Media coverage of Who Killed the KLF? documentary

14th April 2022

British film-maker Chris Atkins is known for his excellent Bafta-winning documentary Taking Liberties in 2007 and also for his five-year jail sentence in 2016 for tax fraud involving falsified invoices: a conviction that sent a there-but-for-grace-of-God shiver through the British film world. It resulted in Atkins’s bestselling prison memoir A Bit of a Stretch, which also became a hugely popular podcast. At the time I wrote about the heavy-handed prison treatment of Atkins’s co-defendant, Christina Slater, who at the time was a new mother.

Now Atkins has hit upon the ideal subject for what I can only describe as his talent for investigative mischief: it’s the strange story of the KLF, later the K Foundation, comprising Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the electronic-pop-duo-slash-situationist–art-collective who in the early 90s had gigantic chart hits with singles including 3am Eternal and What Time Is Love?, and then morphed into a guerrilla unit pranking what they saw as the money-crazed art world. They finally deleted their entire catalogue in a spectacular gesture of renunciation, and publicly set fire to the remaining million pounds in their bank account.

The KLF are the best subjects for a documentary and also the worst. Best because the art-rave duo’s career is ludicrously compelling; worst because they haven’t talked to anyone about it for years. Undeterred, Chris Atkins has found a way around that obstacle and directed a film that is appropriately wry, bonkers and irreverent.

The film is built around a cache of old audio interviews with the band members Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty conducted by an unnamed third party but never broadcast. Some of the material is gold. Drummond remembers firing a machinegun (loaded with blanks) at the Brits audience after the KLF shared the award for best group with Simply Red.

There is also the exquisite revelation that their book, The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), was read by a band of yodelling rappers called Edelweiss, who promptly had a No 1 of their own (Bring Me Edelweiss).