May? 1996

Thee Data Base contributor John Dower & co-hort Dave Greer host
"Everything You Know Is Wrong" on Glasgow's Sub City Radio. The
following is the full interview with The K Foundation as it was
broadcast. 

John Dower: So, why did you burn it? A lot of people don't know the
background, they'll think you were the KLF so you took a million quid
and thought 'oh we'll burn it for a laugh, it'll be a bit of a giggle
and that's it'. Is that why you did it?

Jimmy Cauty: It wasn't really a giggle. We were deadly serious about
it.

J: Was this a spur of the moment thing? Did you wake up one morning
and think "oh we've got a million quid let's burn it'?

JC: It's something we've always wanted to do.

Bill Drummond: Anybody that has followed what we have done as The K
Foundation closely would see that that could be a logical conclusion.

J: Is this a statement? Is this a critique of capitalist society?

BD: I don't think so, but some people read it as that. If they do
that's fine.

J: How do you read it?

JC: We're still confused

J: You're hoping this tour of Bntain with the film will bring you the
answers?

JC: Ir might not give us the answers but we're getting something out
of it. We come away from each thing thinking 'that was good'.

BD: We're doing this because we've also learned that other people get
stuff out of it. and its almost like...

JC: We're obliged to show it. 

BD: We've got a bit of a responsibility here.

JC: If you've got an art work that you've created, you do for some
reason want to share it with people. I don't know why.

J: You see this as a piece of art? You seem to suggest that.

JC: [laughs] I did say that but I take it back. 

Dave: I've read a quote from you Bill...

BD: You're not holding us to quotes are you?

D: Well someone asked you why you did it and you said 'because I had
to. I just do what I have to do'. Why did you hove to do that?

BD: That seemed the right answer to give at the time.

JC: There's about 400 different reasons but we're trying to whittle it
down to maybe a handful of really good reasons.

J: Do you think money is the root of all evil?

JC: No. We've got nothing against money,

J: What was the background with this money? Was this the money that
was nailed to the wall?

BD: When we decided to have a thing called the K Foundation, it was
the money that was going to be, or was, "the K Foundaion". That money
was the foundation.

J: When you set up the foundation, wasn't it an art foundation for
struggling artists to apply for money - and then you'd help them out?

JC: That was the original idea but luckily we managed to get out of
that. We decided not to do that.

BD: We realised that struggling artists are meant to struggle, that's
the whole point.

J: And they don't deserve any money?

JC: Not from us, not our money. 

D: When you tried to give the money to Rachel Whiteread when she won
the Turner Prize in 1994, she tried to refuse the money didn't she?
You offered her stlg40,000 and she turned round and said she didn't
want it.

BD: We weren't giving it to her because she was a struggling
artist. We gave it to her because people had voted her as the worst
artist in the country that year. She had originally given us the
details of her bank account so that it could go straight in there if
she won. As it turned out, she won but a couple of days before the
announcement she decided not to accept the money.

J: Did you not like her exhibit, "House'?

BD: It was nothing to do with us. That's what people vored for. 

JC: We've got nothing against her or her work

D: What happened after she refiused?

BD: We phoned her up and said, "Look You have won and if you don't
accept it we're going to burn it."

J: Is that where the idea started? If you could say to someone "We're
going to burn forty grand' why not go all the way and burn a million?

BD: There's a man in this room who thinks it's all his fault and he's
called Gimpo. It was his job to either give her the money or burn it.
He thinks if he'd actually got it burnt that night, we wouldn't have
needed to burn a million pounds. I'd never really thought that
through, but then about a month ago Gimpo told us this, that he'd been
harbouring this guilt, that it was his fault.

Gimpo: I should have burnt it. I had petol all over the stlg40,000,
but we'd waited until two minutes past eleven. We were due to wait
until eleven o'clock until she came out, but we were told to wait
another two minutes and I was well pissed off. I had these matches
ready to burn it with all these journalists around me. But then she
sent one of her people out and he said "Oh, the money's not real." So
I ripped this a wad of stlg50s off and gave it to him. He looked at
it, ran in and then Rachel Whiteread came running out. She just
grabbed the money and dragged it over the fence. I was well pissed off
because I couldn't burn it.

D: How did you actually go about burning the million? A lot of people
mght have heard the story, but like a lot of things you do it's
shrouded in folklore and mystery.

JC: Well, I had a box of matches...

D: I know you took a journalist called Jim Reid with you, and you took
Gimpo with you.

BD: It wasn't like "Let's take this journalist with us"... We were
going to do this exhibition called "Money: A Major Body Of Cash" which
we were going to exhibit nailed to a wall and it was a million pounds,
a hundred bundles of ten thousand pounds, each one numbered. For
various reasons we knocked that on the head. Jim Reid had written this
15,000 word catalogue for this exhibition, so when it evolved into us
going to burn the money, we said to him "Sorry we're not using your
catalogue, but we're going to do something else and you can witness
it. And you can do what you like with that information."  He decided
to sell his story to The Observer. He didn't know where he was
going. He didn't know what was going to happen. And Gimpo didn't know
what was going to happen at all.

J: You didn 't just go to bank and take the money out of a cash
machine...

BD: We'd organised to get the money. In the morning we went and got
two suitcases, drove down to this money warehouse in South Croydon. It
had come from a bullion centre and a security company were holding
it. We then drove to a liule airstrip where we'd hired a plane. They
didn't know what we had on board. Jimmy and I knew where we going and
the pilot knew, but Gimpo didn't know and Jim Reid didn't know. We
flew to Islay and then we went from Islay across to Jura and booked
in. We then did what we did.

J: A lot of peopk are going to think "This is easy". You're fommer pop
stars wadded up to the hilt. Was this your last million or have you
got loads more stashed in the bank? Surely that puts some bearing on
the buming? If you've got five million and you burn a million, it's no
great loss you 've still got some cash.

JC: There would have been no point in us burning it if we had
five. It's not a sacrifice, we weren't sacrificing everything. We've
both got a house and we both still get PRS cheques from our back
caulogue.

J: Didn't you delete your back catalogue?

JC: Yes, but you can still buy it in Japan and Germany...

BD: We weren't doing it to say "Look how heroic we are, we burnt all
our money". We burnt a million because a million is the symbolic
figure.

J: How did you feel after burning it? Liberated? Exhilarated? Or just
fairly nonplused?

JC: I was fairly nonplused really. We'd known we were going to do it
for about six weeks before hand and during that time you go through
all those "things" you go through when you know you're going to burn a
million quid.

J: I don't know that feeling...

JC: It's quite intense. By the time you get to it, you've done it all.
You're burnt out. You just have to go ahead and do it. 

[Jack Maclean from `The Herald' enters the studio]

J: Jack, what do you think of someone burning a million quid? 

Jack McLean: Actually, I'm bloody angry if you want to know the truth.
What was the point of this gesture? You could have burnt counterfeit
money. Your best gesture of all would have been to give the money away
to a worthwhile charity. How can you answer this... Over twenty-five
years ago, when I was at Edinburgh College of Art, and I was the
National Union of Students Vice-President, I managed to negotiate with
the Government an extra 25 quid for every arts student to buy extra
material, because it was very, very expensive. That was twenty-five
years ago and they're getting even less money now. And you spent a
million pounds for the sake of art?

JC: Well, for a start we're not saying that it's necessarily
art. We're not really sure what it is. We know we've done something,
but we don't know what category it falls under. Secondly, we're not a
charity, we're not about giving money away to people, that's not why
we do what we do.

J: Surely,Jack it's their money - they earned it. If they want to burn
it who are you to say it's wrong?

JM: I'm going to say right off that I find that there are a number of
young artists who find it very difficult to the extent that they end
up in working in various jobs and they don't return to their art. Now
that million pounds could have helped them produce art. There are many
artists out there who find it difficult to make ends meet, especially
the young ones straight out of art college. they end up doing things
like teaching which I did fourteen years. With that million pounds. I
wouldn't have to be teaching for fourteen years and take flak off all
the wee basturds...

BD: It's the choice you make. If you're going to be an artist, you
know that's the score. You're not in art to be making money. You made
the decision to be a teacher and that means you sold out. If you'd
wanted to be an artist, you would have carried on. It was in you.

JM: You're saying we shouldn't teach art?

BD: I'm not saying that. You were saying you had to become a teacher
because you couldn't carry on being an artist.

JM: No, a lot of young artists can't manage and they have to do
something else. Today, they don't do much teaching at all because the
jobs aren't there. What they do is they work for stlg 1.50 an hour in
hamburger joints. These are poor kids who are struggling and don't
have any money for materials. How are they going to be artists?  In
the meantime you decide on a gesture of burning a million pounds.

JC: Those poor artists could actualty get something quitegood out of
us doing that. They could get a positive thing out of seeing us just
burn that money because if they're just thinking "Oh God. I can't do
my art because I haven't got any money", they're mistaken I think.  

JM: What do you do with a musician whose instrument is stolen or can't
work any more and they need another instrument? He doesn't have the
money so he can't play, so he's not a musician anymore, is he?

JC: No. He's not. That's one of the laws of the universe isn't
it. It's not our fault.

BD: It's not our job to give out money. What we did by burning it
is... and I'm not saying it's art... we created something there. That
thing there now exists. The fact that that million pounds exists in
your mind - maybe you'll walk out of the studio and forget about it -
but it exists there. Maybe it'll gnaw away at you, it might make you
giggle some times, you might see other things in it. It evolves in
peoples' minds in different ways.

JM: And the students that are finding it difficult to keep on
going. They're going to be angry as well aren't they?

BD: But you can get through that anger.

JM: But how do you get through that anger, when you could have given
the money to a wee village in India where they're dying?

JC: There's plenty of organisations who are set up to give money to
other people.  It's not our function to give our money away. it's our
function to do with it something that we find interesting.

JM: In a weird way you're coming across as the other side of the coin
that characterises the greed that is the National Lottery. It's a lack
of respect for other people's labour.

D: But do you think by what the K Foundation have done, they have
exposed the anomalies in market capitalism. They've certainly drawn
your attention to the anomalies. Has that served a function in itself?

JM: What you could have done to expose the nature of capitalist greed
is written to the newspapers, or even written for them, as I indeed do.

BD: We're not journalists. You're a journalist and you're a blues harp
player. Obviously we respect that, that's what you do. We don't do
those things. We can't communicate in those ways.

JM: Well where did the money come from?

BD: We made the money out of pop records.

JM: And who made more money out of pop records than you?  

BD: Loads of people.

JM: And how many people paid into the profits you made and the record
business made?

J: When you showed the film to the builders this morning, one of them
said "I've bought all your albums." So you are in effect burning the
money people have given for your pop music.

BD: Yes.

D: Do you not feel you've let your body of fans down by what you did?

JC: I think a lot of them will be really horrified, yes.

BD: I think we let them up.

JM: Out of all the places you could have chosen to burn a million
pounds, you had to do it on Jura. The lsle of Jura has distilleries
closing down all over the place. There has been 20,000 jobs lost in
the whisky industry and to do it there? If you're going to burn a
million pounds, can you not do it somewhere like inside Buckingham
Palace?

JC: Just because some people are less well off than other people,
doesn't mean that they shouldn't be exposed to what we do.

D: What was the reaction of the people of Jura. Why did you show the
film to them before you showed it to anyone else.

J: Were you guilty?

BD: We just thought it was the right thing to do. Some people were
very angry about it. Other people were into it. Other people were
saying it had split the island. It churned up a lot of things.

D: Has the reaction you've received made you think that perhaps you
shouldn't have done it?

JC: No.

J: No regrets?

BD: No. As Jimmy said, he went through it all before he burnt
it. After we made the decision, I was Mr. Tunnel Vision about it and
nothing else could get in. It was only afterwards that I went through
the big...

J: Depression? Did you not wake up and think "Oh God!"

BD: Yes that would happen about seven days a week. [laughs] That was a
bit of a joke. Was that a joke?

J: Bill you've got two kids who are aged eleven and eight Yau haven't
told them, have you?

BD: No. It's hard to tell your children that I went out into the
garden and chopped down the money tree.

J: How would you feel if your two kids opened up their piggy banks and
burnt or chucked all their money away? Would you be annoyed as a
father?

BD: When I was a kid I remember coming home and I had this pocket
money. I had about six pence left and I threw it in the side of the
road. I came home and I thought "I feel good about this." My dad was a
minister and he was so angry.

JM: A Church of Scotland Minister? It's Calvinist guilt here all over
again!

BD: [laughs] No Calvinist guilt here. I'm just adding a bit of colour...

JM: All is explained!

BD: Not at all!! Anyway, I had to go back and find the money and it
had to go in the missionary box.

J: You don't feel you had to go back to the missionary box after you
burnt a million quid?

BD: My dad's into this. He likes it. He thinks it's good.

JM: I find this utterly inexplicable. You seem like good lads.

D: The K Foundation have said that they're trying to change art
history. You don't think you'll end being swallowed up into the
establishment that you're trying to critque?

JC: No, I don't think we'd be accepted. It's like they don't want to
play and we're okay about that really.

D: But today's art estabbshment is quite loose.  People like Damien
Hirst are seen as an rebels, but they're quite quickly brought into
the fold.

BD: They're playing the game. It's a straightforward game they're
playing. And we do have a criticism and it's that they're not trying
hard enough. That's our big thing - they're just all playing the game
and what they're doing is just not good enough.

D: Do you see yourself as part of the new renaissance in London - the
relationship between the art world and the pop music industry? Damien
Hirst and Blur for example.

J: Maybe you should turn the flm into a pop video.

JC: That's a novel idea.

BD: Who should do
the music for it then? J: Maybe the KLF?  JC: No, we're not interested
any more.

[Stewart Cruikshank from the BBC enters the studio]

Stewart Cruikshank: I'm here to present Bill & Jim with a top secret
document at the request of Matthew Bannister from Radio One.

BD: Are we allowed to read this out on air?

SC: No. it's got to remain under wraps.

J: You're messing with The K Foundation here.

JC: Let's have it.

BD: Is it a cheque? [opens the package] Matthew Bannister says "On
April 1st 1996, I want to give the KLF [laughs] a whole hour on Radio
One to do what they want. This, Bill and Jimmy, is a true proposal."

D: What are they saying?

JC: They want to give a band that doesn't exist anymore an hour of
Radio One time. I think it's a bit strange.  We've been given this
idea before and we said, yes we'll do it...  we'll have an hour of
silence. They just said "No, sorry..." That still stands.

BD: Yes. we're up for a silence.

D: Will the controller let it happen?

SC: He might well do. Anything's possible on Radio One in this day
and age.

BD: [opens rest of package] Hang on, there's more here! [reading] "By
the way, the programme is to be called 'The KLF: What The Fuck Is
Going On!'. It's to last sixty minutes, scheduling Sunday documentary.
Question: what do ice cream vans, sheep, the Timelords, Abba, flying
Vs, the Red Army Choir, Tammy Wynette and the Turner Prize have in
common? Answer:..."

JC: [still reading] "...These are only a few images and metaphors used
by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Together as The KLF, they have
confused and thrilled their fans, the media, their family and friends,
with their music. The hype and the media scams." Hmmmm.

BD: [reading] "What we propose, and the choice of April Fools Day is
significant, is a journey to explain through actuality, samples and
original music together with creative and production input from Cauty
and Drummond, what the fuck was going on? Who are The KLF ? Why do
they consistently buck the system and find success? Where are they
heading? And what guisewill they use next? The effect on the listener
we hope..." [stops reading] They're not actually saying we can do what
we want... They're saying they want to make a documentary about us!

J: Maybe you could answer all the questions in two minutes and then be
silent for a hour?

JC: No, we don't want to compromise. 

SC: There's room for discussion on this.

JC: I think we'll have to turn you down on that one.

J: Getting bock to what you said before, you said it wasn't your job
to give away money. What is your job then? Do you have one?

BD: Yes.  It's to do what we're doing.

J: Which is what?

BD: Well, we're showing the film so that's what our job is at the moment.

JC: The job develops and changes all the time.

D: You started off a long time ago in Liverpool music promotion and
Bill, you were involved with Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop
Explodes. You've flirted with quite a number af things thus far, do
you feel satisfied with your career?

BD: We've both mainlined all our life. We've never flirted. I don't
know how to flirt. On a surface level it looks like you're moving
around. Underneath, you're surging ahead and banging away at that same
seam.

D: Have you gleamed anything from that seam?

BD: You're always just against the bit you're at at that
moment. That's the bit you're hammering at.

D: Do ynou feel content?

JC: No. Does anybody? I'm not happy with anything we've ever done.

J: Is that why you keep burning it?

BD: We don't keep burning it!

JC: We've only ever burnt one thing, really.

J: I heard another rumour that when you sampled Abba's "Dancing Queen'
they were going to take you to court, so you drove over to Sweden, you
didn't actually get in touch with Abba, but then you burnt a load of
Abba records. Is that true?

BD & JC: Yes!

J: So you have burnt more than just a million pounds!

JC: Okay, so we have burnt a few other things as well.

BD: People like fires, don't they! Ever since you were a kid, you've
liked having a fire.

JC: Yes, the reason why we were doing it was that we were trying to
set a good example to young people. That's why we burnt the
money. That's today's excuse.

[Jonathan Monk, an "artist" arrives]

D: Jonathan, do the K Foundation say anything to you about art?

M: No, not especially. I like the way you sell money for less than it
is.  Can I buy a tenner off you for a pound?

JC: You could have done in the old days. We've moved on from there
now.

JM: What are you doing now?

BD: We burnt the money a year ago. It took us a long time to come to
terms with the fact that we burnt it. And we didn't know we had this
film up until a couple of months ago, on seeing that we decided to
show it other people. Once we'd showed it to the people on Jura, we
thought we should be showing this to a lot of different people all
over the place.

D:Jonathan, do you and your art chums in the CCA have any degree of
respect for what the K Foundation have been doing? Has it rocked their
cultural world?

JM: No. Not really. [pauses] We're kind of interested in other things.

BD: You've got to be wittier than this. You've got to be sharper.

JC: We really want to engage with other artists, but nobody seems
prepared to engage with us.

JM: But are you definitely artists?

JC: Not necessarily, but we would like to have some dialogue with
somebody or something. We don't seem to be getting that.

J: Jonathan, as an artist did you think that that nailing the money to
a piece of wood and exhibiting it as an. Was that a piece of art for you?

JM: I don't know. What did you do with it afterwards?

BD: We had to take it apart and put it back in the bank.

JM: Can you just get a million pounds out like that?

BD: No. We had a million quid in the bank account and we thought we
could go along and just cash a cheque. But you just own the concept of
the money, you don't actually own the pieces of paper and the
coins. and The Bank Of England weren't having it.

JM: Didn't you get done for putting nails through it?

BD: Yes we did. They had to burn that lot when it went back to the
Bank of England.

JM: So they were copying you?

BD: No we hadn't done it yet.  We were copying them! We had to them
pay stlg500 to them so they could print up another million.

JM: I applied for Rachel Whiteread's money. I wanted to build a wooden
model of "House" and burn that on Jura.

BD: That's excellent!

D: Will the K Foundation provide Jonathan with the funds to do
that project?

JC: We haven't got any money! You don't burn a million quid and then
start giving money out afterwards.

BD: What we're saying is he should go and do it.

JM: I can't afford it.

JC: That's bollocks.

BD: You can hitch up to Jura. There's wood up there. There's trees. We
had a bonfire up there - the Forestry Commission provided all this
wood and they would do the same for you.

D: There you go Jonathan. The K Foundation have done something for
your life.

BD: And if you don't do it, it's because you're lazy and you're just
not trying hard enough.

JC: It's not our fault. Don't put the responsibility on to us because
we can't give you any money.

D: Before the film was seen, when it was still a mythical anecdote, it
was quite intriguing. But now you 're showing the fim everywhere, is
it not a case of the law of diminishing returns? The more you show it,
the less interesting it becomes?

JC: Yes, I think that's probably true, but we're still going to go
ahead and do it anyway.

JM: It's also publicity. though. In art terrorism you're supposed to
remain unknown.

BD: We're not art terrorists.

JM: What are you?

BD: I don't know, but we're not art terrorists.

J: Do you think you ever will find out what you are?

BD: Other people decide what you are, don't they?

D: Surely you should maintain an idea of who you are, otherwise you
don't have an identity.

BD: I'm Bill Drummond and he's Jimmy Cauty.

[Andrew Nairn, Visual Arts Officer for the Scottish Arts Council arrives]

D: As a member of the Scottish arts establishment, do you feel
battered and bruised by the assaults the K Foundation have made?

AN: I don't feel battered at all. I think the art world has just
yawned actually. They felt there was no context. I think that says
something about the art world. If you'd burnt the million pounds in an
art gallery, you'd have got a lot more attention from the art world
than burning it somewhere else.

BD: He's right. If it had been burnt in a gallery. then people would
have seen it as art, then they know what they're dealing with.

JC: We did know that, we had thought about doing it in an art context
like that, but we decided not to.

AN: There have been a lot of important iconic gestures in the history
of art since the war and in theory this could be added to
them. Somehow, it doesn't feel like it's going to happen. The people
who did it are seen as interesting people in the pop world, not the
art world. So it comes down to categorisations.

BD: We're not begging to be part of the art world.

JC: We don't really want to be let in in the first place. We're
not bothered.

D: Inevitably, this act will go down in art history somewhere.

JC: I think we fulfill a much better function outside of the whole
system of the arts.

BD: We're not saying Andrew is wrong, either. Everything he has said
is totally right.

AN: Did you have something against Rachel Whiteread's work? I saw her
last week and I think she's a really good artist.

BD: Of course she is.

JC: If she's going enter into the spirit of being an artist, going
in for competitions, she has to accept that it's not all...

AN: I think people liked all your adverts at the beginning of the
whole thing. But, somehow it left a nasty taste in peoples' mouths at
the time of the Turner Prize.

BD: Partly because she was a woman, there was a sexist element
there. They thought "Poor little Rachel Whiteread". It wasn't us. We
hadn't decided. It was people voting that had decided - that's why she
won. Initially the votes were coming in for the geezer that did the
rice thing, the Cambodian guy, because that was getting the coverage
in the broadsheets, so that's what people were reacting to. But once
the "House" thing came out, everybody was voting her as the
worst. That was the reason why she got it.

AN: I am interested in the public reception to contemporary art.  If
you go into the Tate, there's nothing about the famous bricks from
Carl Andre from 1976. If you go and look for bricks in the catalogue
of the Tate, you would think it might say something about the biggest
controversy ever, since the war, in Britain about these bricks on the
ground. There's nothing said about it. And yet the understanding of
the artwork for most people is within that controversy that surrounded
it. And that's similar to what you did. There will always be an
association and you grabbed on to that. That said, I think "House" is
one of the great artworks of the 90s.

JC: Fair enough, yes. We were into it too.

D: But the public disagreed.

AN: I don't believe that. I take issue with that.

D: The K Foundation did a poll...

JC: Yes, but the people who voted had never studied art.

BD: They don't know.

D: What's that got to do with it? It doesn't matter what the middle
classes think about art, it's what the public thinks...

BD: No. The public don't know about art.

JC: They're not interested in it.

D: But it's their money being spent by the SAC on these projects.

JC: There's nothing wrong with that.

J: If the public don't know about art, why did you put out a poll
saying "People vote for the worst art"?

JC: It was a mistake.

BD: No.  it wasn't a mistake.

JC: I thought it was [laughs].

BD: Contemporary art - the whole purpose of its being is to be at the
forefront, so the public ain't going to understand that. Why should
they? If the public understood it, it wouldn't be working. The public
only ever react to contemporary art when it is like the Tate
bricks. They can only understand it on some kind of ludicrous
level. They can only ever get into it on the shock horror thing. They
can never actually really understand it.

J: Was your piece intended to shock and horror?

JC: We didn't want it to be shocking because the shocking-ness would
spoil it.

AN: Why did you burn it as opposed to sinking it in the North Sea? Did
you go through the environmental issue?

BD: Burning is steeped in all sorts of symbolism, going all the way
back. When we were burning it, we thought "any second now, God's going
to say - it's okay boys, there's a ram out there in the bush."

D: You thought it was a religious expenence then? A sacrificial act?
With spiritual connotations?

BD: God didn't show up.