If you’ve never heard of Chris Atkins, the director of this doco, or the dance/hip-hop/rave music act known as The KLF, much of what follows will be hard to believe.
In 1991, The KLF was the biggest selling singles act in the world. A year later they deleted their entire back catalogue and disappeared.
They had morphed out of the late 1980s electronic and sample-heavy bands The Timelords and The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs).
KLF founders Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were so perplexed and contemptuous of their rapid rise to success and all the money that flowed their way, in 1992 they decided to blow up the band.
After deleting their music, they scrawled their coming vows of silence over a car and pushed it off a cliff into the sea. Their final act took place on the remote Scottish island of Jura where they filmed themselves burning their entire earnings - ₤1 million in bank notes.
Drummond and Cauty then left the music business entirely and didn’t reappear until 23 years later for a book signing.
As for Chris Atkins, he wanted to make a film about The KLF and in 2009, searched out Drummond and Cauty: “they insisted on meeting in a dingy café in Farringdon, London…[they] patiently listened…they nodded sagely, and very politely told me to piss off”.
Jimmy Cauty (l), Bill Drummond (r)
With no rights to the music or to first-hand interviews, Atkins decided to behave just like Drummond and Cauty: “what would The KLF do? The answer was suddenly obvious: they’d stuff the rules and get on with it. Which is exactly what we did.”
After re-staging the Jura bank note burning and recreating the car being pushed off the cliff, Atkins lucked out when a fan produced a couple of audio cassettes of Drummond and Cauty recounting a sort of memoir of The KLF. It was gold.
However, in 2016, Chris Atkins was sentenced to five years in jail for an illegal tax scheme he had used to fund his previous film Starsuckers. With a laptop smuggled into prison he was able to continue editing Who Killed The KLF?and after being released in 2018, he continued working on the film.
When Drummond and Cauty had their first number one single in the UK, “Doctorin’ the Tardis”, they decided it was too easy to do it and released a book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).
The Illuminatus! trilogy of books was hugely influential on the duo, not just in the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, but being labelled as believers in Discordianism and perpetuating the recurrence of the number 23 in their work.
One example: when they re-emerged 23 years after burning the ₤1 million it was at 00.23am on the 23 August for the release of their book 2023: A Trilogy. The numerals of the date – 23 August 2017 – are 2+3+0+8+2+0+1+7 = 23.
They also attracted labels as “anarchistic situationists” and “Neoists” and were constantly lumped in with the “conceptual artists”.
Throughout their musical career, the pair had a 1968 Ford Timeline (with the number 23 painted on the roof) and drove it to Sweden to meet ABBA and to retrospectively ask for permission to over-sample Dancing Queen from their 1987 album What The Fuck Is Going On? In Stockholm, they discovered ABBA were actually living in Henley-on-Thames, so they burnt copies of the offending LP in a field and threw the rest into the North Sea from a ferry.
There were plans to build a Peoples’ Pyramid constructed from as many bricks as there had been births in the UK in the 20thCentury. Plans also for the ashes of dead people to be inside the bricks.
After a riotous performance at the British Music Awards in 1992, backed by Extreme Noise Terror,they fired blanks from a machine gun over the heads of the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the after party. They took their award for Best British Band (shared with Simply Red) and buried it at Stonehenge.
Who Killed The KLF?- well, they did - is packed with such stories and reminiscences. There’s footage of a cop on Jura investigating the burnt ₤1 million. He had authenticated it as legitimate currency and found there was a law against defacing the notes but no law against burning them.
Poignant is footage of the year-long tour around the UK screening their footage of burning the money, followed by question-and-answer sessions. Chris Atkins may have cut the sequence to emphasize the negative and aggressive reactions, but Drummond and Cauty show remarkable pain at the failure of their audience to understand their motivations. “It’s just paper” shouts Drummond at one point.
Very recently, Chris Atkins was asked to meet Drummond and Cauty at the same Farrington dingy café he first saw them 12 years earlier:
“…they were extremely kind and welcoming. ‘We’ve seen it,’ Bill grinned. This knocked me for six, given we had avoided sending out links before the release. ‘And we loved it’.
Chris Atkins’s full account of making the film is here:
Two of The KLF’s hits (one with Tammy Wynette) here:
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