Gone to Pot

Six years ago, when a group of Belfast artists invited Bill Drummond to play host at a gathering at College Green House on Botanic Avenue, something like a seed seems to have been planted. Accepting the invitation, the former Timelord decided that rather than rehash stories about his Bunnymen and KLF past, or, indeed, about a certain million quid/roaring kiln interface, he would instead serve his guests better by giving them the benefit of a craft in which he considered himself to have a degree of (untutored) expertise. Bill spent the evening making everybody soup.

“It was a really great night,” he says. And one that he found provocative enough to document in his fine travelogue/memoir 45.
Last year, in response to a set of dispiriting questions posed by a Nottingham journalist, for some reason he thought back to the honesty of that occasion and, subsequently, felt obliged to offer his culinary services to any of the town’s citizens capable of a more provocative line of enquiry.
“That turned out to be a great night, too.”
On his way home, in a clear, lucid state of mind, Drummond pulled into a motorway service station, bought a map of the British Isles, and drew a straight line passing through the two places – starting in Felixstowe, ending up in Rosapenna, Donegal – and, once finished, decided that he would try to make soup in as many of the locations situated on that line as possible. From April 30 through to May 6, under the auspices of the fine people at the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, Drummond will be making good on the Irish section – stopping off at households in Portavogie, Comber, Belfast (“my city of dreams; the place where I saw Santa for the first time.”), Maghera, Dungiven, Burnfoot, Carrigen and Rosapenna, with nothing more than a pot, some vegetable stock and a host of good intentions.
Why? Well, Drummond claims “not to have thought it through.” But probe a little deeper and he’ll insist on the enterprise’s genuine basis. Don’t expect a convoluted po-mo prank (or, in fact, an elaborate mission statement); this is, he claims, simply “a friendly thing to do.”
“To go to someone else’s home to cook, it requires a leap of faith on both sides,” he says, leaning forward on a sofa in the CQAF office, “and I’ve always been attracted to leaps of faith. People could be suspicious. They might think that I’m coming to laugh at all their stuff, I’m aware of all that. I’m aware that I’m a stranger being invited into someone’s kitchen, which is a very intimate place. But hopefully everyone will enter into the spirit of it and recognise that there’s nothing dodgy involved. It’s very much a communal act. I’ve no pre-planned recipes. Everybody is welcome to come along and contribute. One of the great things about soup is that every time you make a pot, it’s different. I’m just getting a really great, genuine feeling about doing it and I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of people.”
Old skool Drummond aficionados may well blanch at this evidence of his apparent domestication. What they will fail to see though, is that the very iconoclasm that saw him dumping rotting sheep carcasses at the Brit Awards, informs the spirit of The Soup Line.
“That barrier that’s supposed to exist between an artist and their audience, I’ve always wanted to break that down,” he reveals. “I’ve seen enough musicians who, the minute they’ve experienced a bit of success – and it would frighten you just how little success is necessary – they just turn into monsters. I’m not going to stand in judgement on them – because I’m in no position to stand in judgement or point fingers at anyone – but that is what happens. But at the same time, if Bob Dylan walked past here, I’d be struck mute.
“I’ve conflicted emotions about that type of thing: part of me really hates the fraudulence, but part of me absolutely loves it when something really exciting comes along that seems to have landed from space.”
Later on, during a brief photo shoot, Drummond stands on a table, casting a massive shadow over the floor.
“The first book I really fell in love with when I was a kid was On The Road,” he says in a deceptively gentle Scottish accent, bowing his head slightly in front of a self-produced artwork celebrating the upcoming adventure. He scratches his jaw and opens the palm of his other hand. “But I don’t know if that’s significant or helps to explain things.”
The inexplicable, romantic gesture; the fascination with strangers, the ingrained faith in the transformative possibilities offered by an open road. Well Bill, maybe it does.

Bill Drummond is making soup as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival