KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by J.M.R. Higgs

on

the track The...

I.

Whitney Joins The JAMs.

they very nearly made a fantastic record of their own. The song was their third and final single of that year, Downtown.

Drummond's lyrics revolve around homelessness, to contrast with Petula Clark's romanticising of London ("Neon lights are pretty," she sings whilst Drummond snarls "In Leicester Square, did you do it clean?")

The problem was that Cauty couldn't get a standard 4-4 dance beat to work with it. After some experimentation, he came to the conclusion that the only drum beat that would fit was the Glitter Beat. As a result, samples of Gary Glitter's Rock n' Roll (Part Two), plus the odd bit of Blockbuster! by Sweet, were added to the mix.

The name 'Ford Timelord' was an echo of Ford Prefect, a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by the Doctor Who script editor Douglas Adams.

The car itself, a 1968 Ford Galaxy, had originally been shipped to England by Pinewood Studios and it had been used as a prop in a number of films, including the first Superman movie. It was then bought from Pinewood by a young artist named Gary Mitchell, who painted it to resemble a police car, attached a pirate flag to its aerial and largely trashed it off-roading and driving doughnuts in the fields around Godstone in Surrey. Mitchell then sold the

The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds.

Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is a living thing, for that would sound crazy. It is to say that it behaves as if it were a living thing, which is a much more reasonable observation.

The basic alchemical principle, where a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object - the idea of it, if you prefer - is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.)

When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s. There

What we have here, then, is character of fiction, neither created nor 'owned' by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds - that it needs to survive into the future.

For Moore, and other artists such as David Lynch who use similar models, the role of the artist is like that of a fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present their catch to an audience.

Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish.

Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who-knows-whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace. For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was “totally mad."

In a sense, this was always inevitable when they became successful because the public narrative believed that success comes from

knowing what you are doing. The equally common phenomenon of stumbling upwards is rarely recognised and, even if it is noticed, it tends to be dismissed as an anomaly, something that 'doesn't count,' rather than an example

of how things actua...

Rave happened.

It is not on an artist presenting the audience with an experience, but on an audience that is creating its own performance.

Drummond turned to Cauty at a rave, intending to ask when the MDMA they had taken would kick in, but found himself phrasing the question in the words 'What time is love?'

Even among committed and die-hard KLF fans, Waiting is considered to be unacceptably boring.

The coincidental arrival of both of these wicker men on the 1991 Summer Solstice was unusual because, apart from the release of the film nearly twenty years before, there was an absence of any other wicker men in our culture up until that point.

For Alan Moore, this would signify the arrival of the wicker man concept in a more accessible area of Ideaspace. Or to paraphrase Charles Fort, ‘wicker men come when it's wicker men time.’

The Burning Man festival's description as being a “dadaist temporary autonomous zone” is also interesting in light of the glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, that Drummond performed on Jura.

Talking in meaningless words like this was common at the birth of Dada.

just as the use of the London Gospel Community Choir affected those who listened to Downtown.

Rudolph Steiner, for example, made much of the contrast between two different aspects of the Devil, namely Lucifer and Ahriman. 'Ahriman' is something of an archaic name these days, but we know this critter better as Mephistopheles.

To Steiner, Lucifer and Mephistopheles are opposite principals. At their simplest, they can be thought of as energy and matter. Lucifer is the light-bringer. He represents thought, creativity and spiritual desire. Mephistopheles, meanwhile, represents the physical world. He is matter, solidification, boundaries and limitations. They are both considered to be necessary, for without Lucifer there is no motion, and without Mephistopheles there is no form. Yet they are both considered to be dangerous, and negative. It is necessary to avoid lusting after Lucifer's promise of spiritual bliss, or Mephistopheles' gift of worldly desires. To Steiner, the Christ figure was the mid-point between these two extremes, and this was the state to aspire to. Beyond that mid-point the world would alternate between the negative influences of one or the other.

Satanists invert this symbol, however, so that this point is down, as if the figure had fallen. In this context, the four physical elements are crushing the spirit, trapping it under the physical.

The Faust legend is the basis for one of the founding myths of modern music. In this telling, the great Delta bluesman Robert Johnson met the Devil at a Crossroads. The Devil tuned his guitar and gave him mastery of the instrument in return for his soul.

The connection is, at times, pretty overt. Bands like Black Sabbath, Metallica and the Jimi Hendrix Experience all made use of a musical interval called the tritone, unaware it had for centuries been condemned as 'the Devil's chord' or 'the Devil in music' by the Church.

Faust basically gave his soul for a medieval version of Wikipedia.

Here, then, is the Devil's bargain to musicians. It is Lucifer that they crave, but it is Mephistopheles that destroys them.

is the spiritual yearning that Lucifer represents. Prometheus gained this, and gifted it to mankind. In return he was chained to a rock, or trapped by the physical, solid, manifest world of Mephistopheles.

leave aside the Christian associations of the Devil and allow that name to refer to Steiner's two opposing forces, then we have an accurate metaphor for what happened to Page. He lost his soul to the Devil.

In all our literary history and shared culture, Punch is the only figure who triumphs over the Devil.

Wild, uninhibited creativity is essentially self-indulgent if it is not followed by the hard work involved in manifesting that inspiration into something that connects to other people.

parody news magazine called Yossarian Universal.

'Don Lucknowe' is based on a Stooges' catchphrase “Don't look now.” This interest in Three Stooges-style comedy was a typical Discordian touch,

'Yossarian' is the protagonist in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and is also, according to Illuminatus!, a Discordian Saint.

The liberation loophole, then, is giving yourself permission to accept those contradictions and to allow the idea to grow under its own logic, protected from the withering scorn of rationality.

Justified And Ancient (Stand By The JAMs) was a record that you could play to anyone, from seven year old kids to fifty year old country music superstars, and they would all immediately get it.

In 1870, eleven years after Darwin published On The Origin Of The Species, the Vatican formalised the doctrine of

papal infallibility.

New ideas came thick and fast from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Freud, Picasso and Joyce. Every breakthrough seemed to be pulling in the same direction, that of undermining certainty.

Wealth was pursued, but it did not have the power to properly satisfy us, and that too was soon discarded as a candidate for our unassailable personal omphalos.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm has coined the phrase 'the short twentieth century' to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. This is a useful timeframe for a historian because it works as a complete narrative.