'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

BILL DRUMMOND IS DEAD

29 May 1998

In the post was a postcard from Cally. At some point in the 1980s, Cally had been the manager of the singer Julian Cope, the former front man of the pop group The Teardrop Explodes. Mercury Records had asked Cally to 'design, compile, re-master and co-ordinate the proper reissue on CD of Kilimanjaro and Wilder, these being the only two long-players recorded by The Teardrop Explodes. Cally liked what I had written about Echo and The Bunnymen, and wanted to know if I could write some­thing similar, but much shorter, on The Teardrop Explodes. I caught the bus to the library and wrote, knowing exactly what story I wanted to tell.

The Teardrop Explodes - A novel by Bill Drummond

Ever since the band of the same name crumbled into a sorry heap of forgotten ideals, unpaid bills, drug habits, foolish vani­ties, bitter recriminations, evaporated visions and regular stupidity, I have suffered a recurring fantasy of writing a novel about the subsequent (fictitious) career of The Teardrop Explodes. The story would start at the moment in 1983 when the band split up, and end with the lead singer, Julian Cope, being shot in the head in mid-1986.

In Liverpool in the late '70s, there was a nucleus of about twenty-three individuals who were each fired by a dream of creating the ultimate mythical band. This dream had been inspired by a number of other bands from distant lands and other times. The list of bands may have included at various times Pere Ubu, Love, The Residents, The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, The Monkees, Can, Television and The 13th Floor Elevators. The greatness of these bands was obviously not mea­sured by their commercial success, or even the guaranteed quality of their creative output, but by an aura that emanated from the mere possibility of their existence. We knew few objective facts about these bands. We gained glimpses of their greatness from the dog-eared sleeves of long-deleted LPs in the second-hand racks of the Probe Record Shop, or the mini­mal label information on rarer seven-inch singles. Singles like '50 Seconds Over Tokyo' or 'Little Jimmy Jewel'. There were no repackaged videos, no South Bank Show documentaries, no reveal-all biographies; just rumours, spread by word of mouth from Button Street to Devonshire Road.

We sat around our very unround tables in the Armadillo Tea Room in Mathew Street, refining our visions and working out routes to ride in search of the tea cup of true myth from which we could sup. My vision got waylaid and I somehow ended up managing The Teardrop Explodes. Once a contract with a major record company had been insecured, I had neither the experience of human nature nor the strength of character to hold the reins, drive the car or sail by the stars. The fact that my own private life was totally out of control didn't help.

With the luxury of hindsight, it is easy to pinpoint the moment when the vision of what The Teardrop Explodes could be was forsaken for something tatty and cheap. It was the morning that Paul Simpson, the original keyboard player, alone perceived that the way to greatness did not lie in accepting an offer to be the support on a Patrik Fitzgerald tour, and quit the band. For the rest of us, this tour appeared to give the band its first opportunity towards nationwide exposure and just deserts. In reality, this was the first slip on a downward spiral thai helter-skeltered through a world of Spandau Ballets, Howard Joneses and Duran Durans, and ended up in the summer of '83 with The Teardrop Explodes as the opening act on a stadium tour headlined by Queen. (I have wiped from my memory a subsequent tour, as a three-piece, of university freshers' balls.)

Although I would feature as a character in the last few pages, the novel would be written in the third person. It would begin with Julian Cope waking up in a bed, in a room, in a hotel in a South American city. Not knowing how he got there, but glad he had. He would feel inspired to phone Paul Simpson, to whom he had not spoken for three years, back in England and ask him to get over on the first available flight.

'Oh, and Paul - get Finkler, Dwyer and Balfe to come with you. We've got a gig in the hotel restaurant tomorrow night. I'll sort the gear out this end.'

Over the following three years, the original line-up of The Teardrop Explodes would tour, adventure and angst their way through South America as a bar band, playing their psycho-industrial pop classics and English pastoral ballads, Dave Balfe driving the bus, shagging the girls and counting the money. Mick Finkler discovering new hallucinogenic mushrooms, lis­tening to modern jazz, Gary Dwyer humping the gear, thumping the drums and worrying about Everton and Julian Cope living out his fantasy of being a troubled poet and writing home daily to Dorian, his new wife. And Paul Simpson keeping the vision intact.

During their self-imposed exile, they would scrape together enough cash to record three LPs in rundown eight-track stu­dios. The master tapes would be sent back to Bill Drummond in Liverpool, to be released on Zoo Records. The first two albums would be considered, over a period of time, to be two of the greatest LPs ever recorded, even better than Marquee Moon, but neither would sell more than 20,000 copies worldwide. After listening to the tape of the proposed third album, Bill Drammond would decide it was marginally less good than the previous one. He would know at once that the time had come to get on the first flight to Bogota, buy a gun and shoot Julian Cope in the head. Drummond would lie to the rest of the band, telling them that Cope had done a runner to Manizales and that they should give chase before he attempted to get back to England and cash in on his now legendary status by launching a solo career. Later that day, the band's bus would leave the narrow mountain road on a high Andean pass, bursting into a ball of flame as it hit the bottom of an inaccessible ravine. The bodies of Drummond and the band would never be recovered.

In the postscript to the book it would be explained how The Teardrop Explodes became the ultimate mythical rock 'n' roll cult band, pissing all over The Velvet Underground, even eclipsing The 13th Floor Elevators. There would be whispers of a never-released third album. Tribute bands would tour the world playing to thousands, and Oliver Stone would be rumoured to be working on a biopic of their career. The book would be magical, serious and frightening. What moments of humour it might contain would go unnoticed by the casual reader. It would say more about young men driven by a vision than any other book written in the English language.

But if I were to start writing it, I would be too shit-scared of what it might reveal ever to finish it.