Bad Wisdom
Bill Drummond & Mark Manning
Penguin, pbk, £6.99
now reissued as a Creation Books paperback
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

‘Ladies and gentlemen, The KLF have left the music business.’ With that The KLF announced their 1992 retirement. This was after ‘machine gunning’ the audience at the year’s Brit Awards and deleting their entire back catalogue. Since then Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty have expensively disrupted the 1994 Turner Prize as The K Foundation and announced that nothing less than world peace would free their next record - ‘K Cera Cera’, with the Red Army Choir. In the meantime they burnt a million pounds cash on a remote Scottish island, asking audiences to view the ensuing film and tell them whether or not it was Art. Not a lot in four years.

Bad Wisdom is what Drummond did on his holidays. With Mark Manning (a.k.a. gonzo-rocker Zodiac Mindwarp) and hard-man minder Gimpo, he left London in November 1992 to travel to the North Pole. Their logic was inescapable: as Zen Masters, the mystical forces invoked in leaving a portrait of Elvis at the top of the world would reveal the Baby Jesus and bring about the aforementioned global harmony. Simple.
Time and reality dissolved. Somewhere in the distance I could hear the theme tune of The Twilight Zone. . .

This unlikely triumvirate thunder across the tundra, consumed by both the quest and their increasing psychosis. It starts out easily enough with heavy drinking and cod philosophy, but soon the strangeness kicks-in and the shit - literally - starts to fly. In between arguments - Wordsworth versus Blake, Hughes or Burroughs - they meet a bevy of trainee supermodels on a train and fuck them. Then a battalion of ‘Nazi kung fu sex bitches with Rottweillers’ and fuck and kill them; a pattern emerges amongst the blood and sweat and the shit and the liquor and cum:
‘we were gonna free Willy, fuck chicks and slay dragons. We are Zen Masters and know what the fuck we are talking about.’

We look for precedents in Burroughs, de Sade, Stewart Home and, worst of all, Meng and Ecker. Lord Horror’s boot-boys are spiritual sherpas in our heroes’ odyssey as it plunges into sub-Burroughsian skits of scatological depravity, absurd sexual athletics and Bottomley-baiting violence. Necrophilia, rape, coprophilia, cannibalism, rum, sodomy and the lash. The narrative, alternating between Drummond and Manning, leaves no stone unturned, nothing beneath unbuggered or alive as they exorcise ‘the young man’s religion of rock’n’roll.’

This is a foul and disgusting text, scarred by humour so dark in its priapic splendour that ‘black’ scarcely covers it. Indeed, the book is only saved from schoolboy shock tactics by the obvious quality of its writing. For between bodily excretions, Manning and Drummond hit some surprisingly articulate passages and eloquent invention: like the latter’s explanation of Elvis’ place in his personal (anti-)canon, or The Chippendales as a holy order dedicated to duelling with darkness in the forms of Madonna and Rupert Murdoch.

‘It’s puerile, it’s petty,’ Drummond told The Big Issue, the book’s rampant misogyny and homophobia illustrating the ‘stupidity of those attitudes, the perversity.’ As if it needed explanation. It can be very funny or just plain annoying, and reads like a book that had to be written. Let’s hope the promised sequels are the books they could write.