BILL Drummond is nothing if not interesting. He has, at various times in his life, been a milkman, steelworker, carpenter, apprentice trawlerman, cook and nursing assistant in a psychiatric hospital.

He's also a trained artist, spent more than 15 years in the music industry as a manager, producer and musician with such bands as The Teardrop Explodes, Echo and the Bunnymen and The KLF, and written, or co-written, nine books including The Manual (How to have a number one the easy way).

His latest book, 17, came about through the collision of two different ideas. The first is Drummond's belief that all recorded music has run its course, that it has been played, re-played and sampled to the point where it has lost any meaning and is now fit only for advertising jingles, mobile ring-tones and film soundtracks.

The second is his creation of The 17, hence the book's title. The 17 in question is a choir involving an ever-changing cast that give one-off live performances. It is based around music that has no melody, rhythm, or words, which disappears as the final cadences fade.

The book is a loose diary explaining Drummond's ideas interspersed with his musings on recorded music and its future. "Over a period of time I came to the conclusion that music, whether it's pop, folk, or classical, had been seduced by this 20th century business model, but it's no longer relevant and it's a creative dead-end," he explains.

The idea first came to him during a random visit to a high street record store eight years ago. "As I walked through the door, I could see aisle upon aisle of cds and I had the feeling that this isn't what music should be about," he says.

"When the ipod first came out I thought it was fantastic, it stored every song I could possibly want and I could carry my music collection around in my pocket. But I felt our relationship with music was fundamentally changing and I thought it should be about more than something that makes the bus journey to work a little more bearable," he says.

"Recorded music defined how we thought about music and how we listened to it, but technology has moved on. It's like other art forms, people still do pottery and mosaics but they aren't at the cutting edge of art any more."

Drummond believes the future of music lies in reconnecting people with live performances, rather than stockpiling CDs that simply gather dust.

"People don't like letting things go, but if you look at silent movies they disappeared almost overnight when the talkies arrived. I don't think the same thing will happen with recorded music, but it's well documented that ticket sales for concerts have gone up while CD sales have dropped, because more people are downloading music."

However, he concedes that some music fans will continuing collecting records. "For past generations music was about owning records, so you still have some people who collect vinyl but the relationship has changed.

"Personally, I'm excited by change and the fact that something like the ipod can radically change our relationship with music."

Drummond's 17 project is both intriguing and baffling. He first came up with the idea of creating a series of impromptu choirs while driving his car. "It sounds a bit mad, but I started hearing a choir in my head. There was no melody, rhythm or words, it just sounded like a thousand Vikings in my head." He has no idea where the number 17 came from, but about five years ago he decided to record the sound of his car engine during a cross-country trip. "I drove from Hull to Liverpool on the M62 with just the sound of the engine for company for two hours and twenty one minutes." He then gathered 17 people and took them into a recording studio to recreate the same sound using only their voices. "They probably thought I was a nutter but after a few minutes everyone lost their inhibitions and the sound that came out was much better than the one I initially heard."

Since then the 55 year-old has been experimenting with similar musical scores involving random groups of people. The music is created, recorded and then deleted.

If this sounds unorthodox, then his own life story reads like a kind of strange fiction. Born in South Africa to a missionary father, he was brought up in Scotland and went to art school in Liverpool. After finishing his course, he vowed never to paint another picture again, prompted, he says, by a belief at the time that music and writing were a better way of reaching a mass audience than art.

So, in 1977, he and a group of friends formed a punk band called Big in Japan, which although short-lived kickstarted Drummond's musical career. Since the early '90s he has spent most of his time writing books and working on website projects, but now intends to concentrate on The 17.

His improvised choirs have already performed in places like Moscow, Stockholm and Vienna and he has tours of Brazil and the United States lined up. "Over the next two or three years I will be taking The 17 worldwide, using taxi drivers, footballers, teachers, all kinds of people," he says.

"I know some people will think it's bizarre, but something more radical will take over from recorded music in the future and this notion keeps me awake at night with excitement."


Bill Drummond will be signing copies of his new book 17 at Waterstone's, in Leeds, on September 25.