A new product needs marketing and it’s here that The KLF excel in heightening curiosity, teasing and rewarding fans through their unique style of engagement.
Yellow smoke streams across the high street from canisters hurled onto a bus shelter. People going home from work stop, their backs against shop fronts, to watch 99 people in plastic yellow rain macs march – chanting a mysterious mantra – through the evening rush-hour traffic. The 99 turn into a local square where a rusting ice cream van awaits them, laden with whisky and hand-made mince pies.
This is a momentary snapshot from an evening recently spent following the directions of British electronic band The KLF. An immersive experience that wound through east London’s canals and onto the eventual clamour of Dalston’s Kingsland Road, this band – famed for igniting debate when they burned £1 million of their earnings in 1994 – know a thing or two about creating an immersive marketing experience.
It might not be what they want to hear, but The KLF are experts in influencing their audience, and their followers cannot get enough.
After burning the money back in the 1990s, The KLF – aka Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond – essentially disappeared for 23 years. In 2017, however, they returned with a book entitled 2023: A Trilogy. Described by The Guardian as a ‘multi-layered, self-referential meta-tale’, this is a futuristic vision of our familiar world, instead steered by major global brand conglomerates such as FaceLife, AppleTree and Amazaba.
But a new product, whether it’s a record or a book, needs marketing and it’s here that The KLF excel in heightening curiosity, teasing and rewarding fans through their unique style of engagement.
Only 99 tickets were available for their recent London event, Burn the Shard. Those lucky enough to scoop one, including myself, were given only a postcode and a meeting time. At the resulting canalside venue, we chose roles for the night, put on a KLF-branded yellow rain mac, drank KLF ale and enjoyed a live reading from the book.
