When I was a boy, one of the great privileges of being the oldest child in the family was being allowed to stay up to watch the first half of the Late Late Show on a Friday night. At this point we only had 8 TV stations, and most households in Ireland tuned in to watch Gay Byrne’s long running chat show. I would have watched every Saturday for a few years, but I only have memories of 2 specific episodes. One was an interview with Rael (who was on the show a few times) and one was an interview with a pair of musicians who had burned a million pounds.The latter episode roughly coincided with my 9th birthday, and I remember being as disgusted as both my parents and the members of the live TV audience at the notion of burning that much money instead of donating it to charity. I had never heard of the band.

It was probably about 10 years later that I became interested in a band called Extreme Noise Terror. I’ve mentioned them before on this blog. I read somewhere that they had performed at the Brit awards with some electronic dance act and that the performance had involved somebody shooting a real gun into the crowd. I remember seeing a very blurry video of the performance (here’s a clearer version) and thinking it was really cool. I probably checked the dance act’s wikipedia or something and learned that they were the same guys that burned the million pounds. I don’t think I gave them much more thought, but as a dedicated grindcore fan at that point, I probably had a much easier time accepting the artistic statement of burning a million pounds.

In 2015, I read The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. I had already started this blog at that point, but that book pushed me past the point of no return. Robert Anton Wilson‘s Discordianism and ideas on chaos magic have had a very significant impact on how I view reality.

I don’t remember how I came to discover the fact that I was in the same boat as the KLF. Because they had deliberately deleted their catalogue to make their music inaccessible, it wasn’t until just a few years ago that I first saw the video for Justified and Ancient. It blew my mind. This is a big budget music video featuring a hugely popular country star singing about a sect of Discordians from one of my favourite books of all time, a book that remains relatively unread despite its reputation in conspiracy theory circles. This truly bizarre piece of art had remained hidden for decades at the behest of its creators. In truth, it’s not the kind of music that I enjoy listening to, but I couldn’t help but love it. This is real weirdo stuff, but at one point it had been hugely popular. I was fascinated.

A couple of weeks ago, I read John Higg’s The KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds. It was really entertaining. It’s a strange book to read too because so much of it seems unbelievable. The KLF’s story is so strange that they almost seem like characters from Illuminatus! rather than just fans of the book.

So Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were essentially failed musicians who had been in a few different projects but had taken on non-creative roles in the music industry. Almost as a joke, they started a “hip-hop” project that consisted of them mashing up famous songs and releasing them as singles. They used their contacts in the music press to drum up a bunch of attention and controversy. The music was fairly crap, but they did media stunts and record burnings to keep the attention going. It worked, but it is unclear as to whether they were just extremely lucky or whether the media stunts they were performing were actually extremely potent and successful chaos magic rituals. After getting a number one single with this approach, they turned away from the mash-up genre and started making stadium house. In reality, they only wrote a few songs, but they reworked and remixed these until they became huge hits. They continued doing weird stuff as they released these songs including making a road movie with no plot and burning a giant wicker man in a ritual in front of a bunch of music journalists on a small Scottish island.

In 1992, they were awarded the best British group award at the Brit Awards. It was in response to their growing popularity that they invited Extreme Noise Terror to perform with them. They also left a dead sheep outside the venue. Within a few weeks of that awards ceremony, the band quit the music industry and deleted their music. The money burning happened a few months later.

Higgs’ book is great. It has plenty of detail on the story of the band, but it also gets into odd theories too. There’s a chapter on Alan Moore, who seems to have been friends with the band, and there is even mention of psychogeography in here. The book heavily leans into RAW’s reality tunnel ideas too. The KLF claimed they were members of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (JAM). (The JAMs were agents of chaos fighting against the Illuminati in Illuminatus!) Anyone who has read Illuminatus! will remember Operation Mindfuck, the Discordian effort to thoroughly mess with people’s heads at any cost. That Drummond and Cauty leaned into the promulgation of chaos is obvious, but Higgs discusses the interesting idea that they were driven to do so by external forces rather than internal ones.

After reading the book, I also watched the 2021 documentary, Who Killed the KLF? I’m used to reading about bizarre stuff, but seeing video footage of what I had just read about was quite weird. These things really happened. The way we consume media is so different now compared to the late 80s/early 90s that it’s really hard to imagine anything as weird as the KLF becoming hugely popular again. I know there are still plenty of brilliant oddballs out there being creative, but I feel like it’s a shame that they’ll never have to chance to share their weirdness with a mainstream audience. At the same time, it was very encouraging to see people really pushing the boundaries of popular entertainment. Markoff Chaney would be proud.

In honesty though, I still think that burning the million pounds was lame.