Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid
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Watch the K-Foundation Burn a Million Quid is a 16mm colour documentary film of the K Foundation burning a million pounds in cash. It was filmed by their collaborator Gimpo, who owns the only print of the film and shows it occasionally at art events. The film consists mostly of bundles of £50 notes being put on a bonfire by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, who obtained the money from their successful popular music career as The KLF, The Timelords and various other aliases. The film lasts around 50 minutes, and was described by one reviewer as, "Rather boring." A coffee table book was also made of the film, published in the UK by Ellipsis and containing stills and viewer reactions.
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Details of the event
KF-moneyburn.jpg
a still from the film
Drummond and Cauty burnt a million pounds in an abandoned boathouse on Jura (near the village of Ardfin if you want to make a pilgrimage), in the middle of the night of August 23, 1994. It took just over an hour for Cauty and Drummond to pile the wads onto the flames, while Gimpo filmed it, and freelance journalist Jim Reid witnessed it. The whole story is told by Reid in an article called "Money To Burn" (http://www.libraryofmu.org/display-resource.php?id=387) in The Observer. Reid admits to feeling at first guilt, then boredom while watching the money burn.
In a BBC Omnibus documentary the K-Foundation's bank confirmed that a million pounds in cash had been withdrawn (intriguingly, the pictured statement also shows a credit transfer of £1,300,000 going into the Foundation's account just a few days later) and picked up by a private security firm which also confirmed the amount. Much of the money remained unburned: notes flew up the chimney, many of which were later found by Jura residents on the shoreline. One resident handed £1,500 into the police. Some ashes (valued in the Omnibus documentary at £800-£81,000!) were brought back from Jura, and kept in a suitcase, until Bill and Jimmy asked Chesham brickmaker James Matthews (age 23) to make them into a brick. Bill said the reason for the request would be revealed in 23 years.
The Film
The K Foundation destroyed the film, feeling that the public had to have faith that the burning had taken place rather than proof. 10 months later, Gimpo revealed to them that he had secretly kept a copy. It was very badly filmed (on Super 8) and the dialogue is almost intelligible. In most (all?) of the screenings, there was no sound projection. Drummond and Cauty said that they wanted the audience to discuss the film as it was showing.
The initial screenings
The first public screening of Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was on Jura on the August 23, 1995 - exactly one year since the event - when nearly half the population turned out to watch and discuss.
Two weeks later an advert appeared in The Guardian (pictured right), announcing a world tour of the film over the next 12 months at "relevant locations".
The second screening was at Manchester's In The City music industry convention on 5 September. After the film was shown, Drummond and Cauty held a question-and-answer session under the heading Is It Rock'n'Roll?. The audience were generally supportive and friendly towards the pair, but the consensus was that the burning was not rock and roll. [1] (http://www.libraryofmu.org/display-resource.php?id=463) [2] (http://www.libraryofmu.org/display-resource.php?id=476) [3] (http://www.libraryofmu.org/display-resource.php?id=400) In The City director (and former Factory boss) Tony Wilson told the duo:
- "See rock'n'roll, this should be throwing a TV set out the hotel window. That's rock'n'roll. But the point is that it's not your TV set it's the hotel's TV set. Whereas this was your money and maybe that's why it's not rock'n'roll. I think it's very art, but it's not popular enough. This was an art event. Rock'n'roll is popular, rave is popular. All great rock'n'roll is popular."
A week later the pair travelled to Belgrade in Serbia as guests of alternative radio station B92 where the post-screening discussion was titled Is it a crime against humanity?
The Glasgow screenings and Cape Wrath
On November 3rd, accompanied by journalists, the pair screened the film in Glasgow at several low-key locations. They later conducted a radio interview. Stories appeared in the Scottish press announcing a public screening on 5 November. Then suddenly the K Foundation changed direction again.
Drummond and Cauty had become bored of the question-and-answer sessions - they felt that nothing new or interesting was coming forward and the same issues were being talked about each time. They left Glasgow on a whim, on a road tour up the West Coast accompanied by Gimpo. On November 5 1995 Drummond and Cauty signed a contract agreeing to wind up the K Foundation and never to speak about the money burning for a period of 23 years, ending 5 November, 2018. The contract was signed on the hood of a rented car which they then pushed over the edge of the cliff at Cape Wrath. The contract was also announced in a K Foundation advert in The Guardian on 8 December.
- On 5 November 1995, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond signed a contract with the rest of the world agreeing to end the K Foundation for a period of 23 years.
- This postponement provides opportunity of sufficient length for an accurate and appropriately executed response to their 'burning of a million quid'. The K Foundation's fate now lies irrevocably sealed in the imploded remains of a Nissan Bluebird nestling among the rocks 600 feet below Cape Wrath, Scotland.
Post contract screenings
Despite the fact that the K Foundation had disbanded and signed the contract, further screenings of the film took place as planned. At each screening, Drummond and Cauty announced they wouldn't answer questions, post film, rather they would ask questions of the audience.
Screenings were held in Bradford, Liverpool, Bristol and Aberystwyth.
Club Disobey
On December 8th, 1995 a screening was held at Club Disobey - an irregular alternative art evening organised by Blast First boss Paul Smith and held downstairs in a pub in Brick Lane, London. The event was previewed in the NME, so it was incredibly busy; indeed, the police arrived and asked them to stop. In the NME it was claimed that after the screening the film would be cut up and individual frames sold off to the public. Gimpo, the owner of the film, had no intention of doing so, but after the screening was nearly overwhelmed by a mob of people wanting to take home a piece of the film.
Gimpo has continued to show the film at events such as literary festivals and underground film evenings over the years since the initial tour. A bootleg DVD of the film is available.
The Book - The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid
A coffee table book was also made of the film, published in the UK by Ellipsis containing stills and viewer reactions. (ISBN 0954165659).
Analysis and Reaction
To understand why (and indeed believe that) they did it, it is necessary to consider the events leading up to the burning. Firstly, neither Drummond or Cauty kept any of the money that they made as the KLF, it was all ploughed back into their extravagant productions. Cauty told a Australian Big Issue writer in 2003 [4] (http://rocknerd.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/18/0539252) that all the money they made as the KLF was spent and that the money they burnt consisted of royalties accrued post-retirement:
- 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. this was the money that later became the K Foundation fund for the 'advancement of kreation' it was also the raw material for 'Nailed to the wall' – The rest you know.
They had made the decision that the money was not theirs: it was the K Foundation's. It had to be used for a K Foundation project, and couldn't be given to anyone else.
For the first six months of 1994 the K-Foundation tried to get their Money A Major Body Of Cash art exhibition (which consisted of over a million pounds in actual bank notes) staged. No gallery they approached was interested, so they had to consider other options. They thought about taking the exhibition across Russia by train, but the cost of insuring a million pounds against robbery by the armed gangs that roam across the Steppes was too high. They felt that the money was a millstone around their necks, and that depressed them. Therefore, they decided they would have to burn it.
Initially they couldn't decide whether to make the burning public or not. They thought of putting a picture of Nailed to the Wall with a flame-thrower beside it, on a billboard in London. A week later the picture would have changed to ashes. Eventually Drummond decided that
- "the shock value will spoil it really. Because it doesn't want to be a shocking thing; it just wants to be a fire".
So the burning was a secret event - yet they still took a journalist and cameraman along to witness it.
All through their career the concept of burning a million pounds comes up. When they deleted their back catalogue it was described as being the equivalent of burning millions of pounds. They threatened to burn the K Foundation art award prize money (Gimpo was fumbling with matches and lighter fluid when at the last moment Rachel Whiteread accepted the prize). And in the seventh K-Foundation press advert they stated "What would you do with a million pounds? Burn it?"
The money burning is in effect a massive and very expensive publicity stunt, so that Drummond and Cauty can go down in history as the men who burnt a million pounds. It is intended to make viewers think about money, and its relationship with life. Supporters ask if there is really a difference between spending money on useless objects or publicity, and making the actual loss of the money the publicity.
If they have introduced an important debate about the nature of money, art and fame, then the money might have been used wisely. Supporters argue that it is not true that they are fools who have lost their money, as by having "burnt a million pounds" on their CVs they will be interesting to the media for the rest of their lives, and able to make it back easily. Just as the first line in every biography and obituary of Divine was "he once ate dog shit on film", the names of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty will always be followed by "the men who burnt a million pounds".
Drummond said in 1996 that someone once told him, after seeing the video for "Earth Song", that the reason the K Foundation burned the money was because they knew they would never be as good as Michael Jackson.
In March 1997, after some years of consideration, Bill explained: "One night an audience was asked: is there anyone here that would've liked to do this or thought about this? And people put up their hands. That became a regular thing and it would be about ten per cent [of the audience], so ten per cent of the population ...or ten per cent of the people who came to see this film! [Drummond laughs uproariously] Or maybe they were just trying to endear themselves to us- but it was a real thing. We realised that it wasn't like we were so different or so special or so far-out or so fucking fucked-up; we just happened to have a million lying around..."