’23 Seconds to Eternity’ director Bill Butt on making films for The KLF
With some of the hardest and most varied electronic music of the 20th century and a philosophical outlook of anarchy epitomised by a series of notorious public manifestations, The KLF, formed in 1987 by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, remain one of the most elusive yet intriguing musical acts in our contemporary culture. Their story was captured in all its bass-thumping, creatively visionary glory by the British filmmaker Bill Butt and has now been released in the compilation film 23 Seconds to Eternity.
Butt is credited with making each of The KLF’s music films, from their very first single ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’ in 1988 to their last, ‘Justified and Ancient’ in 1991, via two longer pieces ‘The White Room’ and ‘Rites of Mu’. I recently spoke with Butt about his work with the electronic icons, the sense of mythology that runs throughout their films, and the lost feature-length version of ‘The White Room’ starring Paul McGann.
The director first met Drummond at Northampton Art School when they were both 17 before going their separate ways – Drummond to Liverpool, where he became involved in the music scene and the Everyman Theatre, and Butt to study stage management before arriving at the Bristol Old Vic, having intended to go into theatre, but eventually finding the culture and experience “a bit precious”.
Of his first memories of Drummond, Butt noted: “He was very, very tall. I know we had an argument once, and he kicked me. He was so tall he kicked me in the chest, which was quite unusual. But it was playful and lovely – don’t worry! We kept in touch; we both went our different ways. But we used to keep in touch with letters.”
While looking after his father’s market stall in Northampton, Butt developed a talent for photography, stage design and lighting, and this proficiency eventually led to his working with Echo and the Bunnymen. It wasn’t long before he was collaborating with his old college friend Drummond, first on the video for the solo single ‘The Manager’, and then on the big one, The KLF, the notorious project with which Drummond would forever be associated.
Butt had by that point worked in big studios and “knew exactly how to do really high quality and high production value stuff”, but with the new project, Drummond “wanted it to be different”. Some parts of The KLF philosophy – the performance pieces, like graffitiing over Tower Records in Piccadilly – were “a bit challenging” for Butt, but mostly for the fact that he “wondered whether we were going to get arrested” rather than for any technical issues of film production.
The release of 23 Seconds to Eternity is a true testament to Butt’s prowess as a director and to the vision of Drummond and Cauty, but the brilliance of The KLF films, according to Butt, is that they stem from a genuine collaborative effort. “When you work as a team with people is the difference,” he said. “Often you didn’t get much from bands then, you know – you had to sort of do all the work. But with Bill and Jimmy, they were driving it really; they would come to me with mad ideas. And my job was to translate that to the crew.”
And mad ideas there were, say, sailing a Viking ship across the North Sea to Scandinavia (which never quite came to fruition) or closing off a section of motorway for the single ‘It’s Grim Up North’ (which did). “That was a big challenge,” Butt said, “but we managed to do it.” Perhaps there’s a sense of madness running throughout the entirety of 23 Seconds, but the kind of madness that is so closely related to genius.
Take the 45-minute “road film” ‘The White Room’ for example, which encapsulates the spirit of the old spaghetti westerns with nods to Sergio Leone and John Ford, and also at a push to Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. Cauty and Drummond appear on shimmering barren horizons as two wandering cowboys with their 1968 Ford Galaxie police car (affectionately named Ford Timelord) as their trusty steed. The most ambient sounds of The KLF’s catalogue provide an almost eerie mood, but one that audiences can’t help but bop along to.
“We all agreed we want to do a road film,” Butt said of ‘The White Room’. “Well, as Jimmy said, it was a proper road film without the boring bits, like a story and dialogue. The music carries the film. The film doesn’t have to lead the way. It just works. Again, it’s a teamwork thing. You know, the images have teamed up with the music. And that’s when promos work really well – not trying to show off with a film and not the film carrying the music. I think they have to work in concert, which I believe those films do.”
Then there’s the other long film of The KLF, the legendary ‘Rites of Mu’, shot on the Isle of Jura in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides, a remarkable piece of film with unavoidable shades of The Wicker Man, where Cauty and Drummond lead an unknowing band of journalists through a ritualistic procession to burn an effigy of their own. A stunning moment sees the ‘Angels of Mu’ bathe in the sea as the late afternoon sun beats hot off the water’s reflection. “I mean, you couldn’t buy that, you couldn’t pay for that,” Butt admitted of the moment. “That was just a wonderful, lucky thing that happened, you know.” And if that weren’t enough, then having Martin Sheen do the voiceover a la Apocalypse Now might have been.
Ultimately, though, the quality of the films came down to the fact that Drummond and Cauty could afford to pay for proper production, given the incredible sales of their music. “We couldn’t have done all this without them paying for things,” Butt said, though he admitted, “I could get some very good deals; we got some tremendous deals because we were really looked after by the film industry because we were doing some quite interesting stuff. Nothing was impossible as long as we could pay for it. And the boys were able to pay for it. We could never ever have done that body of work if they didn’t.”
A sense of mythology runs through the films comprising 23 Seconds, not only in ‘The White Room’ and ‘Rites of Mu’, but the more traditional music videos for the ‘Stadium House Trilogy’ and ‘Justified and Ancient’ with Tammy Wynette. Still, it wasn’t Butt’s job to enquire about the thematic vision of The KLF as much as it was to focus on actually delivering that very vision on film.
“There was a journey that we were on,” he said. “And as far as I know, there was a lot of mythology behind it, but I never asked them what that was all about. My job was to listen to how they wanted things to look and the story and then get as close as possible to the vision of how the film should be. I didn’t need to know why certain things were important. About The Illuminati and the Justified Ancients – I didn’t need to know all that. I just wanted to know what they wanted the film to convey and work out how to make that happen.”
Of course, with The KLF naturally comes their borderline performance art moments – burning a million pounds on Jura, firing machine guns at an award show and leaving behind a dead sheep as a parting gift, and, of course, deleting the entire back catalogue of their music at the height of their powers. Butt remains hesitant to talk too much of such instances, though, understanding that perhaps they tend to actually undermine the creative vision of Drummond and Cauty rather than venerate it.
“I don’t tend to talk about the money thing; I had nothing to do with it and didn’t really want to be involved,” the director said. “I was a bit annoyed, to be perfectly honest. I just finished making ‘Rites of Mu’. We’ve finished that as a proper film, and I had to beg so many favours, and after the premiere, Bill told me that they were going to embargo everything for 23 years, and nobody could see the film or the music and all the rest of it. So I was a bit cheesed off, if I’m honest. I don’t mind now at all. I’ve always been mates with them.”
Butt continued, “And now, I think it’s a good thing that happened. I think it’s good that it all came together with making ‘KRASH’ [the final film in 23 Seconds in which Ford Timelord is destroyed once and for all]. We had an end to the story, and that’s what triggered making the film. That’s what triggered putting it all together.”
There have been a handful of other feature films about the elusive yet alluring KLF over the years, but they’ve only ever been “dodgy hatchet jobs” in the eyes of Butt and the band themselves. “They’ve had films that always ended up talking about burning the money, but that devalues what they did really; it makes them look a bit silly,” Butt noted. “I’m not saying they weren’t or anything,” he then joked. “The omnibus film that the BBC did was a proper hatchet job, really, and that recent one trying to do reconstructions and all that, it didn’t show them in the best light. So I’m so glad that we could just stitch together all of the all of the films that we actually made with them. I’m really pleased we did that.”
There had been plans to make ‘The White Room’ into a proper feature film with Paul McGann of Withnail and I set to play the lead character. What we see in 23 Seconds is the “inner film”, but there was an “outer film” in the pipeline too, “which was much more traditional, a bit gangster, a bit conspiracy, and all the rest of it.” Footage had been shot, but Drummond and Cauty later lost the cutting copy after taking it to an event in Berlin.
Feature films had been of interest to Butt before he went on to make natural history documentaries, for which he earned a Bafta nomination in the process. Had Drummond and Cauty’s embargo not happened with the films, then perhaps that interest would have come to be a reality, although Butt admits he’s glad he didn’t move into features as “it takes over your life”. He explained, “I mean, during The KLF stuff, the scale of the filmmaking gave me all the kicks from making big productions, feature films, but I’d only been making one or two scenes. So I wouldn’t be hanging around with actors for eight weeks or 12 weeks and all that. It’s all worked out in the end. I think that the route was good.”
23 Seconds to Eternity is an extraordinary collection of films documenting the short-lived and remarkably intense career of the eternally iconic KLF. Come the end of the production of ‘Rites of Mu’, everyone was “completely washed out”, said Butt, and he left our conversation with a maxim on the art of filmmaking: “When you’re doing big films like that, you have to have a lot of discipline. When you’ve got big stars, and you’ve got big setups, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. It can’t be too ‘creative’. It has to be planned.”
“Proper crews are very, very focused and disciplined,” the director signed off. “The ideas would be mad, but the filmmaking was actually very considered. The wildness came in the ideas. Every time they used to tell me what they wanted to do, I’d think, ‘That’s impossible. I don’t see how we can do that.’ And then then you’d work out a way.”
23 Seconds to Eternity is out on Blu-ray and DVD now.
