(2022-04-08) Prison Lawsuits And A Glovebox Of Fake Cash The Film The KLF Didnt Want You To See

Prison, lawsuits and a glovebox of fake cash: the film the KLF didn’t want you to see. In 2009 my long suffering producer Ian Neil sent me a text: “You should really make a film about the KLF.”

the band had told everyone else to piss off. However, I had just made a documentary, Starsuckers – in which we sold fake stories to the tabloids – that was partly inspired by the KLF’s own press-baiting stunts. This coincidence got me a sit down with Bill and Jimmy... They nodded sagely, and very politely told me to piss off.

It was my cameraman Chris Smith who made the mistake of drunkenly asking: “Well, what would the KLF do?” The answer was suddenly obvious: they’d stuff the rules and get on with it. Which is exactly what we did.

To make Who Killed the KLF? we started by reconstructing the band’s more dramatic gestures, and kicked off with the big one: Bill and Jimmy igniting £1m cash on the remote Scottish island of Jura.

Bill and Jimmy always brought witnesses on their original adventures, who were only too happy to give us first-hand testimony

They may have written a step-by-step guide to having a No 1 hit, but the story of the KLF is a reminder that you rarely make anything interesting by doing things the right way. Our anarchic approach was rewarded when a contributor arrived with a couple of dusty audio cassettes, that had sat in his loft for years, containing old interviews.

Everything was going swimmingly until I was given a five-year prison sentence for tax fraud in 2016. I had used a dodgy tax scheme to fund Starsuckers, and HMRC prosecuted everyone involved.

But there was one central character missing. The KLF drove everywhere in a battered American police car, Ford Timelord, that featured in all their music videos, and even appeared on BBC Breakfast. The original car was long destroyed by Jimmy, but I found an ardent fan who had lovingly recreated this legendary vehicle, right down to the seat fabric and tax disc

A more difficult obstacle was how to deal with the music. My lawyer Simon Goldberg came to the rescue, and said that as long as we were critiquing the music, we could make use of a copyright exclusion called “fair dealing” (fair use)

But the KLF were not going to stop being unpredictable. Despite vowing to never reissue their music again, the band released their biggest hits on Spotify on 1 January 2021

Shortly afterwards, we were sent a string of legal threats from the duo’s publisher, Warner Chappell, accusing us of copyright infringement. Apparently they neither appreciated the irony that an underlying meaning of KLF is Kopyright Liberation Front nor that the very music they were harrumphing about was riddled with uncleared samples.

In the end, they were extremely kind and welcoming. “We’ve seen it,” Bill grinned.

ACCEPTING THE CONTRADICTIONS: A REVIEW OF WHO KILLED THE KLF?

In 2010, Bill Drummond was closing The Foundry, re-releasing How To Be An Artist as $20,000 and ending No Music Day.

In 2010, John Higgs was half way between his Timothy Leary book and his KLF one.

In 2010, Alan Moore was half way through writing Jerusalem and probably hadn’t got to the bit about money, fire and Cauty & Drummond.

In 2010, film maker Chris Atkins had started work on a film about The KLF. The Greatest Story Never Told.

On initial viewing, Who Killed The KLF? could have been made in 2010

the good news is that WKTK has achieved everything it set out to do, in telling the story of the band that deliberately wrote themselves out of the history books

What was so brilliant about the John Higgs book and Bill’s own 45, was that it wasn’t really about The KLF. It was about everything in the iceberg that was submerged and out of the public domain.

For every devotee of The JAMs post-music adventures there are 23 others that just enjoyed the tunes and this documentary manages to please everyone

WKTK has sourced some incredible archive footage and skilfully augmented it with animations

Sounds/NME journalist (and inventor of lad culture via his Loaded magazine), James Brown, appears to still be heavily involved in Operation Mindfuck, partly because he confesses to making up an awful lot of JAMs stories in the early days and partly because his memory of the 90s seems to have been left there. He is the one unreliable narrator of the film, and his lack of a grasp of what could be called facts let’s things down a little, which is a shame as he was along for the ride on many of those early adventures in 87/88.

Some of the most revealing parts of the film are Jimmy’s thoughts on what drove the them, with Cauty and Drummond effectively managing their alter-egos, King Boy D and Rockman Rock with an almost schizophrenic detachment

There are a lot of comparisons that can be made with The Great Rock N Roll Swindle and The Filth And The Fury, with Bill in particular playing the parts of both McLaren and Rotten. (punk rock)

As the film comes to a close, the unravelling of The K Foundation ends things on a bit of a low. In the context of this film, it’s easy to see The K Foundation as just The KLF, but with art.

For a documentary that was put together over such a lengthy period, it is surprising how of the moment it all feels, managing to reflect both the chaos of 87-92 and today’s cultural memes