'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL DISILLUSIONMENT, I

4 January 1999

To a select few, The Residents were the greatest band in the history of rock 'n' roll. To me they may not have been the great­est, but they certainly were one of them. Not that I have ever owned a Residents record, or come to that listened to one from beginning to end. Actually listening to the music was not nec­essary to judge their greatness; in fact it might have put you off, since much of their recorded output was unlistenable. Hearing it unannounced and out of context, you could understandably mistake it for badly recorded, naive, avant-garde crap. Context was almost everything. They gave the best context going. To three or four of us living in Liverpool in the late '70s, the idea of The Residents was the pinnacle of rock 'n' roll as concept. The fact that this was an era where concept was the most derided of notions somehow added to the potency. If you know nothing of The Residents, and why should you, I will try to give you a brief description of their attraction. That said, I know it is within the context of those times that their greatness shone, and maybe in these latter days it will seem a tad dull, in a lo-fi way.

The Residents came from San Francisco. There were four of them. We never got to know their individual names or what they looked like, and of course they never gave interviews.

There were photographs of them, in which they wore tuxedos and masks shaped like giant eyeballs. There was a later photo of the four of them wearing different, dark masks. In these you could see the whites of their eyes. In their photos they were invariably towering above such American landmarks as the Golden Gate Bridge or Mount Rushmore. The sky was always dark. With these two or three photo images, The Residents were able to haunt the imaginations of young men looking for something more than the posturing inadequacies of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. They existed in a perfect world where they never grew old and never got chucked by their girlfriends. Even better, your girlfriend didn't like them. The band were represented by an even more mysterious organisation called the Cryptic Corporation and their records were released by a company called Ralph Records. Album releases would be announced in the rock press. Full-page adverts would appear. Then, for never-explained reasons, the records would be shelved. Nothing. Just three or four of us standing in Button Street, Liverpool, going, 'Wow! Brilliant!' and, 'They didn't even have to release the record.' Of course, albums did get released, the first of which was called Meet The Residents - this title and the sleeve artwork informed at least my imagination that they were in fact The Beatles from a parallel universe. (Maybe it was a notion that Julian Cope also had, inspiring him to create his own parallel universe, where The Teardrop Explodes existed as Whopper.) Other albums followed - Third Reich & Roll; Duck Stab; Eskimo. Each of their sleeves would be pored over in search of clues and signs, and caused much debate in the Armadillo Tea Rooms in Mathew Street.

Then in the early '80s the Mole Show Trilogy was announced. Over the next few years they planned to release three albums that were to reveal the epic story of the Moles' struggle against the Chebs. While me and my contemporaries in Liverpool were having meagre little careers, fretting over whether it was sell­ing out or not to appear on Top of the Pops, then worrying about subsequent chart positions and radio play, The Residents were striding out across landscapes where none of these piddling things mattered. The only other band that could come close to The Residents in our imaginations was Kraftwerk, but that's another well-documented story. The Residents seemed to be perfect in every way. We were never troubled by what their motivations might be. And the last thing we thought about was who the living, breathing, pissing and farting men were behind the masks. The Residents were as real to me as Rupert Bear had once been. Real real.

Then in 1983, or was it 4, it was announced that The Residents were going to do a world tour performing the Mole Show, their epic opera. As Will Sergeant and I sent off for our tickets for The Residents show at the Birmingham Town Hall, I didn't stop to think, 'The Residents can't perform live, they don't exist in this mortal universe - and even if they could get here, they would tower over everything, crushing all underfoot . . . and what kind of tour bus could ever fit them in?' Will and I had to reschedule the recording commitments of Echo and the Bunnymen's fourth album to fly back to the UK in time for the show. For us, The Rolling Stones were a mere pub-rock band, U2 a sixth-form covers band, compared to the massive stature of The Residents. If they had been playing Wembley Stadium I wouldn't have been at all surprised, but Birmingham Town Hall?

Will and I duly turned up, clutching our tickets. They weren't good ones. We were in the balcony. Our fellow seekers were a strange cross-section of early '80s youth culture. There were long-haired heavy-metallers, past-their-sell-by-date small-town punks, sharp mods, dirty hippies, but the majority of the audi­ence seemed to be made up of introverted loners. Will and I blended in. In a previous career I had been a designer and builder of stage sets. I knew the tricks of the trade and under­stood how to create the backdrops and props for that other world beyond the proscenium arch. In Birmingham Town Hall there was no proscenium arch for us to peer through at this other world. On stage were only a few shoddy and shaky bits of scenery, some dodgy-looking musical hardware and a very unimpressive PA system.

Show time. The lights went down. Then four individuals shuffled on stage. They looked like they were going to a student fancy-dress disco, got up in moth-eaten second-hand tuxedos and four belisha beacon shades they had nicked and then painted, in an attempt to look like The Residents. Most of what followed has been eradicated from my memory banks. I don't know what Will Sergeant thought, or where we headed to after the show. The only thing I can truly recall with certainty is that the individual who was pretending to be the lead singer had that nasally voice that featured on The Residents records down to a T, but his onstage body language was that of a rather small middle-aged man with a bit of a stoop and no idea how to move about a stage with any confidence. Contrary to how it might sound, I did know that the four individuals dressed up in Residents costumes were, in real reality, the four Residents. It's just that I hadn't prepared myself for the fact that this glorious and epic band that stalked my imagination would simply be four blokes from America who had an appetite for the weird and avant-garde. Four blokes who had the wherewithal, drive and imagination. Four blokes who got pissed off with each other, got pissed off with the fact they didn't sell more records, got pissed off with the fact they couldn't pull birds after the show, got pissed off that their genius was not recognised the world over.

In Bad Wisdom I go on about the first time that I saw Elvis Presley up on the screen of my local cinema, when I was 10 years old, and how that was my first great pop moment. Well, since watching The Residents at Rirmingham Town Hall I have a freeze-frame memory of the middle-aged and slightly stooped figure of The Residents' lead singer, his bits of curly black hair sticking out the back of his eyeball mask. In a rational sense, it should be a memory of catastrophic disillusionment, up there with being confronted by your big sister on Christmas Eve with the knowledge that Santa isn't real. That's what gives it its potency. It is why that freeze-framed memory is a pop moment just as great as seeing and hearing Elvis for the first time.