KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  There were creative problems too. Peter Davison was replaced by Colin Baker as the sixth Doctor. Baker was a good actor but he was not someone who possessed the 'kid appeal' necessary for the role. Or at least, that was the view of Michael Grade, who said that his portrayal of the Doctor was "utterly unlikeable, absolutely god-awful in fact." It didn't help that Baker was dressed in a deranged multi-coloured clown outfit. With the benefit of hindsight, some art historians now claim this costume as a postmodern classic, but it did not help the casual viewer take the programme seriously. The producer's pantomime-esque tastes in casting meant that the likes of the musical theatre star Bonnie Langford joined the cast, while a new script editor moved the show away from the family and kids audience by painting a darker, bleaker, violent universe at odds with the earlier spirit of the show. The whole thing had become a mess.

  As a result the show was put on a very public hiatus for eighteen months in 1986, and ordered to pull itself together. When it returned, for its 23rd series, it was distinctively unimproved. The programme had had, in essence, its final warning. Michael Grade ordered that Colin Baker be replaced.

  It is here that our Discordian threads return to the show. A number of actors were auditioned to replace Baker, but it very quickly came down to a choice between two: our good friend Ken Campbell, and Sylvester McCoy (whose first job in showbiz involved sticking ferrets down his trousers as part of the Ken Campbell Road Show.) Campbell auditioned by performing a speech about the nature of time modelled on Alan Moore's Dr. Manhattan character, wearing a long coat, sleeveless cartoon t-shirt and wide brimmed hat. The producer thought that he was too weird, an opinion probably enforced by the strange message that had been left on the answerphone the previous day which he suspected was from Campbell. The message was actually a quote from Charles Fort’s book Lo!, and begins “A naked man in a city street - the track of a horse in volcanic mud - the mystery of the reindeer's ears - a huge, black form, like a whale, in the sky, and it drips red drops as if attacked by celestial swordfishes - an appalling cherub appears in the sea - Confusions.”

  The production team were unaware that this quote was Campbell’s personal mantra, which he would recite in the wings before any performance as a centring exercise, and finding it on the answering machine was deeply unsettling.

  As McCoy remembers, "The executive producer of BBC Series and Serials wanted Ken, but the producer of Doctor Who wanted me, and his argument was that he thought Ken would frighten the children, and I think he was right. The producer in fact threatened to resign if Ken got the job. So I got it."

  Campbell may have been too weird for Doctor Who, but that didn’t mean our Discordian synchronicities would leave the show behind. With the money they made from their Doctor Who record Drummond and Cauty made a film called The White Room, as will be discussed later. There was one major role in the film that required a 'name' actor, and for this role they cast Paul McGann, then well known for his roles in The Monocled Mutineer and Withnail and I. A few years after this McGann took over from Sylvester McCoy and became the eighth Doctor. There was only one person in the entire world who would be cast as the next Doctor, and for Drummond and Cauty to select that very same man for their Doctor Who-funded film is... well, the odds are pretty high. Clearly this is a story that the synchronicities can’t get enough of.

  With McCoy cast, the series returned complete with new star, new titles, new music and a new script editor. And it was, if anything, worse than before. At that point, its fate was sealed. The programme wasn't cancelled immediately, for the BBC did not want to attract the sort of press which that would generate. Instead, it was scheduled against the ratings powerhouse of Coronation Street for its last two years where its long, painful death was less visible. After the failure of the first McCoy series, it was not going to be given another chance. It was a dead show walking.

  It was at this point, between the first and second McCoy seasons when the series' problems looked terminal and the mercurial character of the Doctor was at his lowest point, that Drummond and Cauty called themselves The Timelords and released Doctorin' The TARDIS.

  Doctor Who had lost its connection to a wide, family audience of young children and amused parents. It was no longer fun. It needed to remind people of how good it could be, and of what they used to love about it. Then Drummond and Cauty arrived with a single that was camp, and silly, and ludicrously enjoyable. It was, in the words of critic Peter Paphides, "the one novelty record that most people admit to liking." It sold well over a million copies. It was full of energy and anarchy.

  It was, in other words, exactly what Doctor Who needed at that point in time.

  Then the programme returned later in that year, and suddenly it was brilliant again. McCoy had worked out how to play the role, a new companion created chemistry and the script editor had a clear sense of purpose and direction. Over the next couple of years, as it moved towards cancellation, the character mutated again to become manipulative and mysterious. True, this did not win back the child audience, but it did attract people who would be far more useful for its coming dark ages - writers. Once it was off the air Doctor Who continued as a series of novels, and many of the people who wrote Doctor Who fiction in this period - Russell T. Davies, Mark Gatiss, Paul Cornell and Steven Moffat to name a few - were responsible for resurrecting Doctor Who in 2005. Indeed a number of these people, and many British writers of their generation, have gone on record as saying that they only became writers in the first place because of Doctor Who.

  When Russell T. Davies brought the series back to television he reinvigorated the character by using the narrative device of surviving a great 'Time War.' The 'Time War' idea originally came from Alan Moore, who wrote a number of Doctor Who comic scripts in 1981 about a '4D War' which had two time-travelling armies attacking each other at increasingly earlier points in time so that neither side had any idea what the war was about, or who started it.

  If we take Alan Moore’s model of Ideaspace seriously - if only for a moment - and look at the idea of Doctor Who, we see an extremely detailed fiction. The Doctor is one of the great line of British folk heroes; characters in the tradition of Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes or James Bond. Whereas American folk heroes tend towards cowboys or gangsters who take what they want from the world and end up either rich or winners, British equivalents are very different. They are anti-establishment figures, even when they work with the establishment, and they save the day not for personal gain, but because it is the right thing to do. For generations of British school kids, Doctor Who was the myth that they grew up with. They had only the most superficial knowledge of the likes of Zeus, Odin or Jesus, but they knew all there was to know about Davros, The Master and Cybermen.

  The Doctor is the first British folk hero of the TV age, and the nature of his TV origins make him unusual. There is no definitive creator standing behind him, no Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ian Fleming or J. K. Rowling. Instead, he popped out from the space between many minds. There was a succession of different actors, writers and producers who all invigorated the character for a short while before moving on or burning out. The character is defined by his ability to regenerate and change his personality. He can change all his friends and companions. He can go anywhere, at any time. He is, essentially, the perfect never-ending story. He will survive long after you, me or anyone currently involved in making the series has died. He adapts, grows, mutates and endures. In this he fulfils much of the standard definitions for a living thing. This is not bad going, for a fiction.

  Already, there are many thousands of Doctor Who stories which, for a character of fiction, is almost unheard of. There have been hundreds of stories on TV, and countless more available as novels, audio CDs, comic books, films, stage plays, webcasts, fanfics and radio programmes. The growth of the story, compared to any other fiction from the same period, is deeply unusual. Indeed, it has become arguably the most expansive and complex non-religious fiction ever created.


  According to Moore’s model of Ideaspace, this fiction may be complicated enough to act like a living thing. Note that this is not to say that Doctor Who is a living thing, for that would sound crazy. It is to say that it behaves as if it were a living thing, which is a much more reasonable observation. Of course, if you then go on to try and define the difference between something that is living and something that behaves like it is living, you will be a brave soul indeed.

  The programme’s spread through all possible media was begun by its first script editor, David Whitaker. Although Doctor Who has no definitive 'creator', Whitaker can be said to be the man who nurtured the heart of the series, sculpting the peculiar mix of humour, morality and wide-eyed imagination that makes the series so unique. He was involved in the creation of most of the iconography of the show, from introducing the Daleks, to making the TARDIS be in some way alive and the Doctor able to regenerate into a different actor. He also spread the life of the character beyond television, for he wrote the first novels and annuals and co-wrote the Peter Cushing 'Dr. Who' movies from the 1960s.

  Whitaker's work on Doctor Who was particularly influenced by alchemy, a subject that he claimed to be "very fond of". The basic alchemical principle, where a physical object can be affected by the manipulation of a symbol of that object - the idea of it, if you prefer - is used explicitly in his 1967 story The Evil of the Daleks (which is also a strong contender for the story that invented steampunk.) The Evil of the Daleks is about a pair of Victorian scientists who accidentally build a time machine out of 144 mirrors (the number '144,' or 12 squared, being alchemically significant). This basic alchemical principle is still used in the programme today, for example in Steven Moffat’s claim about his monsters The Weeping Angels: "The image of an Angel is an Angel."

  In Whitaker's Doctor Who, when the TARDIS broke down because of a problem with the “mercury in the fluid links,” there was specific alchemical symbolism in the choice of mercury. When the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was replaced by the second, Patrick Troughton, Whitaker gave him a flute and an obsession with hats in order to echo the classical god Mercury (or Hermes to the Greeks). All this would have meant little to the children watching in the 1960s, of course. Nevertheless, Whitaker seems to have been consciously shaping the character of the Doctor into a mercurial, Trickster figure.

  When the current Doctor Who writers claim that they only became writers because of Doctor Who, they usually credit the series of novels which Whitaker started and which young boys devoured during the 1970s. There is another explanation, however, which comes from the very format of the programme. In the original series, episodes built towards a climax and ended on a cliff hanger in which the Doctor or his friends appeared to be in inescapable danger. Of course, the children watching knew that the Doctor would somehow survive. He always did. The question, then was not would he escape, but how? What could possibly happen to get the Doctor out of that situation? There would be much debate about this in school playgrounds after each episode. And as the kids thought about the problem, their imaginations were being stoked. They were thinking like writers. Indeed, they were trying to write the next episode themselves.

  What we have here, then, is character of fiction, neither created nor 'owned' by any one imagination, who is actively creating the very environment – writers’ minds - that it needs to survive into the future. Not only is Doctor Who a fictitious character that acts like a living thing by constantly evolving and surviving, it is also a self-sustaining living thing that creates the one thing that it needs to survive. From an evolutionary point of view, that's impressive.

  There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this, of course. When the writer and media critic Philip Sandifer writes that "David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who's development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show," he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. Or as Sandifer so clearly puts it, "I don't actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. Except maybe David Whitaker."

  From Drummond and Cauty's perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who-knows-what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore's model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends.

  For Moore, and other artists such as David Lynch who use similar models, the role of the artist is like that of a fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present their catch to an audience. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen - anything really, such is the path of chaos. "It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn't fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it," Cauty has said. "It was like an out of control lorry, you know, you're just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching."

  This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. One of the most important aspects of magical practice is the will. Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in the world brought about by the exercise of the will, hence his maxim 'Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law.' The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who-knows-whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace. For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was “totally mad."

  All this only applies if you're prepared to accept the notion of magic, of course.

  Nevertheless, all this is worth noting because there is another fiction that is important in Drummond and Cauty's story. This one is more significant, because this is the fiction that they became, taking on its title and performing their actions in its name. It is also the source of our whirlwind of synchronicities. We are talking, of course, about The Justified Ancients of Mummu. The question then becomes did Cauty and Drummond choose The JAMs, or did The JAMs choose Cauty and Drummond? A possible clue will come later, when we look at what the founding purpose of The Justified Ancients of Mummu actually was.

  7. WRITING & WAITING

  The huge success of the independently released Doctorin' The TARDIS gave Drummond and Cauty plenty to chew on. It seemed to them that we were at a new stage in the history of music, one where all the previous gatekeepers could be bypassed. For the first time, it was possible for anyone who wanted a hit record to go ahead and make one. This, it seemed clear, was a significant change and one that should be encouraged.

  Drummond and Cauty's reaction to this was to write a book. Called The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way), it contained a set of instructions which promised to allow anyone to repeat their success, regardless of musical talent. It came with a money-back guarantee: anyone who followed the instructions within to the letter, and didn't have a number one hit, would get their £5.99 back.

  The Manual was a distillation of everything that the pair had learnt about the music industry, filtered through the 'just do it you bastard' approach of Ke
n Campbell and the anti-pretension pop sensibility they learnt from watching Pete Waterman work. Due to the rapid technological change in music recording, much of the practical information it contains dated very quickly, making it a historical snapshot of a very brief period. The Campbell and Waterman influences, however, have not dated, and it is for this reason that the book is still read by musicians today. Jamie Reynolds of the Klaxons, for example, told Philip Sherburne that they followed the book religiously in order to make their Mercury award-winning first album. "That's what I did! That's genuinely it. I read that, I noted down the golden rules of pop, and applied that to what we're doing and made sure that that always applies to everything we do." The Klaxons then went on to drop acid and perform with Rihanna in a laser-and-neon pyramid at the 2008 Brit awards, something which suggests that they are a band ideally suited to follow this Discordian-influenced path.

  The Manual can best be seen as a modern update of the famous punk-era fanzine illustration that showed the fingering for the chords E, A and B7 with the words, "This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band." In general though, that's not how its intentions were perceived. The book gives the false impression that Doctorin' The TARDIS was planned, that Drummond and Cauty knew what they were doing and that they set out to deliberately make a number one record.

  Perhaps more than anything they did, The Manual led to the pair being perceived as cynical media manipulators rather than random followers of chaos. In a sense, this was always inevitable when they became successful because the public narrative believed that success comes from knowing what you are doing. The equally common phenomenon of stumbling upwards is rarely recognised and, even if it is noticed, it tends to be dismissed as an anomaly, something that 'doesn't count,' rather than an example of how things actually work. Few people are comfortable with accepting the extent with which blind chance affects their lives.