KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money Read online

  For one example, consider the Discordian catma regarding food. Most religions include strict dietary rules. Jews are forbidden to eat pork. Catholics should fast from meat on Fridays. Certain sects of Buddhists and Sikhs are vegetarian and Hindus cannot eat any part of a cow. In the same spirit, Discordians are forbidden from eating hot dog buns.

  There is a 'reason' for this catma. It originates in a story in which Zeus held a party for the Gods but did not invite Eris on the grounds that she tended to cause trouble. Thus Eris experienced what Discordians refer to as the 'original snub' and was reduced to eating a frankfurter sausage by herself sitting alone outside the party. Nobody believes a word of this, of course, yet Discordians have respected the catma of the forbidden hot dog buns for over forty years. They don't respect it particularly thoroughly, admittedly, and indeed you'd be hard pressed to find a Discordian who has never eaten a hot dog bun. Nevertheless, at Discordian events and special occasions, people still make a show of eating frankfurters with no buns. The reason for this is that the catma, despite being nonsense, is useful. It is a terrific satire against the forbidden food dogmas of established religions. For those who've found it funny, it becomes that much harder to take seriously any claims about food being unclean, kosher or halal. It helps make any religious leader who expresses belief in similar dietary rules appear ludicrous, and this makes any other dogma that they may preach appears equally suspect. Should Discordians ever find a better catma to ridicule religious dietary dogma, then the hot dog rule will no doubt be dropped without ceremony. But until that day, Discordians keep the 'no hot dog buns' catma – not because it is true, but because it is powerful.

  Slowly Hill and Thornley recruited a few like-minded friends into their new religion. Their aim was to undermine existing belief systems by spreading confusion and disinformation with as much humour as possible. To this end they each adopted a host of new names under which their Discordian endeavours were credited. Hill became known varyingly as Malaclypse the Younger, Rev. Dr. Occupant, Mad Malik, Ignotum P. Ignotious or Professor Iggy. Thornley became Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst, Rev. Jesse Sump, Ho Chi Zen or the Bull Goose of Limbo. Many different Discordian chapters were founded. The majority of these contained only one member, and some contained none. Discordians then wrote essays and letters under these aliases, only to then follow them with completely contradictory essays and letters under a different alias. Gradually this process spread and, by the time it reached its height in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it had become known as Operation Mindfuck. The aim of Operation Mindfuck was to lead people into such a heightened state of bewilderment and confusion that their rigid beliefs would shatter and be replaced by some form of enlightenment.

  That was the aim, anyway. In practice it rarely worked out so well, with those heavily absorbed in Discordianism proving more likely to succumb to paranoid schizophrenia than to any form of enlightened bliss. Still, they meant well.

  Discordianism was a joke, of course, at least to start with. Discordianism is often described as being either an elaborate satire disguised as a religion or an elaborate religion disguised as a satire, a description which wrongly assumes that it cannot be both at the same time. The whole concept was a satire or, at most, a way to deal with nihilism by wrapping it up with a goddess and a sense of humour. As events unfurled, however, those at the heart of Discordianism stopped making this distinction. As Discordianism started to take on a life of its own, it became harder and harder to claim that what was going on was 'just' a joke.

  Eris, or rather the concept of Chaos, had a busy second half of the twentieth century. Clearly, she was making up for lost time. The concept of chaos had not been recognised academically since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The closest concept you could find in engineering or physics literature was turbulence, and this was only described as something to be avoided.

  During the 1970s, however, the concept became embraced in places as diverse as university maths departments and occult sub-cultures (or perhaps those places aren't so diverse after all, for university maths departments and occult sub-cultures in the 1970s were both places where young men took lots of LSD). Regardless, whole new fields such as chaos maths and chaos magic sprang up. The relationship between chaos and order was being modelled mathematically, and the results were surprising. In what was thought to be order, people found chaos, yet when they then looked into chaos they found order. Phrases like 'the Butterfly effect,' became universally known, if perhaps not universally understood. Hill and Thornley were only joking when they talked of helping chaos manifest in the modern world, but that is precisely what happened.

  The unthinkable started to happen: music journalists from London actually travelled to Liverpool to write about Liverpool bands. They had to, for something was definitely happening - just as those in the Liverpool scene always knew it would. Every one of the early singles from Echo & the Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes which Drummond released were hailed as the 'single of the week' by the influential British music weekly the NME.

  Those journalists wanted to know what the name 'Echo & the Bunnymen' meant. It didn't actually mean anything. Cope had gone against the tide of the usual, 'blunt' punk band names when he came up with The Teardrop Explodes and now other Liverpudlian bands were creating similarly elaborate and psychedelic-sounding names in an effort to compete. Echo & the Bunnymen was one of the better attempts, while names such as Frankie Goes To Hollywood or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were perhaps less impressive. Echo & the Bunnymen was just one of handful of names suggested by a friend of the band known as Smelly Elly, and was adopted on the grounds that it was the best suggestion that they had. The band wanted a better story than this for journalists, however, so they claimed that Echo was their drum machine, and that they were Bunnymen in a similar way that Playboy models were Bunnygirls.

  The spreading of this story did not please Bill Drummond. He had his own personal meaning for the name, and he far preferred his version. It was triggered by the sleeve of their first single, Pictures On My Wall, which featured a scratchy silhouetted drawing of a strange powerful beast. The two shapes emerging from the top of its head would perhaps normally be interpreted as horns, but in the context of the band could be considered to be rabbit ears. But what a rabbit! This strange beast was sinister and powerful, and Drummond intuitively knew that this creature, whatever it was, was Echo. The Bunnymen, therefore, were his followers.

  At the time Drummond liked to spend hours in the Central Library in the centre of Liverpool, searching through the shelves marked Religion, Myth and Tribal. As he wrote in 1998, "I was on the hunt for real or even imagined information on who this weird Echo character was." He quickly discounted a Greek mountain Nymph and lover of Pan who was called Echo. That story did not connect with him in any way. But there were stories that did make an impression, stories of a mythical trickster being who could take the shape of a rabbit. These stories came from native people from the far north, from Siberia, North Canada and Scandinavia. Drummond began merging these separate tales in his head, creating a clearer image of this elemental spirit from dark, cold landscapes.

  He didn't tell anyone this, of course. That would be crazy.

  So when the band gave the press their version of the story, Drummond held his tongue. "I had to stop myself from butting in and saying, 'No no, 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.' But I didn't."

  In 1980 Echo & the Bunnymen released their first album, Crocodiles. Drummond had licensed the album to Warners, thus keeping Zoo pure and free from such self-indulgent projects as albums. But it still felt like a compromise. McCulloch and the band clearly had very different dreams to Drummond. They wanted to make albums, tour the world and become hugely rich and successful. As their manager, Drummond had to accept this, but he was still of the imp
ression that a real band should just make a few perfect singles and then split up.

  The album sleeve was lying on the floor of his office when Drummond glanced at it, its image foreshortened by the angle. The cover photo showed the band in a forest at night, lit by strong red and yellow light. In the centre of the frame bassist Les Pattinson sat leaning against an ash tree which, strangely, had two primary trunks which gracefully curved around each other.

  Then suddenly – the picture changed.

  Red and evil, a huge rabbit's head stared at Drummond, solid and unblinking. Instantly he knew who he was looking at. It was Echo.

  And then, in a blink, the band photo returned. Picking up the sleeve, Drummond realised that it contained an optical illusion. The tree trunks looked like the head and ears of a rabbit, one that appeared evil thanks to the downward angle of its eye, the sharp elongated point to its face and the red light on the tree. Once he had seen it, it seemed incredible that no-one had never noticed it before.

  This was weird. Echo was supposed to be an idle fantasy of Drummond's, a strange personal thought which he kept to himself. It was not supposed to appear out in the world, eyeing him coldly from an album sleeve. He spoke to the photographer to determine whether it had been done deliberately, and learnt that it had not. The final cover photograph had been one that no-one had wanted, but which had eventually been accepted as a compromise. No-one had seen the rabbit head in the image before Drummond pointed it out.

  He was discreet when he spoke to the photographer, of course. He knew that the idea of Echo was a personal fantasy from his inner life, an idea that could survive in his mind but not withstand the scrutiny of others. But the appearance of the rabbit in the world outside him had strengthened the idea, giving it the potential to grow and evolve and become more elaborate and intricate. Such constructions grow secretly in many minds, acknowledged and understood only by their creators. Their imaginary nature, however, does not mean that they are unable to affect the world at large.

  2: ILLUMINATIONS & ILLUMINATUS

  The psychologist Carl Jung credited a particular dream as being a turning point in his life, one which convinced him to embark on the study of synchronicity and the subconscious. He wrote about this dream in his book Memories Dreams & Reflections. In due course the Liverpudlian poet Peter O'Hallighan read about the dream in that book, and came to view it with equal significance.

  In his dream, Jung found himself "in a dark, sooty city. It was night, and winter, and dark, and raining. I was in Liverpool. With a number of Swiss - say half a dozen - I walked through the dark streets."

  Like many Scousers, O'Hallighan's home city was a significant part of his personal identity, so Jung's mention of Liverpool immediately grabbed him. In later years, he researched Jung's life in an effort to discover if there was a link that explained the setting of Liverpool in this dream. But he did not find any. Jung had never been to Liverpool and didn't have any obvious connection to the place.

  The dream continued. "It reminded me of Basel, where the market is down below and you go up through the Tottengässchen (Alley of the Dead), which leads to a plateau above and so to the Petersplatz and the Peterskirche." The 'Peter' in these street names gave Peter O'Hallighan a personal connection to the dream. "When we reached the plateau, we found a broad square, dimly illuminated by street lights, into which many streets converged. The various quarters of the city were arranged radially around the square." O'Hallighan later searched Liverpool for the best candidate for such a place, and came to believe that Jung referred to the square at the end of Matthew Street. This was an area that then consisted of old warehouses between the centre of the city and the waterfront. This was also the exact same place where O'Hallighan had recently leased a building. Some years after Jung's dream one of these warehouses would become a club called The Cavern, from where the Beatles would emerge to change the world.

  Jung continued. "In the centre was a round pool, and in the middle of it, a small island. While everything around was obscured by rain, fog, smoke and dimly lit darkness, the little island blazed with sunlight. On it stood a single tree, a magnolia, in a sea of reddish blossoms. It was as though the tree stood in the sunlight and was, at the same time, the source of light. My companions commented on the abominable weather, and obviously did not see the tree. They spoke of another Swiss who was living in Liverpool, and expressed surprise that he should have settled here. I was carried away by the beauty of the tree and the sunlit island, and thought, ‘I know very well why he has settled here.’ Then I awoke."

  Jung felt that his subconscious had showed him something of profound importance. "Everything was extremely unpleasant, black and opaque - just as I felt then", he wrote. "But I had had a vision of unearthly beauty, and that was why I was able to live at all." Jung had found, bubbling up from his subconscious, an image of illumination that inspired him. It was no more than a dream image, but it was more powerful and had a greater impact on him than things which physically exist.

  Jung's dream also had a profound effect on O'Hallighan, because he too had had a dream. He had dreamt that he saw a spring bubbling forth from a cast-iron drain cover in the middle of the road where Matthew Street, Button Street and others converge. He came down to Matthew Street the next day and sure enough, there was a manhole cover where he had dreamt one. He also saw that one remaining warehouse had a 'To Let' sign outside. He had then gone to the bank, got a loan and leased the building. He turned the downstairs into a market, and opened a café above it. The market became known as Aunt Twackies, a pun on the Scouse mispronunciation of 'antiques' as 'an teek wees'. He would later discover that there was an ancient spring underneath the building, which fed into an old brick-built reservoir.

  When he later read of Jung's dream, he was struck by the way that Jung seemed to have dreamt of the exact same location, and that he too had linked it to some elemental source of life. This seemed deeply significant to O'Hallighan. He arranged for a bust of Jung to be placed in an alcove in the outside wall.

  The market began to attract members of the local music scene due to its proximity to Probe Records and Eric's nightclub, and because they could spend a day talking and planning in the café for the price of a cup of tea. Bill Drummond, then 23, was one of many who would spend hours in the place. Drummond was working as a set builder at the Everyman theatre. He had returned to Liverpool, where he had attended college, after a short period working on trawler boats in his native Scotland. One day he wandered in and found O'Hallighan hammering a nail into a piece of wood. O'Hallighan told him that he was planning to open what he called the 'Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun'. He also told him about Jung's dream. "I didn't really understand what O'Hallighan was on about," Drummond recalled later, "but it resonated and I remembered it almost word for word. Also, he didn't look like a hippy, more a scouse Beat, so he was okay with my prejudices at the time."

  The Liverpool School of Language, Music, Dream and Pun was planning on staging plays. O'Hallighan had persuaded the actor and director Ken Campbell to base his next project there. This was quite a coup, as Campbell's previous touring show, The Ken Campbell Roadshow, had been something of a success. It had featured Campbell, together with a troop of actors including Bob Hoskins and Sylvester McCoy, dramatising weird and wonderful 'friend of a friend' stories. The reason why O'Hallighan wanted to stage plays was, naturally enough, another one of his dreams. This dream had featured a building with a raging fire upstairs and a play being performed in a theatre in the basement. There had been a copy of Playboy magazine on a seat in the theatre. This didn't immediately make a great deal of sense, but in the world of the dream it was in some way significant.

  The editors of the Playboy 'forum' letters pages during the mid-to-late Sixties were Robert Anton Wilson and Bob Shea. In many ways their jobs were not that different to most office jobs, except that the secretaries tended to be prettier and every week or so they'd be invited up to Hugh Hefner's mansion to “watch mo
vies and stuff”.

  A lot of the readers' letters they received, though, were decidedly odd.

  In part this was because some of these were from the small, initial group of Discordians. The two Bobs found themselves in frequent letter communication with Kerry Thornley. They soon became committed Discordians themselves, with Wilson adopting the Discordian name Mordecai the Foul and Shea calling himself Josh the Dill. It was not long before the Playboy forum took on, under these two editors, a decidedly weird turn. Letters were printed that proclaimed deeply complicated and contradictory conspiracy theories, not because the writers believed what they were claiming, but because they wanted to mess with the heads of the people who read Playboy.

  Context is important here. Those letters appeared considerably more surreal simply because they were part of the Playboy letters page. To use the April 1969 edition as an example, there was the usual letters which begin “After an hour or so of heavy petting, I often find myself in substantial pain in the area of my testicle and lower abdomen” and “The girl who lives across the street from me has been my friend since childhood. Now that we’ve both reached maturity, I see our relationship in a new light.” These letters are then followed by one that starts, “I recently heard an old man of right-wing views – a friend of my grandparents’ – assert that the current wave of assassinations in America is the work of a secret society called the Illuminati. He said that the Illuminati have existed throughout history, own the international banking cartels, have all been 32-degree masons and were known to Ian Fleming, who portrayed them as SPECTRE in his James Bond books – for which the Illuminati did away with Mr. Fleming.” This was then followed by a lengthy reply, detailing the history of the 11th Century Islamic Hashshasin sect and pointing out that Ian Fleming died of natural causes.