Wir hatten ja schon zu Jahresbeginn berichtet (hier und hier), dass sich eine Rückkehr von Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty aka The KLF aka The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu aka The Timelords aka The K Foundation aka etc pp abzeichnet.
Nun, 23 Jahre nachdem The KLF einen „Vertrag“ auf ein Auto geschrieben hatten, das dann von einer Klippe gestoßen wurde, kehren die beiden subversivsten Stars der Popgeschichte tatsächlich zurück:
Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond signed a contract with the rest of the world agreeing to end the K Foundation for a period of 23 years.
This postponement provides opportunity of sufficient length for an accurate and appropriately executed response to their ‚burning of a million quid‘. The K Foundation’s fate now lies irrevocably sealed in the imploded remains of a Nissan Bluebird nestling among the rocks 600 feet below Cape Wrath, Scotland
Das 23jährige Moratorium endet und „Welcome To The Dark Ages“ beginnt: so heißt das dreitägige Programm, das in Liverpool vom 23.8.-25.8. aufgeführt wird. Dazu wurden 400 Tickets verkauft, wobei sich jeder Käufer verpflichten musste, auch „Volunteer“ zu sein. Zusätzlich veröffentlichen Cauty & Drummond ein Buch namens „2023: a trilogy“, das gestern in Liverpool zum ersten Mal verkauft wurde. Für den Verkausstart fuhren Drummond & Cauty natürlich in einem Ice Cream Van an, einem ewigen Bestandteil der KLF-Mythologie (und übrigens Ursprung/Referenz von Scooters „Respect To The Man In The Ice Cream Van“):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKLJWgWC_kM
Das nächtliche Book Signing hatte dabei die folgenden Regeln, meine Favoriten sind
„Traditional handshaking is permitted, but no hipster derivatives.
Do not attempt to take a selfie with the JAMs or with anyone else ever again.“
Das weitere Programm, kryptisch wie gehabt, ist den Volunteers nun ausgehändigt worden:
Gott, ich liebe The KLF. Und die Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu.
(Bilder z.T. via Peter Robinson aka popjustice)
Soweit ich weiß, ist nie geklärt worden, wo die Ice Cream Van Referenz herkommt. In einer alten KLF-Mailing-List gabs die Anmerkung dazu:
„The first KLF ice
cream connection took place at the Liverpool Festival of comedy when they
handed out 99’s from an ice cream van they’d borrowed from it’s owner
outside Trancentral. Then came Justified and Ancient with its ice cream
references in the lyrics, an ice cream van on the cover, a catalogue number
of KLF 099, and promo’s labelled CHOCICE 1 to 3. When they appeared on TOTP
Drummond and Cauty were dressed in huge latex 99 costumes designed by Luck
and Flaw of the ‚Spitting Image‘ TV programme. In promotional campaigns in
the US, Arista organised ice cream van stunts too.
All this lead some fans to wonder if there was a connection to The Ice Cream
Men from ‚Rudy Rucker’s cyberpunk novels ‚Software‘ & ‚Wetware‘. It would
seem not as „The Ice Cream Man was a android controlled by one of the main
computers on the moon, who was advancing the cause of one of the two
factions in a revolution between the little robots and the big robots that
was ongoing on the moon. It was also to allow the ‚personalities‘ that had
been read (by the aforementioned brain-eating) into the computer to operate
as if they still had human bodies. (The brain eating took all of the
chemically- encoded memories into a processor so that the computer could
integrate the personality.) Anyway, the ice-cream man’s van was really a
refrigerator for the robot brain that it carried around, I seem to
remember. Since the novel took place in the Orlando-Cocoa Beach-Daytona
Beach area of Florida, USA and no-one has reported that Bill and Jimmy acted
a bit ‚mechanical‘ on meeting them, I don’t see that there’s much connection
beyond the coincidental. However, they were written back in the late 80’s,
so there is a slight possibility of it being influential, but it just
doesn’t seem likely to me.“ However, strangely, Info sheet 13 has a list of
„questions that we get asked and are unable to answer. So we decided to hold
„The Rites Of Mu“ to celebrate this year’s summer solstice and in doing so
hopefully make the above questions redundant.“ One of the questions was ‚Are
you the ice cream men?‘ But the KLF’s ice cream activities came _just after_
the ‚Rites Of Mu‘, where they performed in Liverpool using an ice-cream van
they had borrowed from a man in the street outside Trancentral. But why did
someone ask if they were the ice cream men, before they had done any ice
cream related activity?“