Who Killed The KLF? – Fantastic Fest 2021 review

30 years after their breakup, The KLF remains one of the most thrilling and perplexing stories in pop music history. Originally set up as more of a DJ experiment than anything else by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the duo would go on to have massive chart success with dance tracks like “Justified and Ancient,” while engaging in increasingly absurdist acts that eventually came to overshadow their music completely. Their most notorious stunt involved their burning of £1m on a Sottish island, an act that drew ire throughout the world and one the band has never fully explained.

Director Chris Atkins attempts to get to the bottom of the mysterious duo with Who Killed The KLF?, a thrilling new documentary that dives into the band’s prankster inspirations and how their desire for self-sabotage finally did the band in. While the notoriously secretive duo aren’t interviewed in the film, Atkins utilizes previously unheard interview tapes with Drummond and Cauty as the backbone of the film. Those audio clips are then placed alongside vintage footage, reconstructions, and animated sequences. The collage approach syncs perfectly with the KLF’s music, which was largely built upon repurposed tracks, including an early single that featured the entirety of Abba’s “Dancing Queen.”

The KLF reached massive success without a manager or record label to stop them from constantly mucking with the press, in what turned out to be a bit of a monkey’s paw situation for the band. The film traces the duo’s interest in Discordianism, the goal of which is to sow chaos and confusion, which the KLF certainly did throughout their short career. Those acts ranged from firing machine gun blanks over the crowd’s head at The Brits award show to ultimately burning a small fortune in cash because money had become meaningless for the band. The fascinating latter half of the documentary follows The KLF transitioning into the “K Foundation,” a nebulous art project that let the duo live out their most esoteric and ultimately destructive projects.

Atkins’ film is an engrossing overview of the incredibly strange rise and fall of The KLF, even if its mostly somber tone doesn’t quite capture the joyous lunacy the band had in constantly fucking with the public on every conceivable level. Given the predominance of the “fake news” narrative these days and how vacuous our current crop of pop stars has become, we need an act like The KLF now more than ever.

Who Killed The KLF? screened during Fantastic Fest 2021.