a hot air current might have caught your eye. Wasn’t that a picture of the Queen’s tiara? Indeed, weren’t those £50 notes on the fire? And not just a few, but hundreds?
In fact, what you’d have witnessed on that August night more than twenty years ago was the destruction by fire of £1 million. A million pounds in £50 notes. It took just over an hour – 67 minutes, to be precise – to complete the task. A fat hour to burn the stuff of every lottery player’s dreams.
The two men behind the fire were from the band KLF. They had made the money with dance tracks from the early 1990s such as ‘Justified and Ancient’ and ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Tired of the music scene, they’d moved on to making art. For them, the burning of the million pounds was a work of conceptual art. Their first idea was to make a sculpture from bundles of notes nailed to a wooden frame. But as a sign of the taboo they were dealing with, they couldn’t find a gallery willing to exhibit such a sculpture. So they had another idea.
Just burn the money.
The whole process was videoed. You can watch it on YouTube today. The two members of KLF are dressed, rather predictably, in black. At first, they peel £50 notes from a wad one at a time, feeding them casually to the fire, almost as if they’re throwing bread to ducks. Jimmy Cauty screws up every note before consigning it to the flames; Bill Drummond frisbees them into the blaze. The notes burn slowly. Some drift out of the fire and have to be gathered up and thrown back in again. After a while the K Foundation, as they called themselves by then, realise that at the rate they are going, the process will take hours. So they speed things up: chucking in armfuls of notes at a time.
Despite the video evidence, there were suspicions afterwards that the whole thing was a stunt. Would anyone really burn so much real money? To prove the doubters wrong the K Foundation had the remains of the fire tested in a laboratory. There it was confirmed that the ashes were the genuine remains of a very large quantity of banknotes.
The performance went to plan, but nothing prepared the band members for the hostility the act would induce. People hated them for it, saying if they didn’t want the money why not give it to charity? People called them selfish and stupid.
After a few minutes of seeing the money burn on the video we all want to know why Cauty and Drummond did it. Okay, it was some sort of art work, but signifying what?
Surprisingly, in the many interviews they’ve given over the years (you can watch these on YouTube too) the two men struggle to answer this question – seeming incoherent, inconsistent, and not even convincing to their own ears.
In the official documentary Jimmy Cauty admits that what they did was possibly meaningless, that its status as a work of art is highly disputable. ‘You can get into this whole area where it’s pretty black.’ You hear him fumbling for an explanation, falling into despair.
In one TV interview, Bill Drummond says: ‘We could have done with the money.’ Cauty and he had six children between them. Only to add: ‘but we wanted to burn it more.’ Then when asked what it was like to throw the notes onto the fire he says he felt numb, that the only way to do it was to operate on autopilot. ‘If you’re thinking about every fifty quid or every bundle . . . ’ and his voice fades almost as though he can’t bear to think about it.1
Yet Drummond also insists they hadn’t really destroyed anything. ‘The only thing that’s less is a pile of paper. There’s no less bread or apples in the world.’2
It is this apparently unarguable statement that gets to the heart of the matter – and explains why so many people were so angry and upset by what Cauty and Drummond did. For although it’s true that no actual bread or apples were destroyed in the fire, something was destroyed. The possibility of bread and apples. A million pounds worth. Food that could have fed people.
What was also destroyed was the possibility of planting trees to grow apples or building a bakery to make bread – or employing others to do so. Which might have resulted in many millions of pounds worth of produce over the years.
And it doesn’t stop there either. Everyone who watches the film of the burning cash thinks about what they could have done with the money. A new house. A new car. Freedom from debt. The option to set up a new business. The opportunity to help family and friends. The chance to travel the world. Aid for thousands of children in a poor country. Help for a project to save the rainforest.
It would have been a different situation if Cauty and Drummond had set fire to an object worth a million pounds. In that case only that particular object – a painting, a yacht, a precious jewel – would have been destroyed. And not everybody would even have valued what was lost.
Had they frittered the money away in traditional rock star fashion – trashing a hotel or snorting it up their noses – people would doubtless have deplored the waste and excess, but there wouldn’t have been such an outcry. And if they had just hoarded the money or put it in a high interest account or invested (and perhaps lost it) on the stock market, few people would have cared. While if they had given it away, they would of course have been applauded.
The issue is not that two men had a million pounds and then they didn’t. It is that nothing came of this vast sum. All the possibilities inherent in the money – for them, but also for the rest of us – were lost.
Herein lies the extraordinary power that money has over our minds. We have invested in bits of paper, lumps of metal and figures on a screen (all worthless in themselves) the promise of so many things we value. More than that, the promise, and our confidence in it, actually summons those myriad things we value into existence. If there is magic in our world this is surely it. Something abstract and virtual, a product of our minds, helps us to create the things we need and want.
It is this property of money that made Cauty and Drummond’s act so transgressive, so sacrilegious: such a taboo. To strike at money is to strike not just at the foundations of modern human society but almost at what it means to be a contemporary human being.
For we are profoundly psychological beings – it is our minds that make us what we are – and money is a mental construct, that doesn’t exist beyond our idea of it, but on which we now depend for most of the things we need to live.
And yet most of us affect to despise money. We would do away with it if we could and are drawn to societies, both real and imagined, which apparently have no need of it. Take this passage from Herman Melville’s early travelogue-cum-novel Typee published in 1846. Who wouldn’t want to live in this earthly paradise?
There were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilised man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bills payable, no debts of honour in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description; no assault and battery attorneys, to foment discord, backing their clients up to a quarrel, and then knocking their heads together; no poor relations everlastingly occupying the spare bed-chamber, and diminishing the elbow room at the family table; no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtor’s prisons; no proud and hard hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum it all up in one word – no Money!
Melville ended up in Typee, a real place on a South Sea Island, after jumping ship. But for all its charms so fondly recalled and re-imagined by Melville – the book is a blend of fact and fiction – he constantly longed to escape, back to civilisation, back to the society he knew, and back, by implication, to money.
This is how it is for us. We’ve cast ourselves out of money-free supposed Edens like Typee. And yearning to go back to them or trying to recreate them (as my old friend Dylan Evans tried to do recently when he set up a self-sufficient society in Scotland, where things didn’t quite go to plan)3 is to miss the point. The ills of our society are not caused by money itself, but the way we use it. So how can we all do a better job of using money for good rather than ill?
This book is called Mind Over Money. It’s a play on words, of course. But there’s more to it than that. My starting point