What do you think?
Rate this book
Bad Wisdom
This is the story of a journey made by Drummond and Manning to the North Pole. Disorientated and disillusioned, they set out in the winter of 1992 to sacrifice an icon of Elvis Presley at the top of the world. Exhausted by the young man's religion of rock and roll, they hope to lay to rest its pagan spirit and carry its blaze forward into eternity. The two accounts of the journey written independently of each other, clash and mesh as the authors try to make sense of their bizarre adventures. Bill Drummond was a pop star in Teardrop Explodes before founding the KLF and later the K Foundation. Mark Manning was a founder of Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction.
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
10 people are currently reading
309 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews
November 9, 2020
Drummond and someone from Leeds go on an adventure to Helsinki. It’s all to do with seeking the “lost chord” and planting a hilarious statue of Elvis on the top of Everest to prove something about the emptiness of celebrity and the spiritual bankruptcy of the West. I can’t be bothered to go back again to check if that’s all right, these sorts of po mo larks can be made up as you go along. It sounds like the sort of thing Drummond would do, I think you’ll agree. The fun of this Art Council dross is that no one minds when their work misconstrued, because when the terms of creation are as broad reimagining the worst parts of a failed stag holiday as bloggable life-theatre, anything which occurs along the way is just another move in the endless, soulless, game of co-creation. I’m sure if I burnt this book Drummond would find that absolutely brilliant - great value all round. Why not? The only objection would be if you didn't take a blurry polaroid of my torching it; because nothing happens unless it's been fussily documented and published somewhere conspicuous enough to gain an instant cult following.
There are, of course, some patches of good and even great writing here. Drummond would not be so highly praised were he not ever so slightly talented. He can definitely produce a good line or two, and knows how to land or segway a thought. It is the pretext which calls the project into question; the programmatic impetus which casts doubt over the whole self-interested undertaking. As a motive, traveling miles and miles to plonk a statue of Elvis on a mountain is clearly too slight to withstand the intellectual scrutiny a book of this ambition entails. There is only so far you can go with any idea as flimsy as this one, even when you're going as far as the Arctic circle. But then, if you want to get on in the postmodern art game, ascribing meaning to essentially meaningless things is all part of the journey. You'll never get started if you don't put your faith in the missionary message: all objects, no matter how mundane, must be treated as relics, and all events, no matter how banal, must be regarded with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious ceremony.
Happily, Drummond is a man well used to justifying everything in terms which far exceed the weightlessness of their source. He is a person who hangs the clock upside down in his kitchen and patiently waits to be asked what it signifies, who pointlessly and irrecoverably sabotages his life as a statement about life itself. Even the socks he puts on in the morning and the breakfast he prepares, you imagine, must carry additional levels of meaning, extra shades of implication. He must be insufferable redecorating the house. In practice though, there is no need for Drummond to justify anything when the project is aimless journeying. Where there is no goal or destination in mind, Zen Buddhism lies waiting to be discovered. It is with a sense of insecure irony and palpable relief that Drummond smugly reminds us how “Zen” all this is; and as the events grow ever more uneventful and lacking in direction, we are inclined to agree.
As a concept, as a catchword, Zen is transient enough to fit the listless happenings that confront our protagonists. A philosophy built around the essential transience of things, you think, probably should be treated as transient as the events over which it smiles. There is nothing basically wrong with any of it. What is egregious, and might actually test the patience of a real Buddhist, is where Japanese mysticism becomes a cover for a Eurotrash solipsism, a bored detachment from events which attempts to pass itself off as enlightened acceptance. It is telling, for instance, that when confronted by a field of slaughtered animals, organs everywhere, Drummond describes the scene not in terms of emotion, but in the value neutral tones of object d’art. “The slaughtered animals resembled fantastic caskets of jewels; the liver and kidneys looked like large, wet rubies. Dancing stars of light glistened on purple intestines, all manner of bright colours flickered inside the splayed deer; sparkling yellows, sensual purples, crimson. There was nothing sadistic in this slaughter, in fact, there was an intensely spiritual feeling to the whole scene, as if it were in a giant open-air cathedral.”
What is, objectively, a grave and traumatic scene, then, under the auspices of a kind of recovered performance, becomes a moodboard of comfort zone associations. The philosophy of mindfulness, shorn of cultural context, becomes amoral detachment, and a conventionally materialist view, in keeping with the times, is proffered as a daring provocation - like a napkin at dinner thrown unceremoniously into your lap, so shocking, so unexpected. We have come across this ‘radical’ conventionalism before. Through Bacon, Freud, especially Hirst, the sight of inner being reduced to innards-out gore is now all too familiar. We have all seen the animal cross-sections, and we all know a modern nude by its depiction of the body as a sagging bag of meat. Desouled materialism is our default cultural setting. This is proclaiming what everyone believes in the loudest voice, saying the sayable and begging not to be punished for it. Why else have a chapter on Madonna, all bondage and harsh sex, when the genuine article (Madonna’s own self-published book, ‘Sex’) was available to buy in the high street three years earlier? No one was outraged then either, but Drummond is stuck in the year of his birth. Bad Wisdom is essentially a ‘banned book’ in an age where books are no longer important enough to attract the editorial attentions of the censor.
But maybe, this is taking things too seriously. Maybe there were no dead reindeers, maybe there was no trip and not even an obsession with a porcelain effigy of Elvis, maybe, like the clearly fabricated Madonna scene, everything else in here is supposed to be taken with a pinch of scepticism. It’s hard to tell: the line between benign invention and a chronic inability to tell the truth is a fine one. Although I don’t really know, I’d suspect, now 25 years have gone by, this is all just as embarrassing for the authors of this book as it is for us. But I also suspect, guardedly, that much of it remains true to form. Drummond is a man who clearly wants to be seen as different, exceptional, and his career since has followed a similar trend of high-mindedness, big concepts belied by unassumingly small ventures. But apart from the incineration of a million quid (which was more small concept vs. big venture), and maybe the choir thing (which was insignificant on both sides), nothing really stands out. When the terms of art are as broad as creating 'moments' and raising questions in multi-media spaces, even diehard fans will, inevitably, struggle to pick out anything as a favourite.
About this particular work, others were less uncertain. Evidently, it struck many as a clear and even definitive artistic statement, even if the public wasn’t quite convinced. The blurb on the back cover invites comparisons with Jonathan Swift, De Sade and William S Burroughs, some big, impressive, auditorium-filling names you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Drummond’s own community hall-sized reputation. But if the comparisons are slightly exaggerated, the bone of contention is at least instructive. Why exactly doesn’t Drummond measure up to those reputations? Well, at least one of those names was a devout clergyman, while the others engaged in activities which led to persecution rather than bad reviews. Swift sincerely loathed his targets, and quite seriously believed in a higher power. De Sade wasn’t just mad in a wacky ‘I’m wearing odd socks today’ way, he went properly mad - getting himself confined to an asylum. Burroughs, meanwhile, got hooked, not merely strung out, on heroin and killed his wife rather than the author (not that you'd want to do either, ideally).
Therein, perhaps lies the subtle and all important distinction: they may have been wrong, often bad, but they meant what they said, believed in what they did. It may not be a defining trait of greatness to mean it, but it probably is a precondition. Had this book been written with immorality in mind, it might have plotted a course based on real principles than the flimsiest of knowing, nodding pretexts. A pop idol pilgrimage may reflect the spiritual emptiness and moral vacuity of the west, but a great artist doesn't just reflect the times, he challenges them. If Someone like Swift was around now, he would be sending up people like Drummond, making a case against irony and holding out for marginalised sincerity. If we are looking for taboos, the prohibition on belief might be somewhere to start. The last controversial thing to do is surely to mean it, and mean it from within the depths of a shy self-reflecting soul - blood, guts and sex we can get without opening a book.
There are, of course, some patches of good and even great writing here. Drummond would not be so highly praised were he not ever so slightly talented. He can definitely produce a good line or two, and knows how to land or segway a thought. It is the pretext which calls the project into question; the programmatic impetus which casts doubt over the whole self-interested undertaking. As a motive, traveling miles and miles to plonk a statue of Elvis on a mountain is clearly too slight to withstand the intellectual scrutiny a book of this ambition entails. There is only so far you can go with any idea as flimsy as this one, even when you're going as far as the Arctic circle. But then, if you want to get on in the postmodern art game, ascribing meaning to essentially meaningless things is all part of the journey. You'll never get started if you don't put your faith in the missionary message: all objects, no matter how mundane, must be treated as relics, and all events, no matter how banal, must be regarded with the kind of awe usually reserved for religious ceremony.
Happily, Drummond is a man well used to justifying everything in terms which far exceed the weightlessness of their source. He is a person who hangs the clock upside down in his kitchen and patiently waits to be asked what it signifies, who pointlessly and irrecoverably sabotages his life as a statement about life itself. Even the socks he puts on in the morning and the breakfast he prepares, you imagine, must carry additional levels of meaning, extra shades of implication. He must be insufferable redecorating the house. In practice though, there is no need for Drummond to justify anything when the project is aimless journeying. Where there is no goal or destination in mind, Zen Buddhism lies waiting to be discovered. It is with a sense of insecure irony and palpable relief that Drummond smugly reminds us how “Zen” all this is; and as the events grow ever more uneventful and lacking in direction, we are inclined to agree.
As a concept, as a catchword, Zen is transient enough to fit the listless happenings that confront our protagonists. A philosophy built around the essential transience of things, you think, probably should be treated as transient as the events over which it smiles. There is nothing basically wrong with any of it. What is egregious, and might actually test the patience of a real Buddhist, is where Japanese mysticism becomes a cover for a Eurotrash solipsism, a bored detachment from events which attempts to pass itself off as enlightened acceptance. It is telling, for instance, that when confronted by a field of slaughtered animals, organs everywhere, Drummond describes the scene not in terms of emotion, but in the value neutral tones of object d’art. “The slaughtered animals resembled fantastic caskets of jewels; the liver and kidneys looked like large, wet rubies. Dancing stars of light glistened on purple intestines, all manner of bright colours flickered inside the splayed deer; sparkling yellows, sensual purples, crimson. There was nothing sadistic in this slaughter, in fact, there was an intensely spiritual feeling to the whole scene, as if it were in a giant open-air cathedral.”
What is, objectively, a grave and traumatic scene, then, under the auspices of a kind of recovered performance, becomes a moodboard of comfort zone associations. The philosophy of mindfulness, shorn of cultural context, becomes amoral detachment, and a conventionally materialist view, in keeping with the times, is proffered as a daring provocation - like a napkin at dinner thrown unceremoniously into your lap, so shocking, so unexpected. We have come across this ‘radical’ conventionalism before. Through Bacon, Freud, especially Hirst, the sight of inner being reduced to innards-out gore is now all too familiar. We have all seen the animal cross-sections, and we all know a modern nude by its depiction of the body as a sagging bag of meat. Desouled materialism is our default cultural setting. This is proclaiming what everyone believes in the loudest voice, saying the sayable and begging not to be punished for it. Why else have a chapter on Madonna, all bondage and harsh sex, when the genuine article (Madonna’s own self-published book, ‘Sex’) was available to buy in the high street three years earlier? No one was outraged then either, but Drummond is stuck in the year of his birth. Bad Wisdom is essentially a ‘banned book’ in an age where books are no longer important enough to attract the editorial attentions of the censor.
But maybe, this is taking things too seriously. Maybe there were no dead reindeers, maybe there was no trip and not even an obsession with a porcelain effigy of Elvis, maybe, like the clearly fabricated Madonna scene, everything else in here is supposed to be taken with a pinch of scepticism. It’s hard to tell: the line between benign invention and a chronic inability to tell the truth is a fine one. Although I don’t really know, I’d suspect, now 25 years have gone by, this is all just as embarrassing for the authors of this book as it is for us. But I also suspect, guardedly, that much of it remains true to form. Drummond is a man who clearly wants to be seen as different, exceptional, and his career since has followed a similar trend of high-mindedness, big concepts belied by unassumingly small ventures. But apart from the incineration of a million quid (which was more small concept vs. big venture), and maybe the choir thing (which was insignificant on both sides), nothing really stands out. When the terms of art are as broad as creating 'moments' and raising questions in multi-media spaces, even diehard fans will, inevitably, struggle to pick out anything as a favourite.
About this particular work, others were less uncertain. Evidently, it struck many as a clear and even definitive artistic statement, even if the public wasn’t quite convinced. The blurb on the back cover invites comparisons with Jonathan Swift, De Sade and William S Burroughs, some big, impressive, auditorium-filling names you wouldn’t necessarily associate with Drummond’s own community hall-sized reputation. But if the comparisons are slightly exaggerated, the bone of contention is at least instructive. Why exactly doesn’t Drummond measure up to those reputations? Well, at least one of those names was a devout clergyman, while the others engaged in activities which led to persecution rather than bad reviews. Swift sincerely loathed his targets, and quite seriously believed in a higher power. De Sade wasn’t just mad in a wacky ‘I’m wearing odd socks today’ way, he went properly mad - getting himself confined to an asylum. Burroughs, meanwhile, got hooked, not merely strung out, on heroin and killed his wife rather than the author (not that you'd want to do either, ideally).
Therein, perhaps lies the subtle and all important distinction: they may have been wrong, often bad, but they meant what they said, believed in what they did. It may not be a defining trait of greatness to mean it, but it probably is a precondition. Had this book been written with immorality in mind, it might have plotted a course based on real principles than the flimsiest of knowing, nodding pretexts. A pop idol pilgrimage may reflect the spiritual emptiness and moral vacuity of the west, but a great artist doesn't just reflect the times, he challenges them. If Someone like Swift was around now, he would be sending up people like Drummond, making a case against irony and holding out for marginalised sincerity. If we are looking for taboos, the prohibition on belief might be somewhere to start. The last controversial thing to do is surely to mean it, and mean it from within the depths of a shy self-reflecting soul - blood, guts and sex we can get without opening a book.
September 29, 2007
who the fuck has my copy of this? i want it back. it's out of print, and i want to loan it out to other people.
it's like if Hunter S Thompson had a couple of illegitimate british art school sons.
it's like if Hunter S Thompson had a couple of illegitimate british art school sons.
May 10, 2022
The first hundred pages were essentially this but a lot less funny. Pretty easy to file this away as a DNF.
January 28, 2012
I didn’t finish this book. I really wanted to finish this book. I took it on a long train journey with nothing else to read, but ended up starring out of the window. I committed an empty weekend to reading it, but cleaned the oven instead. I’m resigned to not finishing it now, I guess there’s no shame in admitting something is a massive disappointment. To contextualise, I chanced upon a couple of records I really rated released on a label called Kalevala, a bit of googling lead me back to Bill Drummond and Mark Manning… interesting. Apparently not only would Bad Wisdom hold forth on the mysterious project that was Kalevala, but would also chart an epic journey to the end of the world in the name of pop culture. Man, I really wanted to read that book. I waited patiently for the postman, I’d loved everything I read by Bill Drummond before, why would this be any different? To be fair my inability to finish this book wasn’t really anything to do with Drummond as only half of it is credited to him. It takes the form of a double monologue, Drummond the stoic cultural theologian with a wicked glint in his eye vs. Manning the unabashed rockstar cliché with only two intentions, to get fucked up and offend as many people as possible while doing it. Sounds promising doesn’t it? But I found Manning’s bits genuinely unreadable in a repetitively puerile rather than a puritanical sense. I’m no stranger to a mucky book, but Manning is the literary equivalent of Jay from the Inbetweeners., without any of the humour. The Drummond sections made it worthwhile for a bit, I could just skim read the sex/death/fart/vomit parts, but in the end it all became too much like hard work. Not that Drummond would ever take any tips from Julian cope, but this could have benefited from the Head-On/Repossessed treatment, as two separate books packaged back to back. At least I’d get half way through Bad Wisdom/Bad Filth.
July 28, 2009
I've read this three or four times now, and it never disappoints. I can see how the dual narrative could prove irritating for some people, and how the fantasy elements can be construed as extreme. However underneath it all there is a warm and flowing account of a true epic journey.
The slightly more philosophical approach of Bill drummond is well tempered by Mark Manning's grotesque parallel fantasy journey. Nothing feel completely real, the pretext or the journey details.Drummond even admits embelishments at the end,but this book is shot through with a vein of reality and some truths which, although they can be hard to acknowledge, must be recognised.
This is a book you will either love or hate.
The slightly more philosophical approach of Bill drummond is well tempered by Mark Manning's grotesque parallel fantasy journey. Nothing feel completely real, the pretext or the journey details.Drummond even admits embelishments at the end,but this book is shot through with a vein of reality and some truths which, although they can be hard to acknowledge, must be recognised.
This is a book you will either love or hate.
July 18, 2013
A lot of the reviews suggest the book would be better if Z hadn't written any of it and it's true that the Burroughsian Illuminatus shagging'n'killing bollocks gets tiresome over the length of a book. Yet the wildly fictionalised elements of his section subtly undermine the supposed "God-given truth" of Drummond's more sober narrative. "All versions of the truth are lies", the book seems to say.
May 9, 2010
Just read it... (unless you're my grandmother!)
August 25, 2010
Best book ever written!
September 5, 2010
wrong, so very wrong, but funny.
February 11, 2019
Wow, I really didn’t get this.
The fart jokes were funny, and that’s literally the only redeeming feature of this pile of twaddle. They could have just farted on a piece of paper and published that and it would have been just as entertaining, and saved me a lot of time. I only managed to read a quarter, and that was still too much.
I’d give it zero stars if I could.
The fart jokes were funny, and that’s literally the only redeeming feature of this pile of twaddle. They could have just farted on a piece of paper and published that and it would have been just as entertaining, and saved me a lot of time. I only managed to read a quarter, and that was still too much.
I’d give it zero stars if I could.
May 30, 2017
Это охуенно тупо и охуенно смешно.
Почти как группа KLF. Почти как фантазии мужиков среднего возраста.
Если увидите эту книгу, сожгите ее.
Почти как группа KLF. Почти как фантазии мужиков среднего возраста.
Если увидите эту книгу, сожгите ее.
September 27, 2017
Toilet
May 19, 2020
Five stars for Drummond, nul point for Manning.
February 15, 2022
This book was selected by Will Storr as one of the best examples of immersive non-fiction. It is an odd mix, alternating between a wacky travelogue (by Drummond) and psychedelic, misogynistic, scatological, and very strange passages (by Manning). I don't understand why he loves it. I found the Manning bits unreadable, awful. Ok, they are imaginative, but full of rape, violence, drunkenness and poo, and oddly juvenile (e.g. relentless farting). The Drummond parts are fascinating.
The story is, three guys (Drummond, Manning and Manning's brother-in-law/manager) head north, to save humanity by placing an icon of Elvis at the North Pole. The journey is a wild one, even without Manning's weirdo narrative.
The story is, three guys (Drummond, Manning and Manning's brother-in-law/manager) head north, to save humanity by placing an icon of Elvis at the North Pole. The journey is a wild one, even without Manning's weirdo narrative.
August 20, 2007
This book is at once insane, wise, foolish, serious -- a plausible travelogue and a wild fantasy of sex, violence and effigies of Elvis. And much else. It's among the most gripping, compelling hoots of a book I've read in the last ten years. In musical terms (it was written by two British musicians) it shifts from the mellow strangeness of Syd Barrett to the more ominous strangeness of, say, Harvey Milk or even Dark Throne, to a fantabulous intensity -- imagine the most violently juicy parts of deSade's 120 Days of Sodom performed with breakneck intensity by 1980-era Bad Brains. The book has two authors and the tale of a pilgrimage to the north pole is told from the three perspectives of the three protagonists, whose outlooks on the same events can be so wildly disparate and imcompatible that it all gets a bit confusing in places -- but never less than a joy to read.
February 29, 2012
I read this book some years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it. I absolutely loved the way it switched perspectives from the two authors; one writing a fairly straight albeit entertaining travelogue, and the other going completely off-piste and writing seemingly drug-addled fantasy. There's a great moment when the 'straight' author (I think it's Drummond) reads over the shoulder of his co-writer and refers to the manic ramblings that he's coming up with.
I would love to read it again but I lent it to my brother ages ago and then he somewhat sheepishly told me that he'd sub-lent it to a friend of his who had lost it. He then said "it's okay I'll replace it." Then he called me to say "but it's about £100 now, sorry".
And that was that, apparently!
Great read though.
I would love to read it again but I lent it to my brother ages ago and then he somewhat sheepishly told me that he'd sub-lent it to a friend of his who had lost it. He then said "it's okay I'll replace it." Then he called me to say "but it's about £100 now, sorry".
And that was that, apparently!
Great read though.
November 28, 2010
There are the seeds of a halfway decent travel book in here, with some evocative descriptions of Lapland and its inhabitants, and Drummond is capable occasionally of expressing some interesting thoughts. Unfortunately he gets drowned out by all the tiresome macho rock 'n' roll sex and drugs nonsense. The book could also be improved immeasurably by simply cutting out any of the sections written by Mark Manning, most of which are simply extended, nauseating misogynistic and unimaginative horror-porn fantasies.
January 8, 2009
I liked bits of this. But the two authors sections clash after a while. And the dude who writes in the the nasty fantasy style gets really tedious by the end.. so much so that I didn't bother reading the last few pages.. the book would have been better off without his imput.
September 12, 2009
What did I learn from this book? Not to believe everything I read, Mr Manning (aka Zodiac Mindwarp) presents a surreal interpretation to events in this tale alongside Drummmonds more straight ahead interpretation.
August 19, 2010
Yeah, I can say that I've read this. I prefer Drummond's solo efforts to this tag-team fever dream collaboration with Zodiac Mindwarp. Way better than their second book together. I can see why a third never happened.
July 20, 2015
This is just one of my favourite books. Weird, warped, laugh out loud funny, imaginative and basically a load of bobbins. Don't take it too seriously or try to make any sense of Mr Mindwarp's sections and you'll be fine. Enjoy the ride kiddies...
September 4, 2008
Mark Manning is a very bad man. His sections gross you out, rather ruining Bill Drummond's much better written sections.
August 3, 2011
how about a strange journey into this world
October 3, 2013
Manning's parts are so nasty that poor Bill's usual day-to-day-life brilliant style and analytics are almost ruined.
September 8, 2014
a hard read in places, but worth sticking with. Bill Drummond's sections are insightful, Zodiac mindwarp's less so (though still very entertaining)
April 8, 2010
грязный нарко-порнографический делирий.
но что-то в этом есть..
но что-то в этом есть..
Displaying 1 - 26 of 26 reviews