Review - The KLF: Chaos, Magic and The Band That Burned a Million Pounds by John Higgs

In the early hours of 23^rd August 1994, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of The KLF entered an abandoned boathouse on the isle of Jura, with their friend and sometime colleague Gimpo.  The band had already announced their retirement from the music industry, deleting their entire back catalogue (an act estimated to have cost them around £5 million), and symbolically burning their bridges by appearing at the 1992 Brit Awards with the thrash metal band Extreme Noise Terror in tow, firing machine guns into the audience and dumping a dead sheep on the steps of the afterparty. They had come to Jura to perform one last rite; the pair brought with them £1 million in £50 notes, the bulk of their earnings over the past five years. They proceeded to torch the money, while Gimpo recorded the event on Super-8 film.

Conspiracy theories immediately sprang up; if they had kept the serial numbers, it was rumoured, they would be able to claim the money back from the Bank of England (this is untrue). Maybe the whole event had been faked, like the moon landings. Friends deny this: 'They knew the burning was real because afterwards, Jimmy and Bill looked so harrowed & haunted. And to be honest, they've never been the same since’. Afterwards, The KLF were unable to provide a satisfactory explanation for their actions. In their confusion, they decided to take the film on tour, to see if the audiences could explain why they had done it. This met with unexpected hostility. Increasingly bewildered and erratic, Drummond and Cauty drew up an agreement not to talk about the event in public for 23 years. In a typical touch, the contract was painted on the side of a Nissan Bluebird, which they then pushed into the North Sea. In this new biography, John Higgs argues that ‘the fact of their bewilderment is evidence that they were swept along by something larger, and something not of their design'. The search to discover what this ‘something larger’ was is the key to the book.

This isn’t a typical music biography. In the tradition of Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces, Higgs primarily examines the intellectual history of The KLF, rather than the music itself. Indeed, the KLF’s musical output is barely mentioned at all in the opening chapters. Instead, we have a rollercoaster ride through the esoteric counter-cultural ideas which were formative influences on the band. In particular, Higgs takes great joy in finding synchronicities – examples of what Carl Jung described as meaningful coincidences ‘that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect’. Many of the ideas contained in the book, synchronicity included, are not the sort of things that necessarily stand up to the scrutiny of the rational mind, but this does not diminish the entertainment or intrigue. 

Much of Higgs’s book focusses on the workings of Drummond’s mind. This is not to diminish the role Cauty played in the band, as he is at pains to point out, merely a result of the need to untangle the complex web of ideas which prompted Drummond’s actions. Always prone to idiosyncratic and dramatic behaviour, the success of The KLF seemed to disturb Drummond’s mind, until his actions were largely ‘determined by his symbolic interpretation of events’. At first, their odd, situationist-inspired promotional activities and pranks made them press darlings, but events took a darker turn as fame took its toll.

One of the key figures in the text is Robert Anton Wilson, the American author and thinker. Wilson was the co-author of the Illuminatus! trilogy, along with Bob Shea. In 1976, Drummond and Cauty were both involved in an influential Ken Campbell stage adaptation of the novels, which also featured the likes of Jim Broadbent, Chris Langham and Bill Nighy. This was the first link between the two; later, much of the symbolism of The KLF would be appropriated from Wilson’s text. There are clear similarities between Wilson and Drummond, who both frequently used employed surreal and symbolic motifs, and consequently found the line between art and reality blurred; for example, both separately describe periods of time in which imaginary rabbits appeared to have been playing a significant role in their lives (for Drummond, the rabbit was called Echo, and was hidden on the cover of the first Bunnymen album).

The Illuminatus! books contain a reference to an organisation called The Justified Ancients of MuuMuu, an anti-illuminati group dedicated to spreading chaos within the music industry, and this is what Drummond and Cauty became (although they didn’t get the spelling quite right). Operating as the JAMMs, they released a series of singles, appropriating vast chunks of songs by The Beatles and Abba, which are almost unlistenable now, but are best seen as an act of subversion by an anti-music band. Lawyers for Abba got wind of the project and demanded that the records be deleted, which the pair did in their own style, travelling to Scandinavia in a failed attempt to meet Benny, Bjorn et al before burning them all in a field. In their subsequent guise, The KLF, Drummond and Cauty were more pro-music, virtually inventing the genre of stadium rave, but their live appearances still had the air of performance art events. The band was determined to give something back to its audience, whether that be their entire appearance fee in Scottish £1 notes dropped from the lighting rig, or, at one appearance in Amsterdam, the instruments and mixing desk the venue had provided them with.

The Illuminatus! books also make reference to Discordianism, a zen-like parody of religion which grew out of the Sixties counter-culture. Based on worship of Eris, the Greek Goddess of Chaos, Discordianism aims ‘to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced by some form of enlightenment’. As a consequence, Discordian texts are characterised by playful use of paradox, coincidence, and a form of magical thinking. However, as Higgs ominously points out, 'those heavily involved in Discordianism proved more likely to succumb to paranoid schizophrenia than to any form of enlightened bliss'.

Like the Discordians, The KLF operated according to a subversive brief, and the effort had a similarly damaging effect on their psyches. Their ideas became more outlandish and unrealistic. At the height of their powers, in 1991, The KLF were invited to open the Brit Awards ceremony. Negotiations broke down, with the organisers unwilling to countenance ‘their plans to fill a stage with angels and Zulus and arrive on the back of elephants. The dealbreaker, with hindsight, was probably their plan to chainsaw the legs off one of the elephants’. By the time they did appear, in 1992, they were even more dangerous: ‘they weren't seeking the adulation of their peers, or looking to further their careers. They were experienced players in the music industry, so realists on one level. Also, they were pursuing a demented, out of control career trajectory, which had already taken in Tammy Wynette, fake submarines, and pagan wicker man ceremonies’. (It is a relief to note that there were some boundaries, however, as Higgs notes in an uncharacteristically understated aside: 'Satanic black masses were generally considered a step too far by musicians in the late twentieth century, even by Bill Drummond’)

This time, though, the stunt went horribly wrong. Far from being shocked, the music industry establishment applauded their actions. Most damningly of all, the novelty pop producer  Jonathan King publicly said that he had enjoyed their performance. Faced with incorporation into the mainstream, Cauty and Drummond decided they had to end The KLF. Propelled along by a warped internal logic, the pair set about trying to dispose of their ill-gotten gains.

The idea of burning money had been in their minds for some time; in 1993, acting as The K Foundation, they announced a prize of £40,000, to be awarded to 'the worst artist in Britain'. The recipient of this dubious honour was Turner Prize winner Rachel Whiteread. Initially, Whiteread did her best to ignore the K Foundation, until they threatened to immolate the cash on the steps of the Tate Britain if she didn’t come to collect it. 

According to Higgs, the idea had dual appeal for the KLF. Firstly, there was the subversive attraction: in our economy, money is supposed to circulate, to 'work hard for you'. When you make a million, you are supposed to use it to make more. Drummond and Cauty, by contrast, nailed money to boards, or burned it, stopping their wealth from functioning as it is intended to. Secondly, the pair had come to view their musical success as a sort of Faustian pact, which threatened to steal their souls. They had already withdrawn from the record industry; the next step was to renounce their material gains. By doing this, they hoped to gain control over their lives again. The real shock factor though, comes from the context. Had the duo burned the money in 1920, they would have been surrealists. If they’d done it in 2000, they would have been anti-capitalists. But 1994 was a strange, liminal time, between the downfall of Communism in 1991, and the rise of the digital age. There wasn’t any context to explain the action, no narrative to attach it to, which is why it was so unsettling, for the performers and audience alike.  

Chaos, Magic... is a tremendously exciting and provocative secret history, cramming in examinations of important counter-cultural figures from Alan Moore to Mr Punch. There are times when the momentum occasionally takes precedence over analysis – for example, a section in which Higgs attempts to summarise 20th century political history is rather broad brush, and the assertion that 'after Blair, politics would no longer be led by ideology' is odd, in light of the present government. These minor details would be glossed over in a typical music biography, but in a book of this wide-ranging interest and intellectual acumen, they are a little disappointing. Ultimately, though, rather than being a music book this is a story about how we interpret reality, and how concepts can shape the real world. Drummond and Cauty began putting their ideas into reality, and had a shocking (if short-lived) effect on culture. Their burning a million quid could be said to herald the dawn of the digital age, which brought with it an economic bubble and the seeds of collapse - if you are inclined to magical thinking. Or maybe it didn't. Who knows?