Chaos theory

John Higgs' The KLF: Chaos, Magic And The Band Who Burned A Million Pounds tells the story of the legendary pop duo Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty and the act for which they've become infamous. Except, crucially, it doesn't - it tells A story.

In the book's show-your-workings final chapter, Higgs makes an honest confession: "From the near-infinite set of data points that were created by Cauty and Drummond's activities, one particular path was selected by this author to serve as a model for what occurred. The decisions which dictated which data points were ignored and which were presented as significant were made in an attempt to create a narrative that was (a) a good yarn, and (b) something that would mess with the reader's head on as deep a level as possible. Neither of those reasons is concerned with uncovering some profound and unarguable 'truth' about what happened, even if all the actual facts they reference are true. There are many other possible narratives that could have been presented and which would have been equally valid. The idea that this chosen narrative is the 'correct' one is only plausible if you forget that this narrative is just a simplified model of what happened back in the 1990s, and confuse it with the thing itself."

This, ultimately, is the art of the author/biographer laid bare: the ability to construct a cogent narrative by imposing a model from above that necessitates selectively dismissing some pieces of evidence and amplifying others, without it seeming too obvious.

Higgs recounts the facts, many of which are jaw-dropping and hilarious. The cash bonfire on the isle of Jura itself, of course - but also Drummond's bizarre personal obsessions; the dead sheep dumped at the 1992 Brit Awards; the rented Nissan Bluebird on which the pair wrote a contract in gold pen before pushing it off a cliff into the sea; and (best of all) the 1987 trip to Sweden prompted by threats of legal action over the unauthorised use of chunks of 'Dancing Queen' in the JAMs song 'The Queen And I': "[T]hey played the offending song outside ABBA's publishing company and presented a fake gold disc  (marked 'for sales in excess of zero') to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA. They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their trouble. On the ferry home they threw the remaining copies into the North Sea and performed an improvised set on the ferry, the only known live JAMs performance, in exchange for a large Toblerone."

(It's anecdotes like that that that made me think of the Butthole Surfers - the chapters/passages on them in Michael Azerrad's Our Band Could Be Your Life and JR Moores' Electric Wizards are riotously entertaining, but then the facts are such that pretty much any half-decent writer could tell a good tale with them.)

But what really intrigues Higgs is the fact that Drummond and Cauty couldn't understand or explain their own motivations for torching the money. The popular line that they were arch media pranksters/manipulators and cunning provocateurs, or even merely "attention-seeking arseholes", can only be valid if they knew what they were doing and why - which they patently didn't.

The door is then ajar for Higgs to step in and attempt to make sense of a chain of events that were incomprehensible even to the two protagonists at the heart of them. His narrative is effectively a crash course in twentieth-century countercultural politics and philosophy, joining the dots between everything from Carl Gustav Jung and the concept of the collective unconscious to Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy, Alan Moore's Ideaspace, Discordianism, Situationism, the work of writer/director Ken Campbell, Doctor Who and the Kennedy assassination. It can be dizzying at times (Operation Mindfuck indeed), but it's also both enlightening and intensely stimulating in a way that your average rock biog most certainly isn't, and leaves you feeling giddy.

Indeed, in a sense Drummond and Cauty are almost incidental. The book is arguably more an exposition of the art of constructing an explanatory thesis (one that can only ever be partial) - the distillation of a complex constellation of coincidences into a coherent narrative. As such, it reflects the instinctive human insistence on searching for and trying to find significance amid meaninglessness - and is a reminder that such significance doesn't exist outside of our own heads.