The KLF were one of those great bands who continually messed with everyone’s heads. From their explosive debut “1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?” through to their huge chart topping stadium pop singles and their heartstopping art projects (see The KLF Burn A Million Quid), The KLF were archetypal cultural plunderers, in love with pop but utterly unsentimental about it.

At the heart of The KLF were Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, both fiercely intelligent and restlessly experimental, fascinated by the money and media attention having something as trivial as a pop single could provide and determined to mess around with it.
The Manual is a genuine attempt by the duo to explain the incompetent alchemy that goes into creating a Number One single, and as well as being a masterpiece of dry humour and rightly cynical appraisal of the music industry, it is a genuinely wise book – you really could have a Number One single if you followed their recipe.

Bill Drummond has gone on to write several more books, the autobiographical 45 being an excellent place to pick up the KLF legacy and go beyond it.

I’m not actually sure of the legal status of The Manual being available for free on the Net, but given it’s out of print and unavailable at Amazon, and given The KLF’s own notoriously liberal attitudes to respecting copyright, I’m sure they won’t mind if I link to the full text that’s available online.

Read The Manual online.