Monday 15 September 2008

The1


It was 1995 when I first met Bill Drummond, formerly of the KLF. He'd recently burnt £1,000,000 of the KLF millions and was touring round the UK with a film of it, hosting debates as to whether it was art or rock n roll or what the hell he was playing at burning money.

It was early November 1995, I'd just started going out with my first girlfriend, my brother had acquired four tickets for the Burning a Million Quid film thing at Manchester's Quaker Meeting House, he was going along with a chum of the old KLF mailing list and I was taking along my wee school chum Nosni.

The KLF were the fist band I really got into, they had thi whole mythology about them, according to the Pete Robinson's Justified and Ancient History, they'd ripped all thi mythology from a book called The Illuminatus Trilogy. My brother got his copy of the Justified and Ancient History in April 1991, the kind of odd thing was that a copy of book one of the Illuminatus Trilogy appeared in my parent's house in February 1991, two months earlier. I remember seeing it and thinking it was odd.

After I discovered its significance, and read it cover to cover several times, my mind was truly fucked.

Back to November '95, brother took a CD and a copy of Justified and Ancient Histroy to try and get Bill and Jimi the other guy from the KLF and Gimpo the roadie to sign it. I took along the first book of the Illuminatus Trilogy.

After the rock n roll burning money debate and the crowds slowly filing out of the room, my brother lurched in to get his stuff signed. I followed a few steps later to get the book signed.

Drummond just laughed that it was all lies and then that he didn't write my book.

Sometime the next week I wrote a letter to Bill Drummond, got knows where I got an address from. The letter explained who I was, and my aspirations for a career in music, and sought any advice.

A few weeks later a poster arrived in the post, a poster of the Million Quid Burning, and a letter from Mr Drummond, addressed to the Manchester Illuminatus Kid.

When I signed up to hotmail, with the alias manc_ill_kid. And the alias has stuck with me for the last 13 years.

Links
Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid

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