That should answer most of your questions... :-) The K Foundation Burn £1 Million Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty "retired" The KLF, formed the K Foundation, then nailed a million quid to wooden pallets. When everyone laughed they flew the money to Scotland and set fire to it. 23 November 1993 On the night of the Turner Prize Art Awards, a motorcade sets off for an unknown destination. Mick Houghton (KLF publicist): The seeds of the burning of the £1 million started when The KLF [Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty] "retired" from the music business and set up their arts organization, The K Foundation. They announced in full page newspaper ads that they would award £40.000 to the worst artist of the year. When tehy announced their winner, it was Rachel Whiteread, who was also the winner of that year's Turner Prize. Danny Kelly (then Editor of Q): In common, I'm sure, with the other 24 media people involved, I got an enigmatic phone call from Mick Houghton telling me to keep the evening of 23 November free because KLF were planning something. Mick Houghton: The intention was to upstage the Turner Prize by nailing £1 million to wooden pallets as an art exhibit. Danny Kelly: On the night we rendezvous-ed at Tower Bridge. We were issued with high visibility jackets, safety helmets and envelopes with instructions telling us to get into a fleet of limos and we'd be taken of somewhere. Mick Houghton: We stopped at Heston Service Station and handed each journalist an envelope containing £1650 in pristine £50 notes, and they just couldn't believe it. Danny Kelly: I'd never seen that much cash in my hand before, and I was excited by it. Was it a bribe? What was it about? We weren't told. We drove on, down through the New Forest, and wound up in a small, brightly floodlit clearing, about the size of a basketball court. Jimmy Cauty was driving an armoured car around the clearing blasting out Beethoven. It was quite wonderful and very strange. Then we noticed that in the clearing lay several wodden pallets on which was nailed a great deal of money. There was a man in the middle of the clearing in evening dress with a loud hailer, giving out instructions, and it gradually became clear that they wanted us to nail down the money we'd been given earlier. I have to say, several of us decided there was no way we were going to let this money out of hands. I took it upon myself as an act of art terrorism to trouser my £1650. I discovered later that everybody had palmed some of it. Mick Houghton: When it was totted up, the cash was about £9000 short. Danny Kelly: Afer much to-ing ont fro-ing, they had what they reckoned was almost £1m nailed to the pallets. Then, with no further explanation, we were bundled back into the cars, hammered up the motorway and arrived outside the Tate Gallery. The pallets were chained to the railings of the gallery, and poor old Rachel Whiteread, who'd just that night been awarded the Turner Prize, came out and was offered the money. Mick Houghton: The actual presentation of the money to Rachel Whiteread was done by Gimpo [Cauty and Drummond's assistant] on the steps of the Tate. He stood there with the £40.000... well, £31.000 in one hand and a bottle of lighter fluid in the other. She was pretty much blackmailed into accepting it because if she hadn't they would set fire to it. All credit to her, wehn she realized it was only £31.000 she demanded that it be topped up the next day. That was very cool on her part. Danny Kelly: Then we all went off to Filthy McNasty's in Islington. I ran into Bill upstairs and asked him what it was all about, and he put his finger to his lips and said, "Shhhhh." And that was it. Like so many KLF-related incidents, it was all beginnging, middle, and no end. Mick Houghton: Bill and Jimmy had also printed up a catalogue, in which they had, for example, a million pounds whihc you could buy at a reserve price of half a million. They made it known, via their accountants, that this stuff was available to buy but they just didn't get any offers. Nobody except them took it seriously. They wanted to have an exhibition, but no gallery was prepared to mount it, not so much because they didn't think it was art but because of the insurance risk. To have a milion quid on display in your window was a bit like an invitation to throw a brick through it and make off with the lot. Anyway, they still wanted to use the money, which was the proceeds of their pop career, as some kind of art statement. I think it was Jimmy who came up with the idea of burning it, around May or June of 1994. Bill Drummond: Jimmy said, "Why don't we just burn it?" He said it in a light-heared way I suppose, hoping I'd say, "No, we can't do that, let's do this..." But it seemded the most powerful thing to do. Mick Houghton: Having made the decision to burn the money, we then started having meetings to discuss how to carry it out. One idea was to hire the Albert Hall on the pretext of doing a free KLF concert or something, during which tehy would ceremonially burn the money on stage in front of 10.000 people, but that never came to fruition. Bill Drummond: It wasn't about burning all the money. And it wasn't about cleansing anyone's soul. In this context, a million is a lot more than two million. A million is the icon. It's what we talk about, dream about. It has the power. Mick Houghton: Eventually they decided to do it on the island of Jura [off the west coast of Scotland]. Once they'd decided, though, the date was set very quickly. 22 August 1994 The burning party flies north from Redhill, Surrey, in a Seneca Mark3 four-seater. They intend to incinerate the money the next day. Mick Houghton: The number 23 has always been significant in KLF lore, and 23 August is particulary significant - don't ask me why because I don't know. Anyway, they just took one journalist, Jim Reid of The Observer, and Gimpo, and flew off to the Western Isles of Scotland. Gimpo: The plane lands on the island of Isla, then we hire a car and get the ferry across to Jura. 23 August 1994 £1m is burnt in an abandoned boathouse n the Ardfin Estate on Jura. Gimpo: I Went to bed about half 12. At about 1.30am Jimmy was banging on my door saying, "Come on, we're doing it now." So we drove in the rain down to the boat house. They unloaded the suitcase, chucked a camera in my hand and said, "Here, you'd better film this. Leave it running." And the next thing I knew, they'd put the money in the fireplace and just lit it. And I was laughing hysterically. Bill Drummond: I've never seen it as a destructive thing. It wasn't to destroy the money. It was to watch it burn. Jimmy Cauty: Burning the money was riddled with flaws. There is the possibility that the whole thing was just a waste of time. That it was rubbish. 24 August 1994 Remnants of burnt cash are found blowing across the beach in Jura. Mick Houghton: I was expecting my phone to be ringing constantly the next day, and yet it was two or three days before we got a single call, and that was from a Scottish newspaper, because someone had found the remnants of the burnt £1m on the beach. PC Ben McEwan: I had been contacted by Alex Reilly-Smith, a local estate owner. He'd been walking on the beach and started finding charred fragments of £20 notes. He collected £1500 worth, all told. I started my investigations by examining the fire grate in the boathouse, and there had certainly been a recent fire in which a lot of paper was bruned. It looked like bankbotes, but crumbled to ash when I picked it up. I then took the charred money to the Bank of Scotland in Bowmore, where the manager checked the serial numbers. They seemed to be sequential, from which he stimated that there must have been at leasst a quarter of a million pounds. I rang Bill Drummond, but he wouldn't admit to it. He just told me to read the Sunday papers. It's quite the stangest case I've ever handled. Mick Houghton: For a long while after the burning, you could see that it had changed Bill and Jimmy. There was a kind of haunted look about them, like the immensity of what they'd done was affecting them. I think there was an elemtn of regret. 3 November 1995 Drummond and Cauty take their film, Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid, on tour. Mick Houghton: They decided to tour with the film and debate with the audiences, about why they'd burnt this money. It started off in Scotland and they showed it at an art gallery in Glasgow, but they couldn't deal with talking about it. Jimmy Cauty: Every day you wake up and go, "Oh God! I burnt a million quid." Craig McLean (journalist): I met up with Bill and Jimmy when they came to Glasgow to show the film. The following evening, I got a myserious call from Bill, asking me to meet them on Cape Wrath, which is the northern-most point on the British mainland. He said I would witness "the end of it all". It was a four-hour drive to Cape Wrath, and, when I got there, they told me they were going to push their car - a hired car - over the cliff. They wrote out a contract in white paint on the car, stating that they wouldn't talk about the money for the next 23 years. Then Jimmy gunned it to the edge of the cliff and jumped out. They pushed it over and it bounced a couple of times and landed on the rocky beach with a dull crump. And that was it. I offered them a lift back to Glasgow but Bill said he was going to hitchhike to 900 miles back to London. He just set off walking, and I never saw him again. Compiled By Johnny Black Q, 2001-04-00