Bill Drummond & Mark Manning, Wild Highway (Creation Books, 2005 )
«Bill Drummond and Mark Manning's second trip was to Zaire, a jungle hell on the verge of bloody civil war, where they traveled down-river in search of the ghost of Conrad's Kurtz. By turns hilarious and horrifying, Wild Highway will cement the reputation of Drummond and Manning not only as cutting-edge writers, but as two of the most dangerous and subversive "pranksters" of the fledgeling 21st century.»
«This book is the second part of a projected trilogy by Drummond (also known as King Boy D of The KLF) and Manning (better known as Zodiac Mindwarp of the band Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction). The first book, Bad Wisdom, was published in 1996 or so.
Relevant flashback: as I was travelling on the tube one Friday morning in 1996 or so, I was reading Bad Wisdom. An Australian woman asked me what I was reading, and if it was any good. My reply was that it was kind of a travel book, but written by two authors, and one of them was totally unreliable, so you didn’t know how much to believe. This was true, but the reality of the situation was that the woman was friendly and pretty, and I didn’t want to alienate her by telling her the full truth, which is that Bad Wisdom was without a doubt one of the most insane and filthy books I’d ever read in my life.
And that’s the case with the follow-up too; as Drummond and Manning write of their journey up the Congo to perform a Punch and Judy show for the President in an attempt to win back their souls from the Devil (see, told you it was mad), pretty much every taboo is on show: racism, sexism, murder, homophobia, rape, cannibalism, paedophilia, and just about every scatological variation you could think of.
The two authors alternate their sections, though even that’s questionable, as it becomes clear partway through that Manning’s added fictionalised events under Drummond’s name. Drummond, on the whole, tries to give a linear version of events – or at least as linear as can be, given that we’re possibly dealing with a journey which may not have taken place in anything like the form depicted – whilst Manning’s sections are (at least I hope) utter fiction: depicting himself as a serial killer in league with a sexually depraved murderous BBC international reporter, sexual predator and alcoholic, Manning’s sections are at first fairly shocking, and then after a while amusing in so far as he does seem able to keep coming up with scenarios which are more and more designed to shock. It’s pretty obvious that he’s doing it for effect – though quite what effect he’s hoping to achieve, I’m at a bit of a loss to ascertain – and there’s a funny section where Drummond asks the reader why they think Manning writes the stuff he does. It almost suggests a degree of despair at his co-writer, as the gross imagery does tend to overwhelm the insights which lurk within Drummond’s sections.
The book’s about twice the length of its predecessor, and Drummond admits on the penultimate page that a reader would need to be pretty dedicated to have made it that far, and he’s not wrong, really; it feels a bit like a wade in every conceivable kind of filth, so it might be seen as something of an endurance test, but having finished it, I feel it was worthwhile, though I can’t quite tell you why. Whether it’s merely because I feel vaguely as if I’ve read something which could legitimately be classified as ‘obscene’, and have therefore put one over on ‘the man’, or whether I’ve just become so inured to the horror on show in the book and have effectively made myself slightly less sensitised, I couldn’t really say. But it felt worth reading, and I suspect that if the third volume ever sees print (I have some doubts – the first volume was published by Penguin, and the second by the smaller Creation Books, apparently on the grounds that the racism on display, however feigned, put Penguin off), I’ll be back to read that.
Despite some concern about what new obscenities Manning will once again commit to the page, and how much (or how little) they might startle me.» - John Soanes
«In November 1992, Drummond and friend Mark Manning decided to save the world by planting a photo of Elvis at the North Pole, with the idea that his soul would seep down across the world on the ley lines and bring about world peace. The two were also hoping to find Baby Jesus within themselves. So they and Gimpo to drive to the North Pole. They got all the way up to Lapland, almost freezing to death, before realising that the road runs out and the unfrozen Arctic Sea starts. However they did meet the keeper of the 'most northerly lighthouse in the world' so they presented the photo to him and then came home.
Drummond and Manning decided to write a book about their trip called initially 'Bill and Zed's Excellent Adventure' or 'The Lighthouse At The Top Of The World'. They decided that it would be a limited edition of one, hand-transcribed and illustrated by them (they were both artists after all) and bound in 18th century reindeer leather which had been recovered from a shipwreck (!!) and which Drummond bought from an auction for some outrageous price. The idea being that before the invention of the printing press books were so rare and special that an interested reader would make a pilgrimage across Europe to see a book. In this age of information technology, they wanted to re-capture some of that magic. So the book was to be displayed in the specially purchased Curfew Tower, which was built as a prison for 19th century dissidents, in Cushendall on the East coast of Northern Ireland. Unfortunately they hadn't considered just how long it would take to hand-write and illustrate, and the project was put on hold. Then, in October 1996, it was somewhat surprisingly published in paperback by Penguin and is now widely available as Bad Wisdom.
The style of the book somewhat reflects that of Hunter S. Thompson (author of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The sleeve reviews are by Jarvis Cocker from Pulp: "The truth, no matter how uncomfortable, cannot help but be beautiful - this is a very beautiful book" and subversive writer/artist Stewart Home: "This is a brilliant anti-novel with a pedigree running from Swift and de Sade to Dada and Burroughs. Blunt, shocking, uncomfortable. A future underground classic."
There is no dedication, and it all begins on Monday 2 November 1992 the day Bill'n'Z'n'Gimpo set off for Helsinki. The text alternates between Drummond and Manning. Drummond just recounts the detail of the events, presumably truthfully, and describes people in his own often wonderful way. He also writes relfectively about life, his past (and the KLF and it's demise) and various things that irk him about the world, eg. MTV. In the meantime Manning is writing wild Hunter S Thompson fiction, wild horrific trips of fancy based around the real life characters, but presumably with some basis in truth, like he's tripping all the time and he sees everything exaggerated. The interplay between the two accounts is very interesting and works very well most of the time. You start to recognise the events or objects or people in real life (i.e. Bill's account) that Z bases his fantasy's around. Bill even writes about Z writing which sheds further light... one page he's bored and not writing anything ... the next he's scribbling away furiously in the back of the car chuckling demonically... the next he's acting out the characters he's created, entertaining Gimpo and Bill.
To publicise the book Bill and Mark (and 'tour manager-cum-support act' Chris Brook; Gimpo also went along, but played no part in the actual performances) undertook a series of public performances (and book signings) initially starting off with a date in New York then at various venues in towns and cities across the UK. From the event flyer:
"This performance is adapted form the novel Bad Wisdom which is based on Drummond and Manning's journey to the North Pole in the winter of 1992. The performance reflects the double narrative of the book with Manning and Drummond relating their separate but intertwining versions of the story."
They react a rehearsed performance, with Zed standing behind an ornate brass lectern which Bill picked up from a church salvage yard for 300 quid, and Bill using "Stig of the Dump's bird table - a crazed scaffold of fence posts and sycamore stumps".
In May 1996 Bill and Mark went to the Congo to write the next chapter in the search for the Lost Chord. Bill said the next chapter will probably be out around 1998, but it took them seven more years to get their second book finished and published. Wild Highway got released in August 2005, incorporating the same writing style as Bad Wisdom before.
They say that for the final chapter, they will voyage to the moon. But as will many creative exploits of the KLF, these things are yet to happen...» - http://www.klf.de/faq/index.php?category_id=6
Bill Drummond & Mark Manning, Bad Wisdom (Creation Books, 2003) «Having exhausted (and been exhausted by) the young man's religion of rock and roll, the authors undertake an epic journey to the North Pole to sacrifice an icon of Elvis Presley. Two very different accounts of their journey clash and mesh as the pilgrims venture forth into the frozen wastes at the top of the world.»
«How did you originally come across it?
This goes back to 1992. Before my book Bad Wisdom was published I had this idea that the Internet (which was in its earliest stages of creation) was somehow going to affect the written word, and literature. The idea I had was that the Internet was going to make the book, the paperback, redundant. And so I then thought that this would push the hardback the other way – that the hardback would become the hand-written artefact; a one-off piece of literature that the reader would have to make a journey to engage with, like it used to be in the middle ages. I wanted to get a building that was something like a toll-box – something where we could keep hand-written copies of Bad Wisdom, that people would have to travel to read.
Mark Manning, who I was writing the book with, saw an advert in The Sunday Independent for a tower. It didn’t say where it was; it just had a phone number. I phoned up, found out it was in Northern Ireland, and found out that it wasn’t expensive. So I had the idea that we’d have the hardback copy in the tower, and then we’d put the book on the Internet. Of course, then Penguin came along with a chequebook, and we ended up using the tower in a very different way. The interesting thing is that we did get the big hardback book made, but we didn’t use it, so now it stays in the tower and the artists can draw in it or write a log. For me, this is the best thing about the tower.» - Drummond at http://skibunnyclub.co.uk/site/grant-gee-interview-3/
