If you're interested in The KLF - or indeed interested in pop music or the counterculture generally - then I urge you to get hold of a copy of John Higgs' extraordinary book on the band. But if you just want a quick crash course in what Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty's project was all about, and why it's still talked about now, then you could do much worse than watch this episode of BBC Scotland's Rip It Up Unwrapped.
Ignore the fact that (as the narrator concedes) claiming them as a Scottish act is tenuous - Cauty is English, and Drummond was born in South Africa rather than Scotland and moved to Northamptonshire at the age of 11. Just enjoy the wild ride: from Drummond's A&R job in Liverpool and short-lived solo career ('Julian Cope Is Dead', anyone?); through newsreaders interviewing talking cars and Top Of The Pops performances with the duo dressed as giant ice cream cones and a virtual Tammy Wynette singing on screen; to machine-gun blanks and dead sheep at the Brits, deleting their back catalogue, and burning a million quid on Jura. Along the way, they created the likes of 'What Time Is Love?' and the Chill Out album that would turn out to be enormously influential in the worlds of dance and ambient.
The programme throws up plenty of tasty little titbits along the way, too: that Drummond was instrumental in getting The Proclaimers their first publishing deal; that Edelweiss followed the guidance in the KLF book The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way and it actually worked; that The KLF were (somehow) the biggest-selling single act in the world in 1991.
They and their various offshoots/predecessors were born out of a disillusionment with the record industry and a desire to seriously fuck shit up from the inside. As Cauty puts it in a snippet of archival footage, the pair were "just trying to maybe push things a bit further". The Vaselines' Frances McKee ventures that "they were just making it up as they went along" - and Drummond and Cauty wouldn't disagree.
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