How do you get Tammy Wynette to sing on your record? How do you stop the Teardrop Explodes from imploding? And what’s the wildest thing you can do with £1m? Bill Drummond of the KLF on the strange wisdom of theatre maverick Ken Campbell

Lesson one

“Heroic, Bill, it has to be heroic. There is nothing heroic about what you have done. In fact, it is rubbish.” This was Ken Campbell’s response to drawings of the stage sets I was planning to build for the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool’s first production. Ken then proceeded to tear up my drawings. Drawings I had spent all night preparing.

This short exchange took place the day after I first met Ken. It was the summer of 1976. I was 23, Ken was 36. I had spent the previous 18 months being the “master carpenter” at the Everyman theatre in Liverpool, but my responsibilities stretched somewhat further. I thought I knew what stage sets should look like. I thought my drawings were good. Apparently, they were rubbish.

“Bill, don’t bother doing anything unless it is heroic.” This was the first lesson I learned from Ken. Today, 38 years later, I still don’t know if he meant that it’s not worth doing anything in life unless it’s heroic, or just when it comes to stage sets.

Ken was already a legend in my world. Although I had never actually seen his infamous Ken Campbell Roadshow, stories about their performances loomed large in my still young and fertile imagination.

In June 1976, the Everyman closed for refurbishment, which meant I was out of a job. So I took to wandering the streets of Liverpool. One of these wanders led me into a disused warehouse, just down from where the Cavern Club had been. There I met a man dressed in a Swiss naval uniform. He introduced himself as Peter O’Halligan, told me he was a poet and welcomed me to the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun.

We got talking. And somewhere during the talking, he told me Ken was coming to Liverpool later that day to launch the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool in this warehouse. And he was in need of somebody to design and build the stage sets.

I was the man for the job.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jim Broadbent and Chris Langham in Illuminatus! on stage in Liverpool, 1976.

O’Halligan said I could use the basement of the cellar as my workshop. He then gave me Ken’s phone number. I went and found a phone box and called the number. It was in London, thus long-distance, thus cost me all the money I had on me, almost all the dole money I had for the week. The phone was answered by a strange, strangulated voice. “Ken Campbell here. What do you want?”

Ken was about to get the train to Liverpool. We arranged to meet at six the next morning at the Pier Head, where we caught the Mersey ferry. All of that morning was spent sailing back and forth across the Mersey. With one return ticket, you can spend all day going back and forth. Or you could back then.

Ken talked and talked. We were up on top of the ferry. The sun was shining and the Liver Birds kept watch. There was a lot of what Ken talked about that I did not understand. He told me the London theatre establishment sneered at science fiction and for that very reason he was going to set up the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool. He also went on about a book called The Illuminatus! Trilogy that he had bought in San Francisco. He was going to turn this book into a 12-hour play, the first production by The Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool.

“But what is the book about?” I asked.

“It is about a secret society that controls the world called the Illuminati and their arch rivals the Justified Ancients of Mumu. But some people think they are the same organisations.”

I didn’t tell him I had no interest in science fiction. I like reality. Ken did not ask me any questions about what I did or had done. He just told me I started work the next day.

Lesson two

It was that next day he tore up my drawings. This was followed by my second lesson.

“What is the budget for the stage sets?” I asked him.

“There is no budget. You have to find everything you need in the streets. Or steal it. Liverpool is full of things you can use to build the stage sets from. Go and find them.”

“But yesterday you said there was a budget.”

“I spent the budget on getting this.” He lifted up a phone. It was mustard-coloured.

“You spent the budget on a phone?”

“Yes. Right now in the world, the phone is the most powerful tool you can have. Right now, I can contact anybody in the world of any importance with this phone. Anyone! In fact, you can help me. We need someone to play the role of an oriental woman in the play. Who should we get?”

I could not think of any oriental actresses so I said Yoko Ono. In my head, she was the most famous oriental woman in the world.

“OK, we will ask Yoko Ono.” Then he rings a number. Someone answers. He asks a question and writes down a number. He phones this number. Someone answers. He asks a question and writes down another number. He does this two or three more times – after which he is actually speaking to Yoko in New York. This was not more than 10 minutes after I had half-jokingly suggested her name.

As it happens, Yoko declined his offer to appear in the Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool’s 12-hour production of Illuminatus!, as she had to look after her new baby boy.

Fifteen years later, when Jimmy Cauty and I were working on the KLF track Justified & Ancient, Jimmy said what it needed was a vocal by Tammy Wynette. Now Tammy Wynette was a genuine living legend, the First Lady of Country – and the record we were making was a sort of dance-pop record with weird bits. It was the last thing you’d expect the First Lady of Country to be singing on. While Jimmy got on with the track, I went into the office and picked up the phone. Ten minutes later, after three or four calls, I am actually talking to Tammy Wynette, just before she goes on stage in Chicago. We play her the track down the phone and she agrees there and then to record the vocals with us.

Back to 1976: I went down to the basement. It was dark and damp. There was, for some reason, a pot of yellow paint and a brush on the floor. I opened the lid. It was full. I took the brush, dipped it in, and then proceeded to paint, across the walls of the basement as large as I could, BUT IS IT HEROIC? This was to be my mantra for the next few months.

The sets I built, using material I found in skips or stole, are still the work I’m most proud of.

Lesson three

Illuminatus! opened in the Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream & Pun that autumn. It was a roaring success and received glowing reviews from critics in London-based broadsheets. It featured a host of unknown young actors, including Jim Broadbent, David Rappaport and Bill Nighy. Peter Hall, then the artistic director of the National Theatre, wanted Illuminatus! to transfer to London and be the opening show on the National’s new Cottesloe stage.

Ken and I drove down to have a meeting with Hall. As we entered the National, Ken turned to me and said: “Bill, before you enter any meeting, you have to know exactly what it is you want out of it. What we want out of this is for you to have whatever budget and facilities you need to build all-new stage sets for the production here.”

I had come prepared, with models of the sets. These I had spent all of the previous night building and they looked exactly how I wanted the real thing to be. I thought they looked brilliant. I still have them.

Hall smiled and agreed to everything.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prunella Gee in Illuminatus! at the National Theatre, 1977.

Lesson four

The stage sets got built and the London production was a success. Every show was packed. Nighy and Broadbent looked and sounded like the stars they were to become. A West End company wanted to take the show on, but instead of it transferring to a Shaftesbury Avenue-type theatre, they picked the far hipper Roundhouse up in Camden. In the mid-1970s, the Roundhouse was about as hip as you could get.

They wanted to use all of my stage sets, sets I had originally made for nothing and got paid next-to-nothing for. The company was willing to pay me a week’s wages to set it all up. Ken said there was nothing he could do about it and that this was the reality of commercial theatre, and I should see this as an opportunity to prove my worth. But as far as I was concerned, this was shit. The actors were all going to get paid for the complete run.

I worked like fuck to get everything ready. Then, on the day it was to open, while attempting to bolt down a part of the set – a toilet – to the stage floor, I cracked the porcelain. I told Ken I was going to go and get some Araldite to glue it back together. I walked out of the Roundhouse and down towards a hardware shop on Chalk Farm Road. But I just walked past and I kept walking until I got to Euston Station, where I got a train back to Liverpool.

It was spring. The world was turning. The punk rock wars were raging across the land. I put my tools away and tuned up my guitar. Within a month of not returning with the Araldite, I had formed my first proper band, Big in Japan.

The lesson that Ken taught me here, even if he did not mean to, was when to walk away. I have put it to good use various times since.

Lesson five

Four years later, still in Liverpool, I am co-managing two of the hippest bands in the land: Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Echo & the Bunnymen were going from strength to strength. They were a solid four-piece democratic band. The Teardrop Explodes were more difficult. They had just had a top 10 single, Reward, and their first album had gone gold. But the band was riven with internal problems, changing line-ups, conflicting egos and too much dope.

Ken was back in Liverpool. He had got a proper job as the artistic director of the Everyman. The co-manager of these bands, and my best friend, was Dave Balfe. He was also the keyboard-player with the Teardrop Explodes, and that was one of the problems. I had told Dave about Ken and how he was the only proper genius I had ever worked with. I knew Ken had no interest in music but I suggested we should visit him and ask what to do with the Teardrop Explodes.

So that night, we go to Ken’s lodgings and knock on his door. On seeing my face, the first thing he says is: “Drummond, have you got the Araldite?”

Introductions over, Dave and I explained the problem. He said it was simple enough to sort out. I asked how and he said: “Give me £100 and I will tell you.”

So Dave and I went back out into the night to get £100. There were no cash machines in those days. There was only one person we knew in Liverpool who would have that sort of money in cash at that time of night. Obviously, he thought we were there to buy his wares. We said no, we just want to borrow £100. The interest was agreed and he loaned us the money.

Back at Ken’s lodgings, we counted out the notes. Ken put them in his back pocket. He looked up at us and gave us his broad grin.

“WILDER!”

“What do you mean, Ken?”

“I mean WILDER! That is what you need your band to be. WILDER!”

“Have we just paid you £100 for the word ‘wilder’?”

“Yes. And it is probably the best £100 you are ever likely to spend.”

When we left, Dave was certain Ken was just taking the piss out of us. He may have been. But that did not stop us from convincing the Teardrop Explodes and their record company to call their next – and final – album Wilder. Although it went gold, it did not solve the problem within the band. I walked away. And the band broke up. But with everything I have worked on since, I can hear Ken’s voice telling me: “Wilder, Bill, it should be wilder.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bill Drummond, right, and KLF bandmate Jimmy Cauty in 1990. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

Cosmic postscript

Over the years since, I worked with Ken in a number of ways. He directed Jimmy Cauty and myself in our Fuck the Millennium production at the Barbican in London. And anyone who knows anything about my own trajectory will know the influence of Illuminatus! has been profound. None of that would have happened without Ken and the five lessons I learnt from him.

Earlier this year, I was contacted by Daisy Eris Campbell, his daughter. She was planning to put on a play in Liverpool based on Cosmic Trigger, the book by Robert Anton Wilson that was the follow-up to The Illuminatus! Trilogy. She was not asking me to get involved and I knew I could never go back to that anyway. As far as Ken was concerned, I was the boy who had gone to get the Araldite and never came back.

But I am looking forward to returning to Liverpool and watching this show. I just hope it is even more heroic and wilder than her father could ever have expected.

• Cosmic Trigger is at Camp and Furnace, Liverpool, 21-23 November (0151-709 4776). Then at Lost Theatre, London, 26-29 November (020-7720 6897).

• Ken Campbell obituary – “he was one of the strangest people in Britain”

• Archive interview: The elf of Epping Forest