This text should not be here. And nor should these images. Neither should exist because their subject – a 25 hour non-stop voyage on the M25, the circular motorway surrounding London– is itself too strange an event to inhabit our reality. Testimonies of previous M25 Spins, of which there have been seven, can be tracked down. I’d already encountered the Spin in the pages of Bill Drummond’s book ‘45’ and Iain Sinclair’s ‘London Orbital’. An otherwise lacklustre evening devoted to Sinclair’s at the Barbican Centre had been enlivened by separate performances from the two artists formerly known as The KLF. These performances celebrated the genius of Gimpo for originally conceiving the Spin.
When I got in touch with Gimpo and Tim, the Spin’s (dis)organisers, about the possibility of recording part of it for a documentary on Resonance 104.4 FM I ended up switching from being an observer with no commitment beyond accumulating some interesting sound recordings, to the rather different role of providing a live DJ mix to be broadcast for the entire 25 hours from the back of a transit van. Things got stranger still on the Spin itself, so strange that I am now, a day later, not sure that all or even any of the following actually occurred, however convincing the photographic evidence.