THE KLF - CHAOS, MAGIC AND THE BAND WHO BURNED A MILLION POUNDS -
JOHN HIGGS
Call me a cynic but I don't actually believe Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty burned a million pounds. The only way they would have done it is if they had at least the equivalent amount behind them, thereby reducing (to them in their eyes) the worth of the amount burnt. One million is a lot and it's enough, another million on top is peripheral and surplus to requirement. It's only greed and a lust for money that provides the impetus to keep adding or trying to add another million after a million after a million after a million ad infinitum. It's feasible, I guess, but I don't imagine Drummond and Cauty were rich enough at the time to be in a position of not needing anymore money so I suspect the idea of burning a million pounds was just that: An idea. An experiment. A test. An investigation into the consequences of burning a million pounds and one that clearly proved to be interesting, not least for the mythology that has since sprung from it of which this book is a part.
"Bill Drummond is a cultural magician," as writer and music critic Charles Shaar Murray once said, whilst according to comic book artist and writer Alan Moore "Bill Drummond is totally mad." Well, I've actually met Bill Drummond and found him to be a very likeable and affable bloke though at the same time someone who is probably prone to exaggerate and who probably believes his exaggerations to the point of coming across as a confident and very believable exaggerator.
When someone begins talking about the Illuminati, Discordianism, and the assassination of JFK as author John Higgs does, you know you're entering a maze of mirrors and it's probably time to go home and go to bed. When Higgs then also starts talking about giant invisible rabbit spirits as in the kind that the sleeve art of the debut Echo And The Bunnymen album evoked, the kind that Robert Anton Wilson talked about, the kind that walked with Jimmy Stewart in Harvey and popped up in Donnie Darko that opened with the Bunnymen's track The Killing Moon - and then tells you not to think about it - you can't help but wonder where he's going with all this? Well, the answer is in the title of his book: The KLF - Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds.
Higgs weaves a tangled web of conspiracy theories, coincidental coincidences and Chinese whispers in a bid to serve up meaning and critical theory to Drummond's and Cauty's art and music but the only thing that really sticks is Situationism, an optic that when looked through makes complete sense of it all.
'The Situationists,' Higgs writes 'saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately.'
Situationism explains Bill Drummond, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The Time Lords, the KLF, the K Foundation - everything. It's all cultural jamming. It's all spectacle. It's all appearance. A fine example of this being the KLF appearance at the Brit Awards in 1992 where they performed a Hardcore Punk version of 3am Eternal accompanied by Extreme Noise Terror, ending with Drummond spraying bullets into the audience from a machine gun. Although the dead sheep left on the steps of the after-show party venue was very real, the bullets were fake. Machine-gunning the music industry was appearance. It was spectacle.
And then at an earlier appearance at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, whilst performing a twenty-three minute long version of What Time Is Love? they gave most of the instruments and mixing equipment to the audience for them to take home and keep. A slight problem, however, was that none of it actually belonged to the band but was instead the property of the club.
The fact that I don't believe a million pounds was ever burned presents a bit of a problem when reading Higgs's book as it blows the whole premise out the window from the very start. Not that it really matters to Higgs, however, because apparently rather than just burning a million pounds, Drummond and Cauty actually sacrificed it. There's a difference. It's a fine line between the two but it is there if you care to look and it's where Drummond and Cauty can be placed. A kind of no-man's land between imagination and reality. A hinterland between fickle Pop gimmicks and subversive art. A three o'clock in the morning-type place. An eternal 3am. The cusp of the moment when you're waiting for the MDMA to kick in and your mate turns to you and asks 'What time is love?' It's a place where anything can happen and where the choice is essentially yours as to whether you hang on to the balloon as it rises or you let go before it's too late? Posing the next question, of course, as to how long can you keep a grip on the rope?
Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty are interesting people though Drummond is arguably the more interesting. The KLF were an interesting band - or should that be 'concept'? John Higgs's book is pretty interesting but not absolutely and is somewhat less interesting than Higgs probably thinks it is.
John Serpico
