Both seemed too sensitive for the roles they’d created for themselves both found the contradiction and compromise in the success they yearned for, achieved and then hated was too much to bear. These two anguished icons were, in a sense, throwbacks. The money burn was, both temporally and figuratively, the filling in the sandwich of two pivotal cultural events the suicide of Kurt Cobain and the disappearance of Richey Edwards. But it couldn’t have been much more at odds with the era whose birth pangs coincided with the burning. This self-policed scarcity adds to the sense that theirs is a career that has gathered weight over time. It’s as if they’ve reacted to our current era of infinite cultural profusion by withdrawing their consent, rendering themselves samizdat. And only last year, a wonderful little clip of the pair DJ-ing at an outdoor rave in the late 80s (during which they showered the crowd with pound notes!) appeared on, and then promptly disappeared from YouTube. Their 1992 Brit Awards appearance with Extreme Noise Terror is regularly removed from streaming sites. The KLF - or someone close to them - seem to guard their legacy extremely carefully. And this is a common thread running through subsequent years. The film of the event has a beautifully dingy and blurred quality, lending itself to enigma and speculation. Wouldn't most burners of a million quid - like, for example, Joe Corre - be summoning the world’s TV cameras, inviting several busloads of journalists to the party and generally shouting it from the rooftops?īut this ambiguity - and the fact that it was so sparsely witnessed - is an essential part of the act’s power, confirming it to be, at heart, a gesture borne out of personal confusion as much as public exhibitionism entirely at odds with the always wrongheaded notion of the KLF as master media manipulators. If we assume that it did, how remarkable to leave even the slightest room for doubt. There are still a few people who cast doubt on the idea that the burning actually happened. But why does this act retain such potency? And what does it mean in 2017? Accordingly, the memory of the 1994 money-burning has bubbled away insistently underneath the events of the past two decades, feeling simultaneously like a reproach, a beacon and a promise. Their early 90s dalliance with pop stardom doesn’t feel like a career as much as the priming of a series of philosophical depth charges. It’s testimony to the fascination the pair continue to elicit that anything so straightforward would be a huge disappointment. But it’s probably safe to say that half-assed run-throughs of 'What Time Is Love?' and '3am Eternal' won’t be on the agenda. What form the Liverpool: Welcome To The Dark Ages event will take is predictably, anyone’s guess. But Drummond and Cauty have been as good as their word 23 years have now passed and right on cue, the K Foundation will be re-entering the cultural fray at exactly 12.23am on August 23 2017. The full story of the events surrounding the burning and much, much more can be found in John Higgs’s magnificent 2013 book The KLF: Chaos, Magic and The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds. They then retired the name and resolved not to return to the subject for 23 years. Crucially, in contrast to Corre, The K Foundation never really claimed to know why they’d burned the money - indeed, a year later, they went on a somewhat self-flagellatory tour of the UK in the hope of uncovering their own motives, during which they screened their film Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid and went on telly a few times - where they received a bewildered and occasionally hostile reception from people who couldn’t understand why they hadn’t either given the cash to charity or spent it on drugs and hookers like proper rock stars. In contrast to Corre’s oedipal temper tantrum, this still feels like one of the most striking and extreme artistic statements of the last 50 years. On August 23 1994, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - trading under the name The K Foundation - burned a million pounds in cash. He claimed to know exactly why he was doing it but his explanation (some trite, clichéd platitudes about punk nostalgia representing ‘conformity in another uniform’) simply suggested that he’d never truly understood punk in the first place. Putting aside the fact that these weren’t, strictly speaking, his creations to destroy, the essential problem with Corre’s burning was that it was all rather too neat. That was Bill Drummond’s hilariously precise and perfunctory dismissal of Joe Corre’s rather theatrical 2016 burning of a pile of apparently valuable punk memorabilia that he’d inherited from his father Malcolm McLaren.
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