2023: WTF is going on? As The KLF come into view once more by way of the BFI’s forthcoming DVD collection of assorted videos and films from the self styled ‘Stadium House’ duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, you might well ask. Cauty and Drummond, after all, aka Rockman Rock and King Boy D, gatecrashed the pop charts in the 1980s with their epic brand of conceptual rabble rousing before self-destructing at the 1992 BRIT Awards. As The K Foundation, they rebooted late twentieth century pop culture as we knew it, burning a million quid as they went.
23 Seconds to Eternity – The Collected films of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF and The Timelords (1988-1992) brings together video clips for assorted smash hits including 3 A.M. Eternal, What Time is Love? and Justified and Ancient. The collection also features rarely seen ‘ambient road movie’ The White Room (1989), plus restored or previously unreleased shorts, all directed by Bill Butt.
For long-term K watchers, this is a treasure trove, as are the quartet of digital playlists of long deleted greatest hits posted in 2021 by KLF Communications. Given Cauty and Drummond’s self-imposed moratorium on working together for 23 years announced in 1995, and the deletion of their entire musical back catalogue, this spate of activity is especially thrilling.
The signs were there in 2017, when, after two decades of largely music-free solo artistic endeavours, the moratorium ended with the publication of the novel, 2023: A Trilogy. This coincided with Welcome to the Dark Ages, a three-day spectacle that took place in Drummond’s former stomping ground of Liverpool. It was here back in 1976 that a young Drummond was co-opted into designing the set for Illuminatus!, maverick theatre director Ken Campbell’s audacious nine-hour staging of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s sci-fi hippy conspiracy trilogy, The Illuminatus! This was pretty much responsible for everything Drummond and Cauty in their various guises have done since.
In true conceptual style, there is even a KLF world tour. Sort of. A poster advertising twenty-three dates looks set to take place on the 23rd of each month. In 2323. These dates take in a series of seminal venues that closed years ago, alongside a dozen totemic wonders, including the Jura Boathouse where The KLF burnt a million quid. Immortality moves in mysterious ways. Still justified. Even more ancient. Mu Mu Land is within sight.
23 Seconds to Eternity – The Collected films of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF and The Timelords (1988-1992) is released by BFI on 6thNovember 6.
ends
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