The KLF

The KLF were Bill Drummond, a Scot, and Jimmy Cauty, an Englishman, two pranksters who treated the pop charts as a playground and then set fire to the swings. Working out of Liverpool and London, they went by a pile of aliases, first the JAMs with their sample-choked hip-hop cut-ups, then the Timelords, who landed a UK chart-topper with "Doctorin' the Tardis" and then wrote a book explaining exactly how anyone could do the same.

As the KLF they pioneered what they called stadium house: rave music blown up to arena size, with pop-rock production and crowds roaring out of the sampler. Chill Out helped launch ambient house, and by 1991 they were the biggest-selling singles act on the planet, with The White Room as their pop headquarters. "3 A.M. Eternal" pounds like a riot with a dance beat, "What Time Is Love?" throbs and chants, and "Justified & Ancient" turns their own mythology into a sly, stately anthem.

They lived the Illuminatus! mythology to the hilt, defacing billboards and placing cryptic ads. At the February 1992 BRIT Awards they teamed up with Extreme Noise Terror, fired blanks into the crowd, dumped a dead sheep at the afterparty, quit the business, and deleted their catalogue that May. As the K Foundation they burned a million pounds. They resurfaced in 2017, and in 2021 began putting the old records on streaming services.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.