by Higgs, JMR
To add to the insult, the KLF were then awarded the Best Band award, but they were awarded it jointly with Simply Red. Simply Red were at the time at the height of their commercial success, following their multi-platinum 'Stars' album. It was not a good time for the industry to tell Drummond and Cauty that it considered them to be the best that they could possibly be, which was just as good as Simply Red. Such an accolade is easy to misinterpret.
Drummond and Cauty had left immediately after their performance, so a motorcycle courier collected the award on their behalf. The statue was later discovered by a farmer in Wiltshire, who found it buried in a field near Stonehenge. The farmer returned the statue, so Cauty and Drummond had to go back to Wiltshire and bury it deeper.
Jonathan King was not known, at that point, as a paedophile. He was jailed in 2001 for the sexual assault of five teenage boys. This makes King the third person in this story to be jailed for sexual offences related to minors. Gary Glitter, who appeared with Cauty and Drummond on Top Of The Pops, was jailed for possessing thousands of images of child pornography and charged with having sexual relations with a 14 year old child. Chris Langham, the Thick Of It actor and co-author with Ken Campbell of the Illuminatus! stage play, was jailed in 2007 for possessing child pornography.
You might think this a remarkably high instance of such crimes for one story, and you would be correct. It becomes more uncomfortable in light of a character in Illuminatus! called Padre Pederastia, a paedophile priest who initiates new recruits into the Justified Ancients of Mummu by leading a satanic black mass. Not all the coincidences that flock around this story are light and funny.
After the Brit awards, the actions of The KLF were quickly rationalised by journalists as 'pranks' or 'scams.' They were nothing of the sort. They were an honest expression from the very core of Drummond and Cauty. As Drummond told the journalist Danny Kelly the next day, "There is humour in what we do, and in the records, but I really hate it when people go on about us being 'schemers' and 'scammers'. We do all this stuff from the very depths of our soul and people make out its some sort of game. It depresses me." Once again they had reacted instinctively on the deepest level they knew, and found their actions misinterpreted as some sophisticated Machiavellian media manipulation.
They could not wound the industry, and they could not fight it. When they first decided to take on the mantle of The Justified Ancients of Mummu their intention had been to claim the music industry for themselves. Instead, it had swallowed them up.
They had failed.
They were in a very dark place. As Drummond told Danny Kelly, "Looking back, we realise we don't really know what our motivation was. All we know is we've got, as well as everything else, this dark side to our personality. We looked into our souls and entered into the same area that Manson must have entered... and that bloke who shot up Hungerford." Kelly challenged him on this because, if it was hyperbole, then it was in terrible taste. He asked Drummond if he really meant it. "I do actually. Yes I do," Drummond said. "It is the same area. Somebody recently used the phrase ‘corporate rebels’ - about the Manic Street Preachers, I think - and both Jimmy and I didn't want to be just corporate rebels because there's just so much of that, shameless, in the music business. We felt we were headbutting... headbutting... trying to push at what's acceptable. It was completely pointless and you don't know why you're doing it but it has to be done. And that's what Michael Ryan did; he just woke up one morning and thought ‘right, today's the day I go out and get the bastards’ and went out and shot the bastards..." A number of journalists from this period came away from interviews speculating whether Drummond was on the edge of a breakdown.
What next? Where could they go from there? They had been on a journey deep into the very heart of the beast. They had failed, and they may never feel clean again. They had to get away, but was it possible for a group that successful to escape from the industry? In 1992, the KLF were massive. The previous year they had sold more singles globally than any other UK act. They had had a string of number one records around the world. They had hits in America. The critics adored them. How could they escape from the industry? How could they become forgotten?
How could they reclaim their souls?
The first step was to stop. The Black Room sessions were ended and Extreme Noise Terror paid off. Then they killed the KLF. A full page advert announced the fact in the press (and was largely considered to be a clever marketing ploy to promote the forthcoming The Black Room.) They left the country, spending time in Mexico. Still this wasn't enough, so they took an even more drastic step. They deleted all their records.
Being completely independent, they were one of the few acts to be in a position to do this. True, they couldn't do anything about the records that had already been sold, and they were unable to delete their catalogue in non-UK territories where they had licensed their work. But in the UK at least, there would be no KLF records in shops, no special edition re-issues, no songs licensed to compilation albums, adverts or video games. This act, in many ways, was far more brutal than the later money burning. In pure financial terms, it has been roughly estimated that this would have cost them something like five million pounds in future earnings.
They were removing their body of work, the result of extraordinary risks and effort, from the public sphere. This was a cost that went far beyond the financial. Yet they thought it necessary, for what they wanted to get back was far more valuable.
12: UNDERCURRENTS
The K Foundation, as Drummond and Cauty called themselves after they stopped being The KLF, burned their money in August 1994. The period of the early 1990s is far more potent and significant than it is usually given credit for. In order to understand what this means it is necessary to consider what was so strange about that period, and why an act like theirs needed to have happened at such a time.
Our mental landscape was very different a century or so earlier. Victorian England had been, on the surface at least, a bastion of certainty. The Victorians had three unshakable beacons with which they could orientate themselves and their society by, the pillars of Church, Empire, and Crown. This, of course, was not to last. The botanist Charles Darwin had developed a scientific model that was ingenious and ground breaking, but which had implications. Perhaps wisely, he kept it hidden away in a drawer for twenty years. But in 1859 he published.
The Victorians had believed that they understood how things were, and where they themselves belonged in the natural order of things. But Darwin's work, in combination with breakthroughs made in the field of geology regarding the age of the planet, caused one of the unshakable pillars of Victorian certainty to crack. The teaching of the church about the origins of life on this planet had been shown to be wrong. This was a severe failing for an organisation which exists to proclaim an infallible understanding of truth.
The Church didn't react to the new understanding well. In 1870, eleven years after Darwin published On The Origin Of The Species, the Vatican formalised the doctrine of papal infallibility. This dogma asserted that the action of the Holy Spirit can remove even the possibility of error from the Pope. The Pope was right, in other words, because he was the Pope, who was right. This was clearly a form of circular logic, another of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels, and once that had been recognised the Darwinists found themselves outside of the Church's logic. They could no longer submerge themselves inside the church and unquestioningly accept what it had to say. Calls for the need to have "Faith" could no longer be met with reverent acceptance. Indeed, they were increasingly met with knowing smirks. Nietzsche was one who was brave enough to publicly articulate this change in the world. "God is dead", he wrote, "and we have killed him".
This change in understanding may have been unsettling, but it was just a warm up for the goodies that the twentieth century had in store. New ideas came thick and fast from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Freud, Picasso and Joyce. Every breakthrough seemed to be pulling in the same dire
ction, that of undermining certainty. Things were no longer anywhere near as simple as they had been. Our most fundamental bedrocks - time, space, matter, the rational mind - were discovered to be nothing like as dependable as they appeared. We were steaming ahead into uncharted territory.
The First World War erupted, and shattered any notion that there was glory in Empire. As Church and Crown eroded in our mental orientation, the need for an unarguable authority gave momentum to politicians, who quickly offered up the state as a candidate. They differed in the details, or course – the fascists thought the population should serve the state while the communists thought that the state was the servant of the people – but the methods used to enforce the centralisation of power were essentially the same. These ideas played themselves out to their horrendous conclusions during the Second World War. The notion that the state should be the central authority in our lives has never seemed credible since.
As the decades rolled on the search for an unarguable touchstone to replace Church, Crown or Empire in our lives took on an ever more urgent air. For populations still traumatised by the wars of the 1940s, enforcing social conformity in the 1950s made a lot of sense, yet this was stifling for the generation coming of age after the war. In the 1960s they sought liberation, but the philosophies that made so much sense on a personal level did not scale up well to the level of society. In the 1970s the attention shifted to the self, but the hedonistic self-indulgence grew to such unbearable levels that Punk was needed to tear it down. In the 1980s they believed that money and the pursuit of material possessions was the answer. Wealth was pursued, but it did not have the power to properly satisfy us, and that too was soon discarded as a candidate for our unassailable personal omphalos.
So what next? By then we had reached 1990. By this time all options had been tried and found wanting. We could return to the Church, the state, politics, material greed, personal liberation or hedonism if we wished, but we could no longer see them without being aware of their faults. They were damaged goods, still significant but no longer permanent and secure. But what other options did we have? Did we have any? It appeared not. We were out of ideas.
And so there arose a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in. This awful period was brief, and we can date it quite precisely. It arrived in mainstream culture in 1991, fully formed and simultaneously emanating from many different art forms. Douglas Coupland's debut novel Generation X was published in March that year, and the generation it described suddenly found themselves with a name. Another label arrived in July, when Richard Linklater's no-budget indie movie Slacker arrived in cinemas. The comedian Bill Hicks’ career suddenly started taking off in the UK, and the generation found their philosopher. Then in September, their anthem arrived. Nirvana released the single Smells Like Teen Spirit, and the story of alternative music was changed forever.
Slackers were not well dressed, because there was no reason to dress smartly. Their uniform was old jeans, Converse trainers and warm, practical lumberjack shirts. They were not career minded, for there was no reason to pursue the corporate dream. They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options, rather than just innate laziness. They were often well educated and creative, and are usually portrayed as being talkative and self-obsessed. If they had a mission, of sorts, it was to work out how to move forward from where they were.
With the Berlin Wall down and Thatcher and Reagan out of office, there was a clear sense that the old order had finished. Modern historians also draw a line at this point. The historian Eric Hobsbawm has coined the phrase 'the short twentieth century' to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War. This is a useful timeframe for a historian because it works as a complete narrative.
The question that needed to be answered was, 'what next?' Looking to the past didn't help; it didn't have any answers and it was all out of ideas. The past shrugged as if to say, 'Good luck. You're on your own.'
At first, Generation X was linked to a sense of relief and a feeling that they had overcome the blind spots of the past and were now facing up to things with a refreshing honesty. But as '91 rolled into '92 and '93, this honesty became less invigorating and increasingly unbearable. It started to become apparent that they were not going to find a focus for their narrative, or a way to repair the damage to their mental landscape. The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface. The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain's suicide, the burning of the million pounds, and the year Bill Hicks died. This was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres, as noted earlier, came to an end. That era was over. By this point there was a desperate need for a way out. Any way out.
By the end of 1994 the gears that cycle the eras could be heard to shift. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had taken control of the Labour party and launched their New Labour Project. John Major wrote in his memoirs that his victory in the 1992 UK election "killed socialism in Britain." Margaret Thatcher was of a similar opinion, as was, it seems, Tony Blair, whose first concern upon gaining leadership of the Labour Party was to remove the socialist 'clause IV' from the party's constitution. After Blair, politics would not be led by ideology, but by opinion polls. This was his 'third way,' a political discourse dominated by spin, where it was not what you did that was important, but how that played in the press.
In Europe, the Maastricht treaty paved the way for the modern European Union and, ultimately, the Euro. Over in America, George W. Bush entered political life in 1994 as Governor of Texas. Netscape released the first version of their Navigator software that year, the first popular web browser, and Microsoft followed with a high profile launch of their Windows 95 operating system the following year. The modern digital era began. The world of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook was starting. The old order was being ripped up. The Age of Networks was being born.
As the blogger Neuroskeptic notes, during the period from 1945 to 1990 new cults, religions and sects were springing up all over the place. This period gave us the likes of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, the Moonies, Jesus Freaks, the Manson Family, Heaven's Gate, Jonestown, the Kabbalah Centre, the Nation of Islam, the New Age, Neopaganism and Wicca. Why, he asks, did that outpouring of new religious groups dry up so abruptly and decisively, with hardly any popularly known groups forming after the Waco siege of 1993? The question points to a deep change in our culture, and once again marks the early years of the 1990s as the end of an era. It was not just new musical genres, it seems that stopped appearing at that point in time.
If we can date the end of the previous era, what the historian Eric Hobsbawm called the 'Age of Extremes,' to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the Information era to the first popular web browser in 1994, what should we make of those years in between? They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state. They were a period when the old rules were gone, but before the new order was formed. They were a period, in other words, when normal certainties did not apply, when anything was possible and the strange was commonplace. As John C. Calhoun, the 7th Vice President of the United States once wrote, "The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism."
Being innate storytellers, we neglect this brief, confusing period and prefer instead the clearer narratives that surround it. If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you'll find that each successive year has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the Internet during this period. The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines. The age of John Major and George Bush Senior, it seems, does not attract our attention. Our cultural narrative
skips from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman late-eighties to the Britpop and the Spice Girls mid-nineties quite happily. Even the Adrian Mole diaries skip these years. This boundary period is a cultural blind spot; we choose not to look at it.
But there is much that can be learnt from such a time, and great art can be found there. In The KLF's field of music, for example, this brief period brought albums such as Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream's Screamadelica, Nirvana's Nevermind, Automatic For The People by REM, Peggy Suicide by Julian Cope, U2's Achtung Baby and Oasis' Definitely Maybe - all records that are considered the career best, or thereabouts, for those musicians. Considering the long careers of many of those bands, the fact that their highest achievements all fall in that narrow period does suggest that there was something in the water at that time, so to speak.
In the moments that followed the withdrawal of one wave of history you can see, if you chose to look, a brief glimpse of the undercurrents at work in the late twentieth century. It did not last long, for the next grand narrative arrived and drowned out these subtle workings with energy and noise. And that next wave was noisy.