Here's Jim Reid's story of what happened, from the Observer, 25
September 1994.

Money to burn: The K Foundation do art scams. They left a dead sheep
outside a pop awards ceremony, faked corn circles and gave pounds
40,000 to Rachel Whiteread. Now they claim to have burnt pounds 1
million... or have they? One journalist accompanied them. This is his
account of the events. Judge for yourself


In the back of a Senecca mark 3, four-seater aeroplane, lie the remains
of one of the most peculiar stories of the year. Peculiar because
pretty much everyone who comes across this magazine is going to have
trouble believing a word of it. Peculiar because every last dot and
comma of what is to come is the truth.

Besides myself there are three passengers in the plane: Jimmy Cauty and
Bill Drummond, formerly of the KLF pop group, now the K Foundation (an
art foundation), and Alan Goodrick, known as Gimpo, former artillery
man in the Falklands war and a rock group tour manager.

Behind us is the bulk of our luggage. Rucksacks, hold-alls, nothing
flash. And two new Gabriel suitcases. One is empty. One contains the
ashes of what was formerly pounds 1 million. Cash. Twelve hours earlier
the K Foundation had burnt the money, 20 tight bundles of pounds
50,000. Twenty thousand pounds 50 notes up in smoke. For no apparent
reason. And, it must be said, to no great surprise.

The pounds 1 million was burnt without ceremony in an abandoned
boathouse on the Isle of Jura, in the Inner Hebrides, between 12.45am
and 2.45am on Tuesday, 23 August. It was a cold night, windy and rainy.
The money, practically all the former chart-topping duo had left in
their account, made a good fire. When the fire had gone out, all that
was left was the cold and the rain and the ashes. The sense in all this
was not quite so tangible. This story has a tortuous plot, a lot of
blind alleys and more than its fair share of miscalculations. It is the
story of how far Cauty, Drummond and an idea will go.

If what the K Foundation did was art, and I am not the person to judge
that, then this piece is the beginning of the art work. Without this
article none of it ever existed. Before I explain, consider this. How
would you watch pounds 1 million burn? With anger? With horror? I could
tell you that you watch it at first with great guilt and then, after
perhaps 10 minutes, boredom. And when the fire has gone out, you just
feel cold.

The trail to the burnt million starts with the 1994 K Foundation Award
and ends in the abandonment of a putative art exhibition. I first met
the K Foundation last November, 10 days before their award of pounds
40,000 for the artist responsible for the worst body of work in the
preceding 12 months. It was given to Rachel Whiteread, who won the
Turner Prize on the same night.

I'd known Bill Drummond for 12 years, but it was the first time I'd met
Jimmy Cauty. Shortly after the award night, the pair hired me to write
the catalogue for their upcoming exhibition Money: A Major Body Of
Cash. The exhibition was to consist of seven pieces, all involving
various amounts of cash nailed to, tied to or simply standing on
inanimate objects. Nailed To The Wall, a work featuring pounds 1
million in mint pounds 50 notes nailed to a wall, was to be auctioned
(reserve price pounds 500,000), and five of the six remaining works
sold, by postal bid, for half their monetary value. This offered the K
Foundation a possible pounds 555,555 loss, or if Nailed To The Wall
became art (ie, was sold for more than a million), a possible profit.
As a satire on the art market it was cute. If pounds 100,000 could cost
you pounds 50,000 and pounds 10 a fiver, was pounds 100,000 greater
art?

Presumably both pieces, employing the same 'idea', had the same
artistic value. Or was money the only value in art?

It was an extreme example of the kind of provocative act for which the
pair had gained a reputation. Cauty and Drummond promoted themselves as
the KLF by creating fake corn circles and spending pounds 70,000 taking
50 music biz insiders to Jura to take part in a pagan-like ritual. They
announced their departure from the pop world by leaving a dead sheep
outside the ceremony at which they'd been voted the best British Band,
and then deleted their back catalogue. In the lead-up to the K
Foundation Award, they spent pounds 125,000 on a series of cryptic
advertisements, one telling us to 'Abandon All Art'.

What Cauty and Drummond were primarily concerned with was money: money
as art, art as money. The possibility of meaning beyond money. To
challenge the power of money. And if none of that makes sense, maybe
that was the intention.

But would they be able to shoe-horn their commentary on money into the
art establishment? Jayne Casey, director of the Liverpool Festival
Trust and an old friend of Drummond's, provided their first chance.
'The Tate, in Liverpool, wanted to be part of the 21st Century Festival
I'm involved with,' says Casey. 'I suggested they put on the K
Foundation exhibition; at first they were encouraging, but they seemed
nervous about the personalities involved.'

A curt fax from Lewis Briggs, the gallery curator, informed Casey that
the K Foundation's exhibition of money had been done before and more
interestingly. Setbacks like this have an invigorating effect on the K
Foundation. They change their minds. 'The thing about knock-backs,'
says Cauty, 'is it forces you to come up with better ideas.'

'We wanted to take a container with Nailed To The Wall in it all around
the world,' says Drummond. 'We'd go through the former Soviet Union by
train, take the container over to the US by boat, go across America in
a truck and then sail back to Liverpool. Money goes instantly around
the world, we wanted to take it by hand, we were celebrating the end of
cash.' But they were not taking into account the extremely un-nostalgic
view of money in the more lawless parts of the former USSR. No company
would handle the project. By May they had switched their attention to
Dublin as a possible site for their exhibition, specifically Kilmainham
Jail, where the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were executed.
However, no sooner had they slated August for an opening than they
rejected the idea of an exhibition.

'Jimmy said: 'Why don't we just burn it?' remembers Drummond. 'He said
it in a light-hearted way, I suppose, hoping I'd say: 'No, we can't do
that, let's do this...' But it seemed the most powerful thing to do.'
The money, according to Drummond, was always going to go. Now it was
going to be disposed of in one event. Sizzle, gone.

The K Foundation have no particular regard for their financial
security, but their relationship to that million is more complex. Cauty
and Drummond tend to dismiss their past work. The million may have come
from a critically-acclaimed music career, but to them by now much of it
seemed like a failure. Perhaps burning the money is a purgative.

If the pair have ducked the trappings of traditional fame, the feeling
persists that all the angles, all the lavishing of money on aborted
projects, comes in the quest for something longer lasting. Little
things like immortality. And to get there you have to constantly up the
ante. Neither of them is a rebel. If anything, they are romantics.
Drummond, former manager of Liverpool rock bands Echo And The Bunnymen
and Teardrop Explodes, is tall, square-jawed and bespectacled. He lives
in the country, keeps four cows in his field and likes bird-watching.
Cauty, who at 17 had produced the best-selling Athena poster, The
Hobbit, is a slight, quiet chain-smoker who lives in a rambling inner
London house. He owns a Saracen Armoured Personnel Carrier and dummy
AK47.

Drummond and Cauty do not wear designer clothes or visit fashionable
clubs or restaurants. Neither cultivates famous friends or does
interviews. As pop stars they were virtually anonymous, rarely being
the focus of their videos, never in the tabloids on a supermodel's arm.
Partly this is because they are old enough to know better ' Drummond is
in his early 40s, Cauty is 37 ' but it's also because their success has
financed new ideas rather than sports cars.

They have nothing to promote, yet over the past year they have spent
pounds 1.25 million following an idea simply because 'they had to'.
This might be lunacy or ego tripping of the highest order, but it is
what they meant to do. 'The money was never ours,' says Drummond. 'It
was the K Foundation's, it was never intended for personal use.
Originally we were going to invest the whole lot in some capital growth
fund and spend it all on one big event, maybe at the millennium.'

But even the burning of their remaining fortune was not without its
Byzantine twists and turns. The plan was to write to Nicholas Serota,
director of the Tate Gallery, offering Nailed To The Wall as the 1995 K
Foundation Bequest To The Nation. If the gallery accepted the award
they could show it as an exhibit for 10 years and then sell it, but not
deconstruct it.

The letter, which was never sent, would have amounted to no more than a
ransom note. Because if the Tate decided not to accept the gift, and it
is reasonable to assume they would not have, the K Foundation's aim was
to burn the work.

Deciding to cut out the middle man, they chose Bankside power station,
the future site of the Tate Gallery extension and an imposing building
downstream from the South Bank, as the venue for their unique bonfire.
A poster campaign was also planned for the capital. Posters were to
appear on 15 August bearing the legend 'The 1995 K Foundation Bequest
To The Nation', under which would have been an image of Nailed To The
Wall on an easel and two flame-throwers lying on the floor. On 24
August a new poster would go up, exactly the same as the first except
that this time the work would be burnt. But the power station was not
available, and with just four weeks to go before the event Drummond and
Cauty booked a rubbish dump at Rainham Marshes as their site.

With the plans finalised, we went to meet a gallery owner who had
expressed interest in exhibiting the remains of Nailed To The Wall the
day after it was torched. An austere man in his early 40s, he had been
trying to determine if there was artistic meaning in the K Foundation's
plans, but he was undecided. Similar actions had taken place before,
although never with such a large quantity of money. He also believed
the spectacle around the event may damage its impact.

'In the end, whether or not it had a chance as an art work was not as
important to them as actually doing it,' says the gallery owner. 'The
last thing I said to Bill was for them to absolve themselves of the
dilemma. Put the money in a position where it couldn't be touched,
where it is effectively being slowly burnt. And transfer the right to
destroy it to someone else. Someone could buy the right to destroy it
or they could postpone that right indefinitely. But they needed the
cathartic experience of destroying it, which was a self-indulgence, and
weakened it as a work of art.'

'We had nothing better to do with the money. Even if it's not art, it's
the most important statement we can make,' said Drummond. 'We needed to
express something about money and we wanted to push it through art. But
after a while we thought: 'That's not possible.' We were trying to make
it fit in.' One week before the exhibition the plans changed again.
There would be no public burning, no press or TV ' 'it just seemed like
a PR show for the media' ' and just one witness to their act. At first
Cauty thought of Damien Hirst, but instead they picked me. All I was
told was that Drummond would be phoning me on the morning of 22 August.

Drummond phones at 9am on the 22nd and advises me to take some sturdy
footwear. There will be one more person on our journey, Gimpo, who I
have not previously met. Gimpo is waiting for us at Cauty's house. A
well-built man, he is wearing a greyish turtleneck, Levi's and black
boots. The K Foundation are also in walking gear, army surplus and
Levi's, their normal clothes. Cauty and Drummond buy two suitcases in
central London and then we set off across the river. 'We have to pick
the money up from a company called Ratedale,' says Cauty.

No one bank holds pounds 1 million in cash, so the K Foundation have
hired a security firm to pick up the money from a NatWest bullion
centre in Kent. We enter an industrial estate near Gatwick airport and
stop outside a modern warehouse block. Cauty and Drummond get out of
the car and ring the bell by door number 19; they are carrying the
suitcases and their passports. About five minutes later they emerge
with two security guards, one severely tattooed. They laugh at the
condition of Cauty's motor. 'Has that got an MOT, then?' one of them
asks before walking back to his office, shaking his head.

The suitcases are put in the back of the car and Gimpo is told where to
drive. The car moves through straggly bits of Sussex and Surrey
countryside before we reach Redhill aerodrome. We are met by Hugh, our
pilot. All I know is that the journey will take two hours and we are
going west. Drummond keeps playing with the door of the Senecca and
debating whether he should just fling the suitcases out of the plane.
We land on a runway that juts out into the sea, Islay airport in the
Inner Hebrides. A hire car is waiting for us and we take off round the
island for Port Askaig and the ferry to nearby Jura.

Jura is well known to Cauty and Drummond. Three years ago when they
were still the KLF they staged one of their more spectacular
myth-making coups here. They landed 50 music biz insiders from around
the world on midsummer's day, dressed them in yellow robes and led them
across the island to a 60ft wicker man they had constructed. Everyone
was told to throw their money on to the wicker man and the whole lot
was set on fire. Naturally it made great copy. A film of the event
called The Rites of Mu was made. 'When we were looking at the film,'
says Drummond, 'we thought: 'That's where we should go and do it...'
Going to Jura follows something through.'

We stay at the Jura Hotel and have battered haggis for tea. The plan is
to get up early tomorrow and climb one of the Paps, the triple mountain
range that dominates the island, taking the suitcases with us. At this
stage I have not seen what is inside them.

At 10 in the evening Cauty wants to revisit the site of the burnt
wicker man. We make our way down a rough track; it is pitch black.
Gimpo parks the car and leaves the lights on; we can just see in front
of us. Cauty and Drummond scour the area for remains of the burnt
wicker man. To the left of us is a disused boathouse and the sea. It is
raining. After 15 minutes we make our way back to the hotel.

Around midnight we all go to bed. I sit down and start to make order of
the notes I've been taking all day. Half an hour later there's a knock
on the door. It's Cauty and Drummond. 'Come on, we're going to do it
now,' they say. They are both holding a suitcase. Why now? 'Do you
remember Christmas when you were a kid and you just couldn't wait for
morning?' says Drummond. 'There's just a time when you instinctively
know it's right,' says Cauty. 'I think it's important we get off the
island as quickly as possible.' We get in the car. Now it's really
raining. 'We're like clowns here...' says Drummond. 'Yeah, like showbiz
celebrities,' says Cauty. Gimpo just drives, but there's real tension
for the first time on the trip. Earlier in the day Drummond could bet
Cauty pounds 500,000 to jump in the sea; now all the bets are off.
'This just feels better,' says Drummond in his blue kagoule, 'going out
in the night when it's pissing down with rain.'

We pull up in front of the boathouse and Cauty and Drummond take the
suitcases out of the car and put them inside the rough stone building.
The floor inside is earth, there are wooden rafters just below the
ceiling from which hang two rope swings. To the right at the far end of
the room is a basic fireplace.

Gimpo leaves the car lights on and he and Cauty get to work. Gimpo
drags a piece of scaffolding from round the back of the building. There
are two triangular bits of cloth attached near the top of the pole, one
white, one perhaps blue, but it's too dark to tell. To these Gimpo adds
two survival flares that Cauty had bought the day before. Below the two
triangular cloths Cauty is tying a large piece of aluminium foil, a
survival blanket. Now Gimpo and Drummond have found a wooden drum, a
relic from the burning of the wicker man. The pole is hoisted up into
the drum which is laid on its side and the lights and flags flutter and
blink over the stormy night. Inside the boathouse Drummond is tying the
two bags on to the ropes. A picture is taken. Then the bags are untied
and opened. A million pounds looks like so much that my first instinct
is to feel very guilty. When you see a million packed into 50 grand
bundles, plastic bags tight around each bundle, you begin to feel as if
you've stolen it, as if someone's going to put the collar on you. Maybe
that's what Cauty and Drummond feel when they look at what remains of
their fortune.

The money is not beautiful, and it is only intimidating for a while. It
is impossible, looking at it, to imagine what you might buy with it.
Four bundles for a nice flat in Chelsea, the whole lot for a lifetime
not working. It doesn't look that impressive. The next thing you feel
is the need to do something, not to let it just stand there. Because,
of course, I, like anybody else with healthy appetites, want it.

Lying on the floor in its proud plastic packages, the money represents
power. But it is a power that is painfully vulnerable. Cauty separates
two fifties from a bundle, hands one to Drummond, and taking his
lighter, lights them both. Despite the rain and wind outside, the money
is going to burn. In fact, nothing could burn better.

Drummond is standing to the left of the fireplace throwing fresh
bundles in, Cauty is to the right, screwing up three or four fifties at
a time. After five minutes their actions become mechanical, almost like
it is peat or coal that they are fuelling their fire with. But this is
going to take some time. 'Well that's OK,' says Cauty, rolling a
cigarette. 'It'd take a long time to spend it. Can I spend an hour out
of my life to burn a million quid? (Drummond laughs)... All the time
you say about things: 'I haven't got the time to do that.' Well, I've
definitely got time to do this.'

The fireplace is a rough affair. Occasional fifties get wedged in
crevices above the fire before they eventually fall down to be
destroyed. Cauty is poking at the fire with a stick, moving the bigger
bundles into the heat. Whole blocks of 50 grand remain resolutely
unburnt: singed, charred, but perfectly legal. We have a bottle of
whisky with us and it is passed round as if nothing could be more
natural than burning pounds 1 million on a remote Scottish island in
the middle of the night. This is the truly shocking thing about the
evening. It almost seems inevitable.

It took about two hours for that cash to go up in flames. I looked at
it closely, it was real. It came from a bona fide security firm and was
not swapped at any time on our journey. More importantly, perhaps,
after working with the K Foundation I know they are capable of this.

Only Gimpo and I know what it is like to see that money go up in
flames. Whether the act has a greater 'purity' because we are the only
witnesses, or whether, without public confirmation, it is meaningless,
is something I do not know. But with such a high profile as pop
scamsters, the K Foundation have, by burning the money privately,
demonstrated that they do not care if they are believed.

What is interesting now is whether the burning of pounds 1 million
becomes legend or is swept away with tomorrow's news. 'I don't think
people should find out about it; nobody would understand,' says Cauty.
'The shock value will spoil it really. Because it doesn't want to be a
shocking thing; it just wants to be a fire. That's what I realised when
it was happening. It's like any other fire.' 'It proves nothing,' says
Drummond. 'It doesn't matter why we've done it... Any meaning in it
will have to do with how people react to it.'

We're talking in almost complete darkness now, the only light in the
boathouse is the small red light on my tape recorder, a few embers; the
last remains of the K Foundation's fortune sparkle in the darkness like
stars in the black, black galaxy above the rainy Scottish night. The
front of the boathouse by the open door is a boggy mess, Cauty's
symbolic flagpole is still twinkling across the sea that lies directly
in front of us, the aluminium sheet fluttering furiously in the wind.

Two days later, Cauty destroyed all video tape and photographic
evidence of what they had done. 'The art works not in the action, but
in the void of what it is,' said the gallery owner. 'The dilemma that
anyone receiving the information is put in... that, if anything, is
what embodies the art work.'

When we got back to London I spoke to Lionel Martin of the K
Foundation's accountants, Martin Greene Ravden. He confirmed that the
money has been debited from the K Foundation account, though he didn't
know what the money had been used for.

Seven days later, Drummond received a phone call from a Constable
McEwan of the island of Jura police. Burnt, charred money had been
found washed up on the beach. 'A considerable sum', he said. 'Is it
anything to do with you?'


WHAT DOES POUNDS 1 MILLION BUY?

RWANDA - 2,702 kits which will feed a total of 810,810 people
DIANA - Her grooming for 6.25 years
HOMELESS - B&B accommodation for 68 families for one year in London or
106 families outside London. Or the cost of 12.5 new family houses.
STATE NURSERY PLACES - 565 full-time places for one year
EDUCATION - Grants for 254 students in London or 313 students outside
London
HEALTH - 40 transpalnts, 55 kidney transplants or 250 hip replacements
LAW AND ORDER - 71 new constables
LE MANOIR AUX QUAT' SAISONS - 5,555 meals at a la carte average costs
SOCCER - Two sponsorship contracts between Eric Cantona and Nike
THE OBSERVER - Two million copies (if you buy the Guardian on saturday)

*ENDS*