The KLF: Chaos, magic and the band who burned £1M
johnhiggs.com
johnhiggs.com
One thing that the media have a tough time recognizing is the fact that Bill and Jimmy are legit experimental artists, and still love making art of all kinds. And they also happened to have some amazing musical talent and experience (Jimmy: The Orb; Bill: Big In Japan and early manager of Echo and the Bunnymen).
So, they decided to take their talents into areas where few experimental artists had ever gone before, taking over the pop charts ... and then proceeded to do what experimental artists are wont to do in such a situation.
They gave a huge middle finger to the industry, by barnstorming the big UK music industry award ceremony (the '92 Brit Awards), playing a death metal version of one of their dance hits while Bill fired blanks from a machine gun over the heads of the crowd. Later in the evening they dumped a dead sheep outside one of the after-parties, and shortly afterwards deleted their entire back catalogue.
They proceeded to do lots of other experimental stuff, ranging from writing some excellent books (I recommend Bill's "45") to activities such as Jimmy's model English village a few years back.
And the music, 30+ years later, is still fantastic! Not just the pop hits. Listen to The White Room. Dig up the club singles and experiments like the Abba and Whitney projects and It's Grim Up North.
Yet after all that, what does the media remember them for? More often than not, it's the one-off act of Burning a Million Quid in 1994. Their ground-breaking music, the books, the anti-establishment statements and art ... it's almost an afterthought.
It's like releasing an otherwise interesting book about Ozzy Osbourne - a seminal figure in the history of heavy metal with an unusual groundbreaking role in reality TV - and positioning it around a single sensational incident from 1982, "Crazy Train: Ozzy Osbourne, the Man Who Bit The Head Off A Bat"
The pain of not having enough is a fundamental human experience, and to see someone who had more than most will ever see in their lifetime literally burn it away hurts. I thought it was deeply selfish stunt then, and still do now. They earned that black check on their reputation by their own actions.
I'm not sure that's true.
> I thought it was deeply selfish stunt then, and still do now.
There are so many more selfish decisions made every single day that have dramatically greater negative impact on people.
I don’t resent them for burning their money. They could have bought toys, instead they made a statement.
We live in a world where many of us (myself included) have to live with the pain of not having enough. I’m reminded of that every day. I wonder why we live in such a world. Do you think it has anything to do with why they burned a million quid?
Absolutely not. It was all tied up with their distaste for the art industry, not inequality. The burning was the last attempt to create art with the money (after Nailed to the Wall, the failed Money: A Major Body of Cash exhibition, and the K Foundation art award).
What does that mean? I mean really mean?
Follow-up question: did they achieve anything .. other than (even more) notoriety?
In this case, the ramifications of the public questioning and examining the fundamentals of ownership, the distribution of wealth and its potential injustices etc - are difficult to quantify, but can be assumed to be valuable.
Anything controversial by nature is also likely an under-examined yet extremely important issue. It's controversial partly because it's not been sufficiently examined or discussed to the point of understanding or resolution.
"The public"? Which public? No politican from Kier Starmer rightwards is seriously doing anything of the sort.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/government-breakfast-b...
I hope that we all are able to be that creative - that we achieve something that humankind speaks of 30 years later.
Someone in this thread was upset that the artists burned more money than the average person sees in their lifetime. Another commenter questioned why this would be more unfair than all the “regular rich” who we know spend many times that amount of money on a yacht or another property that they don’t need.
Why are there two moral categories for wealth? Someone who is understood to not have money by default — like an artist — and then gets a sudden windfall is expected to use it responsibly. But someone who is simply rich has no such obligations and doesn’t answer to society. And yet the former category is a rounding error but the latter control the majority of resources on this planet.
I'm sure we can all think of a few counter-examples to that one!
Rihanna: net worth: ~ $1.4 billion Paul McCartney: net worth: ~ $1.2 billion Bono: net worth: ~ $700 million
> then gets a sudden windfall is expected to use it responsibly
"Expected" - by whom?
I may be just a bit jaded, but we should perhaps consider the hypothesis that for very successful artists it's a simple commercial decision to signal you're acting responsibly with your wealth, otherwise your much, much less wealthy customers who are buying your output might start to notice, disapprove, and ultimately stop buying your output. One could call this "fiduciary duty to oneself", really.
Here I'm thinking of young Johnny Depp or Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, to give just three examples.
There are artists who do art for arts sake and not with the aim of getting wealthy. When these artists do have success, they can potentially become overwhelmed.
What does anything "really" mean? We are all going to die anyway.
Keeping it in a less grand perspective, it means they made some people think and discuss the incident, debate the role of money and how we treat it, and made a fine punk gesture in the process...
It might even spoke to some people that money is not some God we should workship, and that being irreverant and having fun might be worth more!
All hail Eros
So while people do what they want with their money, actually burning it like is rightly seen as a dick move by most people. It is also illegal in many countries.
Can an economist tell me please?
The result is intended to be a rise in price, benefiting all holders. It can be uncertain to assess whether a resultant rise in price is actually due to a coin burn, but given a coins supply is commonly used as a valuer, it's plausible.
But if you go deeper in the meaning of money, it's even better: when you receive money, what you actually receive is an IOU for a good or a service. E.g. when you receive $40 for fixing a computer, it means the society owes you $40 that you can claim at any time. Burning the $40 means that you fixed the computer for free, and that you don't want anything in return, and at the same time nobody can claim the $40 in your name (i.e. you didn't give the money away).
The "you should buy anything to move the economy" is a well known economic fallacy.
I'm not 100% comfortable with it, but MrBeast is probably the Musk of this potential. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ2ifmkGGus
Not sure if this helps you, but the money supply changes all the time. The government creates and destroys money as needed and nobody ever says boo. What these folks did made all the other money in circulation worth slightly more, so nothing was actually lost in the way that would have been had they, say, bought houses and burned them down.
I hate this argument, because it's worse than vacuous: It makes out that art is about as meaningful as a gunshot in a crowded room. Is that art? It'll damn well get a reaction, especially from the person who was just shot. Shouldn't we demand more from art? Like actual meaning and maybe, just maybe, a positive impact on the world?
Or should the next art piece be a car bomb in front of the Louvre?
Yes, burning a million pounds is comparable to a gunshot because a million pounds could save a life, so destroying a million pounds might well have ended one, in terms of opportunity cost. And no, you don't get to handwave that away by pointing to other people doing things, any more than a serial killer gets to exculpate themself by pointing to tobacconists. People do things with consequences, and then have to live with those consequences, and the members of the KLF are getting off easy.
I'm too young to have heard about the KLF when they did it. But learning about it later - the emotional response it triggers, the questions it poses about the nature of money, about personal responsibility to society, and the extent to which it reveals the hypocrisy of people who are outraged - I think it's an incredibly powerful act. Certainly far more powerful than a random shooting.
Now if someone is uncomfortable or doesn't understand this message then yes it was just a gunshot.
Chris Burden thought so!
I suspect a lot of people are offended that in a supposedly free capitalist culture they had - and presumably still have - the freedom to subvert the usual rules.
In capitalism artists are either supposed to be poor and struggling, or fragile gilded celebrities cocooned in enviable opulence. Both options are defined by money.
It's a shock to the system for a successful artist to act with self-determination and to dramatise control over capital instead of being controlled by it.
What about the other hundreds of thousands of rich wasting their millions? Why are these guys the target of your anger now, and not the one driving a Bentley you just passed around the corner?
How different is spending $1m vs burning $1m for art? Why aren’t all museums closed and the proceeds given to charity? By the same measure of yours, The Louvre could save 35000 people.
And by the way, us having this discussion here in 2023 is the value/impact of their art.
Art - you either get it, or it gets to you
The lifesaving potential of Great Britain was exactly the same before and after they burnt the money. Same number of hospitals and doctors. Same amount of food and housing. Etc, etc.
The money supply of Great Britain was recently 3,598,911 million pounds down from around 3,700,000 million pounds, [1] a difference 100,000 times as great as what the KLF did. Are you 100,000x as outraged because of that change in the money supply? Are you perhaps 3.6 million times as outraged because all that money isn't being used to save lives?
I'm guessing not. You might think about why you so intensely blame them and not all the other people who could be spending their money more in line with your values.
[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-kingdom/money-supply-m3
Yes, but the money was out of the hands of someone who could have used it to leverage that potential for themselves.
And don't just limit it to the UK, with its NHS: The KLF could have donated it overseas.
Even if we look only at "liquid values under control of a single person", this was a tiny, tiny fraction of the UK's stock of money. I can't find M3 numbers for back then, but currently this would be 0.0000027% of money. It would be hard to argue that this was the worst spent million, or even in the bottom decile.
I'd say what they got for it was a lot of people questioning and discussing the value and purpose of money. For decades! Given that so much of our culture is supportive of acquisition regardless of harm, it could be argued that a million pounds of anti-greed propaganda was one of the most socially positive things they could have done with it.
And even if we don't go that far, even if we discount the social value of art to 0, they still provided a hell of a lot of public entertainment for a million pounds. The latest Rolling Stones tour costs about 100m pounds. Major blockbusters cost 100-300m pounds each. Many indie films will cost more than 1m GBP. Compared with that, this looks like excellent value for money, and here nobody had to buy a ticket.
So I think at the very least there are much worse uses of money to be mad about. But if you'd still prefer this one, I imagine they'd be fine with that. Stoking outrage was clearly one of the intended goals of the project, and they wouldn't have achieved their goals without it.
I think their bad reputation and fade into obscurity is a consequence of being so dismissive and even offensive to anyone (especially media, of course) who wanted to make celebrity shows of them. It's great for them to perform their art, and it's great (or at least natural) for media to decide they don't bring value to them.
If they had spent it on a yacht would that be better? It represents an exchange of money for an object, and I suspect you don't regularly get hurt by the fact that people buy largely pointless status symbols. But in some ways it amounts to the same thing.
(Actually I'd argue that the resources and fossil-fuels involved in manufacturing a largely pointless object such as a yacht is less than the burning of the money. And yet, which hurts more?)
I heard a story that a young Tony Blair and some of his friends burned a 50 pound note in front of a destitute homeless person. Are the KLF worse for burning their larger sum of money as an act of rebellion against a corrupt self-serving industry? Or is it Tony Blair who is worse for sadistically showing a little hope to a desperate person and then snatching it away?
For me, the answer is that, ultimately, everyone is responsible for the plight of anyone else. Society, run by The State — an entity whose powers including being able to raise revenue, make decisions, and then spend it to fix things. Demand more from the state (and every citizen who can vote — Society and State go hand in hand) if you haven’t given up hope that we can do better.
Another alternative is we end up with Chan/Zuckerberg deciding who gets a hospital and who does not, Mackenzie Scott deciding which cities get schools and which do not, and Bill and Melinda Gates deciding which countries get more nurses and which do not.
The real world is close to this. The bill gates foundation trying to patent seeds, controlling food supplies. The billionaire lobby groups controlling puppet politicians. So it’s not an alternative from my understanding. It is the current state of affairs.
Still, nobody bats an eye when some other celebrity or CEO or socialite throws away 1 million just for a single wedding or even a birthday party, or 10 million to have a large swimming pool. Which happens like every single day. $1m is probably what some Wall Street guys spend on coke for their guests per year those days.
At least these guys earned it through their artwork, and never stole it from anybody, or created huge machines of surveillance and brain-washing like Facebook, or by treating people like disposable shit - like tech bros in companies like Uber.
I'd rather have a role model burning money than cherishing it.
What they don't do is set it on fire, thereby depriving others of it permanently.
If burning money is "depriving others of it permanently", then when banks issue currency (e.g. quantitative easing), they are supplying money to others permanently. Logically, it would seem that if you are against the destruction of currency, then you should be a proponent of banks creating as much currency as possible. Obviously it's not that simple and currency is not the same as 'value', so it's overly simplistic to think purely in terms of creation/destruction.
You could argue that they theoretically increased the value of everyone else's money but the actual amount is so infinitesimal it would just add insult to injury. The vast majority of the money in existence is just numbers in bank databases, actual cash is a small fraction and burning an even smaller fraction of that does absolutely nothing beneficial to anyone.
If there was a bank that just continually created new money and gave debt to everyone, then do you believe that they are creating value and presumably a society could exist purely from the value created by these numbers?
Rich people stock way more money (percentage-wise) out of circulation (like in real estate property, tax havens, jewlery, and so on) than working and middle class people - which spend almost all the money they make. For many rich what they actually spend and re-circulate, is a tiny slither of their income (much less their overall wealth).
Not to mention the externalities destroying the environment and societal value from spending money in certain ways (from flying across the world in your private jet, to throwing money at taking people out of actual productive work to cater to your BS fancies like building you an olympic sized pool and organizing BS parties for your friends, to influencing politics and law with your money outside of the democratic process).
>What they don't do is set it on fire, thereby depriving others of it permanently.
Nothing in that case was "deprived from others permanently". Those KLF guys still bought things they needed, and paid for them - just with other money.
They didn't destoy actual value or stole anything. What they did is basically the same as if they just didn't spend their money (and kept it in a safe or under the matress).
Not to mention they've helped with lowering inflation!
To me, they where post-acid house, but still connected to the fun and experimentation that had going for it. A bit like De La Soul they where of themselves.
Always wondered if they inspired Daft Punk who had a similar vibe.
Their early minimal techno stuff isn't terribly imaginative and their pop/disco/funk stuff has always felt safe, commercial and boring to me. The only musical similarity is "use samples". I don't think they've ever ruffled someone's jimmies or done anything musically daring. They appear in Gap adverts whereas the KLF would be more likely to firebomb a Gap store.
But they are mostly safe music, never have been daring (and born to wealth to begin with, so their personal journey and connection to the world is less real and gritty). They're basically producers of polished electronic hits -- which is 1/10 of what makes KLF and their pre- and post- adventures interesting!
In fact I would go so far to say if you had worked with them you are going to find the book really interesting.
More recently I really started listening to the album more. "Build a fire" has grown on me.
Such a great album. Still sounds good today...was amazing then.
“3 a.m. Eternal” sounds huge, and doesn’t inflict pain when turned up LOUD.
I haven’t listened to it on streaming services, but most of their catalogs have been ruined by “remastering;” AKA crushing them into a wall of noise with dynamic compression to make them “louder.” It’s despicable.
They relented recently after 23 yesrs but the copyright issue mentioned remains so for example their "Chill Out" album was officially re-released by them as "Come Down Dawn" but the Elvis, Fleetwood Mac and Acker Bilk samples got removed as part of that.
Still available on Youtube via unofficial channels though.
Economics and the $1trillion note come to mind.
I think I've read comments that the K foundation people can understand that some poor scots don't appreciate what they did as a statement facing systemic poverty in Scotland.
Performance art almost always has to lie in the margins. The film isn't art, it documents a performance. The music is art, even if they deleted the catalogue. Deleting the catalogue was performative, but personally I don't think it's art.
I get the sentiment of the poster elsewhere here who points out it's boring to only talk about the money fire and Ozzie's bat, or the Gallagher brothers spitting contests or Dylan's Albert hall gig or a million other lacunae, rather than the art. So I'll stop.
Like the Panther Moderns in Neuromancer, he has elevated culture jamming and subversion to a literal art.
Who else could make some of the best electronic music of the post-Acid house era, as well as a full guide of the formula they used for the lowest effort radio hit imaginable ((Doctorin the TARDIS")
Embrace the contradictions.
If you listen to it without prior knowledge it probably sounds like something Douglas Adams made up, but it's all basically true:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06y18n2
> How To Burn a Million Quid lays the story bare. A comic, surreal and fast moving adventure that sees Bill and Jimmy rise to the very top of the music industry, becoming the biggest selling music act in the UK before crashing out of the industry in spectacular fashion and heading toward the art world with the intention of creating similar mayhem. Inspired by a madcap theatrical genius and a cult novel, they blaze a trail that takes them to Sweden, the North Pole and the Sierra Nevada, via Northampton, before arriving finally on the Isle of Jura, with two suitcases containing a million quid.
Drugs, probably.
Firestarter is an amazing track when it comes on at 3am and you've been dancing for hours. In the cold light of day, not so much.
EDM of that era was very much designed to be experienced with MDMA and the KLF in particular really needed a stadium full of people in a similar state to fully appreciate them.
All the extra Discordian stuff was just icing. Hail Eris!
It's when the Prodigy had become mainstream and this was was dance/indie-rock crossover type track that they used to headline Glastonbury the following year. Pre-teens loved it - energetic and edgy... but really it wasn't subversive, just broadly available pop music that hit the top of the charts. If I went to a mid-90s techno or hard house event and they played this, I would have been as disappointed as if they played 2 Unlimited. Despite this, I still liked and went to Prodigy concerts and saw them at festivals.
I was, and looking back on it, its very nostalgic but some of the music hasn't aged well such as some KLF tracks. Early Liam Howlett (The Prodigy) tracks I must admit I find interesting just because of all the sources sampled and how it was worked with the hardware available at the time with a raw energy that I remember when I was 17/18
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wngp8zou_M
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have left the building.
I first read it when I was (quite by chance) 33 and 1/3rd, the same age Drummond was when he decided to form the KLF. This was a direct inspiration to me to take creative risks, say yes to things, cause mischief and generally have fun.
I’d also recommend Higgs’ latest book, looking at the last century through the prism of The Beatles and James Bond.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/love-and-let-die-the-beatles-ja...
https://www.mumufication.com/get-mumufication/
Much more interesting than burning a million quid. Wonder if they're still following through with it.