Streaming - Find it wherever you can - Rod Bishop recommends WHO KILLED THE KLF? (Chris Atkins, UK, 2022)

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 20^thCentury. 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:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/apr/08/who-killed-the-klf-the-film-drummond-cauty-did-not-want-you-to-see

Two of The KLF’s hits (one with Tammy Wynette) here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIbYM1ecT2I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg

Melbourne International Film Festival (6), Cinefest Oz and streaming from 1 September - Rod Bishop reports on UNDER THE VOLCANO (Gracie Otto, Australia, 2021)

At the southern end of the Caribbean island of Antigua is Crossroads, a drug treatment centre founded by Eric Clapton. With a commanding cliff-top position, it’s a sort of local tourist attraction along with the family homes of fast bowlers Andy Roberts and Curtly Ambrose and the historic English Harbour. 

Look out to sea and the closest island is Montserrat, once the location of the AIR recording studios, operational between 1979 and 1989 and built by the legendary Beatles producer George Martin (below).

Montserrat and Antigua are very different places. In this documentary, Montserrat is described as “not like Antigua”, as far more “innocent” and “quieter” with “gentle people” and “no need for security”. Anyone who has spent time on Antigua is unlikely to describe that island in the same way. 

Despite Montserrat’s idyllic setting and its empathetic locals, many wondered why “George Martin chose a volcanic island” for his state-of-the-art studios. Jimmy Buffett recorded his album Volcano there in 1979 with the prophetic line: “I don’t know where I’m a gonna to go when the volcano blows”.

The roll call of performers who recorded at AIR studios also included Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Elton John, The Rolling Stones, Dire Straits, The Police, Duran Duran and Earth, Wind and Fire. All testify to having had a very nice time indeed.

Those who didn’t, like Lou Reed and Black Sabbath, prefer urban grit for their creative environments, not this tropical “chill”. The Police seem to have loved it at the beginning, but “it became a living hell” and the “three alpha male” musicians all had divorce proceedings start while recording on the island. 

The local Montserratians weren’t overwhelmed by the visiting musicians either (“only by athletes and cricketers”) and their party lifestyle was a more than a match for the internationals. In this doco, they also take time to talk about their music, known as Soca, a party music if ever there was one. Having a good time with music is at least one thing they share with their neighbours on Antigua. I once saw the Antiguan band The Burning Flames start a Soco set around midnight on a recreational ground and when I left four hours later, they were still at it, no breaks between songs, just a continuous stream of party music.

This is an Australian film, directed by Gracie Otto and supported by Screen Australia, Screen West and Screen NSW. The archival research is extensive (despite oddly leaving out Australia’s Little River Band who recorded on the island in 1981). The new interviews are both comprehensive and entertaining (particularly those with Sting, Stewart Copeland, Midge Ure, Mark Knopfler and Jimmy Buffett); with still photos and private home movie footage rounding out the material available to Otto. Karen Johnson’s buoyant editing coherently draws it all together.

Two moments made me laugh out loud. Elton John and his band are lying prostrate around the studio, wasted, inert, hungover and suffering tropical malady. Elton summons enough energy to rise up and roar out his dissatisfaction at this state of affairs. From a huge cloud of marijuana smoke in the control room comes the voice of a technician: “Well, I’m still standing”, which Bernie Taupin promptly used as the lyric for one of Elton John’s biggest hits.

The second moment is blacker. After Hurricane Hugo destroyed the studio in 1989 and the volcano erupted destroying most of the island in 1995, the voice of Verdine White from Earth Wind and Fire that was heard earlier in the film seems darkly appropriate: 

“I’m from Chicago. We don’t do volcanos”.