The KLF
- Thread starter pattycakes_
- Start date
Radio doc about the pyramid they wanna build (not listened yet)
www.bbc.co.uk
and there's a film out about it
burning-bridges.vhx.tv
BBC Radio 4 - The People's Pyramid
Once they made pop records. Now they're building a pyramid out of dead people.
and there's a film out about it
Welcome to the Dark Ages
For 23 years, since they disappeared from sight after burning one million pounds in a remote boathouse on the Isle Of Jura, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have turned down every request for them to participate in a documentary. In 2017 Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty, formerly The KLF returned...
burning-bridges.vhx.tv
honestly burning that million pounds wasn't even a prank. unless you invest that money elsewhere in various business ventures there's no way you can just chuck that in a bank for personal consumption, they'll be right onto you. Unless you go to some weird place like Liechtenstein.
Or of course you have aristocratic-cum-criminal contacts in Nigeria.
The whole idea kind of wanks me off, because i would have done exactly the same, even though as a marxist in an ideal world it would mean I wouldn't be forced on benefits or to adhere to wage labour, it's just the way things go. You can't just have hot cash on you. It's brute necessity.
This is true and this is why I far prefer TBD over the KLF. Because they managed to escape the trap of pop art whilst making populist music. They did it man.
It never meant anything. The top 40 invented ambient. Without the top 40 there would be no Brian Eno. I don't mean in the elitist masses are too stupid to understand real music, i mean what is so horrifying about whiteboy blog/internet ambient is that it inverts the universal mirror of pop. It takes away the very limited context/culture specific elements and what you're left with is pops attempt to reach the primitive unconscious timeless. Which can either be ambient or drone, but not Xenakis or Verese, who are far more coldly cosmic in ambition.
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It's why Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works is venerated more than Urban Shakedown. Because it is, fundamentally, a record of human sensuousness, just through the medium of being a primordial hum. Urban Shakedown - Do It Now, is populist but not pop. It is quite anti-pop in many ways. bad production, screaching chipmunks, abrupt cuts. All of these avantprole techniques make it closer to Merzbow than they do kws, or livin joy.
under a communist dictatorship this will be the only legitimate music.
@luka you never made @Corpsey a true cratedigger nut nut hardcore jungle evangelist. You let him succumb to goldsmiths uni. did not take him right into the inner depths of psychosis. This forum is for psychotics, not well adjusted mandem. @john eden give your charge a good spanking with a ruler. Make sure the senobites devour corpse.
@luka you never made @Corpsey a true cratedigger nut nut hardcore jungle evangelist. You let him succumb to goldsmiths uni. did not take him right into the inner depths of psychosis. This forum is for psychotics, not well adjusted mandem. @john eden give your charge a good spanking with a ruler. Make sure the senobites devour corpse.
jenks
thread death
I don't know if he's been mentioned before in here but some of Ken Campbell's shows and stuff have been archived here. I should imagine he'd be quite a popular figure on here (although some may just remember him as Alf Garnett's angry neighbour)- his stuff in part two of pigSpurt about PKD for example. I saw him in about 89/90 and it was among the most exhilarating live shows i'd seen - esoteric, anarchic, wildly amusing and genuinely odd. https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/seeker-ken-campbell-podcast/id1450204130
IdleRich
IdleRich
There is a Russian film about a millionaire under communism who has to hide his money and pretend he's not a millionaire cos you're not allowed to be. It's a caper/heist film with some crooks trying to first find a millionaire and then rob him... and then hide the money themselves.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
The KLF rework classic album ‘Chill Out’ for new release, ‘Come Down Dawn’: Listen
The group recently added their music to streaming services for the first time
djmag.com
Minus the elvis and fleetwood mac samples though
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From John Higgs' latest newsletter
'WHO KILLED THE KLF?' DOCUMENTARY
I’m being asked a lot about the forthcoming KLF documentary, especially after the Guardian article about it.
I’ve lost track now of the number of times I’ve been approached by filmmakers who wanted to option the rights to my KLF book. It’s still happening in 2021, nearly a decade after that book first appeared. I respond by saying that I’d only agree if the filmmaker (a) had Bill and Jimmy’s approval and (b) the rights to use their music. Typically, I am assured that they will definitely get these things, then I never hear from that filmmaker again.
The one filmmaker who didn’t disappear was Chris Atkins. He was the guy who made Starsuckers, an exposé of how Murdoch and the British tabloid press works, which led to him giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry. He also made Taking Liberties, about the erosion of UK civil liberties after the Iraq war, and UKIP: The First 100 Days, which received more complaints than any other programme that year - the majority from Britain First members.
Atkins, clearly, has a thing for making powerful enemies. It is something you can imagine a therapist would want to talk to him about at length. In his defence he does choose his enemies well.
It had long been clear to me that someone would make a KLF film eventually – because people are still trying to process what it was that they did. The real question was whether that film would do them justice, or catch their spirit. Atkins was not in the slightest bit troubled that Bill and Jimmy did not want him making a KLF film, or that I wouldn’t option the book. He just ploughed ahead and made his film regardless, funding it himself, and delving deep into the technicalities of 'fair-use' copyright exceptions. There was something of Ken Campbell about the pig-headed way he ignored the difficulties and just did the work.
It was pretty obvious to me very early on that Atkins was the guy. He was the one filmmaker stubborn enough to see this through. He was also the one filmmaker who seemed to be driven by motivations that were just outside of the rational, like the cast of the wider story in my KLF book.
I still didn’t option him my book, but I wished him well and did an on-camera interview for his film. This was around 2015 or thereabouts, before I started turning down requests for interviews about the KLF. Full disclosure – I got £200 and a sandwich for doing the interview, sadly long spent. And eaten.
And then Atkins went to jail. His crime was falsifying invoices for the funders of Starsuckers. He is open about his guilt here, but it does seem odd to me that a director was jailed for five years because of how a documentary was funded. I do wonder if it would have happened if he hadn’t made quite so many enemies in the British establishment. But that’s probably just my paranoia - it was, after all, a very Chris Atkins-like thing to happen.
In jail, he became a ‘listener’, working with the other prisoners and their problems. When he got out, he wrote a book about this, A Bit Of A Stretch, which is very readable, empathetic and humane. Then he finished his KLF documentary.
Now, Bill and Jimmy are very much against this film and have taken legal action to try to stop it being shown at film festivals. Don’t think from that, though, that it’s a hatchet job, or it doesn't do them justice, or it is in some way unfair or against them. Or at least, it isn’t to my eyes - I saw a nearly complete edit a while back and thought it was really well done. If you think of it as a version of my book for people who don’t read books, you’re probably not that far off.
Bill and Jimmy, of course, are very much against it and don't want it released. The idea that public figures get to vet who tells their story, however, is not one I’m comfortable with. Perhaps that’s professional bias on my part, and I certainly understand why they were unhappy with the BBC documentary in the 1990s. But when artists do stuff that the wider culture can learn from, people need to talk about it and pass the story on. That's not a process you can or should control. The KLF did, after all, tour a film of themselves burning a million pounds around the country and asked for reactions. They didn’t ask for reactions only from carefully vetted and approved individuals.
I know some long-term KLF fans are uncomfortable about Warner's lawyers attempting to 'protect their copyright', and the heavy irony involved with that. But as a plot twist, it's a stance which is so wrong that, in the larger story, it seems entirely right. Together with the whole saga of Atkins going to jail, the story of the KLF documentary is unfolding in a borderline ridiculous, larger-than-life way that seems tonally perfect for the larger myth. To my mind, there was always going to be a film, and it seems right that it's this one.
The film should appear in the not-to-far future at cinemas in the UK. Unless of course, there are more twists yet to reveal themselves...
linebaugh
Well-known member
what will we listen to over candle lit dinner?
mixed_biscuits
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My parents named me after this one.
