Trivia / The KLF

• Black Sheep Hit: "Doctorin' The Tardis" was essentially an attempt to invoke this deliberately. They were never able to duplicate its success though, although they did have several other fairly large hits later in their career.
• Bury Your Art: At the height of the band's popularity in 1992, they abruptly announced their retirement from making music and deleted their entire back catalogue. The band also wiped the master tapes for The Black Room, a planned follow up to The White Room, thus ensuring that their label couldn't release it behind their backs. They did all this mostly to spite the music industry, rather than due to dissatisfaction with their own work. Decades later, in 2021, they relented and re-released their surviving material on all streaming platforms.
• Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: Many fans assumed that the majority of the last ten minutes of Come Down Dawn was a new unreleased section of Chill Out, but it actually was "What Time Is Love? (Virtual Reality Mix)", released on a remix maxi-single in 1990.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Drummond later said he regretted their contribution to the War Child - Help! charity album, "The Magnificent", as an inappropriately flippant response to the civil war in Yugoslavia. The radio station sampled on the track took quite the opposite view though, going so far as to adopt it as their theme tune.
  • The "burning a million quid" project has been seen as this by the members in later years since they realized that having the money would have meant financial security and nowadays, they see their reasons for burning the money as them being young and stupid.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The group deleted their entire catalogue in 1992, keeping it that way for decades. Even before then, original versions of 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) were difficult to find because copyright issues resulted in it being withdrawn from circulation. In January 2013, the band's catalogue reappeared on streaming and download sites, but the albums were pulled within a day. This would ultimately be averted when a poster plastered under a railway bridge (yes, really) announced that a 5-part compilation of their music would be released onto streaming platforms throughout 2021, starting with Solid State Logik 1.
• Missing Episode:
  • The White Room film.^note The group finished the Inner Film (A fictional account of them locating the mythical White Room in Sierra Nevada desert). They planned on making an Outer Film (a documentary about inner workings of the group IRL), but never filmed it due to funds shortages. Even though it never saw an actual release, most video releases by the group states "This is not The White Room" just to tease the fans.
  • The Black Room, a collaboration between the KLF and Extreme Noise Terror that would've been a New Sound Album follow-up to The White Room; the album's master tapes were supposedly deleted as part of the KLF's retirement, though Cauty claimed in a 2003 interview that he still possessed a recording from the recording sessions.
• One-Hit Wonder: As The Timelords, they were this.
• The Other Darrin: The "Gary Joins the JAMs" version of "Doctorin' the Tardis" was quite understandably not re-issued on Solid State Logik 2 in 2021 due to Gary Glitter's crimes, imprisonment and Unperson status. A new version of the song featuring Jarvis Cocker is included instead.
• Production Posse:
  • Mark "Spike" Stent: the band's Engineer from "Kylie Said to Jason" onward.
  • Bill Butt: directed The White Room Film, along with all the group's music videos.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends
  • Rumors persist that they did a track ("Ooh! Aah! Cantona") for Manchester United. This is in fact an imitator/tribute group called The Unjustified Ancients of M.U.
  • The band printed up sleeves for a few Pure Trance singles that were never pressed. They might have never even composed.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: The group are no stranger to this, given that many of their songs sampled other well known songs. However, their most well known run-in with lawyers was with the track "The Queen and I" from the abovementioned 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) album, whose title is not only a nod to the The King and I, they also heavily sampled ABBA's "Dancing Queen". After some fierce courtroom battles with ABBA's lawyers, they were forced to recall all unsold copies of said album, on which the titular song was on, from all store shelves. They then went to Sweden to try to gain an audience with ABBA to seek forgiveness. Failing to do so, they burnt several cartons of the unsold vinyls in a field and dumped the rest into the North Sea.^note this also had the side effect of making any copies sold a collectors' piece, as the only way to get the song now is through the underground and getting the song legally is impossible.
• Two-Hit Wonder: In the US, they have two Top 40 hits as "3 a.m. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)", which peaked at number five and "Justified and Ancient (Stand by The JAMs)", which peaked at number 11.
• What Could Have Been: The group were working on an album called The Black Room which would have been utterly abrasive in the style of their collaborative performance with Extreme Noise Terror. However, they decided to retire from the music industry and it was never finished or released.

---