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

John Higgs is the author of I Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary and The Brandy of the Damned . He created the long-running BBC Radio 4 quiz show X Marks the Spot and has directed over 100 episodes of animated pre-school television. He has written for the Guardian, Independent and Mojo . He lives in Brighton with his partner and their two children, and blogs at www.johnhiggs.com .

The KLF

Chaos, Magic and the Band
who Burned a Million Pounds

John Higgs

To the Prettiest One

CONTENTS

Edmund Miller, Lewis Carroll Observed

J im Reid retired to his hotel room at around midnight on 22 August 1994. Half an hour later there was a knock at the door. It was Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty and they had the suitcase with them.

Come on, were going to do it now, said Drummond.

Reid asked why. Theres just a time when you instinctively know it is right, Cauty replied. The plan had been to get up early on the morning of the 23rd and climb, with the suitcase and its contents, to the top of one of the mountains that dominate the island of Jura. Well, it was now technically the morning of the 23rd. The mountain was unimportant.

Do you remember Christmas when you were a kid, and you just couldnt wait for morning? Drummond asked.

Reid was a journalist who had been taken to Jura by Drummond and Cauty in order to act as a witness. He grabbed his Dictaphone and followed. They left the warmth of the hotel and went outside into the night. Here they met the fourth member of their party, Alan Goodrick, a Falklands War veteran and rock tour manager more commonly known as Gimpo. It was raining.

Drummond did not look like one of the most successful and credible pop stars on the planet. He was forty-one years old with an Everyman haircut and the sort of thoughtful, respectable demeanour you might associate with a secondary school teacher. Nevertheless, he had produced a string of global number one singles and had just come first in Select magazines 100 Coolest People list. Jimmy Cauty, the other half of the duo known as The KLF (among other things), was a few years younger with wild dark curly hair and a more anarchic sparkle in his eyes.

The suitcase went into the hire cars boot. Reid had still not seen the contents of the case at this point, but he was pretty sure he knew what was inside. Gimpo had also guessed. During the flight to the Hebridean island the thought of killing Drummond and Cauty in order to steal the suitcase had entered his head. He didnt do that, of course. He just thought about it.

Well, you would, wouldnt you?

Gimpo drove them away from the hotel, down a rough track and across the Scottish island. The night was pitch black. This just feels better, Drummond said, going out in the night when its pissing down with rain.

A few minutes later they pulled up by a deserted stone boathouse. Cauty had discovered it earlier in the evening when he and Drummond had been searching for the remains of a giant wicker man they had burned three years earlier, in front of dozens of robed and hooded members of the music press. They stepped out into the cold. Gimpo left the car lights on and they illuminated the rain, the bracken and the boathouse. They took the suitcase out of the boot.

They went inside. The flame from a cigarette lighter revealed rough stone walls and an earth floor. Ropes hung from old wooden rafters. And at the far end: a fireplace.

The suitcase was opened and its contents were dumped onto the ground. The four men stared down at the heap of paper at their feet.

It was a million pounds.

Very few people get to see a million pounds sterling first hand. Even fewer get to dump it onto a dirt floor in a remote abandoned building in the middle of the night. Those fifty-pound bundles were power and potential in its purest form. They were countless acts of compassion and charity, or a lifetime without work. The amount was highly symbolic. It was the amount that is associated with success; the quantity of money needed not only to escape the rat race, but to win it. That money was freedom, both physically and symbolically.

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.

On their return from the isle of Jura, Drummond and Cauty found themselves at the start of the long, hard process of coming to terms with what they had just done. As Cauty told the BBC six months later, Every day you wake up and think, Oh God Ive just burned a million quid. Nobody thinks it was good. Everyone thinks that its a complete waste of time. The heart of the problem was that they did not know why they had done it. I dont know what it is, what we did. Some days I do. Bits of it, Drummond said. But Ive never thought that it was wrong.

Drummond and Cautys inability to justify or explain their actions is one of the most intriguing aspects of what happened on Jura. It echoes the fates of the founders of Dadaism, the small group of artists and radicals who opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in the middle of the First World War. The Cabaret only lasted for six months, and no recordings were made of what happened there, yet those present spent the rest of their lives trying to come to terms with what they had done. They never really did. As the American author and music journalist Greil Marcus points out, This is the best evidence the only real evidence that something actually happened in Zurich in the spring of 1916.

The money burning was recorded. Gimpo had filmed the event with a small camcorder. In the months after the burning, as Drummond and Cauty searched for some context or insight to allow them to understand their actions, the idea that they should show people the film arose. Perhaps if they showed the film and asked for help, someone might be able to explain to them what they had done?

This was a terrible idea, but they were hardly in their right minds at the time. They set about organising a film tour of arts venues and unusual locations around the British Isles. The first screening, on 23 August 1995, would be in the village hall back on Jura.

People were, by and large, rather angry. This is not surprising. If you ask a crowd to tell you why you burned a million pounds, when members of that crowd would very much like to have a million pounds themselves and know that they never will, then there is not going to be a huge amount of sympathy in the room.