Mu day rising
The KLF return, with a cast of cult-like volunteers and a bespoke funeral business. in their own immortal words, “what The fuck is going On?”
Twenty-three years older, wearing their trademark rhino horns for the first time since their dramatic exit from the music business, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty stand on the Liverpool shore at sunset and set fire to a pyramidal pyre containing two oversized coffins. It’s as if they’re burning themselves in effigy – KingBoyD and Rockman Rock have not only left the building, they’ve been turned to ash, marking the end of a remarkable event. Just don’t call it a comeback.
the KLF – aka the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu – had contracted to remain silent until August 23, 2017 about their motivations for burning £1 million on the Isle Of Jura in 1994. Like everything else about them, their return is wholly unconventional. they’ve written a novel, 2023: The Trilogy, but provided no review copies (other than volumes in which each page is entirely blank) and no interviews. Instead, they have instigated a mysterious three-day event in Liverpool open to anyone who could afford to devote £100 and three days of their life to... something; nobody was saying what.
Along with 399 other ticket holders, I arrived with no idea as to what I’d bought into, apart from that there would be no KLF music, live or otherwise. Also, as we soon realise, we’re not going to be an audience – we are there to work. Like everyone else, I’m a fan (full disclosure: I’m working on a documentary about Bill Drummond’s 12-year art world tour) and ready to do whatever Drummond and Cauty ask.
Signing in, everyone is given a wristband and a list of choices which will determine their role in the event. Among the jobs handed out are Skull Painters, Badger Kull Members, Badger Kull Hardcore Fans, Gravediggers and Koffin Karriers. Flipping a coin, I end up with number 2, singing, and am designated a role in the choir, under original KLF arranger nick Coley, starting the next day. that gives me some time off to read
2023: The Trilogy, a mind-bending metafiction, supposedly written by one Roberta Antonia wilson under the pen-name George Orwell, which then influences a pair of young Ukrainian women, tat’jana and Kristina, to start a band, the KLF, whose activities bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union. the characters include two versions of yoko Ono, a killer whale, a dead perch, Alan Moore, and a genderswapped female version of 1984’s winston Smith. Cameos include Jonathan King, Courtney Hate and “the Chapman Brother” (“the other one died from sniffing too much glue while doing his Airfix”). It’s wildly self-referential, and an awareness of the history of Drummond and Cauty is essential. But if you have that knowledge, it’s a wild, funny and provocative ride.
Later, there’s a four-hour inquest into the money-burning, where luminaries such as the artist Jeremy Deller offer their ideas on why it happened, witnesses including KLF roadie Gimpo give often hilarious first-person testimony (“they did it ’cos it was fun!”), and the audience gets to vote on the truth. Academic Annebella Pollen’s view that it was part of a deep tradition of historical weirdness wins out.
next day, while I’m off practising backing vocals for a new version of “Justified & Ancient” with the choir, Drummond and Cauty assign the other attendees a page from the book, then give them the day to come up with an artistic response. It seems an impossible task, but the results, presented in Liverpool’s Burned-Out Church at dusk, are spectacular, involving fire, whisky, space operatics and an obscene rewriting of “Feed the world”. the volunteers are now the act, not the audience, while the KLF themselves sit off to one side, loving the creativity they’ve unleashed. the entire event seems to be an anarchic deconstruction of the creative industries, designed to deprogramme us all. that – or perhaps we’re all becoming members of a Doomsday Kult?
At this point nobody has any idea what’s in store on the final day, The rites of Mu. It will involve the manufactured group Badger Kull, formed of volunteers under Pete Wylie’s tutelage, and their only song, “Toxteth Day of The Dead”. Day Three, then, begins in a converted Victorian boys’ home, the Florrie, where the choir report for dress rehearsal. We’re all painted with skullfaces, then the choir gets yellow JAMMs robes for a full dress rehearsal and are instructed to keep silent about the guest vocalist in our midst, Jarvis Cocker, here to front our cover version of “Justified & Ancient”.
The Rites Of Mu itself is a 23-minute film by Cauty, heavy on the eye/pyramid/Shard/ grapefruit symbolism that permeates 2023, and climaxing with a predictably unexpected announcement. The KLF are now, it seems, in the funeral business, and will be building a structure called The Peoples’ Pyramid. Subscribers will have their ashes formed into bricks which will form a modern-day Mayan-style structure, added to every November 23 – the Toxteth Day of The Dead.
on that bombshell, a threemile procession behind the KLF’s ice-cream van begins, leading to the pyre. Exhausted and exhilarated, we watch it burn, while some queue for beer, others to buy their funeral Bricks of Mu, a snip at £99. Then we troop across the road, still in our robes and facepaint, to see Badger Kull perform their only song. These four have become a formidable strobe-lit rock machine, with an instant fanbase who are wild for them. Next day we will all disperse back to normality, but with a renewed understanding that anything is possible – as long, perhaps, as there are some veteran conceptual pop stars around to demand it. 2023: The Trilogy is out now, published by Faber & Faber