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

“Cauty opened the first bundle and took out two fifty pound notes. He handed one to Drummond and set fire to both with his lighter. Despite the cold and damp, the flame readily ate through the paper. More notes were placed in the fireplace and, over the course of the next two hours, the fuckers burned the lot.”

“Nevertheless, a G-reg Nissan Bluebird was soon hired and the contract was written across its entire body and windscreen with a gold pen. Cauty and Drummond signed the contract and the poor car was duly pushed over the cliff to fall hundreds of feet into the crashing North Atlantic surf. Cauty had removed the radiator cap because it would ‘smoke better’ as it fell.”

“Bill Drummond and Julian Cope drove across Liverpool in an old, battered transit van. In the back was a stolen mattress which they were taking to Devonshire Road in Toxteth.”

“But this was 1965, a year before he became involved in the Kennedy conspiracies and two years before the Summer of Love thrust hippies, psychedelic drugs and alternative lifestyles in front of an unwary public. Things had not yet begun to get weird, in the other words, and for a respected figure like Garrison there was little to indicate what surprises the future had in store. He would have been quite unprepared, then, for the book that Caplinger and her friend Greg Hill were producing in his office.”

“It was in one such bowling alley in 1957 that Thornley showed Hill some poetry he was writing. It included a reference to order eventually arising out of the chaos. Hill laughed at this. He told Thornley that the idea of ‘order’ was an illusion...For Hill, an atheist, the failure to understand this was the major folly of the religions of the world...Hill also told Thornley that the ancient Greeks were an exception to this rule, for they had a Goddess of Chaos. Her name was Eris...”

“Jung’s dream also had a profound effect on O’Halligan, because he, too, had a dream. He had dreamt that he saw a spring bubbling forth from a cast-iron drain cover in the middle of the road where Mathew Street, Button Street and others converge. He came down to Mathew Street the next day and, sure enough, there was a manhole cover where he had dreamt one. He also saw that one remaining warehouse had a ‘To Let’ sign outside. He had then gone to the bank, got a loan and leased the building. He turned the downstairs into a market and opened a café above it. The market became known as Aunt Twackies, a pun on the Scouse mispronunciation of ‘antiques’ as ‘an teek wees’.”

“He could imagine a great stream of some form of energy flowing through space and powering into the Earth. It poured into Iceland, flowed under Mathew Street and emerged back out into space again at Papua New Guinea...His idea was to arrange for the Bunnymen to play a gig in Iceland at exactly the same time as the Teardrops played in Papua New Guinea. He would remain in Liverpool and, at the correct time, he would go and stand on the manhole cover.”

“How could he find out whether he was receiving information from aliens from the star Sirius or an ancient Chinese philosopher? He decided to get another opinion... In actual fact, Wilson was told, he was in touch with the spirit of a medieval Irish bard.”

“Wilson comforted himself with the idea that a giant invisible European rabbit spirit was currently intent on trying to tell him something...”

“Moore set out to build a model of the mental world...which Moore calls Ideaspace. As the ‘–space’ part of his name implies, he chose a spatial metaphor. This seemed reasonable, he thought, for we naturally talk of ideas being at the back of our minds or at the forefront of our thinking, we can be deep or high minded, and so forth...Moore thought that we each had our own little corner of Ideaspace, our own home in the mental land...Could we then wander out of our little territories, go further afield and explore the rest of Ideaspace?”

“The album was called The Man. It was somewhat unexpectedly, an album of low-key, acoustic Scottish folk in which Drummond sang songs of love and music in a pronounced Scottish accent over blissful slide guitar...This was no bitter dismissal of his career or the music industry that he was leaving. Still, it was a deeply odd affair. His voice brought Ivor Cutler to mind, the closing track featured his father reciting a Robert Burns poem and the cover showed Drummond sitting on a Liverpool dock holding his Gibson 330 guitar and wearing blue jeans, white socks and brown shoes.”

“Drummond had initially thought that if he met with ABBA and explained his reasons, then they would be able to come to an agreement as artists. It quickly became clear that no meeting would ever be granted. Nevertheless, Cauty and Drummond headed to Sweden…Here they played the offending song outside ABBA’s publishing company and presented a fake gold disc (marked for ‘sales in excess of zero’) to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA. They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their trouble.”

“A significant upturn in Cauty and Drummond’s financial circumstances occurred in May 1988, when they accidentally produced a hit single. It was called ‘Doctorin’ The TARDIS’ and they released it under the name The Timelords. It was a novelty record...They decided to claim that the record had been made by Cauty’s car. This was a huge American cop car that looked like a beaten-up version of the Blues Brothers’ Bluesmobile. It was, if nothing else, an original idea. No car had ever had a hit record before.”

“Doctor Who began way back in 1963. Its first episode was broadcast on the Discordian holy day of 23 November, a date the Discordians honor because it is also Harpo Marx’s birthday.”

“Campbell auditioned for Doctor Who by performing a speech about the nature of time modelled on Alan Moore’s Dr Manhattan character, wearing a long coat, sleeveless cartoon T-shirt and wide-brimmed hat. The producer thought he was too weird, an opinion probably enforced by a message which had been left on his answerphone the previous day believed to have come from Campbell. The message was actually a quote from Charles Fort’s book Lo!”

“Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in the world brought about by the exercise of the will, hence his maxim ‘Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law’. The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who knows whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace.”

“ ‘...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.’ Towards the end of this period they assembled their speakers on the beach and played music out to sea while they sat in deckchairs at the water’s edge, like Canute, and waited for this explanation. It never arrived.”

“The journalists were then dressed in robes and led across the island in a silent procession. At the head of this procession was a figure in white with a single horn emerging from his hood. He led them towards their final destination: a 60-foot tall wicker man, surrounded by a hidden sound system. They formed a circle around the figure. Here they were addressed my Drummond, although his true identity was masked by the robe and horn. Thanks to a microphone under his hood, his words were being mixed into the trance-like rave music that the sound system was pumping out.”

“In 1989 The KLF made a film. It was not released, or even properly finished. But they made it. It was called The White Room. Many successful musicians made films in the 1980s, from Madonna to Prince to The Pet Shop Boys. The KLF’s was very different from these. The version that exists is a dialogue-free ambient road movie just under an hour in length.”

“‘Yossarian’ is the protagonist in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and is also, according to Illuminatus!, a Discordian Saint.”

“A true professional, we can only wonder what she (Tammy Wynette) really thought about the lyrics she was given to sing or the imagery of the video. It seems unlikely that she would have interpreted a line like ‘We don’t want to upset the applecart’ as a reference to the Discordian’s Golden Apple of Discord, for example. It seems equally unlikely the she was aware that the four white-robed women around her represented the Four Handmaidens of Lucifer.”

“Jimmy had originally goaded Bill by suggesting that Drummond should cut his own hand off during the performance . . . Cauty’s suggestion reminded Bill of the Red Hand of Ulster. Irish legend told of a race across the sea from the south-west of Scotland, where Drummond had been raised, in which the first competitor to touch Irish land would be declared King of Ireland. One potential king was lagging behind in the race, so in desperation he cut off his own hand and threw it ahead of his rivals, onto the shore, and in doing so claimed the land as his own.”

“It was not a good time for the industry to tell Drummond and Cauty that it considered them to be the best band that they could possibly be, which was just as good as Simply Red. Such an accolade is easy to misinterpret.

Drummond and Cauty had left immediately after their performance, so a motorcycle courier collected the award on their behalf. The statue was later discovered by a farmer in Wiltshire, buried in a field near Stonehenge. The farmer returned the statue, so Cauty and Drummond had to go back to Wiltshire to bury it deeper.”

“No one was in any way prepared for the actuality of The Great War, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable.

This was the period that spawned the Cabaret Voltaire. As we have seen, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did and an inability to explain or come to terms with their actions. This makes a strange sort of sense when we view this period as the liminal gap between eras. There was no narrative context at that point to explain their actions, because the old story had ended and the new one had not yet begun.”