March 2007 - South Bank Centre
I saw Bill Drummond talking at the Royal Festival Hall as part of a tribute to Robert Anton Wilson. A lot of the evening's focus was on Alan Moore - he was being very shamany. But it was Mr Drummond who was most striking. I've just finished reading KLF and realised, maybe, why - this was the first time he'd actually read the Illuminatus! trilogy.
"In his 2008 book 17, Drummond writes about being asked to appear at an event at the South Bank Centre in London to commemorate the death of Robert Anton Wilson the previous year. Drummond agreed after hearing that Alan Moore would also be appearing, but he was unsure what he should do at the event. For inspiration, he decided to read Illuminatus! He claims that he had never read the whole thing before. When Campbell gave him a copy to help him design sets, he read little more than the first volume because that was where most of the play was taken from. He was not particularly impressed by what he read.
He was more impressed in 1986 when he picked it up again and it inspired him to form The JAMs with Jimmy Cauty, but even then he only read as far as page 138 in a trilogy of over 800 pages. Cauty, although he had seen the play, never read the book at all.
Reading the whole thing, in 2007, was something of a shock. Because it was in there, all of it - rabbit spirits, Lucifer, submarines, the angels in the lake, even, to his horror, money burning. It seemed like his life had been mapped out in this one book. It went far beyond the obvious stuff he stole from the first volume. At the time he was involved in a choir called The17, for example, not realising that the number 17 kept appearing in the book at the same places as the number 23.
This was a similar situation to how he learnt about the Situationists, for he only really learnt what they were about, and why his actions kept being described as Situationist, in 1995. Seeing his own history sketched out in the book was deeply unsettling."