Back in May, LA electronic duo YACHT put their burgeoning career in the toilet by unveiling an internet prank in which they pretended to be victims of a sex crime. In their half-apology, they cited an act named The KLF as partly influencing their stunt.
You may not be all that familiar with The KLF, otherwise known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The JAMs, and The Timelords, but anyone who knows of their legacy will react with an instant chuckle as soon as those three letters are mentioned.
The KLF were arguably the progenitors of stadium house, but they’re best known for a stunt they pulled at the 1992 BRIT Awards. As YouTube channel This Exists recently recounted, they got crust punk group Extreme Noise Terror to perform their hit chill-out single ‘3 a.m. Eternal’.
The KLF members Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty then used a machine gun to spray blanks over an utterly stunned music industry audience. In other words, they did something that would never get past network lawyers in 2016… ever, in a million years.
But that wasn’t the last time The KLF would prove that they straight DGAF. After dubbing themselves the K Foundation, on 23rd August 1994, Drummond and Cauty made a break for Ardfin Estate on the Scottish island of Jura and burned a million pounds.
Not ‘burned’ as in ‘burned through’, burned as in they lit one million pounds — just under two million dollars AUD — on fire and watched it burn a la The Joker in The Dark Knight. It was every penny they made as one of the biggest pop groups of the early 1990s.
Why did they do it? Who knows? But it certainly wan’t to promote some dumb music video *cough* YACHT *cough* But if you want some more hijinks from The KLF and maybe an insight into what motivated their famous stunts, check out the clip below.
