the 23 Questions. Number 6: Is all that glitters gold? (from The Assayist). This question was uploaded at 12:30 on 7 April, requiring answers by 23:23 that same day.
I am delighted, at 18:15 on 8 April, to be sharing both Pete’s story and NIk’s answer to the question (which was received at 20:06 on 7 April). NIk had not, as far as I am aware, seen Pete’s story. There are, however, some common themes. I will leave it to you to interpret NIk’s answer as you will. Please share any thoughts in the comment box below.
Dear GANTOB,
Imagine a glamorous party filled with dazzling lights and glittering decorations. Everything seems perfect and inviting from afar, but upon closer inspection, you realise that, beneath the glitter and glamour, party-goers kibble in a world of superficiality and deceit. People wear masks, hiding their true intentions and emotions behind their smiles and charm. It’s a stark reminder that not everything that glitters is genuine or sincere (gold). In this meme, glitter serves as a facade, masking darkness and emptiness lurking beneath the surface, illustrating the deceptive nature of appearances.
You’re welcome.
Thanks,
NIk
aka Young Man on Facebook
The answer to Question 6 of the 23 Questions
Together, Pete and NIk’s answers form #GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 28 of the #52Pamphlets
Pete and NIk will receive a personalised copy of the pamphlet by post ASAP and will be the lucky recipient of a copy of the 52 Pamphlets book when it is completed (by January 2025 at the latest, and potentially very considerably sooner than that – watch out for an answer to question 12, which relates to this topic, imminently).
Footnotes:
Pete writes:
1. There is a whole chapter about Bill’s actual meeting with Peter Green in Bill’s “45” published by Little, Brown & Co in 2000. The chapter is “The Autograph Hunted”. The meeting between them described in The Goddess of Gold is “imagined” but it it is true that Peter Green worked briefly as a gardener in a cemetery (not as a gravedigger as often reported) – and that he made clear in various interviews that The Green Manalishi was about the evils and temptations of money’.
2. The notion that The Burning of the Million Quid was a precisely timed “burnt offering” to offset the dark enchantment of The National Lottery was first published in a November 2018 Editorial in the monthly community magazine: Network News: A Guide To Inspiring Events In North Wales. The issue is downloadable here and the Editorial is on Page 3. It is also worth noting that on the K Foundation poster prior to the 1995 screenings of Gimpo’s film, the second of the nine questions suggested is: “WAS IT A BURNT OFFERING?”.
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