I used to work for Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond's record label. This book looks interesting ... but I really wish the focus was on the art and the music, and not the "the guys who burnt 1 million quid" incident.
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"
Might just be me, I was of that time, but the burning £1M whilst interesting isn't really why I remember them. It's almost the least interesting thing about them. Being Scottish I was more amused by the location being an island in Scotland.
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.
Daft Punk just have the "don't focus on our identities/we stay behind the scenes" vibe shared with KLF.
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!
The original pressing is a great example of how good pop music used to sound and how shitty it sounds today because of dynamic compression.
“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.
I’d be interested to hear your opinion after reading the book, he covered a lot of what you mention. The burning is covered, but then it goes back and goes over everything leading up to that to frame it and put the act in context, and IIRC talks a bit about things after.
>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.
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.
Deeply selfish? There are literally millions and millions of extremely wealthy people who would spend that amount doing nothing, buying a yacht, their 20th property, or do actual terrible things.
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?
> 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).
The true absurdity should have been the message but it got lost in the outcome. From what I remember they tried to sell Nailed to the wall for £300k explicitly stating it was £1 million in legal tender, but the gallery refused to buy it because they couldn't get it insured.
I feel this thread is evidence that the question provoked by the performance is actually quite important, certainly more so than the average “but is this art” meta-debate.
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.
> Someone who is understood to not have money by default — like an artist [...]
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.
There is an category of artist who become overnight famous and cannot deal with the sudden interest and wealth.
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.
Making a controversial artistic statement that results in widespread media coverage places whatever issue being highlighted at the forefront of popular discussion and thought, if only for a time.
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.
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!
If you buy a yacht or a supercar you give the money to a number of people. If you actually burn the money you destroy it and it is lost for everyone.
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.
Is it lost for everyone or is it more like a stock buyback? Did everyone's money become 0.000000001% more valuable by taking that chunk out of circulation?
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.
The point is that in real life (as opposed to an academic textbook) burning those $40 does not do anything useful or positive to anyone, while spending them or giving them away to someone would do something useful.
Not an economist, but in crypto, "coin burns" are a regular occurrence where a percentage of supply is destroyed, typically by sending to a public address for which the corresponding private key is proven unknown.
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.
>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.
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.
Rich people don't "throw away" money, they spend it. The money is circulating and enriching others for services rendered. In fact, the more money they "throw away" the better. The rational thing to do as a capitalist is to capture as much of that money as possible.
What they don't do is set it on fire, thereby depriving others of it permanently.
>Rich people don't "throw away" money, they spend it. The money is circulating and enriching others for services rendered
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!
Isn't burning money just the opposite of Quantitative Easing and thus it slightly increases the value of existing money?
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.
Nope. The whole point of money is to buy things. Banks create new money backed by debt which is what creates real value. The new money is destroyed when people work and pay off the debt. This "act" has created nothing of the sort.
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.
I don't agree with your description of money creation as a primary means of creating value. Surely value is created by human endeavour and currency is just a convenient means of tracking that?
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?
You misunderstand me. Money is indeed created by banks creating debt, but money is not the same thing as value. It's used as a convenient way to exchange value, but if you were stuck on a island with no-one else, you wouldn't find money to be of any use.
> I thought it was deeply selfish stunt then, and still do now.
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 appreciate the kind words. My anger at their actions comes from how coddled from reality they had to be to make such a choice. The levers of monetary supply and demand, of course, 'make' and 'destroy' much larger sums on a daily basis. But those aren't liquid values under control of a single person, either. Money that is, is much more salient, and more valuable. And they just pissed it away.
Did they piss it away though? That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later. Can you say that about other things people spent £1m on in 1994?
> That single statement was so powerful it's still causing emotional arguments about it 20 years later.
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.
> Shouldn't we demand more from art? Like actual meaning and maybe, just maybe, a positive impact on the world?
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.
You seem to have missed most of this debate. Is the rapper who bought a $200M mansion also akin to murdering 200 people?
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?
I wasn’t handwaving it away by pointing at “other people doing bad things”. I’m questioning your definition of bad, equating money wasted to death, and how far can you take that analogy.
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.
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.
For me, their message was that art scene is dominate by money. In fact the entire world is dominated by money. Yes you might do a lot of good with a million quid but humans tend to do bad things when given a choice.
Now if someone is uncomfortable or doesn't understand this message then yes it was just a gunshot.
I found a lot of meaning in the symbolic gesture. Not everyone derived a negative from it. For me it was a positive impact learning that their existed a radical group with balls enough to stick a big fat fuck you to the money machine of the world..
Would you be happier if they'd used the money for startup seed funding with a view to eventually cashing out after IPO?
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.
For sure. A16Z alone has wasted far, far more money than this. As has Donald Trump. Or Sergey and Larry. But that's the "correct" kind of wasting money.
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.
Just speaking my personal opinion- it's still a a waste, but at least the money would have been put back in to circulation. Better than burning it, at least.
It is fine for art to be selfish and to be painful. Their act was one of the things that helped me understand that art is more than just being pretty and hard to craft.
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.
I see where you're coming from, but isn't the point just the opposite? People aren't starving because of lack of money, they're starving because richer people decided that another million is worth letting people starve for. If the people who already have millions decided, like the KLF, that another million isn't worth that much, maybe they would not let it dictate how they treat other people.
See it this way. Other organization are also spending money on „statements“. They are only calling it ads. For example greenpeace is spending more money on statements on ads then those two burned away.
The problem with this logic is who gave them their money,
and why are those people not scorned as well?
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.
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.
The context of this is a biography though. The genre is supposed to do a better job of taking the long view, rather than short term sensationalism of the news cycle.
> 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.
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?
The story in the press about this insinuates David Cameron might have done this as it is apparently a Bullingdon Club (which Boris Johnson was also a member of) “thing”.
It would be quite surprising for someone who went into Labour politics to do this:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/bullingdon-club-initia...
I remember hearing "What Time Is Love" as a kid and that music sounded like coming from an alien spaceship with virtually no peer anywhere. Then it morphed into/kicked off the trance genre and the main riff was reused by many artists later.
Wonder showzen was inspired by this stunt and took their episode budget of ~$100k and paid a homeless person $10k to throw another $10k out of a helicopter onto the statue of liberty. It didn’t work out in the end but still was a hell of a tribute in theory. See https://www.brooklynvegan.com/wonder-showzen-creators-talk-t...
honestly, if you do a stunt outrageous enough, that is inevitably going to be the main thing people remember about you. this might be the most serious context in which i have ever recommended reading the "angus the bridge builder" joke, but it's very relevant: https://jokes.one/joke/angus-the
It's inherently racist, in that the money could have been used to help poor people (disproportionately PoCs) but was, instead, burned by a bunch of White people.
It makes me a bit sad thinking about how smart creative people in order to make a bunch of money use to form bands like this. Now they form startups in a much more dull society.
Funny, I actually did not know about the money burning until a couple of years ago. Admittedly I also did not know about many other things they did, but still remembered them for a few of them.
Unfortunately many of their albums are unavailable to the public at large because the use of samples makes them impossible to license for streaming services.
They actually chose to stop selling their music, since that was were the million quid they burnt came from. Part of the same stunt "The KLF has now left the music industry".
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.
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"