KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money Read online

  Often, however, those characters should have no knowledge of the story that they are in. They may feature in an early scene and never be seen again, remaining blissfully ignorant of the events that follow. They would have no more reason for thinking that they were part of 'Harry Potter's story' than the story of anyone else that they met. Indeed, the idea that this was 'Harry's story' would seem ludicrous because, as far as they are concerned, they are in the middle of their own story. Their story could conceivably be more dramatic and exciting than Harry's. To them, Harry would be a bit player in their own story, not vice versa. This is certainly the situation in narratives which deal with real, as opposed to fictitious, people. We are all forming our own narratives and we can't be expected to keep track of everybody else’s narratives, no matter how much they would like us to.

  In the light of Wilson's comments, I started to wonder if there was such a thing as a story that no-one knows they are in - least of all the main characters. Could a complete narrative develop by itself with no-one guiding it or steering it? You would instinctively think not, yet whenever I thought about the KLF story and Cauty and Drummond’s confusion about their actions, I couldn’t shake the idea that there was nobody involved who could hear the story that was being told.

  On one level the story of The KLF is easy to tell, because almost everything that they did between 1987 and 1994 was well recorded. Almost every song they produced, interview they gave, video they made or press release they issued is archived on the internet somewhere (or at least was and will be again - KLF websites and .ftp archives have a habit of appearing and disappearing). For this we must thank Drummond and Cauty's championing of Situationist ideas, particularly with regard to their views on copyright. The Situationists were a small but influential group of avant-garde thinkers from the 1950s who thought that culture was forced upon us, and that we needed to take control of it. These ideas sufficiently influenced KLF fans so that, when the internet grew in the years after the band split, they digitised their collections and shared them with the world.

  Thanks to these copyright-ignoring KLF fans, it is possible to download the entire story of The KLF, as it played out in the media, in an afternoon. Then, with every press article, photograph and interview laid out before you, you can then begin to pull a narrative out of all that data. The Situationists would have made a distinction between this mass of cultural data, what they would have called the spectacle of The KLF, and the actual events that caused this spectacle. What we have is not what happened, but it is all we can know about what happened. As the Situationists saw it, it is all that you can ever have to go on.

  This made sense to me because of my experience researching the Timothy Leary biography. For that book, I behaved as you would expect a conscientious biographer to behave, and for a very good reason. I had never written a book before, or indeed any text of length. I didn't know what I was doing, essentially, and wanted to hide that fact from people. As a result I worked diligently and tracked down people who had first-hand knowledge of events, formed a good relationship with his estate and gained access to a number of archives, including Leary's own. I travelled thousands of miles and I got to know as many people as my budget and time frame would allow, because basically that is what you are supposed to do.

  As I progressed with this research, however, I noticed a surprising pattern in the data. Time and again, older books, letters and interviews proved to be far more illuminating than first hand interviews. It soon came apparent that accounts of events changed over time, and that the 'truth' of what happened depended very much on the date of your source. This was clear to me because I had access to Leary's own archive of papers. I could read letters and diary entries written at the time, find later magazine interviews about the same period, and also speak to surviving witnesses thirty or forty years after the event. These differing sources revealed a drift away from the raw chaos of what actually happened into a neater, simpler narrative which didn't always match with the original sources. Even though later sources could offer greater perspective and illuminate things that were not apparent at the time, I adopted a rule of favouring the older sources whenever possible. They captured the flavour of the times, somehow, in a way that the more considered later versions didn't.

  Researchers have studied this drift of memory into error in great detail, and found it to be an undeniable fact of our lives – even if most people refuse to accept it about their own memories. This drift has been found to be so precise and predictable that it can be plotted on a graph, known as the Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting. What happens is that witnesses slowly absorb events into their own narrative, losing the loose ends and unexplained incidents and making sense of what they can with respect to their own lives and prejudices. We all do this. Indeed, if modern neuroscience is correct, it is something that we do far more than we think. The role of the ego, it appears, is less like a President or a Prime Minister deciding on a course of action, and more like their spin doctor, explaining the action afterwards in the best possible light. We rationalise the actions of our unconscious minds and present them as an entirely correct, politically consistent course of action regardless of what it was or how uninvolved we are in the decision.

  All this needs to be considered in any attempt to say why the KLF burnt a million pounds. If the central protagonists were as baffled as everyone else about their behaviour, and if other characters are not even aware that they are in this story, that leaves us with something of a problem. In this instance, asking the protagonists what happened all these years later would not only fail to illuminate those events, it would almost certainly take us decidedly off course. Many journalists have already tried this approach, interviewing Cauty and Drummond at length about the burning, and it hasn’t really got them anywhere.

  What is the alternative? We are left with the spectacle, and it is from within this spectacle that any answer to why they burnt a million pounds must be sought. This approach seems particularly well suited to this story, because taking an encyclopaedic, academic approach to The KLF is not going to reveal the things that we’re searching for. Drummond and Cauty stumbled map-less through their own stories, taking and using whatever they felt useful, so that is the approach we will take as well. We are attempting to find the spirit of those events, and we can only do that by invoking them ourselves.

  Here, then, is a story that the cast were not told they were in.

  Part I: Rabbit Ears

  1: ERIS AND ECHO

  Bill Drummond and Julian Cope drove across Liverpool in an old, battered Transit van. In the back was a stolen mattress which they were taking to Devonshire Road in Toxteth. This was a row of grand Georgian mansion houses that had been built from slave trade wealth, but which had long since decayed into squats and cheap, run down flats. The mattress was for Cope, who was moving into the top floor of the house with his new wife. It was 1976, and Drummond was 24. In the eyes of teenage punks like Cope, he was already old.

  Drummond may have been old, but he had plans. He had previously achieved a touch of local fame with a band called Big in Japan. The band had included Holly Johnson, Pete Burns and Ian Broudie, all of whom would go on, like Drummond, to have more than their fair share of number one records. They had played regularly at Eric's, an influential club on Matthew Street, and they had released one song as part of a split 7-inch single. Ultimately, however, they were always a shambolic affair and they had recently split up, leaving behind a semi-legendary reputation and a string of debts. It struck Drummond that he could raise money to pay these debts by setting up a record label and releasing a Big in Japan EP. It seemed an obvious next step for a man of his age. He still loved music but, being 24, he was clearly too old to make music himself.

  More than anything, Drummond loved 7" vinyl. Singles possessed a magic that indulgent, career-minded albums sorely lacked. They were immediate, cheap and democratic. They could be terrible, of course, but the best ones had power over their owners which no other art form
could compete with. There's nothing vague about the love you feel for a perfect pop song. It does not need explanation or context. And what other art form, in the late twentieth century, could make similar claims?

  If Drummond was going to start a record label then he would do so with the same attitude that musicians should make music with, keeping one eye on personal honesty and the other on the far horizon. His label would only release singles, for a start. And it would only sign bands that possessed an otherworldly something, bands that sent shivers down his spine. It was not necessarily the music that these bands created that he was interested in, for that was out of his hands. It was the idea of the bands that was important. This was why he needed Julian Cope.

  Punk had arrived in Liverpool. It was the sudden return of all the feelings and emotions that hippy culture had tried to repress, a reawakening of all the disrespect and raw frustration that the peace and love generation believed they were above. The punks may have kept the hippies' DIY attitude and their contempt for the older generation, but they were quick to rip down their indulgent fantasies with an ugly blast of blunt realism and angry mockery. They had no intention of putting up with the bullshit any longer. They wanted to do stuff.

  History has adopted a very limited definition of 'punk', one which boils down to a spitting kid with a Mohawk haircut and a safety pin through his nose. Modern punk bands recreate the raw guitar music and confrontational fashion that were created before the original punk spirit faded, but this is to recreate the result of punk rather than punk itself - the symptoms rather than the disease. The attitude and look of The Sex Pistols came to be adopted as the definitive archetype, but away from the Kings Road and outside of London the punk ethic found many different ways to display its contempt for conformist society. In Belfast, for example, the Troubles were at their peak in the late Seventies and early Eighties and slight nuances in speech or dress were enough to indicate sectarian allegiance and, potentially, bring violence or even death. Against this background a woman walked around the city dressed in a bin bag and flippers, carrying a kettle for a handbag. That was pretty damn punk.

  Liverpool, too, had its own local flavour of punk, and it was one with strict, self-policing ideas about what was acceptable. Fierce competition between local egos created an atmosphere where anything gimmicky or fragile was immediately leapt upon and torn to shreds for sport. There was a general contempt for anything from outside the city, with the notable exception of Manchester, with whom Liverpudlians shared an uneasy respect disguised as a bitter rivalry. The Liverpool scene worked on the principal that great things were just around the corner. They were still out of reach, admittedly, but they were definitely getting closer. The big question was not what the future held, but who would be the first to claim it. The Liverpool punks were driven by a fear that their enemies would achieve great things first – or worse, their friends.

  It was into this world that Julian Cope arrived in the summer of '76, a well-spoken student teacher from middle-class Tamworth with an upper-class name and a fondness for wearing a toilet seat around his neck.

  Despite these drawbacks, Drummond recognised two important things about Cope. The first was his obvious talent, raw and untamed as it was. The second, and most important, was that he had put a band together called The Teardrop Explodes and, in Drummond's estimation, this was by far the best band name in Liverpool. True, the Teardrops had not yet recorded, played live, or indeed learnt how to play their instruments, but this was pretty normal for the Liverpool scene. Most bands that Drummond's friends talked about didn't actually exist beyond the idea and a self-printed T-shirt. Cope was ahead of most, as he had already written the best part of three songs and was showing no signs of getting bored and giving up.

  So as the pair drove towards Toxteth, Drummond explained to Cope his aspirations for his label, and why he wanted to put out records by a band called The Teardrop Explodes. Cope was initially wary, conscious of his band's inability to play and of his own current inability to sing. He had, however, once been in a band with Ian McCulloch, a young scouser who definitely could sing, so Cope suggested Drummond release a record by McCulloch's new band. Drummond was initially wary. McCulloch was known to be a fan of David Bowie, which at the time was unforgivable. Still, he asked what the band was called and Cope told him. They were Echo & the Bunnymen.

  Echo & the Bunnymen. The name was not quite as good as The Teardrop Explodes, but it was good. It was mysterious yet, at the same time, strangely confident. Something about the name struck a nerve in Drummond, and after he founded Zoo Records he released singles by both The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen. The singles were "shit", at least in Drummond's opinion, but he loved the bands that made them. Or more accurately, he loved the idea of those bands.

  In the mid-1960s a photocopier was state of the art technology, and having access to one was something of a privilege. The act of using an office photocopier after hours for personal projects, without the boss knowing, was therefore a far riskier and more rebellious act than it is today. This was certainly the case for Lane Caplinger, a secretary for New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

  In 1991 Garrison would be portrayed by Kevin Costner in Oliver Stone's movie JFK, a film based on Garrison's book On The Trail Of The Assassins. But this was 1965, a year before he became involved in Kennedy conspiracies and two years before the Summer of Love thrust hippies, psychedelic drugs and alternative lifestyles in front of an unprepared public. Things had not yet begun to get weird, in other words, and for a respected public figure like Garrison there was little to indicate what surprises the future had in store. He would have been quite unprepared, then, for the book that Caplinger and her friend Greg Hill were producing in his office.

  This book was the original version of what would become known as the Principia Discordia, or How I Found The Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her, by an writer named Malaclypse the Younger. They made a first edition of five copies. At the time it was little more than a joke for some of their friends, but its influence is now scrawled in a haphazard and frequently illegible manner across the history of the late Twentieth Century.

  There was some debate in the 1970s, when the book's influence began to spread, as to just who this 'Malaclypse the Younger' was. Some believed that the book was the work of Timothy Leary. Others claimed it was written by Alan Watts, or by Richard Nixon during "a few moments of lucidity". It is now generally accepted that the book was largely the work of Caplinger's friend Greg Hill, and that some parts were written by Hill's old school friend Kerry Thornley.

  The ideas behind the book can be traced back to the late 1950s, when Hill and Thornley attended California High School in East Whittier, a rural Southern Californian town that was then nestled amongst vast orange groves. In school they were viewed as nerds. Hill was short, squat and introverted, while Thornley was tall, very thin, and bursting with a nervous energy. They both shared an enthusiasm for pranks and strange ideas. They were also both keen on bowling alleys, largely because they served alcohol and remained open until two in the morning.

  It was in one such bowling alley in 1957 that Thornley showed Hill some poetry he was writing. It included a reference to order eventually arising out of chaos. Hill laughed at this. He told Thornley that the idea of 'order' was an illusion. Order is just something that the human mind projects onto reality. What really exists behind this fake veneer is an infinite, churning chaos. For Hill, an atheist, the failure to understand this was the major folly of the organised religions of the world, all of which claim that there is an organising principle at work in the Universe.

  Hill also told Thornley that the Ancient Greeks were an exception to this rule, for they had a Goddess of Chaos. Her name was Eris, which meant 'strife' and which is translated as 'Discordia' in Latin. Clearly, if anyone wanted to worship a deity who was genuinely active in this world, then Eris was the only credible option. All that was needed was for someone to create a religion around Her whi
ch, naturally, they decided to do. They called it Discordianism.

  Discordianism is, at its heart, wilfully contradictory. It claims that chaos, confusion and uncertainty are the true nature of reality. This claim does tend to raise the question as to how Discordianism itself, and all the assumptions that it is based on, can be accepted with any authority. Or to put it another way, if someone tells you that there can be no certainty, then believing in what they've told you becomes a paradox. Hill and Thornley were not put off by such problems. If anything, they enjoyed them. As they developed their ideas over the following years, they found that there were ways around such things, if they only kept their sense of humour about them.

  One such innovation was Hill and Thornley's invention of the concept of 'catmas.' Catmas are similar to dogmas, but they are considerably less rigid. Normal religions consider dogmas to be absolute, unquestionable truths. Discordians consider catmas to be absolute, unquestionable truths, for now at least. This is an approach that echoes the philosophy of the American writer Charles Fort, who in 1932 wrote that, “I conceive of nothing, in religion, science or philosophy, that is more than the proper thing to wear, for a while.” Discordians understand that every catma may one day be discarded on the grounds that it is nonsense. Until that day comes, however, it should be accepted and respected. Some Discordians may even genuinely believe catmas on occasions, should the mood take them, but this is certainly not compulsory.