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

by John Higgs

he would do so with the same attitude that musicians should make music with, keeping one eye on personal honesty and the other on the far horizon.

the philosophy of the American writer Charles Fort, who in 1932 wrote that, “I conceive of nothing, in religion, science, or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.”

Illuminatus! made him simultaneously wiser and more baffled. It was good stuff.

To quote the actor Chris Langham, who cowrote the play with Campbell, “if it’s possible it will end up as some mediocre, grant-subsidized bit of well-intentioned bourgeois bollocks. But if it’s impossible, then it will assume an energy of its own, despite everything we do or don’t do.”

Campbell had shown Drummond that the impossible was only impossible if you did not stand up and do it. It did not matter how big the practical problems were, or how crazy the enterprise may seem. This was an important lesson in Drummond’s education.

when the full enormity of actual events in this world is considered, such unlikely strings of events are guaranteed to happen. Mathematicians such as Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller call this the law of truly large numbers.

“If you do this type of thing well enough, it starts to work. I started out with the idea that all gods are an illusion. By the end I had learnt that it is up to you to decide whether gods exist, and if you take the goddess of confusion seriously enough, it will send you through as profound and valid a metaphysical trip as taking a god like Yahweh [The Jewish/Christian/Muslim God] seriously.”

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.

According to Moore’s model of Ideaspace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like a living thing. 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. Of course, if you then go on to try and define the difference between something that is living and something that behaves like it is living, you will be a brave soul indeed.

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.

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. Drummond has used the phrase “accept the contradictions,” as a form of artistic mantra throughout his career.

As the Situationists put it, “opposition to the spectacle can produce only the spectacle of opposition.” Or to quote Raoul Vaneigem, “pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church.” In this way the music of The Sex Pistols was eventually played to the Queen at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, and the music of Kurt Cobain was eventually covered by The Muppets.

that we habitually confuse our models with what they describe, is central to Wilson’s thinking. Instinctively, we feel it is possible to know the nature of things themselves, and there is a natural resistance to accepting that we can only know our models. Wilson’s work was dedicated to wearing down that resistance. His philosophy was one of multiple-model agnosticism—not simply agnosticism about the existence of God, but agnosticism about everything.

With multiple-model agnosticism there is no point getting hung up on the models themselves, because that’s all they are—models. Models are by definition smaller and simpler facsimiles of whatever it is that they are trying to describe. The models are not “true,” but they do vary in usefulness depending on how accurate they are in different cultures and circumstances. Once this is recognized, we no longer attach our sense of personal identity to the models we use, and we lose our resistance to swapping between different models when necessary.

As Wilson wrote in Illuminatus!, “You cannot understand a man’s actions unless you understand his beliefs.”