KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  The fact that Drummond and Cauty were becoming successful was a clear sign that they knew what they were doing, or so the public narrative went. How then should they explain the strangeness of their behaviour? Clearly, it is all part of their plan. It was calculated media manipulation, 'scams' or 'pranks' aimed at generating publicity.

  With that narrative in place, Drummond and Cauty were in a unique position where they could follow and enact strong occult currents in full public view without comment. No-one took the role of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes who stated clearly how odd things were, not when the entire country was watching and acting like everything was normal.

  Rave happened.

  You only had to look at the crowd to see why rave was different to anything that had come before. At rock concerts and other large scale musical events, every member of the crowd faced in the same direction. The focus and attention of the entire audience was directed at the stage, where it glorified the musicians who performed there. It can be argued that this was actually the purpose of the event, to focus thousands of minds on a small group of people and in doing so to elevate them, in the words of Robert Plant, to the status of 'Golden Gods.'

  Compare that to the early orbital raves of the late 1980s, when first thousands and then tens of thousands of kids found their way to outdoor dance parties on the outskirts of London. The crowd point in any direction they damn well please. That original focus, the band on stage or (later) the 'superstar DJs' on an elevated platform, is absent. Instead, the crowd's focus is turned into itself. It is not on an artist presenting the audience with an experience, but on an audience that is creating its own performance. The crowd are generating, rather than observing. The result is that they were not elevating someone like Robert Plant to the status of Golden Gods, they were elevating themselves.

  It helped to be on the right drugs, of course.

  Rave emerged spontaneously, neither planned or designed. It was a genuine grass roots phenomenon, egalitarian and welcoming. Thousands danced in fields all through the night, out under the moon, in order to achieve a trance-like, ecstatic state. It was a form of communion and it was pagan as fuck. Needless to say, it couldn't last. The press and the government, appalled by such non-violent having-of-a-good-time, moved quickly to crush it. Ultimately, though, they weren't quick enough. Rave grew too big too quickly, and it attracted the attention of those who felt they could make money from such events. Once this happened and the superstar DJs and the superclubs arrived, the focus shifted from the raw crowd back to the event itself. Rave's spell was broken.

  But while it lasted, that spell was powerful and it worked its glamour on Cauty and Drummond.

  Once the pair began attending raves and clubs like Heaven, Hip-hop was quickly dropped. They knew that they weren't very good at it in any case. Clearly, dance music was where it was at. This was evident in their work from a very early point. Even the 'posthumous' JAMs records from 1988 onwards are more dance than hip-hop.

  After the success of their Doctor Who record, Drummond and Cauty suddenly had money, and with money came options and possibilities. It allowed them to build a recording studio of their own, in the basement of the South London squat where Cauty had lived for over a decade. The squat was known as Transcentral and achieved near-mythical status in KLF lore, but Cauty was not keen on it. "I hate the place," he has said, "I've no alternative but to live here."

  The pair set themselves a task of releasing a string of club-orientated dance records which were known as the Pure Trance series. The idea was to release one a month for five months, although only the first two, What Time Is Love? and 3am Eternal, saw the light of day. "This was Jimmy and my response to the urge to make music that had no message other than how it existed on the dance floor," Drummond said in 2012. "We wanted to make a minimal masterpiece. What Time Is Love? in its original Pure Trance version is the closest we came to it." The title came when Drummond turned to Cauty at a rave, intending to ask when the MDMA they had taken would kick in, but found himself phrasing the question in the words 'What time is love?' At which point, they both understood that it had started to work.

  The Pure Trance records were not expected to be a commercial success but their influence spread slowly through the clubs of Europe, selling continuously, and they brought Cauty and Drummond a great deal of credibility in the dance world, away from the London-based music press.

  They were released under the name The KLF. Drummond and Cauty had had this name from the start: The label they had created to release The JAMs records was called KLF Communications. They had a logo which was known as the 'pyramid blaster.' This was based on the 'eye in the pyramid' symbol which features heavily in Illuminatus! The KLF removed the eye from the top of the pyramid and replaced it with a ghetto blaster; their pyramid no longer observed, it broadcast.

  The name The KLF worked well within dance culture. It was minimal and anonymous, offering nothing that might overshadow the music. Stories varied as to whether it stood for anything or not. Sometimes it was claimed that it had no meaning, while other times it was claimed that the meaning was transient and shifted over time.

  Drummond and Cauty had first released a record under the name The KLF in March 1988, a few months before they found success with their Doctor Who themed single, although it sounded more like a JAMs track than a KLF one. Its name was prophetic, however. The first ever KLF record was a twelve-inch dance track called Burn The Bastards.

  The KLF made a few live appearances at raves during this period. 'Live appearances' may be an exaggeration, as they usually played a tape rather than actually performed. At the 1989 Helter Skelter rave in Chipping Norton the pair climbed a lighting gantry and emptied out a bin-bag containing £20,000 in Scottish one pound notes - their appearance fee - over the dancing crowd beneath them.

  This idea of giving something tangible to the audience runs through many of their live appearances. At an appearance at the Liverpool Festival of Comedy in 1991, the pair distributed ice creams to the crowd from an ice cream van. At a 1990 appearance at the Paradiso Club in Amsterdam, meanwhile, the pair performed a 23 minute long version of What Time Is Love?, during which they gave most of the instruments and mixing equipment to the crowd. None of this actually belonged to the band, however. It was the property of the club itself. They were not asked back.

  Given Drummond's love of great, euphoric pop and The KLF's later mainstream success, The KLF's initial involvement with rave culture took a surprising turn. Despite the appeal of the dance floor, their attention became focused more on the post-rave come down. The first KLF album was aimed at the chill out room. Indeed, it even named it, for that album was called Chill Out.

  This was Ambient House. Devoid of beats and anything resembling song structure, it owed more to the ambient music created by Brian Eno in the late seventies and early eighties than it did to high-bpm music of the raves. Eno, who coined the phrase 'Ambient Music,' described his ambient albums as being "on the cusp between melody and texture" which could be "actively listened to with attention or as easily ignored, depending on the choice of the listener." Eno produced a string of such records, in particular four albums entitled Ambient 1, Ambient 2, Ambient 3 and Ambient 4.

  Another Ambient House pioneer was Alex Patterson. Inspired by Paul Oakenfold's Land of Oz nights at the Heaven nightclub, Cauty formed The Orb with Patterson as a side project. Although their collaboration was short-lived and Cauty soon left The Orb to focus on The KLF, their early experiments married the potential of the sampler to Eno's ambient music and paved the way for a genre that continues to this day.

  For Chill Out, Drummond and Cauty added the sound of sheep and slide guitar from Drummond's solo album The Man to samples of Elvis Presley, Acker Bilk and Fleetwood Mac. These faded in and out, as if from far distant radio stations or as if the listener was drifting in and out of sleep. It was presented as a journey through a mythical part of America, with song titles like Pulling Out Of Ricardo And The Dus
k Is Falling Fast or The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By. The song names were the result of plucking place names out of an atlas - Drummond always did like his maps. Cauty has dismissed it recently, saying "mostly it's just a list of places. It was another disaster, really," and many ravers saw it as unlistenable new age noodling, boring in the extreme.

  The album certainly has its supporters, however. The imagery of the journey across vast spaces in America during the twilight hours of dawn and dusk, so full of space and potential, is a perfect fit for this type of music.

  Ultimately, though, ambient is an odd genre, it either works or it doesn't. There may be a critical consensus which rates Eno's Ambient 2 and Ambient 4 above Ambient 1 and Ambient 3, but it would take a brave man to define why. The KLF were more than aware that this wasn't for everyone. As they described their work at the time, this was music that "loves you even if you don't love it." Ambient house was "the amorphous unconscious," which "might only make sense to those who made it to the furthest reaches of dance music." After Chill Out, they left the genre behind, feeling that there was little more that needed to be said.

  Yet it's tempting to say that the state of mind that Ambient House captured continued to fascinate them. It was all about the end of the rave, when all your energy had been dissipated and all that is left is an unearthly glow, a sense of euphoria that has somehow risen from the worn out body. It is a feeling of exhaustion where you also feel extraordinarily awake. It's a sense of expanded awareness, the sense that you can see for miles even when you are lying in a dark corner. It is that moment, in the small hours before dawn, that seems to hang outside of time. The lyrics and song titles of their later commercial successes, such as 3am Eternal or The Last Train to Transcentral, continued to echo this state of mind. This mental state seemed to interest them far more than the music it inspired.

  During this period Drummond and Cauty also experimented with ambient video. They took a portable recording studio up to the Isle of Jura in spring 1990, with the intention of recording a minimalist techno record called The Gate. The record never happened, and instead they spent eight days on the island recording sounds and being videotaped by their collaborator Bill Butt. This footage was eventually released as a 42-minute 'ambient movie,' called Waiting. Even among committed and die-hard KLF fans, Waiting is considered to be unacceptably boring.

  'Waiting' was what occurred instead of recording. As they later wrote, they were, "Waiting for the tide to turn on the almost motionless sea. Waiting for the sun to sink beyond the mountains of the Western Isles. Waiting for the stars to stud the darkening sky. Waiting for the dawn to creep in from the East. But maybe more importantly, waiting as emotions within themselves shifted and changed, stirred and settled. Along with this poetic stuff they continued to wait for all the trivial things in life that we seem to spend so much of life waiting for; kettles to boil, phones to ring, baths to run, moods to pass, something to happen, or at least some sort of explanation."

  Towards the end of this period they assembled their speakers on the beach and played music out to sea while they sat in deckchairs at the water’s edge, like Canute, and waited for this explanation. It never arrived.

  They were waiting to discover what they were going to do next. This is an occupational hazard for those who are not driven by clearly defined goals or a sense of purpose, but instead follow the path of chaos. In the lulls between bursts of energy and action you become purposeless and have no choice but to wait and see what direction you will be pulled in next. So they sat in their deckchairs and waited, until the encroaching sea put an end to their vigil.

  Whatever they were waiting for on Jura, they did not find it that time.

  Part II: Horns

  8: CEREMONIES

  On Summer Solstice 1991 a few dozen journalists from across Europe were asked to arrive at Heathrow airport with their passports. Here they boarded a specially chartered plane which would take them, they were told, to a ceremony at the lost kingdom of Mu.

  The plane actually took them to the isle of Jura in the Scottish Hebrides. The customs officer at their destination was Bill Drummond. He sat behind a desk dressed in a fake moustache and customs uniform, and stamped each of their passports with the 'pyramid blaster' logo.

  The journalists were then dressed in robes and led across the island in a silent procession. At the head of this procession was a figure in white with a single horn emerging from his hood. He led them towards their final destination: a 60 foot tall wicker man, surrounded by a hidden sound system.

  They formed a circle around the figure. Here they were addressed by Drummond, although his identity was masked by the robe and horn. Thanks to a microphone under his hood, his words were being mixed into the trance-like rave music that the sound system was pumping out. The circle of robed journalists chanted while Drummond preached at them in an improvised and meaningless language of his own devising. "I had a little radio mic on Bill, and I was working the mix," Cauty told the writer Richard King. "He was up on a sort of platform in front of the wicker man, dressed with this horn, and did the whole speech in a foreign language he'd just made up. It was totally, totally brilliant, everyone was completely gobsmacked."

  At the finale of what Cauty called "this whole sort of fake Pagan ceremony," the wicker man was lit. Their wicker man was a powerful looking figure. It did not stand to attention like the one in the The Wicker Man film or those seen in historical woodcut illustrations. It had both arms thrust aloft and its leg spaced heroically apart, giving it the aspect of a four pointed star about to pounce. It didn't smoulder or smoke, but instead blazed straight upwards in huge column of fire.

  Wicker men had been rare in western culture up until that point. They were first recorded in the writings of Caesar, who claimed that the Gauls used them as part of ritual human sacrifice. They did not really arrive in popular culture until Robin Hardy's 1973 film The Wicker Man, staring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. The 1991 Summer Solstice, however, was marked not only by the KLF's wicker man on Jura, but the first solstice wicker man burning in Black Rock Desert in Nevada, an event that has grown into the Burning Man festival. This event, planned by its founders as a 'dadaist temporary autonomous zone,' had grown out of solstice burnings on a San Francisco beach which were apparently started spontaneously, rather than inspired by the film. These had been disrupted the previous year by official concerns, resulting in a move out into the desert and the test burning of a figure on Labor Day 1990. Like on Jura, these first Burning Man effigies also forwent the traditional stance and stood with arms stretched aloft.

  The coincidental arrival of both of these wicker men on the 1991 Summer Solstice was unusual because, apart from the release of the film nearly twenty years before, there was an absence of any other wicker men in our culture up until that point. Now, of course, they are more common and appear everywhere from Iron Maiden records to the Wickerman festival in south-west Scotland. For Alan Moore, this would signify the arrival of the wicker man concept in a more accessible area of Ideaspace. Or to paraphrase Charles Fort, ‘wicker men come when it's wicker men time.’

  The Burning Man festival's description as being a “dadaist temporary autonomous zone” is also interesting in light of the glossolalia, or speaking in tongues, that Drummond performed on Jura. Talking in meaningless words like this was common at the birth of Dada. The Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, 1916, included performances of what they called 'sound poetry.' One such example is Hugo Ball's Karawane, the text of which in part reads, 'hollaka hollala / anlogo bung / blago bung / blago bung.' From Ball's perspective, the impulse to stand on stage and address an audience with sounds and gibberish was a reaction to the society that led to World War I. Such a bankrupt society deserved meaningless poetry. What Drummond's impulse was, however, is less clear.

  Speaking in tongues is a strange but relatively common aspect of religious practice around the world, and is found in cultures as varied as Haitian Voodoo and Indian Fakirs. It is best known in the We
st through Pentecostal Christianity, where it is believed that the possessed speaker has received the Grace of the Holy Spirit and is being controlled by an aspect of the divine. It certainly has a powerful effect on an audience, who suddenly find that all the normal rules of human connection have been dispensed with and that something unknowable has taken its place.

  Despite Cauty's description of this as a "sort of fake Pagan ceremony," the trance music, chanting, glossolalia and burning effigy of the Jura ceremony did have an effect on those present, just as the use of the London Gospel Community Choir affected those who listened to Downtown. It was very much a real “fake Pagan” ceremony, and it had a very real effect on those present.

  The music of The KLF is marked by a noticeable increase in religious imagery compared to the music of The JAMs - or rather, by a noticeable increase in religious yearning. Certainly the invitations to attend this Solstice ritual, called The Rites of Mu, were rich in such imagery: "The KLF have invited you to join them in a celebration of the Rites of Mu this summer solstice, during which the fall of Mankind may be reversed - returning him to the garden where the rest of creation awaits." The problem, the invites explained, was that mankind had been distracted from its true nature by the questions Who, Where, Why and What - questions which they described as the "four beautiful handmaidens of Lucifer."

  Four graceful, elegant models were hired to play the role of these handmaidens of Lucifer. The surviving video images, showing them emerging from the waters around Jura in flowing white gowns as the sun sets, are some of the most powerful images from this ceremony. They are a direct visual reflection of the scene in Illuminatus! when angels appear out of Lake Ingolstadt, an event which triggers the grand climax of the book - the beginning of the end of the world.