"The fuckers burned the lot."
The KLF, Timothy Leary, and how our understanding of reality is fundamentally incomplete. Also, a magical guide to destroying capitalism.
This is part of an ongoing series about the philosophy and ideas of Alan Moore. Slightly more than half of those articles are free to all. To read the, click here.
In the 1980’s, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the two musicians who made up the electronic band the Timelords, wrote a hit song: “Doctorin’ the Tardis.” The song is ridiculous. It is basically a mash-up of Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll” (which you know best from the 90s Jock Jams compilations) and the theme song to the TV show Doctor Who. There is virtually nothing original about it.
The song reached number one in the British charts.
Drummond and Cauty afterwards would change their band name from “The Timelords” to “the KLF,” and they became one of the biggest house bands of the early 90s. They were a strange group to have at the top of the charts: they were avant-garde artists who despised the music industry, and in their desire to make this fact known, they would end up committing an act so strange that it would effectively end their music careers.
Drummond, who Alan Moore described as being “totally mad,” had first made his name as a manager for 80s post-punk bands The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen. For the latter group, Drummond became obsessed with their name and the possible meaning behind it: the group said they’d named their drum machine “Echo,” but Drummond didn’t like this story, so instead he spent hours at the library constructing an elaborate mythology for a rabbit-shaped trickster god named “Echo” who was only worshipped in the polar regions.
He didn’t tell anyone about this vision, but the band began to catch on: at one point, he sent them on a bizarre tour that had no apparent rhyme or reason to it. One day, they’d be playing in the southern parts of the country, the next, they’d have a small gig on one of the remote northern isles, and then the next, they’d be down south again. When the band asked him why they didn’t just go to places that were closer to each other, he pointed out to them that if you drew a line between all of their gigs, it made the shape of bunny ears on the map.
Needless to say, he didn’t last as an A&R man. He instead quit, formed the Timelords, and then the KLF. They quickly made a name for themselves by being outrageous — sampling had just begun to be a standard practice in the music industry, and they took it a bit too far by essentially re-releasing “Dancing Queen” by ABBA with criminally little altered. ABBA sued, so The KLF went to ABBA’s publisher in Sweden and played “their” version of “Dancing Queen” outside the offices, before presenting a mock gold record to a member of ABBA whom the journalist accompanying them said later was actually a prostitute who they said “kinda looked” like one of the members of ABBA. On the ferry back over, they gave up their legal fight by throwing all of the remaining records into the ocean. They then performed a gig on the boat in exchange for a Toblerone.
As they got bigger and bigger, though, the KLF became increasingly uneasy with the fact that all of their stunts, which were fairly shocking and crude, seemed to only help their careers. It seemed that antisocial behavior was profitable for the music industry, and that any sort of satirical look at how the industry functioned could still be incorporated into the industry and converted to profit.
So they did the one thing the industry couldn’t wrap its head around. They filled a suitcase with £1 million in cash, went to the Scottish island of Jura, and, in the words of British writer John Higgs, “over the course of the next two hours, the fuckers burned the lot.”
Higgs’ covers all of this in his seminal book The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (which is being released in the United States for the first time in July! Preorder here). It is not a typical music book — Higgs isn’t just trying to tell Drummond and Cauty’s story, he’s also trying to make sense of what they did. Because from Higgs’ perspective (and many of our own) burning that much money makes no goddamn sense:
The fact that their actions are so incomprehensible suggests that we must be missing something. Somehow our view of our world or our culture is incomplete.
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