We should write things down when they happen. I am as guilty as anyone else in not following my own advice. When I am talking to my students and trainees I suggest that they keep a diary. Sometimes I call it a “lab book”, which harks back to my first experiments at school, studying the way that yeast behaves. As a chaotic 16-year-old my experiments were documented on scraps of paper, ultimately lost, or compressed to a mulch at the bottom of my schoolbag beside a leaking bottle or a forgotten, liquified banana. My biology teacher instilled the discipline of writing things in a single notepad, dating and describing progress step by step. The gentle shaking of test tubes to keep yeast cells in suspension for days at a time, hindering flocculation, using the vibration of the fish tank aerator as a source of agitation that wouldn’t overheat and burn the lab down. All documented, ready to transcribe into the final project report. Perhaps we should be documenting our lives like that, to allow a close reading of events in the months and years that follow.
I would like to be able to say that electronic communication – the emails, blogs, social media messages – replaces the lab book, but it’s so easy to get lost in all that digital traffic. I have been looking back through my email correspondence with GANTOB (the person) to identify the point at which I was invited to represent GANTOB (the project) on the K-Line walks between Trancentral, London and Liverpool (“Sample City” according to fellow K-Line walker Andy Gell). My son suggests it’s long deleted in Snapchat messages, but I’ve never used that. Whatever. Life is busy and I don’t always remember the fine details. I frequently find myself replying to emails or social media messages on autopilot, in a hectic blend of work and social life. Things are busy again, with none of diary-simplicity of the pandemic. Not that I would want to go back to that of course.
The long and the short of it is that my wife Liz and I found ourselves at Waverley Station on Friday 21 June 2024, waiting for the TransPennine Express train to Preston, and from there to Liverpool Lime Street. More curiously, once I had shared our planned itinerary with GANTOB, we were also instructed to rendezvous with a guy in a red jacket and yellow cycle helmet twenty minutes before the train departed from Edinburgh. We met him a few minutes later than scheduled outside Boots in the station. He made his apologies for the delay, handed me a brown paper bag marked “tuna” and gave Liz a business card. “Food and Literature Delivery Rider”. It rang a bell. I think that the first GANTOB book was delivered to Edinburgh-based contributors through a similar arrangement in September last year. It might have been through the local Little Free Library, but I also had some unexpected deliveries through the front door. There was no time to talk and check whether this was the case though. We had to rush to catch our train. Liz hates to rush.
The Liverpool weekend was hugely enjoyable, even with blistered feet from 70km of walking. It was a chance to meet people who I knew through KLF Facebook groups and blogs and videos and audio recordings from the GANTOB project. It made me think of all the times that I have travelled the length of the UK to attend KLF-related activities. The BFI 30 years ago (the K-Line walker was there too). A failed attempt to acquire tickets for The Barbican a few years later (the K-Line walker was successful in his parallel quest). More recently, trips to Corby (2022, successfully navigating around a near total train strike) and Cushendall (2023). And the weekend before last, a trip to Glasgow to a tiny venue called Deep End to see Bill Drummond and Tam Dean Burn present Voices from the Galloverse (by the Penkiln Burn Players) in a three act performance called Hear Hard.
The weekend in Liverpool felt like a culmination of all these activities. I have never been to a Toxteth Day of the Dead (the November KLF-related gatherings in Liverpool). I don’t even have a Mumufication brick. It’s something I found myself saying a few times during the walk. In fact, searching for Mumufication in my emails (a term specific enough to track down the key discussion) while I write this piece I see now that’s exactly how I ended up becoming a GANTOB proxy. When you write to GANTOB, you can expect there to be a bit of chat.(*) Most recently for me that was the batting of ideas relating to the 9 Missing Years project. I wrote to Bill Drummond on 10 March about one of the missing years in his memoir The Life Model, with a piece that led on from my official contribution for that same book. GANTOB has subsequently sourced contributions for the other 8 missing years, completing the project on 9 April. GANTOB and I have kept in touch with progress, both contacting Bill a couple of times to see if he was interested in using our pieces further (it remains to be seen). In early May, Stu Huggett, the K-Line walker, was in touch with GANTOB inviting her to participate in the final stages of his walk. Stu has been a regular GANTOB contributor. With this piece, if accepted, I think I will match his number of contributions to the 52 Pamphlets book (three each).
Bingo! My trawl through emails has reaped dividends – in a reply to one of my emails from that time GANTOB mentioned her frustration that she could not attend a K-Line walk. I noted that I was interested, though didn’t even have a Mumufication brick, and connections were made, with some of the forwarded emails providing some of the further context. The day after I was introduced to Stu, Bill Drummond sent out the first email about Hear Hard (13 May 2024). It was starting in Glasgow the weekend of 14 June, then heading to Edinburgh 21 June, including a trio of events dotted along Leith Walk, all of them just round the corner from my house. Brilliant. But, downer, that was the weekend that I had already committed to go to Liverpool to walk the K-Line, with train and hotel booked on a non-refundable basis.
That was how I found myself on Sunday 16 June heading on the red-eye ScotRail express to Glasgow, then tramping down Buchanan Street, across the Clyde on a Victorian pedestrian suspension bridge and a long stretch of main road passing through warehouses, post-industrial and residential areas. It was pouring, but at least the roads were quiet, with major diversions through the city for a 10k race. It felt like a wild goose chase, almost losing the trail until I caught site of the signs to Deep End pointing down behind a strip of retail units. And there was Bill Drummond, greeting me as “Doctor”.
I did not take notes or photos during the Hear Hard event. I followed the instructions of Tam. I closed my eyes as if in meditation or prayer, breathed, listened to his calming voice and then the surrounding noise, sitting with almost 40 others of around the same age as me. Eventually we heard the noise of the needle as it landed on the vinyl playing the Gaelic psalmody versions of key songs from the 1970s and 80s Liverpool music scene, reimagined on Voices from the Galloverse. I let the voices, and very occasional instrumentation (bells, water) wash over me. The effect was disorientating, musically and spiritually. We left the gallery space to make way for an exhibition of Iranian women’s art and gathered outside to hear Tam and Bill’s reflections. Luckily the area was covered. I was almost mute when I bought the LP from Bill a few minutes later, taking my copy out from one of the heavy tea chests that protected their precious cargo.
My “lab book” from the Hear Hard event consisted of jottings as I walked back along the main road, now much busier, past warehouses, and shops selling spices and dried chickpeas, making my way towards Queen Street station and on the train back to Edinburgh to catch up with my Dad and two of my children for Father’s Day. It was still raining, so I sheltered in bus stops and doorways jotting down words, looking up terms that had been used, and finding others that were new to me but that described the extraordinary music and stories that the audience had heard from Tam and Bill. There was mention at one point of a paper boat made from lyrics of a song written by a young musician (aged somewhere between 17 and 23 years – what Bill described as the key period of productivity for pop music). The musician was now past his prime. The boat sailed down a river or stream. It reminded me of the toy dhow mentioned in the Harmonics box that Bill did with Gavin Wade, Duncan McLaren and Simon Wood for the Sharjah Biennial in 2002, which I have written about before for GANTOB. In the Harmonic publication – just a collection of emails on dozens of loose sheets of A4 in text in four colours, one for each of the contributors, with an even longer electronic addendum – they talked about sailing Bill’s copy of the Harmonics’ 7″ down the Persian Gulf.
I will not give any more details away about Hear Hard, because it’s Bill and Tam’s show. You can hear a couple of tracks from the Voices from the Galloverse LP on a Glasgow radio show (from 37 minutes, heard through Searching for The White Room). I recommend, if you can, that you attend one of their events. Subscribe to Bill’s Penkilnburn website and watch out for updates about the Hear Hard tour.
Even before the mention of the paper boat that Sunday morning, I had been thinking about The Harmonics during the Hear Hard performance, because the delivery and harmonies were rather similar to parts of the Gaelic psalmody on the Galloverse record. I took a short recording of The Harmonics’ 7″ when I visited one of the Harmonics last spring. I think that this recording, and some of the other points in the Harmonics’ box of emails, show the clear development of an idea over 20+ years, from the simple single chord of The Harmonics, through the inclusive, scored but often unstructured and unrecorded output of The17 to the power, rawness and careful arrangement of Voices from the Galloverse. The turning and wandering embellishments that usually work and sometimes don’t are appropriate to the form; almost a requirement. Each of these stages over more than two decades seem to have been a necessary stepping stone, and the Voices LP may be the start of a much larger project, with hopefully more to come, including a film.(+)
And with that mention of long-term projects, we are back to last weekend’s walk. The route from Helsby to Mathew Street was long and varied. We met some wonderful people – Stu and Carolyn, Steve and Sarah, Andy, Nick and Gemma, Gary, Darren, Adam and Angie. They had come from near (points along the route – Widnes and Sefton Park) and far (California!) and with a wide range of expectations, from The KLF, Bill Drummond’s connections with Liverpool (read Gary’s blog here), deep dives into previous Days of the Dead and a love of Iain Sinclair type wanderings and exploration. Stu had walked the full distance, in instalments, from London to Merseyside.
Arriving at Mathew Street, then moving to the shadow of the Brian Epstein statue, the mysterious contents of the bag that I was carrying from the Food and Literature Delivery Rider were unpacked from a tin of grapefruit, explored and distributed, taking care to hand out the tiny sheep enclosed in green tea envelopes, the pencils to decorate them, and pamphlets (The Muted Postal Horn by Gillian). And that was another connection – Adam and Angie had come for the Thomas Pynchon symbol. The book The Crying of Lot 49 was recommended. I will need to track down a copy. Perhaps then everything will make sense.
Many of the people we met were there for multiple reasons, and most had stories of 30+ years of history involving The KLF and their subsequent guises. There were many references that were familiar, but plenty that were new to me. Each journey – the experiences during the walk, and the reason that they were there – was unique, and again I will not attempt to capture all the discussions and observations, in case people want to write them up themselves. The weather was beautiful on both days and our walk was soundtracked by chiff chaffs and song thrush, sometimes traffic. There was the contrast of timber frame and thatch in Frodsham and brutalism in Runcorn Shopping City. After scarecrow moments on Wigg Island we crossed the Silver Jubilee Bridge, with views across to the Mersey Gateway (suspension) Bridge and the unfamiliar territory of the West Bank, Hale, Speke and vistas across the expanse of beaches, industry and cormorants along the Mersey when we picked up the walk the following day. The walk into Liverpool city limits had moments where I could have been in Glasgow the weekend before, without the rain. It all ended with a pub quiz hosted by Stu and Andy (the ultimate KLF gurus), and which Liz and I chanced to win. The prize was a copy of Special Request’s What Time is Love? Sessions double LP.
The two weekends in a row focused on Bill Drummond and The KLF, meeting the man himself and many others who I have known via social media or read in the GANTOB books and blog, have been fascinating. I hope that this is the first of many such gatherings. You can read Stu’s posts about walking The K-Line and Andy Gell’s books which I believe include details about its discovery. It, like GANTOB, has brought people together in unexpected ways. The effects of both are now spread across the internet, in photos, new friendships, conversations over pints or music, scraps of paper rescued from boxes of tea (rather than chests), envelopes from teabags adorned with images inspired by the experience. This is the closest that I can do in the time available to capturing a “lab book” of these events. It is also a report back to Stu and GANTOB to thank them for their invitation. Make of it what you will.
GRAHAM 29 June 2024
Number 51 of the #52Pamphlets (note that there may need to be more than 52 pamphlets, though the deadline for submission remains 23:23 on 30 June 2024 unless extensions have been agreed in advance of that time)
* As GANTOB noted in her most recent pamphlet – the link or “golden thread” for this current pamphlet perhaps
+ There is no doubt a longer connection with sustained singing of this nature, with The KLF’s use of Mongolian throat singing and Kuy Dhiem’s beautiful performance of Me Ru Con, but I will leave that for others to unpick.
GANTOB blog 