Context
In the early 1980s, British musician and artist Jimmy Cauty was the guitarist in an underachieving pop/rock band, Brilliant. Brilliant had been signed to WEA Records by A&R man Bill Drummond, formerly a member of the Liverpool group Big in Japan, the manager of The Teardrop Explodes and Echo & the Bunnymen, and co-founder of the independent record label Zoo Records. In 1986, Brilliant released their one and only album - Kiss The Lips Of Life - before splitting up. In the same year, Drummond left WEA Records to record a solo album. Whilst out walking on New Year's Day, 1987, Drummond hit upon an idea for a hip-hop record but, he said, knowing "nothing, personally, about the technology", he needed a collaborator. Drummond called Jimmy Cauty who agreed to join him in a new band called The Justified Ancients of Mu-Mu (The JAMs).
The JAMs' debut release, the single "All You Need Is Love", was released as an underground white label on 9 March 1987. By 1991, the duo—now calling themselves The KLF—had become the best-selling singles band in the world and, according to the Allmusic, were "on the verge of becoming superstars". Instead, in May 1992 they machine-gunned a music industry audience at the BRIT Awards (albeit with blanks) and quit the music business.
By their own account, neither Drummond nor Cauty kept any of the money that they made as The KLF; it was all ploughed back into their extravagant productions. Cauty told an Australian Big Issue writer in 2003 that all the money they made as The KLF was spent, and that the royalties they accrued post-retirement amounted to approximately one million pounds:
| “ | I think we made about £6m. We paid nearly half that in tax and spent the rest on production costs. When we stopped, the production costs stopped too, so over the next few months we amassed a surplus of cash still coming in from record sales; this amounted to about £1.8m. After tax we were left with about £1m. | ” |
Although the duo had deleted their back catalogue in the UK with immediate effect, international licensees retained the contractual right to distribute KLF recordings for a number of years. The KLF, like any other artist, were also entitled to Performing Right Society royalties every time one of their songs was played on the radio or television. Rather than spend these earnings or invest them for personal gain, the duo decided the money would be used to fund a new art foundation - The K Foundation. "Having created an artistic machine that created money", said GQ Magazine, "they invented a machine for destroying it." Quite what the Foundation, this money-destroying machine, would do with the million pounds plus was still undecided.
Music journalist Sarah Champion pointed out (prior to the million pound fire) that, "Being 'in the money' doesn't mean they'll ever be rich. always be skint, but their pranks will get more extravagant. If they earned £10 million, they'd blow it all by buying Jura or a fleet of K Foundation airships or a Van Gogh to be ceremonially burned." "There are things we'd like to do which we haven't done.", Drummond told a journalist in 1991. "Totally ludicrous things. We want to buy ships, have submarines. They really are stupid things I know, but I feel confident that in the event of us selling ten million albums we would definitely go out and buy a submarine....Just to be able to say 'Look we've got a submarine and 808 State haven't'."
Read more about this topic: K Foundation
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