Longitude was the bait for Bill Drummond (KLF activist, pop star, inventor of bands). Drummond was an interestingly complex mix of artist and anti-artist, performer and hermit, scholar, iconoclast, polemicist, prankster and well-grounded human. More than most, he honoured the past — particularly his own — even when he had to invent it. His Scottishness was important to him, although he’d lived for years in England; Corby, Liverpool, Buckinghamshire. He went north, to the island of Jura, when he decided to burn a million quid. (As a way of shaming the substance, the wads of paper, Drummond always referred to it as ‘quid’, never pounds. Quid gave the condemned loot an agricultural classification. Chewed and hawked tobacco. Quid was nineteenth-century slang for the vagina.) Using bundles of banknotes as peat was a transgressive act that prefigured the grotesque barbecues of farm animals, the smoke plumes that marked out the north-east corner of the M25.
Drummond was into a form of conceptual art that had mud on its boots. It was meant to work. You didn’t just photograph it and file it away. The ashes from Jura were a register of ugliness that would be swept up and compressed into a brick. Another notion that Drummond played with, talked about, was to infiltrate this brick, bad karma, into the wall of Gilbert Scott’s power station (soon to be revised as Tate Modern).
Bill’s sidekick Gimpo (visionary ex-squaddie) had a very clear take on the M25. He saw it as something to be circumnavigated at the vernal equinox; pile into a van at South Mimms (everything starts there) and keep going, wired and crazy, cameras rolling. Gimpo was the inspiration and Drummond the scribe. Bill wrote about the affair in a piece entitled ‘Gimpo’s 25’ which he published in the collection 45. By that point, the onetime manipulator of the charts, theatre designer, was blown: he had come out in the identity he had been sliding towards for years, writer (i.e. leper, outcast). Writer and self-publisher. Double whammy. Most of us started that way — and kept quiet about it — but Drummond had triumphantly descended the evolutionary scale. He’d chucked away his chance of an appearance on Celebrity Big Brother to scribble in cafés, hang out in small town libraries — and plod up the Lea Valley with a pair of distressed psychogeographers.
Gimpo is the white-van man of your worst nightmares. See him parked up in South Mimms and you’d leave three or four clear bays on either side. Drummond, as he recounts, responded very positively to the idea of an orbital spin: ‘Fuckin’ brilliant idea, Gimpo. Can I come with you?’ This was back in the days when the motorway could be seen as a video game, an arcade challenge (such things were actually marketed). Even earlier, at the outset, Thatcherite city boys re-enacted movies they’d never viewed, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point. Head-to-head, from South Mimms to South Mimms, at night: cash-splash, noise, nothing to see. Like driving down the barrel of a gun. Jogging on a treadmill.
Precise to the point of pedantry, Drummond calculates that it’s 124.5 miles around the circuit. Gimpo is aiming to stick to the fast lane, the outer rim; bugger petrol consumption. His stated aim is to find out where the M25 leads. The demented wheelman’s ambition, according to Drummond, is to ‘soothe his seething’. Like extinguishing a small blaze in a frying pan by dowsing it with kerosene. The M25 is seething incarnate. Gimpo is practising sympathetic magic, treating like with like in sanity-defying doses. Nietzsche believed that ‘only thoughts which come from walking have any value’. And look what happened to him, seething till his eyes popped out, conversations with horses.
The Gimpo/Drummond equinoctial circumnavigation was a primary inspiration for my M25 pilgrimage, the leisurely twelve-part walk. I liked the way Drummond responded to the Queen Elizabeth Bridge; the pleasure he derived from civil engineering, from the overview of the Purfleet diaspora, oil tanks, wilderness gardens, gleaming blue tractors waiting for export. Distribution and storage (human and otherwise) was the name of the game. Riding the high road over the Thames was the only point on the circuit where the motorway achieves the condition of vision. The rest is foot-down, fingers drumming on the wheel. But the Bridge is not, officially, part of the M25. It’s where walkers are refused entry, pulled over by a cop car, told to swim for it.
Gimpo wants to be Mad Max, motorhead jester of chaos. He wants to lead an E-fuelled procession of smoking pick-up trucks, customised gas-guzzlers, Gaffa-taped camera cars, in a noise cone, a whirlwind of dead leaves and burnt rubber. A 124.5-mile, bumper-to-bumper procession: so that standing still, being held in the stream, will feel like torrential movement. The rrrr-ushh.
‘The further we go, the less familiar it will all become.’ That’s Drummond’s glorious expectation, the germ behind our walk. Gimpo’s gang push it — even talking of a twenty-five-day spin, further — until they achieve lift-off, white van acting like a tin opener gashing the surface of the globe, letting out chthonic spectres. Drummond realises, in one of those vulture-on-the-shoulder flashes, that he is older than Tony Blair. In actuarial time, maybe. By birth certificate. But look, on TV, at those folds, those bruised pouches; look at the eyes. Nothing on earth is older than Blair. The skin job, the hair teasing, the diamond-dust orthodontics, don’t help. The grin that threatens to meet itself at the back of the neck. Blair is so weary. He’s tireder than a coprolite. Older than oxygen. Drummond is his direct contrary, his dark twin. Their Scots heritage aligns them with Stevenson’s quarrelling cousins and potion-swallowing doctors, with James Hogg’s protagonist in The Private Memoirs and Con fessions of a Justified Sinner. Drummond is a true patriot, a grassroots football follower. He wanted to do a non-ironic recording of the national anthem, a picture of the Union Flag on the screen. With one serious prank, plotting to hang dead cows from an off-highway pylon, he was inventing eco-surrealism — in sermon form — years before Blair decided that it would be all right to do nothing, while the herds burnt, heifers were hooked and hoisted, and pigs taken out by expensively trained army marksmen.
I’m writing this at the vernal equinox 2001, wondering if Drummond and Gimpo are still out there, addicted to addiction, to counter-inertia terrorism; spinning like a blunt needle around the groove, picking up fluff. The trees are bare, the light dead. It’s still raining. More and more of Hackney is being improved: that is, less and less of Hackney is available to pedestrians. The canal path is blocked so that authentic Victorian ironwork can be introduced. Public funds for private projects, hobbyism running amok. Building work has been going on for over a year, beyond my garden wall. Roads are closed off and tower blocks (that I saw going up in the Sixties) are being demolished. Alps of rubble. Dust clouds. The man from the mini-mart wants compensation. The residents of Queensbridge Road are being driven mad by the noise and the dirt. You can never establish the nature of these new alliances, council (bankrupt), state (emollient), developer (benign); Irish contractors, shit-shovellers, as ever, digging the ditches, LAINGS HOMES. Suburbs imported. Estates with no atmosphere but with clearly defined boundaries, points at which security slackens its grip, and you step out of the frame of the surveillance monitor.