SOUP IS THE MEDIUM

3 May 2004

You can lose yourself in making soup. The imagination can start to spiral into uncharted regions, reality can become bearable, even enjoyable. You can also find yourself in making soup, though what you find may bore you. It always starts with chopping onions. Holding back the tears has to be mastered, but once that's done, onions are the most rewarding vegetable in the world to chop. Everybody loves the aroma of frying onions. It's what unites all meals in every kitchen around the world.

Earlier this year (2004) I was on the phone with Sean Kelly, who is the director of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast. He wanted to know what I had been up to and I was being my usual evasive self. I mentioned this Soup Line thing I've been thinking about, kind of hoping he might pick up on it.

Things start somewhere.

In 1998 I got an invitation to contribute to an exhibition in Belfast. The exhibition was to be held in a large run-down Victorian town house in the bohemian quarter, if Belfast has such a thing. It was being curated by a pair of artists named Susan Philipsz and Eoghan McTigue who lived in the top floor of the house and operated under the name Grassy Knoll. I don't know if their grassy knoll had anything to do with the infamous grassy knoll or its partner-in-crime the book depository in Dallas, Texas circa 1963. They were asking every artist type who had ever stayed in the house and was still alive to contribute to the exhibition. I was told that hundreds of artists had stayed there over the years. There were rumours that Oscar Wilde had secret assignations there and every second person you meet in Belfast will tell you that their mother swears blind that Errol Flynn stayed there on more than one occasion. Mark Manning and I spent a few debauched hours there one night in 1996 when we were out promoting our book, Bad Wisdom.

I decided that instead of contributing something more recognisably a work of art, I would go over to Belfast and make soup for everybody at this house. I would leave the decision about who the everybody was to the Grassy Knoll. The everybody turned out to be 30-odd Belfast-based artists, cultural contributors and would-be bohemians.

The soup that I made that night was a variation of the one I always make. I call it Big Pan Soup. The only fixed ingredient is onions, after that anything I can get hold of and that makes me think 'Yeah, that will add something,' goes in. Along with hunks of bread and chunks of cheese the soup is a meal in itself.

The evening was a riotous success, wine flowed, songs were sung and there was plenty of washing up to do. Over the next few days I documented the whole thing in a story called Making Soup. The quote at the beginning of this story comes from it.

In the autumn of 2002 I took part in a live art festival in Nottingham called NOW. I was doing a performance thing that came out of my book How To Be An Artist, and in connection with this I wrote a piece in the local listings magazine, City Lights. Originally it was supposed to be an interview. They emailed me a list of questions but I found the questions impossible to answer. So instead I wrote about why this was and then offered up the questions to readers. Whoever emailed me back with the best answers to the questions would get the prize of me coming around to their place to make them, their family and close friends soup. Only one person responded, so I judged her the winner. She was called Julz.

On a wet cold February night in 2003, I drove up to Nottingham with an address BluTacked to the dashboard and my soup-making utensils in the back of the Land Rover. The house turned out to be a red-brick, two-up two-down terrace. I bought all the ingredients from an Asian greengrocers at the corner of the street. I got to work chopping onions in the cramped but spotless kitchen and by the time the soup was ready the place was rammed with her family and close friends. They were a raucous lot, and the cliché motley crew could be used to describe them.

I got out of the house with all my bits and bobs before midnight. Down the M1 and I was sitting in the silence of my kitchen with a mug of tea by 2.00am. And as I was supping the tea I was thinking that it had been a weird but brilliant evening. There seemed to be something about turning up at a stranger's house and doing this communal thing with a bunch of people you have never met before. I was staring at a map of the British Isles that we have stuck on the larder door. I started to imagine a straight line all the way across the map joining Belfast and Nottingham. Then I had an idea. It was a simple one and it went like this: the line is called The Soup Line and anyone who lives on it has the right to contact me and invite me around to their place to make soup for them, their family and close friends. I then went to bed and slept soundly.

Anyway, this is what Sean had to say.
'So this sounds interesting, Bill. How's it been going so far?'
'Well I haven't actually been out there doing it yet. It's still in the fantasy stage, but I have done a couple of my posters, one with a list of instructions on how to find out if you live on The Soup Line and what to do if you do. The other poster is a recipe, in case you want to make a rough approximation of the soup yourself. I've also made one of my text paintings with the words MAKE SOUP on it.'
'So Bill, would you be up for coming over for the festival at the back end of April, making soup along the length of The Soup Line that cuts across the north of Ireland?'
'Yes,' I said.
That was the response I was hoping for.

Yesterday - 2 May 2004 - I got back from spending a week in Ireland, and today I'm trying to work out what it is I've been doing for the past week other than make soup for people I have never met before. In some twisted way, it was one of the most creatively rewarding weeks of my life.

A fortnight before I drove the long drive up to Stranraer from my place, to get the ferry across to Belfast I put together an A5 flyer. On one side was a reduced version of the poster telling you what to do if you live on The Soup Line that I mentioned above (Penkiln Burn Poster 54) on the other a map of the north of Ireland with The Soup Line across it and the names of the towns and villages that it cuts through printed in bold. Sean Kelly had these flyers sent off to libraries, post offices and other likely locations in the town and villages along the line. In the corner of the map side of the flyer was this: Bill Drummond will be based in Belfast between 30 April and 6 May 2004 as part of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival, constructing the Irish section of The Soup Line. Every evening he will be available to travel to one home situated on The Soup Line and make soup. If asked 'Why?' he is likely to say 'because it is a friendly thing to do.' Bill Drummond comes equipped with ingredients and utensils. The selected host is expected to provide liquid refreshments and a warm welcome. If you live on the line and would like Bill Drummond to come to your home and make soup for you, your family and friends; email soupline@penkilnburn.com or contact the Festival office on info@cqaf.com or on the telephone 028 902 324 23.

There was nothing on the flyer that explained who the fuck I was or if it was art or just some weird form of charity. The response was instant, but as I planned to make soup only once in each place along the line I had to draw names from a hat and turn down the vast majority of the invitations. Things got complicated, as they tend to do, and I ended up doing lunchtimes as well on most days, so I made eleven soups in only six days. What was great for me was the variety of places where I ended up making soup. I could be at a residential care home for the elderly at lunchtime and a condemned house full of debauched students in the evening.

There was one recurring problem. In making arrangements with my host I would get the number of expected guests. Near enough every time I would get to the house to be told, 'You don't mind if a few more turn up.' The Irish are kind of loose like that. This could fuck things up for me. Not that I was being tight with the soup, it was more to do with the time it took to prepare. The more mouths to feed, the longer it took. It would take a minimum of three hours from chopping the first onion to ladling the first bowl. Or at least that was my rule of thumb if there were going to be no more than 20 mouths to feed. If 28 were turning up, it could put another 30 minutes on to the preparation time. And then you get people complaining that they had been told that supper would be ready at 9.00pm.

I have a habit of writing in my head as I am driving, and for much of the eight hours' drive south from Stranraer to my house I was writing about straight lines on maps and how I had always been taken by the fact that a bunch of men in London or somewhere would have a map of a distant land and rule a line across the map and decide that forever more what lies on one side is Egypt and on the other Libya or draw the line between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan or even the parallel that divides Canada from the USA and what I was writing in my head usually doesn't have any full stops and sentences would just go on and on… And these lines drawn by men many thousands of miles away from the land in question will be the deciding factor, come wartime, on which side a young man will sacrifice his life.

I like the idea that I have taken a map and drawn a line on it and decided to give it a name and make up rules about it. 'I'm afraid it states quite clearly here, that if you don't live bang on the line Bill Drummond will not come and make soup at your place.' It's not about living to the north, south, east or west of this line, you've got to live right on it. I suppose it must have something of the ley line business about it, except I hate all that Celtic myth, new age stuff. Ley lines have no mystical or spiritual powers other than those we invest in them. Just 'cause some blokes 3,000 years ago decided to build their stone circles in a particular place doesn't give it any more value than a line drawn across any part of the world.

Well that was the sort of stuff that I was writing in my head last night and I was hoping to get it a bit more focused today but I think it is better leaving it unfocused. Trying to nail down why the idea of The Soup Line excites me might just kill it off. I just know that it does and for some reason those people that I have met along it have accepted the notion of this line very positively, in public anyway. One person reminded me of the Stone Soup fable; a couple told me that the phrase 'taking the soup' has a very negative connotation for one camp in the Irish sectarian divide; and two or three commented on the blind trust that had to exist for both parties in allowing a strange man into your house under the pretext he is going to make you, your family and close friends soup.

I haven't quite worked out how I can justify it to my family. Can't see how it is going to put bread on the table. The obvious thing to do would be to write about what happened at the different homes that I visited along the line. But if I did that and ended up publishing it, I would somehow feel that I was exploiting the welcome I had been given.

This morning when I checked my email, among all the degrees with no studying, instant ordinations, pharmaceuticals without prescription, Nigerian banking scams and offers to make my cock even bigger than it already is, was an email from Richard and Judy wanting me to go on their show to talk about The Soup Line. There was another from a BBC TV producer who was interested in discussing the possibility of developing a whole Soup Line thing into a TV series. I can't deny that there was a part of me that went 'I'm on to a fuckin' winner here.' Then I thought about my previous brushes with TV and how shite they had all been and how they had reduced whatever I had been doing to the lowest common denominator. And I remembered what my colleague Cally told me, 'Bill, soup is the medium.' And I said 'You're fuckin' right, Cally, the soup is the medium.' I didn't know what he meant and I don't know where that leaves the message but it sounded good to me.