Bill Drummond: 'The creative urge is in us all' Bill Drummond standing in the Penkiln Burn, Minnigaff, Dumfries and Galloway, 2009. Photograph: Tracey Moberly How do you go about interviewing someone when you have only got four questions to play with? Especially someone like Bill Drummond, whose life is hardly uneventful. From managing Echo and the Bunnymen and forming the KLF to burning £1m and making soup for strangers living on a certain geographical line, Drummond's projects are outlandish, provocative and always thought-provoking - what all good art should be, basically (you can check out more of his work at Penkilnburn.com). For his latest project Drummond has decided to stop doing regular interviews and to answer just 200 more questions (50 people asking four each) between now and his death. The first 100 questions make up his new book, 100. This interview will be the opening instalment of his final 100 questions. As someone who asks questions for a living, I found the whole process oddly stressful. There was no ice-breaking involved and I went round in circles looking for something unique to ask (one rule is that Drummond could never have been asked these questions before). I thought about going abstract, I thought about focusing on one subject, I even thought about testing his knowledge with some A-level history questions until I realised that might not make for a great Guardian feature. In the end I just asked some things that interested me personally. Of course, I soon realised I'd had four questions to put to one of the most interesting artists of my generation and all I had done was ask him about cake and whisky, but by then it was too late - the deadline was looming. So I sent them off anyway and awaited my answers ... In your book 100 you talk about turning as much of your life into art as possible. For example, you would take a route to your fishing spot that, when sketched on a map, showed the outline of a fish. Another example would be the fact that this very question will end up as part of a sculpture. Is it important to be so conscious of these pieces of art or do you think every day people are creating their own art works without even realising? It may be a form of OCD or just an attempt to give life more meaning than it seems to have, but as far back as I can remember I have had a habit of trying to create patterns in the games that I played or the things that I was doing. In my childhood this could be climbing 10 different trees before the sun passed the spire of the parish church or walking out the shape of a square on the map of our town when going to the shops and back to get the messages for my mum. I was never that interested in organised games or religion because someone else had already worked out what all the patterns were. Using a word such as ritual may be too loaded for my liking, but I guess it is from these motivations in us that ritual is born. In the past dozen or so years, I have tried not to suppress or hide these urges in me and let them openly be the central driving force in my stuff. But I am still in denial about using the word "art" in association with it. As soon as we use the word "art" it becomes loaded. In the past couple of years I have tried to sidestep that by using the word "sculpture" in that it sounds more practical, as if some hammering and chiseling has had to be done. Of course, there has usually been precious little hammering and chiseling. For me, how the words, music or art are packaged, distributed and consumed have been as much part of the creative process as the words, music or art bit are. For me, they are all part of the same thing. I think we all approach life in a vaguely similar manner, the creative urge is in us all. The farmer who has just ploughed his field will look back at the neat rows of furrows with the same pride as Jackson Pollock would have done after splattering the canvas. Even the way we stack the plates on the draining board or hang the washing on the line can be infused with the same creative urge. I am tempted to write something about how we define roles in modern western culture, but I will get way out of my depth so I will leave it at that. About a year ago, I went on holiday to Islay and made a pilgrimage to the infamous barn on neighbouring Jura where you burnt your £1m. Are you able to draw a link between the smoke-infused whisky of Islay and the smoke from the burning money? The short answer is no. The longer answer is a difficult one for me because not only do I have no interest in drinking whisky, but I loathe the fact it is the one product my country is known for around the world. I have been to Japan a couple of times to do with work and when they learn that I come from Scotland all they want to talk to me about is whisky and golf. When walking through the duty-free areas of an airport, I have to restrain the urge to take all the boxed single malt bottles off the shelves and smash them on the floor. I like to think this has nothing to do with the fact that at the age of 17 I drank half a bottle of Glenfiddich in the hope that it would give me enough Dutch courage to ask Linda Ballantyne for a dance. It didn't work and I am still getting over the hangover. As for the money burning, Jimmy Cauty and I are still waiting to get a proper answer to the question that we posed some years ago - why was it necessary for someone to burn £1m? - before we make any further comment. You once created a cake circle which involved people baking a cake then delivering it to the home of a stranger. Here at the Guardian we are quite into baking things for each other. What is it about cake that helps friendships blossom? Baking cakes is something I learned to do for myself at the age of 12, when I could not put up with the fact that my mum did not bake enough to satisfy my needs. The baking of cakes is the one thing that I have taught successfully to the majority of my children. I have been constructing cake circles for more than 10 years now. What you do is take a map, draw a circle on the map. The centre of the circle has to be somewhere that you can bake cakes. Each cake you bake there, you then take to the edge of the circle, knock on a door; when it is answered you say: "I have baked you a cake, here it is." Now most people might love the idea of someone baking them a cake, but when you have this strange man standing in your doorway trying to give you a cake, you will undoubtedly have a lot of things going through your head. It may be all cosy in the Guardian offices when you are baking each other cakes, but out there in Bootle or the Dingle, as in when I was constructing the Liverpool Cake Circle last autumn, it can get quite confrontational. That said, there have been parts of the world where I have constructed a cake circle and every door you knock on they invite you in for a meal and they get their neighbours in to meet you as well. Based on my experience, I would say that the Lebanese are the most friendly and welcoming people in the world. For me, the best part about doing it is the tension that builds up in me between the moment of knocking on the door and the moment it is answered. If you could ask one person between now and their death four questions, who would it be and what would the questions involve? There are no famous people who I have ever wanted to interview, but over the past few years I have interviewed numerous barbers around the world. Whatever country I go to, I like to visit a local barber to have a haircut or shave. I like the fact that the cutting of men's hair has been a trade that must have gone on for hundreds of years and will carry on for hundreds to come. Be you Bill Gates or a bloke sleeping on the street of Kolkata you will have the same male vanity and will want your hair to look good. And the barber who cuts Bill Gates's hair will be no better at his trade than the barber in the back street of Kolkata. My interviews with barbers always start with the same question: why did you decide to be a barber? Always the next barber I am going to interview is the person who I most want to interview in the world. Right now that is a lad who works in the Turkish barbers across the road from where I live now in north London. He is only 19. A couple of years ago, he did 10 months for something. His English is not that good, but there is a wisdom about him that goes way beyond the vast majority of people who I meet in my supposed professional life. I will only know what the next three questions will be once the interview starts. Bill Drummond will be at The Idler Academy, 81 Westbourne Park Rd, London W2, 3-10pm on Wednesday 30 May.