The enigmatic rave duo refused to approve Chris Atkins’s documentary on them – and then he got five years for tax fraud. He explains how he channelled their anarchic spirit and made it anyway, Ford Timelord and all
In 2009 my long suffering producer Ian Neil sent me a text: “You should really make a film about the KLF.” This enigmatic and brilliant band were a mainstay on Top of the Pops in my youth, and were best known for burning all their money in the mid 90s, when I was a middle-class teenage anarchist and thought that torching a million pounds was by far the best thing you could do with it. “Aren’t they dead?” I replied.
It turned out that the two members of the KLF, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, were very much alive, but had gone to extreme lengths to destroy their legacy. They had deleted their entire back catalogue in 1992 and written a vow of silence on a car, which they promptly pushed off a cliff. A few enquiries revealed we weren’t the first people to suggest making a documentary, but the band had told everyone else to piss off.
