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

by J.M.R. Higgs

Elton John’s money after all, and his extravagance seemed in keeping with the personality that earned him that money in the first place. His wasted money, at the very least, had made a number of florists happy. When Cauty and Drummond wasted their money it felt different. Seeing video footage of the burning was a genuine shock. Their money looked like kidney dialysis machines, beds in homeless shelters or funding for young artists in a way that Elton John’s wasted money didn’t.

This drift has been found to be so precise and predictable that it can be plotted on a graph, known as the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting. What happens is that witnesses slowly absorb events into their own narrative, losing the loose ends and unexplained incidents and making sense of what they can with respect to their own lives and prejudices. We all do this. Indeed, if modern neuroscience is correct, it is something that we do far more than we think. 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

Here, then, is a story that the cast were not told they were in.

He still loved music but, being twenty-five, he was clearly too old to make music himself. More than anything, Drummond loved

there are now countless conspiracy theorists around the world who believe that it is true. Imaginary ideas have a way of being just as influential, it seems, as more grounded ones.

Jim Broadbent recalled the production of Illuminatus! working on a ‘genius level . . . It wasn’t that Ken was being a genius . . . it was the whole creation of doing the greatest show yet done on Planet World . . . his creative imagination was just stunning.’ The success of the play led to a move

Cauty, originally from Liverpool and then aged twenty-two, had already had some success painting bestselling The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit posters for Athena (they were bought, he said, ‘mainly by student nurses’).

Wilson, instead, made one the most important philosophical leaps of the twentieth century, although, admittedly, it is not yet generally recognised as such.

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.

pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician . . .’ Does Drummond view himself in this way? He

The contents of Moore’s Ideaspace exist outside the physical world’s relationship to time. Events that are about to happen – or, rather, the idea of events that are about to happen – could well be discovered in this immaterial realm by deep wanderers such as Jung.

‘It was a powerful magical event,’ Moore told them afterwards. ‘I can’t see any other explanation for it. You’re dealing with a form of language, a conversation – but you’re not sure what the conversation is . . . you’re waiting for a reply.’

Drummond’s first lyric on ‘All You Need Is Love’ was ‘We’re back again’, not a typical opening line for a debut single by a band that had only formed a few months earlier. The rap continues, ‘They never kicked us out, 20,000 years of “shout, shout, shout”.’ Again, it is not usual for rap artists to announce themselves as

What we have here, then, is a 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. Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character who acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive. From an evolutionary point of view, that’s impressive.

The equally common phenomenon of stumbling upwards is rarely recognised. Even when it is noticed, it tends to be dismissed as an anomaly, something that ‘doesn’t count’, rather than an example of how things actually work. Few people are comfortable with accepting the extent with which blind chance affects their lives. The fact that Drummond and Cauty

They are both considered to be necessary, for without Lucifer there is no motion, and without Mephistopheles there is no form.

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

The ‘fire’ of the gods is spirit, imagination, knowledge, or consciousness itself. It is the spiritual yearning that Lucifer represents. Prometheus gained this, and gifted it to mankind.

Anyone who has ever had to read record company press releases will know that they contain more unreadable bullshit than any other literary medium.

Today, X Factor contestants are unable to get a haircut without permission. Nothing is left to chance. The approach of total control taken by Simon Cowell and his ilk is the exact opposite of the path pursued by Drummond and Cauty. Which is preferable is a matter of personal judgement, but you are free to hold up ‘Justified And Ancient (Stand By The JAMs)’ against any X Factor-related record that you choose to see how they compare.