I envy you…just discovering these great bands who set the foundation for so much good music which followed.
Are you familiar with Meat Beat Manifesto? Satirycon is a great intro album of theirs:
Jack Dangers is an amazing producer/composer…I bring them up since you highlighted the Shamen and Utah Saints…
I’ve heard the name before but I’m not familiar. I’ll check it out.
Honestly at first I thought it was all super cheesy but I kept listening and it all just kept growing on me. Now, almost everyday I start my morning with Utah Saints Something Good Is Gonna Happen followed by Shaman Move Any Mountain. They’re great hype songs to get my day started.
I like The KLF and bought The White Room when it first came out years ago. Still have it in my play list, but when they wigged out 100 other bands moved in to take their place. (Like Utah Saints)
I read on their website somewhere that nobody was sure if he’d put blanks or live rounds in the gun.
I was lucky/old enough to see the live broadcast of this. I thought it was ace, parents not so much. You know it’s good if your parents hate it right (I think Lemmy said this)!
KLF = real deal art mavericks
They’re brilliant, independently and together.
Bill has such a strong “just do it” mentality. It’s worth reading his books to find out how it plays out. He applies it to really practical things but also to his rather odd magical thinking. The stuff in his book “45" about his time managing Echo & The Bunnymen is really fun. I find it inspiring. I also suck at following the advice 
I really like this mix off ‘En-Tact’…with the shouty crowd noise for good measure 
Their snare sounds like shit.
(/joke)
I’ve met Bill Drummond a few times when he came to my town (I did a pub quiz with him ha!) and he refuses to talk about the KLF, however I spoke at length with his assistant John about them. Most juicy bit of info is probably that the documentary is staged. Yes, they really burnt a million quid, but the rests was acted out. Kinda obvious now.
I stayed in Bill’s Tower in Cushendall, NI - which was weird - but in the attic I found a box containing an absolute treasure trove of KLF merch: one off white label promos, picture disks that never got made etc. Plus loads of press clipping mentioning KLF and their antics. Nothing was too unimportant to save, even tiny mentions in the NME, Bill kept everything.
I’m old enough to have seen it too, with un-impressed parents!
They were going to chuck a dead sheep into the crowd too, but Extreme Noise Terror were all vegans and refused to be involved, so they dumped it outside the Brits award party!
The book mentioned above is great, I loved the mythology, even though the truth about them is almost as mad.
Punk-art-terrorists!
The John Higgs one? I need to read that, several people have said it’s good.
Allow me to join the chorus. It’s excellent!
Yep, I really like his idea of why they really burned £1 million quid.
Think this was IIRC the track that launched them:
I think they did a bunch of other late 80’s rave stuff under various pseudonyms too around the same time 88/89.
Then a few years later they went a bit more mainstream.
I didn’t know this one got onto Top Of The Pops (weekly top 40 chart show, in the UK, ran for 30 years or something. An institution for those of us of a certain age. Currently being flogged to death on BBC4 re-runs).
I still find it amazing how they managed to get such odd things to chart so high.
There was definitely more leeway for this back then!
KLF Adjacent
Fascinated by the story like many and the documentary brought back memories.
Listening to their back catalogue does make me wonder how talented were they musically? They didn’t half squeeze and make the most out of their main KLF hit singles with countless remixes and hovering in and out of the Chill out album etc
Anybody know more about the production - I know they had a famous synth programmer etc onboard and of course sampled to death. Did they wing it totally or was Jimmy etc responsible for most
they were able to distil pop down to its purest form and then create a manual for it. You can’t do that without some ability.
