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

by J.M.R. Higgs

Like the founders of the Cabaret Voltaire, the fact of their bewilderment is evidence that they were swept along by something larger, and something not of their design.

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.

Jung defined synchronicity as a ‘meaningful coincidence’ or an ‘acausal connecting principle’, where ‘acausal’ means a string of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect. Or, to put it another way, if something is behind these events, then we don’t know what.

If the cosmos is just a bunch of inanimate particles flung out of the chaos of a Big Bang, how exactly did it become aware of itself?

Many scientists, faced with this, take the view that consciousness doesn’t actually exist; it is an illusion. This illusion is an emergent property of the brain. Patterns of activity across the billions of neurons in the brain fool the brain into believing that it is a ‘mind’, but that ‘mind’ has no actual existence in any real sense.

Daniel Dennett’s remarkable book Consciousness Explained

‘The one place that Gods unarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity.

one of the most powerful magical ideas we have: money.

The Situationists were a group of thinkers and critics who were active in the Fifties and Sixties, mainly in France. At the heart of their thinking was the concept of the spectacle. The spectacle can be thought of as the overwhelming representation of all that is real. In the simplest possible terms it can be understood as being mass media, but that simple definition should really be expanded to include our entire culture and our social relations. The spectacle is both the end result of, and the justification for, our consumerist society.

‘Waiting for the tide to turn on the almost motionless sea. Waiting for the sun to sink beyond the mountains of the Western Isles. Waiting for the stars to stud the darkening sky. Waiting for the dawn to creep in from the East. But maybe more importantly, waiting as emotions within themselves shifted and changed, stirred and settled. Along with this poetic stuff they continued to wait for all the trivial things in life that we seem to spend so much of life waiting for; kettles to boil, phones to ring, baths to run, moods to pass, something to happen, or at least some sort of explanation.’

Those who glimpse divine wonder will not be able to bear returning to the material world.

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.

‘The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.’

there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable.

It is interesting to remember what Charles Shaar Murray wrote when he reviewed Drummond’s book 45 for the Independent. ‘Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes [. . .] involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a world of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician