'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL DISILLUSIONMENT, II

5 January 1999

Yesterday, when I got back home from writing about The Residents in Aylesbury library, I phoned up Will Sergeant. I hoped he could remember in which year we had paid our visit to Birmingham Town Hall. He couldn't, but what he could remember was that our seats were not in the balcony, but towards the back of the stalls on the right-hand side and that the next morning he had to fly off to the States to join the rest of The Bunnymen, who were about to start an American tour. He also reminded me of the time the two of us were in San Francisco and we went looking for Ralph Records. Will had the address. We found the place, a non-descript boarded-up office front. It was closed. Will went back later. The door was open and Will wandered in. The place was empty. On a work bench was one of the eyeball masks. Will picked it up and was trying it on for size when somebody walked in and started yelling at him. Will made his excuses and left.

The last time I saw Will was backstage at the Barbican con­cert hall in London in 1997. It was after Jimmy and I had done our 'Fuck the Millennium' performance. That performance, the unfocused emotions and uncertainties that it generated within me, have pushed me towards wanting to write this story about The Residents and some of the stuff that our performance that night churned up in me. It's been a notion of mine to write this thing for over twelve months, but as I wanted it to be one of the last stories I wrote for 45 I kept on putting it off. After phoning Will, I re-read 'Thrashed' and 'Wheelchairs' to refresh my memory of what state of mind I must have been in and to make sure I didn't repeat myself. After the record had been finished and Jimmy and I were almost satisfied with all its lumbering parts, we were encouraged by those at Blast First/Mute Records to think about making a promotional video clip for it. Not only was the record to be called 'Fuck the Millennium', but it had me liberally using the F-word all over it, thus making it a piece of product unbroadcastable in all media. When Jimmy and I had done things in the past, it was always at our own expense, in every sense of the phrase. This time someone else was paying the pipers. Our initial idea was to make the video clip on a steep and blustery beach up north somewhere near Whitby, with an angry sea threatening from behind and a dark and troubled sky glowering from above. The whole cast would be there: the brass band; the hymn singing lifeboatmen; Jeremy Délier; the Rev Bitumen Hoarfrost giving full-submersion baptisms; Gimpo running about and of course me and Jimmy in our wheelchairs, attended by Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor. Reality pointed out to the pair of us that however great the idea might be, angry seas and troubled skies are not readily available in the middle of the summer. Instead, we thought of creating and pre­senting a grand tableau in a theatre in front of an audience of paying guests. Not a rock 'n' roll show, but something that would only last as long as the track. A tableau that would include all the above mentioned characters minus Hattie Jacques and Barbara Windsor, sadly. A little research revealed that real lifeboatmen didn't look like the ones in our imagina­tion, so the Viking Society that we worked with on our 'America: What Time Is Love' video clip were contacted. They were more than willing to dress up as turn-of-the-century lifeboatmen. They had the beards. They were committed beard growers.

Paul Smith - not the tailor nor the New Neurotic Realist, but the boss of Blast First - was responsible for promoting the whole event. He also had his own ideas, good ones. He said we should invite the striking Liverpool dockers to take part in the event. Although Jimmy was originally from Merseyside and I spent many years living there, neither Jimmy nor I was up to speed with these particular malcontents' complaints about the system. But we understood them to be a fashionable (in an unfashionable way) cause célèbre. It was thought that their involvement would bring a reality factor to our end-of-the-career-show. Paul Smith booked the Barbican, Jimmy and I dreamt up ad copy and worked on layout in our standard style, for two full-page ads in the same issue of Time Out (London's leading listings magazine). The first ad read: 'They're back, the creators of Trance, the lords of Ambient, the kings of Stadium House, the godfathers of Techno Metal - the greatest Rave band in the world, ever. The KLF, for one life only'. Nothing else, just our usual typeface, black out of white. A few pages later the second advert read: 'Jeremy Délier presents "1997 - WHAT THE FUCK'S GOING ON?" Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drammond invite you to a 23-minute performance during which the next 840 days of our lives will be discussed. Barbican main hall Tues. 2 September. Millennium crisis line: 0800 900 2000.'

Media interest was aroused. Tickets sold. Then Diana got killed, so the show got put back in respect of a nation in mourning and the fact that our little tableau would earn no media coverage compared to what the dead princess would get. Ren Campbell and Colin Watkeys directed the cast. Show time. 23 minutes later, job done, and Jimmy and I were happy men. Still in our aging make-up and piss-stained pyjamas, we willingly posed for photos and jabbered with gay abandon into any microphone that was put in front of us. We waved goodbye to the supporting cast and bit-part players and were off into the night, with some Scam-Mongering Publicity Stunts to be done. We scaled the walls of the National Theatre with pots of emulsion, long-range paint rollers and a journalist from Time Out in tow. Ten years earlier we had followed the same route to daub the beckoning acres of virgin grey-concrete wall with our opening salvo, '1987: WHAT THE FUCK'S GOING ON?' This time, '1997: WHAT THE FUCK'S GOING ON?' Some things change, some things don't. And 2007 is not that far away.

Yes we shall not grow up

As you that are left grow fat

Age shall not bring us wisdom

Nor the years learn us

At the going down of the sun

And in the morning

We will still be up for celebrating

Our own Futility

Job done, we scarpered. Stood on Waterloo Bridge watching the security guards swarm. But over the following days and weeks the printed media, those few that were interested, ran their reports and reviews of what us pair of aging pranksters had been up to. And I despaired and was wounded. And I quote (at length):

It's five years since The KLF left the music business. And yet it seems like they've never been away. Maybe that's because they haven't. OK, so they haven't released a record in those five years, but they've done just about everything else they could to stay in the public eye.

Since they pretended to machine gun the audience at the Brits in 1992, and threw a dead sheep across the foyer of the hotel where the aftershow bash was held, they've been up to all manner of mischief. How we laughed when they offered a £40,000 prize to the worst artist at the Turner Prize in 1993, and then nailed it to a board as an artistic statement of their own! How we frowned in conclusion, then thought, 'You're a bunch of tossers actually, aren't you?' as they burnt a million quid on a remote island, filmed it, and talked about going off to Rwanda to show it to poor people, but showed it to their music biz and media mates instead! How we thought, 'Can we go home now please?' as they ferried loads of journalists to Devon to hear Jimmy playing with his tank-cum-soundgun toy, and kill animals with it! And how it stimulated minor dinner-party debates among the chattering classes! . . .

Aren't they playing all these pranks not to highlight the bullshit the world is wallowing in, like say Chris Morris, but to be clever, and to tickle their own art-wanker egos? Aren't they running out of ideas somewhat, rehashing an old hit with their new single, and calling it 'F The Millennium' for no other reason than an unimaginative attempt to surf the Zeitgeist? Have they actually done anything of any consequence or meaning as a creative partnership except make four hit records? Weren't they brilliant when they were populists (stadium rave, The Timelords) and aren't they f ing tedious now they're elitists (endless pranks for the benefit of no-one but themselves and a mildly uninterested media)? And perhaps most importantly - does anyone give a f*** what is going on any more?

Aha! But we're debating it even now! We're still fascinated by them! We still give them triple-page spreads! We don't know how to react! We're questioning our most basic values, sort of thing! So they've won! Ha ha! Congratulations. But we are kind of in the hope that some shadow of their former genius for spectacular pop music might re-emerge. We'd really rather have some entertainment than an art-school debate.

Prospects for the spectacle part of the equation look promising as we arrive at rehearsals to the sight of 30 Liverpool dockers standing on a stage with placards, in front of a full brass band in uniform, with a male voice choir of lifeboat men, recruited (I kid you not) from the Viking Appreciation Society Of Great Britain. To our right, a funk band is jamming in the corner of the stage. Meanwhile, a vicar in a gold sequinned suit stomps around, followed by a strange man in a white coat and a Salvation Army officer. And at centre stage is a large white sheet covering something we can't quite make out.

The dockers are herded offstage for the moment, and then, without warning, a loud noise, like a CB radio, crackles into life. '1997 - What the f*** is going OOOOOOOOOOON? F - - - THE MILLENNIUM!' The vicar tries to mime the words, despite the fact they're obviously on backing track -all part of the postmodern statement, no doubt. The white sheet is pulled off the large object and hark! it reveals our heroes, made up as grumpy old men (all be it [sic] with the trademark horns on their heads) in pyjamas and motorised wheelchairs. They proceed to whizz around the stage for a bit, as the funk band soldier on in their flat caps and the brass band mime for all they're worth.

The discerning observer will notice, however, that the actual tune being played is What Time Is Love?',

The KLF's 1991 hit. Oh well, suppose writing anything new was far too prosaic and orthodox an approach for Drummond and Cauty's mischievous sensibilities.

Johnny Cigarettes, NME, 27 Sept 1997

An evening to remember, said the people who collected their Fuck The Millennium shopping bags and went home. But there was no press furore the next morning - merely the anticlimactic aftertaste left by 40-year-old men miming to a seven-year-old song . . . 2K was unquestionably a failure. The single got no radio play, the event attracted precious little non-music attention, and it achieved even less than Drummond and Cauty's last stunt - their burning of £1 million on the island of Jura, filmed and shown to the requisite gasps before the whole thing fizzled out and they could no longer be arsed.

Select, December 1997

I wanted to stamp my feet and scream, 'But you don't under­stand, the whole show was about the crapness of the comeback, of blowing one's own myth. You are supposed to see that and applaud the fact that we have an incredible understanding and postmodern take on all things pop, at the same time as deliver­ing the goods.' And then I did understand. Everything was OR. The show was a success, the record stiffing at number twenty-eight in the charts was just what the doctor ordered. We had not only blown it, we had destroyed whatever remnants of cred­ibility, bankability and myth we had left. We had been exposed for what we had become. It wasn't just the money that got burnt; it was also the bridge that we could have trotted over any time we felt like it for a fiscal graze in the green pastures of

success. With my finger no longer on the Zeitgeist, I could pick up this pencil, downgrade my horizon and get on with the rest of my life without being weighed down by that sack of credibil­ity, myth expectations. That sounds like a cute riding-off-into-the-sunset ending to this particular fable but there is more. Or at least there are a few loose ends to tie.

The journalist from Time Out who came with us as we scaled the walls of the National Theatre had been one of our most hardcore fans. In 1988, at the age of twelve, he had bought our 'Doctorin' The Tardis'. He got on board. Then through his teenage years he had faithfully followed our every move. We were the idealised big brothers he never had. On our official retirement from the music business in 1992 he even wrote a book recounting our exploits. Then that night in 1997, after we daubed our message on the grey concrete and were about to speed off looking for some after-hours action, I shook our former teenage Number One Fan's hand and wished him well. In that moment, as our hands shook, I detected something in the glint of his eye: disillusionment, as real and pure as disillu­sionment can get. Almost as powerful and strong as when I saw that bit of dark curly hair sticking out the back of that Resident's eyeball mask. In our (Jimmy's and my) short journey through pop, that moment of disillusionment was maybe our greatest creation. Without that final state of disillusion, the power and glory of pop is nothing. And when it happens (and if it has not already happened for you, it surely will), savour it, because it very quickly slithers into disinterest and gets forgot­ten as life marches on.