Dead sheep, ABBA, and £1,000,000: The KLF’s five most outrageous moments
It seems almost impossible now that a subversive, dance-prank outfit like The KLF could ever get so close to the pop mainstream today as they did in the early 1990s.
No wiggle room anymore. The last few decades of neoliberal rot have wrought an infestation of market demand strangulation on creativity and dissidence, as well as the scrapping of any remote safety net for a young troublemaker to try their luck with something new and inventive. Add the arts’ grim class ceiling rendering any alternative ambitions beyond hope, and The KLF’s advice to “be skint and on the dole” for any budding musician feels almost quaint after the gnawing bite of years-long austerity.
It’s in the last faint vestiges of the post-war order that The KLF were able to make their weird mark on the pop world. While their burnishing is wrapped in a little mythmaking, it’s understood that A&R man Bill Drummond decided to pack in his sweet little gig at WEA Records upon turning 33⅓ years old, tried his hand at a solo album before immersing in a love for hip-hop and roped in Brilliant guitarist Jimmy Cauty to begin cutting heavily DIY singles as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.
What followed was a careening hurtle through the world of music and art across the subsequent eight-odd years, leaving a steaming crater of subversion on the UK pop charts before a jump to baffling obscurity in 1995, vowing to return after 23 years in the wilderness. Sure enough, in 2017, Drummond and Cauty returned to launch their 2023: A Trilogy book, as well as finally seeing official streaming and YouTube uploads of their formerly deleted back catalogue across the early 2020s. The KLF had returned in their ice-cream van to a different world, a culture war-ravaged and economically plundered climate where such a captivating and eccentric jolt to UK life feels just as absurdist and remote as their illuminati-inspired Mu Mu mythologies.
From the dole queue to riotous pop extravaganza across legal threats, machine gun blanks, and gifting Doctor Who a number one, we take a look at the five essential chapters of KLF lore.
The KLF’s five most outrageous moments:
‘The Queen and I’
Armed with an Apple II computer and a TR-808 drum machine, the pair raced into the new world of sampling like kids in a candy store on the JAMs’ 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) debut, grabbing at anything from The Monkees, the Sex Pistols, and Samantha Fox without regard for license or dilemmas of plagiarism.
It turned out that the duo’s sampling buffet had irked Swedish pop sensations ABBA due to the pilfering of ‘Dancing Queen’ for the underground LP’s ‘The Queen and I’. With their legal team coming down hard, the JAMs were forced to withdraw their debut from sale and hand over the master tapes, prompting a brief sojourn over to Stockholm gold record in hand to gift to a sex worker who they thought resembled Agnetha Fältskog.
“How to have a number one the easy way”
Not content with dwelling in the dance underground, the JAMs decided to don hats and capes as The Timelords, mash the Doctor Who theme with Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll’ and just a little of The Sweet’s ‘Blockbuster’ in an unashamed nab for the mainstream.
Universally loathed as a terrible novelty gimmick, the pair got their number one despite admitting 1988’s ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ was “probably the most nauseating record in the world”, but their DIY mythos now took shape with a bona fide case study of success, leading to the immortal “be skint” instruction on their The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) released that year.
Kick out the JAMs
Now they had a taste of pop. Adopting the enduring KLF moniker, a string of deliriously kaleidoscopic eurodance thumpers would be dropped with equally bombastic videos for the various mixes of ‘What Time is Love?’ and ‘3 am Eternal’, as well as the Tammy Wynette-starring ‘Justified & Ancient (Stand by the JAMs)’.
The KLF decided to call it quits at the peaks of their fame and in attention-grabbing fashion by performing their punked-up version of ‘3 am Eternal’ at the 1992 Brit Awards with grindcore metalheads Extreme Noise Terror, Drummond chomping on a cigar and firing blanks from a machine gun into the audience before announcing they’d “left the building”. To make the message clear, a dead sheep was dumped on the afterparty red carpet with the note “I died for you – bon appetit.”
‘Worst Artist of the Year’
They weren’t kidding. Deleting their back catalogue not long after, Drummond and Cauty instead transformed into The K Foundation to take a swipe at the arts world. Pitching up outside the Tate Gallery as the 1993 Turner Prize was underway, The K Foundation offered double the £20,000 award money offered to that year’s Turner winner, Rachel Whiteread, as their ‘Worst Artist of the Year’.
The lucky winner of both, an initial rejection soon gave way to an acceptance of the cash prize and dishing out to various charities when realising Drummond and Cauty were set to burn the money instead. It was here that the seeds of their most enduring piece of lore were sown.
“It’s a hard one to explain to your kids…”
Scooping up all the gains they’d made from their Money: A Major Body Of Cash exhibition and whatever was left of their musical efforts, The K Foundation set off for the Scottish island of Jura – the location of The Wicker Man’s horror ending – in August 1994 and torched a million in cash for the following year’s K Foundation Burn a Million Quid documentary.
It was a stunt that even Drummond and Cauty could never quite defend or articulate in the barrage of criticism, but it somehow perfectly bookended a brief but gloriously anarchic seven-odd years, where the world of music and art was upended by The KLF’s avant-garde grenade of disruption. “It’s a hard one to explain to your kids, and it doesn’t get any easier,” Drummond later confessed. “I wish I could explain why I did it so people would understand.”
