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People: Why Drummond Money-Coutts is the Lord of Enchantment
This magician might be the heir apparent to the UK’s Latymer Barony, but his mind and heart move to the beat of magic
When I sit down with British magician, mentalist and illusionist, Drummond Money-Coutts, or DMC as he is popularly known, in a Delhi hotel lobby for this interview, I cannot help noticing his tattoo. It features three Hindi words and is placed right above his left ear, peeking out from behind his gold-rimmed Harry Potter-round glasses.
“The tattoo says hausla, pyaar, vishwaas (courage, love, faith)!” Drummond smiles. “During my third trip to India, when I was travelling across Rajasthan, I bought a lot of books from little bookstores. I was reading a lot about spirituality and having the right mindset for life. One evening, I sat down and wrote three mantras for myself and decided that no matter what, I would always stick to them. Upon arriving back in London, I wrote to my friend Mohammad in Udaipur, asking him that, if he were to capture each of these phrases in a Hindi word, what would they be? This is what he said they’d be. It’s my little piece of India!”explains the 35-year-old star of the 2018 Netflix show, Death by Magic.
Plan A
Although Drummond is known to the public as a magician, mentalist and illusionist, he prefers to call himself a magician, because it is something of an umbrella term for what he does when he performs.
“For me, the word ‘magic’ captures everything,” he says. “Whereas mentalism is more focussed on psychology, mind reading, and mental powers, and illusionism deals typically with optical illusions. It’s larger, visual magic.”
He began his career as a magician after executing a French drop on his career in finance at Goldman Sachs, London. He calls this his “Plan A”.
“While climbing a mountain in Africa, when I told my father about Plan A, he asked me what Plan B was. I said it was to make Plan A work!” Drummond chuckles.
Drummond is the son of Lord Crispin Latymer, and belongs to the financial dynasty of Coutts & Co., the eighth oldest bank in the world and private bankers to British royalty.
His father cannot complain about Drummond’s interest in magic. After all, it was his father who had taken him to the oldest magic shop in the UK when he was all of eight. Fascinated with all the magic props and playing cards, Drummond felt he could both learn magic, and introduce the world to it. He’s been such a success since he gave up the spreadsheets, he ‘s now a celebrity in his own right, and a magician to the world’s who’s who.
Spell bound
A trip to Delhi, when he was 19 years old, to meet family friends marked the beginning of Drummond’s long-term relationship with India, which has only grown stronger over the years.
“I landed in Delhi and went off to Udaipur the very next day,” he recalls about his first visit to the country. “I fell in love with the city and discovered India while spending a month here, working for a charity and travelling around villages doing magic. That’s why Udaipur is a deeply special place for me. I also went to a magic convention in Kolkata, which I quite enjoyed.”
In fact, Drummond is just back from another show in Kolkata, stopping over in Delhi to catch up with family friends.
He visits India often, performing not only at ticketed and private dos, but also at weddings. However, he has another special reason to return again and again. Drummond met his girlfriend at Soho House Mumbai early this year. She now helps him polish his spoken Hindi for the magic shows, and together they watch Bollywood movies while enjoying sabzi-roti.
“Main Hindi parh raha hoon. Mere liye mushkil hai. Woh mujhe maddad karti hai (I’m learning Hindi. It’s tough for me but she helps me),” says Drummond. “This year, jadu ke liye, main Hindi bolna chahiye (this year, while performing at my magic shows, I want to speak in Hindi) as much as possible. I’ve been using the Duolingo language learning app, where I completed a Hindi course and learnt the script this year, so it’s been a very big step.”
King of arts
Drummond doesn’t spend all his spare time practising his magic and learning Hindi. Last year, during the lockdown, he utilised the time he got to write the first draft of a book and curate a card game called Zilch—he’s a card shark too!
“Pre-Covid, I was very magic-focussed. But Covid-19 really expanded my horizon because the lockdown gave everyone the time to think about a lot of things. So, I’ve been writing a novel which I’ve been wanting to write for many years, and I created a card game called Zilch, which is very special. It’s a sort of UNO with letters; a word-building game, basically. A really simple, but fast-paced and fun game that sells a lot. I love chess and photography and I’ve always adored skydiving, leather-making—I make wallets, I made this Italian leather wallet—I’ve got a restless mind!” reveals the magician.
I circle him back to the topic of the novel. “When I was 19 and went to uni, I didn’t enjoy it at all and I reached out to a family friend in his sixties, who was very successful, and sought his advice on whether university would be useful,” Drummond says. “We’d met once or twice, and he wrote back 1,500 words in the most beautiful email with quotes, thoughts and anecdotes—incredible wisdom. That began this very close mentor-mentee relationship. He guided me through so many of my questions about life in my early twenties; we’d go for lunch, and I’d just load up on questions that he’d answer.
“When I was 24, he died of cancer. Just before that he had said to me, ‘maybe we should write a book together’. I always thought he would’ve known that he wouldn’t have had the time to write a book, so maybe that was his way of telling me to capture all the conversations,” says Drummond.
Since his mentor passed away, Drummond had been thinking about how he could put him and their deeply personal story in the shape of a book, and very early into lockdown, he sat down, fleshing out the idea in the form of fiction.
“I finished the first draft about four-five months ago and hope to have a proper draft this year to tell this deeply personal story,” says Drummond.
From HT Brunch, January 30, 2022
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