The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

by J.M.R. Higgs

It is not necessary for a character in a story to be aware of that story. This is not something that we understand instinctively or intuitively. The films we watch are focused on a hero’s journey, and we automatically interpret the other characters as being part of that hero’s story. If we see merchandise from the Harry Potter movies (for example) which shows minor characters from the films, then this does not strike us as odd. That character is part of those films, after all, and therefore part of Harry Potter’s story. Often, however, those characters should have no knowledge of the story that they are in. They may feature in an early scene and never be seen again, remaining ignorant of the events that follow. They would have no more reason for thinking that they were part of ‘Harry Potter’s story’ than the story of anyone else that they met. Indeed, the idea that this was ‘Harry’s story’ would seem ludicrous because, as far as they are concerned, they are in the middle of their own story. Their story could conceivably be more dramatic and exciting than Harry’s. To them, Harry would be a bit player in their own story, not vice versa. This is certainly the situation in narratives which deal with real, as opposed to fictitious, people. We are all forming our own narratives and we can’t be expected to keep track of everybody else’s narratives, no matter how much they would like us to.

The role of the ego, it appears, is less like a president or a prime minister deciding on a course of action, but more like their spin doctor explaining the action afterwards in the best possible light. We rationalise the actions of our unconscious minds and present them as an entirely correct, politically consistent course of action regardless of what it was or how uninvolved we are in the decision.

As well as undergoing drug-induced schizophrenia, Wilson had been raised as a Catholic and had also been a communist in his earlier years. He had fully accepted these two powerful belief systems before rejecting them both. Thanks to this background, he was able to recognise what he would later call a self-referential reality tunnel. This was a philosophy, religion or ideology that was complete and satisfying and which fully explained all the details of the world, assuming that you did not question its central tenet. This central tenet was an idea and often an appealing one – for which there was a distinct lack of evidence, such as the idea that there was a judgemental patriarchal creator God, or that a propertyless communal utopia would be the final stage of society. The surrounding ideology was an elaborate commentary which developed in order to support the central concept in much the same way that a pearl forms around a piece of grit in an oyster. All the theory and education that is needed to fully understand an ‘-ism’ or religion functioned like a sophisticated defence mechanism which protected this central tenet from crashing and burning on the rocks of reality. The reason these ideological defences were so painstakingly built up over time was because, once inside a self-referential reality tunnel, you had a model that made sense of the rest of the world. This could be an extremely appealing situation, and one that you could happily stay in for the rest of your life.

By the time we reached 1990 all options had been tried and found wanting. We could return to the Church, the state, politics, material greed, personal liberation or hedonism if we wished, but we could no longer see them without being aware of their faults. They were damaged goods, still significant but no longer permanent and secure. But what other options did we have? Did we have any? It appeared not. We were out of ideas. And so there was heard a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in. This awful period was brief, and we can date it quite precisely. It arrived in mainstream culture in 1991, fully formed and simultaneously emanating from many different art forms. Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X was published in March that year, and the generation it described suddenly found themselves with a name. Another label arrived in July, when Richard Linklater’s no-budget indie movie Slacker reached cinemas. The American comedian Bill Hicks’ career started taking off in the UK, and the generation found their philosopher. Then, in September, their anthem arrived. Nirvana released the single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and the story of alternative music was changed forever.

At first, Generation X was linked to a sense of relief and a feeling that they had recognised the blind spots of the past and were now facing up to things with a refreshing honesty. But as 1991 rolled into 1992 and 1993, this honesty became less invigorating and increasingly unbearable. It started to become apparent that they were not going to find a focus for their narrative, or a way to repair the damage to their mental landscape. The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface. The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the burning of the million pounds and the year Bill Hicks died.

We can date the end of that era, what Hobsbawm called the ‘Age of Extremes’ to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the information era to the first popular web browser in 1994. What, then, should we make of those years in between? They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state.

If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’ll find that each successive one has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the internet during this period. The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines. The age of John Major and George Bush Sr, it seems, does not attract our attention. Our cultural narrative skips from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman late eighties to the Britpop and The Spice Girls mid-nineties quite happily.

And how else could they do it? They couldn’t give it away or spend it, because that’s what money wants. It wants to circulate. That’s what gives it power. Even if you nail it to a piece of wood, someone will come along sooner or later to steal it and set it free. Physically destroying it is the only way to stop it. But before it can be stopped there first needs to be the idea that it can be stopped, and that it is not invincible. Up until then, this was largely unthinkable. The burning of the million quid should not be seen from the perspective of art. It was never about art. It was much more than that, and much more obvious. It was about the destruction of money. It was about the idea that money could be defeated.

Alan Moore has a nice little dodge to avoid this problem. He claims that magic is not real, if we define ‘real’ as meaning something that unarguably exists in time and space. Magic, he points out, only exists in the mind. But this does not mean that it cannot explain the larger world, for there is an established tradition of things which are best explained with things that don’t exist. The mathematical concept of imaginary numbers is a useful example here. As the laws of maths make explicit, imaginary numbers not only don’t exist, they can’t exist. The basic imaginary number, known as i, is defined as the square root of minus one. This cannot exist because there is no possible number, minus or positive, which will produce a minus answer when multiplied by itself. Regardless, mathematicians in the eighteenth century played around with imaginary numbers for the fun of it and found them to be surprisingly useful. Over time their properties became understood and they became an important tool for engineers. Our understanding of phenomena such as radio waves or electricity is reliant on them. This is not to say that electricity behaves as it does because of something that doesn’t exist. Rather, it says that our most practical and useful models for understanding electricity rely on something that doesn’t exist. Likewise magic (or art, if you prefer) doesn’t exist but, then again, it doesn’t need to. In a narrative driven by people who practise magical thinking, magical thinking i...

Hence we have experiments that show that light travels as a wave, and we have experiments that show that light travels as a particle. This strange dual nature of light, where it behaves as a wave when treated as a wave but like a particle when treated as a particle, baffled many of our greatest physicists for many years. Wilson’s point is that both the ‘wave model’ and the ‘particle model’ are our own inventions, the lines that we have drawn on the map. Both models are elegant and useful, but they are not light itself. Light is not affected by our attempts to understand it.