Mu Mu
All hail the KLF!
(Originally published in the zine ...and stuff)
Quite a few years ago I used to be a DJ -- in a purely limited and amateur capacity you realise. This was during the mid to late eighties whilst I was at university. Most of the gigs were quite small -- sometimes I played to only a couple of dozen people-- but the largest would see over a thousand dancing to my wheels of steel. I managed to gain a certain reputation in my small pond and for a short time I was rather obsessive with music, not just the fairly esoteric stuff I tend to seek out now, but the full horror of mainstream popular music. Remember this was pre-Smashy and Nicey, the era when unreconstructed Radio One still totally dominated the airwaves, when Steve Wright was this country's most popular DJ and had occupied the afternoon slot for what seemed like forever. I would even listen to the whole of Bruno Brooke's Top Forty on Sunday evenings to see if I could predict upcoming Number Ones to play at the next do. This was during a transitional period in popular music. Punk was a distant memory but with Stephen 'Silk' Hurley's 'Jack Your Body', House had arrived to put a bit of oomph into the charts (It was not to last but that's a different story).
Then a two-man group (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) made a record which subsequently stormed to the top of the charts. The group was The Timelords and the record was 'Doctorin' the Tardis'. Sampling was the order of the day and the record itself was a foot-stomping mixture of The Sweet's 'Blockbuster', Gary Glitter's 'Rock and Roll (Parts One and Two)' - still in ironically trendy, pre-porn surfing, kid-fiddling days - and the Doctor Who theme tune. It was brilliant, mindless, pop -- a total lad record, guaranteed to fill the dance floor with a mad hoard shouting along to its chorus of: "Doctor Who, Hey! -- The Tardis!" There was a crazy Top of the Pops appearance with a home-made cardboard dalek and a video featuring an ex-American cop car. The misfired publicity stunt was that the car, Ford Timelord, had actually made the record. The Timelords vanished without a sequel.
Time moved on and come the nineties the KLF surfaced into the main
stream. KLF allegedly stood for Kopyright Liberation Front though a
number of other explanations for the acronym would eventually
surface. It was the same two blokes as before but this time they
managed to create a sub-genre all of their own -- Stadium Rave. I had
left DJing aside by this time (managing to completely miss-predict
that there was no future in it) and now had to listen to the music as
part of the crowd instead of playing it for them. And there was
nothing like listening to the KLF. This apocalyptic fury was the
music god listened to as he created the world. Over a thumping,
pulsating bass-line were crashing synths, sirens and crowd noise
along with the rapping and shouting of lyrics featuring arcane
references and numerology, including the famous "Mu! Mu!" which at
the time I though was "Boom! Boom!" not knowing a previous
incarnation of the twosome was The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Their
stage act, featuring a cast of thousands in pagan robes with long
rhino horns sticking out from under their hoods, made Top of the Pops
no only watchable again but near essential. They were the leading
edge of the post-acid boom in club music and tunes such as 'Last
Train To Transcentral', '3 A.M. Eternal' and 'What Time Is Love?'
blasted out across the nation and stormed up the hit parade.
One year they become the best-selling British act in the world and they were subsequently chosen to be awarded the Brit Award for Best Band in 1992. But this was all too easy for them. They had even written a book telling you how to do it, if you dared -- The Manual: How To Have a Number One the Easy Way. It was becoming increasingly obvious that they were giants among pigmies in the pop business. So it was time to exit. This was to be fairly spectacular. They appeared at the Brits with thrash metal band Extreme Noise Terror ripping apart '3 A.M. Eternal'. They finished their set with Drummond machine-gunning the audience with blanks and declaring "KLF have left the music business!" before leaving the venue. They tried, but were prevented, to have there award picked up by one of their mates dressed up as a motorcycle courier. Later they dumped a sheep's carcass at the post-award party. They had wanted to cut it up on stage and throw the resultant gore into the audience but strict vegetarians Terror would not let them. Bill Drummond had allegedly planned to chop of his own hand and throw it into the audience. He had been inspired by the legend of the red hand of Ulster. When the first people came to the Northern Ireland, there was a young man in one of the boats who wanted to be the first to claim it for his king or laird, so he chopped off his hand and threw it out onto the beach. Drummond wanted to symbolically lay claim to the whole of the music business. Well it certainly beats chucking a bucket of water over someone but luckily his partner Cauty talked him out of it and to substitute the sheep instead.
The pair next resurfaced in 1993 as the K-Foundation when they offered a prize of 40 thousand pounds for the worst body of art that year. The short list was the same as the Turner Prize for that year and Rachael Whiteread won both (pure coincidence of course). The K-Foundation's award was worth double that of the Turners. When Whiteread turned it down the K-Foundation threatened to burn it. She reluctantly accepted. This was quite a news item for a while -- these were the days when, via the Late Show after Newsnight on BBC2, we had daily arts coverage on our televisions. However this was just a precursor to the main event.
In an abandoned boathouse on the remote Scottish island of Jura the K-Foundation burnt a million pounds of their own money. A friend of theirs -- the same one who had tried to accept the Brit award -- videoed the event (later to become the film Watch The K-Foundation Burn A Million Quid) and they took a journalist along as a witness. Instead of the widespread coverage of the first K-Foundation event, news of this one only slowly leaked out -- the journalist wrote an article and the K-Foundation took the movie on tour to places such as a prison and a Buddist retreat. At first there was disbelief. Then when it seemed to be true there was anger at them for not giving it charity. They refused to comment on their reasons -- apart from the flippant "to keep warm" -- at the time. In a recent interview Drummond says he and Cauty made a pact not to talk about the event as this would dissipate its impact, but he does expand a little on his reasons but they make little sense. He says it was not a destructive act: "…It wasn't to destroy the money. It was to watch it burn."
When I first find out about this it took a while for the enormity of the act to sink in. This was in the days of pre-lottery and Chris 'Who wants to be a Millionaire' Tarrent fever, but even so a million pounds was then an iconic sum and always had been. Who has not spent a few minutes wondering what they would do with a million quid if they had it -- retire, buy a Porche, sail around the world, stick it the bank and watch the interest grow? One thing is for certain if you were sufficiently 'careful' you would not have to 'work' again. But to burn it! This was far worse than Spend! Spend! Spend! (and look how the tabloids treated her.) This seemed to me to be one of the most deeply subversive things you could do -- this was the ultimate anarchist act almost magical in its proportions, a direct attack against capitalism and our free-market society. No wonder people turned against then. And not only had they destroyed most of their earnings that they had gained from the KLF they also deleted their back catalogue. So no more cash for them and no more music for us. However this only added to The KLF/K-Foundation myth.
Finally we have Bill Drummond's 45. It is a recently
published collection of essays written around the time of his
forty-fifth birthday, the perfect age he reckons -- the right balance
of youth and wisdom before decrepitude and senility set in, so the
tile has nothing to do with Colt-45s or 45 rpm or the '45 uprising at
all -- pull the other on Bill -- its about all those things and much
more.
One section, on how Drummond spends an average day, is almost stultifying in its minutia of everyday existence. He wants us to think of him, not as a rock-god and art-anarchist, but stooped and greying in his farmhouse, drinking cups of tea and whiling his time away sitting in his local library. An anonymous ordinary bloke, just like us. It's not easy when you read the rest of it.
He examines the pop business talking about his involvement with Big in Japan, Echo And The Bunneymen and The Teardrop Explodes. He talks about going to Finland to record a series of records with fictitious bands (including 'One Less Slag', a tribute to Princess Diana by lap-punk band The Fuckers) He talks about seeing Michael Jackson with his children and how he writes better songs than Jimmy Hendrix. He makes soup for a bunch of artists in Belfast and talks about how it is his favourite city. He talks about art in this post-modern age and his addiction to buying it (cured by buying a notice from outside a picture framers). He looks at nationalism both in Serbia and via his own sense of Scottishness. He even betrays a rare trace of pride as he tells the story of how a forgotten KLF tune came to be used as an anti-Milosevic rallying cry in Serbia.
However the book really comes alive when he describes K-Foundation stunts such as giving a cube, over six thousand cans, of Tennet's Super to the homeless one Christmas (including an examination of the sociology of the 'Street Drinker' - a brewery marketing term, not his) and spending twenty-five hours driving round the M25. Even better are descriptions of aborted plans such as at the height of the mad cow fiasco to hang two dead cows from a pylon overlooking a motorway (Mu Mu -- you see?) He also planned to buy a stone circle and, as its stones are made from limestone and are slowly dissolving anyway, grind then up to make concrete and recreate the circle with permanent geometrically pure 2001-like obelisks. This idea was blocked by the National Trust (only the land was for sale not the stones.) We also have sketchy plans to demolish Stonehenge for the Millennium via K2 Plan Hire.
Finally Drummond talks about the poorly received KLF comeback in 1997 as K2 -- one twenty-three minute show at the Barbican and a single that was all but unplayable on the radio ("Fuck the Millennium -- We want it now!" The chorus went) This piss-poor effort was, according to Drummond, deliberate in its crapness, celebrating the inevitable awfulness of the comeback. He talks about finally seeing cult underground band The Residents live after years of fannish devotion, flying back from a Bunnymen recording session in America to Birmingham town hall of all places.
"Show time. The lights went down. Then four individuals shuffled on stage. They looked like they were going to a student fancy-dress disco, got up in moth eaten second-hand tuxedos… Contrary to how it might sound, I did know that the four individuals dressed up in Residents costumes were, in real reality, the four Residents. It's just I hadn't prepared myself for the fact that this glorious and epic band that stalked my imagination would simply be four blokes from America who had an appetite for the weird and avant-garde."
Seeing his heros in the cold light of day was a key rock-and-roll moment for Drummond and not depressing at all and he revels in seeing the same glorious disillusionment shining in the eyes of their Number One Fan after the Barbican gig.
45 has received a fare amount of promotion. It has been placed prominently in bookshops -- not just its natural home of Waterstones, but Smiths as well -- and received prominent reviews. This is unlike Drummond's previous book Bad Karma co-written with his friend Z (ex-rocker Zodiac Mindwarp) which dribbled out and which I've never seen. Apparently it is about their aborted trip to place an effigy of Elvis Presley at the North Pole so his influence could spread good karma down the lines of longitude. They got to the top of Norway and faced with driving across the pack ice decided to place it at the top of the most northerly lighthouse instead.
So maybe Drummond really is trying to shatter the KLF/K-Foundation myth by laying it all bare to everyone and thus allow himself to take his 'art', whatever it may become, into new directions without the dead weight of expectancy hanging over it. And the rock myth itself is a dangerous drug, I myself have felt the crack-like boost to your ego of a horde of dancers cheering you when you put on just the right record at just the right time. God-knows what it must be like to achieve KLF-like levels of fame. But dig a bit deeper and think of this. The book has many deliberate lies in it -- in one section he has a long description of working with a Finnish diva. Just when you have almost fallen in love with this beautiful and tragic women, you find out, that just like The Fuckers, that she is a deliberate creation -- so how much, if any, of the rest of 45 is 'truth'? Like any good conspiracy theory, where any official denial inevitably just becomes part of the conspiracy anything that tries to explain the myth just adds to it.
Towards the beginning of the book Drummond tells of his involvement as manager of Echo and the Bunnymen. The name -- he says -- was chosen purely at random from a list of 'cool names' a friend had drawn up (as was The Teardrop Explodes' name) However after seeing the 'devil-bunny' art for the first record he starts to research into who Echo and Bunnymen might actually be. He finds numerous references to Rabbits in folklore across the world, especially as an incarnation of the Native American trickster god. During an interview when, asked to explain the origins of the name, one of the band members talks of Playboy Bunny Girls Drummond wants to say --
'No, no Les, you've got it wrong, it's nothing to do with Bunny girls. Bunnymen are the scattered tribes that populate the northern rim of the world and are followers of a mythical being, divine spirit, prime mover who takes the earthly form of a rabbit.'
However he keeps this to himself at the time not wanting to seem a 'nutter'. There are other links. In many of the KLF acronyms, K stands for Kaos and an earlier version of the KLF went under the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Apparently the name was taken from Robert Anton Wilson's cult Illuminanti books; a secret society who are the champions of Chaos, forever opposed to the Illuminanti -- the secret society for Order.
Perhaps the KLF/K-Foundation are the greatest pop/art phenomenon of the late twentieth century, their work grounded in a continual anarchist cycle of construction and deconstruction. Or perhaps they are just two ordinary blokes. Or perhaps they are, as criticism after Fuck the Millennium suggested, just feeble jokers who were great making pop records but whose 'art' stinks and ultimately has no meaning or perhaps, perhaps…the message is this: Perhaps it is time for all of us to burn our money, pull down the Iluminanti capitalist civilisation, join the Bunnymen, follow the Trickster God and all become The Justifiable Ancients of Mu Mu.
