British film-maker Chris Atkins is known for his excellent Bafta-winning documentary Taking Liberties in 2007 and also for his five-year jail sentence in 2016 for tax fraud involving falsified invoices: a conviction that sent a there-but-for-grace-of-God shiver through the British film world. It resulted in Atkins’s bestselling prison memoir A Bit of a Stretch, which also became a hugely popular podcast. At the time I wrote about the heavy-handed prison treatment of Atkins’s co-defendant, Christina Slater, who at the time was a new mother.
Now Atkins has hit upon the ideal subject for what I can only describe as his talent for investigative mischief: it’s the strange story of the KLF, later the K Foundation, comprising Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the electronic-pop-duo-slash-situationist–art-collective who in the early 90s had gigantic chart hits with singles including 3am Eternal and What Time Is Love?, and then morphed into a guerrilla unit pranking what they saw as the money-crazed art world. They finally deleted their entire catalogue in a spectacular gesture of renunciation, and publicly set fire to the remaining million pounds in their bank account.
