I had a rough cut that mostly resembled a radio play, with amazing audio commentary but nothing to look at. ![]() Being incarcerated was extremely beneficial for the creative process: free from the distractions of social media, alcohol and idiotic executive producers. The conditions were far more relaxed, enabling Chris to sneak in my laptop so I could quietly start editing. I spent nine months in HMP Wandsworth (recounted in my book A Bit of a Stretch), after which I was moved to an open prison. ![]() I had used a dodgy tax scheme to fund Starsuckers, and HMRC prosecuted everyone involved. The heat is on … burning £1m on Jura, as recreated in Who Killed the KLF? Photograph: Bohemia EuphoriaĮverything was going swimmingly until I was given a five-year prison sentence for tax fraud in 2016. However, I could still remain completely objective, unlike in most music docs where the narrative is tightly controlled by the artists themselves. The pair were finally opening up about their emotional journey, and the story could now be told in their own words. The quality was scratchy but the contents were gold some parts were really dark, others had me crying with laughter. ![]() Our anarchic approach was rewarded when a contributor arrived with a couple of dusty audio cassettes, that had sat in his loft for years, containing old interviews. They may have written a step-by-step guide to having a No 1 hit, but the story of the KLF is a reminder that you rarely make anything interesting by doing things the right way. We gathered many similarly surreal tales, but still had the same central problem: I was making a film about two people who refused to talk to me. Claire met her future husband at the rave afterwards and they now have four kids, one of whose initials spells KLF. She landed in Jura where her passport was stamped with the KLF logo, was handed a yellow cape and joined a huge Wicker Man ceremony. Claire Fletcher was a young Radio 1 producer who was told to get on a plane with no idea where she were going. It turned out Abba lived in Henley-on-Thames, so they burned half the offending records in a field and threw the rest into the North Sea. The journalist James Brown, later editor of Loaded, was still a teenager when he accompanied them to Sweden in a doomed attempt to persuade Abba not to sue the KLF for illegally sampling Dancing Queen. In retrospect we should have used stuntmen and safety ropes, as his eyesight wasn’t too great and it twice nearly went over.īill and Jimmy always brought witnesses on their original adventures, who were only too happy to give us first-hand testimony. My lookalikes pushed it towards the cliff’s edge before the elderly owner slammed on the brakes. I tracked down the identical model, a Nissan Bluebird. We next recreated the KLF pushing a car off Cape Wrath. “Don’t worry, it’s all fake,” I replied, before realising this probably didn’t help.Īll abroad, all abroad … the real Bill, Jimmy and Ford Timelord, on the trail of Abba in 1987. “There’s 50 grand cash in your glovebox, mate.” I later took my car for an MOT and got a very worried call from the garage. Thankfully, my fake Bill was also a fireman and it was quickly extinguished. Burning money is extremely satisfying we got a bit carried away and accidentally set fire to a hut. We drove to Scotland where I hired a couple of extras who fleetingly looked like Bill and Jimmy, and took the ferry to Jura. But my mother found an old £50 Houblon banknote, long out of circulation, and printed off half a million quid’s worth. ![]() The Bank of England has pretty tight rules about reproducing the Queen’s currency, for obvious reasons. To make Who Killed the KLF? we started by reconstructing the band’s more dramatic gestures, and kicked off with the big one: Bill and Jimmy igniting £1m cash on the remote Scottish island of Jura. The story of the KLF is a reminder that you rarely make anything interesting by doing things the right way It was my cameraman Chris Smith who made the mistake of drunkenly asking: “Well, what would the KLF do?” The answer was suddenly obvious: they’d stuff the rules and get on with it. But I kept ruminating on this exasperating paradox: that the band with the most unhinged story imaginable was slipping into obscurity because they didn’t want their story to be told. No access meant no rights to music, and no first-hand stories. The rules of film-making dictate that music documentaries require the artists’ consent. They nodded sagely, and very politely told me to piss off. The pair were then in their mid 50s, and patiently listened as I explained how our film would chart their extraordinary journey from sampling stolen records in a south London squat to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world a couple of years later: six UK Top 10 hits in 18 months that crashed an entire mythological rave universe into transatlantic pop culture.
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