(2017-08-23) Return Of The KLF: Pop's Greatest Provocateurs Take On A Post-truth World

The return of the KLF: pop's greatest provocateurs take on a post-truth world

The return of the project formed by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in 1987 – which has lain dormant in a self-imposed moratorium of 23 years – returned at 00.23am on the morning of Wednesday 23 August. As Drummond and Cauty drove into a backstreet of Liverpool in an ice-cream van to begin three days of events, their first new work – a trilogy of dystopian fiction, an “end of days story”, called 2023: A Trilogy – simultaneously dropped online.

So this book – and the three days of accompanying events the KLF have planned in Liverpool, kicking off today – comes right on cue: a sharp reminder that all the pomp and circumstance of the music industry, all the greed of consumer culture and the occult power of finance that the KLF flew in the face of two decades ago, has only continued to grow and mutate in their absence.

Few months ago...

Return of the KLF: ‘They were agents of chaos. Now the world they anticipated is here’

The rave scene was starting to kick off.

louder, larger, more confident versions that The KLF would later call “stadium house”.

“It was like a music factory,” says Thorpe. “They’d have three studios going at once and they would let you get on and do whatever you wanted

By the end of 1991, the so-called Stadium House trilogy had made the KLF into the world’s biggest-selling singles act

“Once they became that successful, the industry embraced them and started to consume them.” Nothing was to say more about the KLF’s relationship with the music business than their manner of leaving it.

This final KLF single coincided with darker times for the group, especially for Drummond

They couldn’t face becoming a self-parody.

finally machine-gunning the audience with blanks