The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who Burned a Million Pounds

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In large studios these are usually a breed of highly efficient women whose matriarchal presence can be felt in all areas and at all times.

The one star I am assigning to this book is a total insult to the other two books I’ve given one star to.Requesting it, I had no idea that the author was also responsible for a Timothy Leary biography I very much enjoyed, but this is on a different level. I'm 3/4 through this brilliant book and with each new chapter I am amazed how much this humble little paperback reveals about global events and cultural responses of the 20th century. There are hundreds of recording studios scattered across the country, from the north of Scotland to deepest Cornwall.

I still dearly love many of those KLF tracks, despite the fact that I was not a big clubber myself and found most dance music irritating or incomprehensible. Dadaism, Situationists, book of the Principia Discordia, Discordianism, the Illuminati, Alan Moore, Dr who and much more mesh together into a quasi-cohesive narrative. I have listened to it for the past week on my commute to and from work and what a fascinating listen it has been! If this lad were to start brandishing a copy of this publication by The Timelords, you would advise him that he had been had and should get a refund on the book instantly before going out to look for an available vacancy on a youth training scheme. Staggeringly good book about how the KLF created the 21st century, and about how it's obviously absurd to suggest that the KLF created the 21st century.I certainly wasn't expecting this mind-altering manifesto from John Higgs, which somehow draws connections between such disparate entities as the Cabaret Voltaire and Doctor Who, between Bill Nighy and the Kennedy assassination. Certainly more convincing than the straight rational idea that the KLF were ‘just attention-seeking arseholes’. Be aware that you will also be charged for the tape you use and extra gear that is hired in specially for your session. John Higgs overlays a standard chronological history of The KLF (a wonderful, and very successful, pop duo active in the late 1980s and early 1990s who adopted the philosophy contained in The Illuminatus! Tell him there will be a couple of times when you will have to issue cheques before others have come in.

My memory of the KLF, though I was a bit too young to really connect with their stuff, is of a subversive but fairly minor footnote to early-90s music. The ‘real’ world is a place where things happen not because of well worked out reasons leading to clear actions and then to desired results, but more the chaotic coming together of circumstances that lie beyond our rational inquiries.Secondly they will be encouraged – even pressurised – into adopting life-styles that will eat through whatever is left of the vast sums that have been quoted at us in no time at all.

Many of the more successful studios have expanded their complexes so as to contain more than one studio.But their stuff somehow captured, as Higgs says, that feeling ‘at the end of the rave, when all your energy had been dissipated and all that is left is an unearthly glow…that moment, in the small hours before dawn, that seems to hang outside of time’. If it is now after 3pm and you have your studio booked, switch on Radio One and listen to “Steve Wright In The Afternoon”.