The NSA and Biographers

When I was researching my Timothy Leary biography in 2005, I had access to Leary's archive. This is now being meticulously cared for by the New York Public Library, but it was then in this nondescript lock up somewhere north of Santa Cruz.

This is what was inside:

There was a lot of stuff there - letters, manuscripts, legal documents, tapes, videos, computer disks, you name it. You could spend years going through it all - as the New York Public Library have now discovered. I saw part of Ken Campbell's archive recently and it was much the same.

All this got me thinking about the recent whistleblowing on the NSAs blanket surveillance and storage of our digital lives. What would it be like being a biographer in the future, when your subject's entire digital footprint is preserved and available? How would you go about writing a life of someone when you had every email they had every written and received, every social media update, their browsing history, a GPS record of their every movement from their phone, every photo taken of them, details of everything they've bought, even the names and duration of every porn video they watched? As should be clear by now, our digital landlords are financially dependent on storing all this stuff, and there is little reason to believe that it will remain private.

It's too much, it really is. Biography would move from being a psychological problem and become a signal-to-noise problem. You'd need teams of people to even think about going through all that methodically. No, what you would do is search it for key words - you'd search for the juicy stuff. And with that much data, you'd find it. You'd find exactly what you wanted to find.

As I discuss in the KLF book, increasing the amount of data available should in theory create clarity, but in practise it tends to do the opposite. Instead, it creates more and more alternative stories that you can pull from the same data set. Supporting evidence will be found to support and entrench misunderstandings, errors and confused context. In-jokes and sarcasm between friends become evidence of bitter enmity. Greetings and terms of affection which were, historically, in common use become evidence of infidelity or tragic yearning (just ask Shakespeare). The filter bubble problem will be magnified. Biographies already reveal more about their author and their prejudices than their subject, in particular with regards to what they omit. That will become much more apparent.

Politically motivated biographers will be in hog heaven. George Orwell will seem even more prophetic. Saints can be turned into sinners, and vice versa. And will be, repeatedly.

I'm biased here: I write about the past. This all sounds great to me. The fact that it will help people grasp just how arbitrary our perspectives on others are is, to my thinking, a bonus. But how would our subjects and their families react to this? What would you think of people going through your existing digital life because, a few months from now, you accidentally do something brilliant and become massively famous? Or if not you, your spouse or children?

All that is part of the conversation we need to be having now. History's view of how that conversation develops, of course, will depend on who chooses to research it.

Last Call for the KLF ebook

Just to forewarn anyone with half a mind to pick up a copy of the KLF ebook - I'll be pulling it from Amazon on Monday (May 27th). It will then be unavailable until September 26th, when a shiny new edition will be published by Phoenix, in paperback and assorted ebook formats (including epub at last.)

The new edition will be essentially the same except with a new cover, a photo section, a notes & sources section, a timeline and a discography, plus a little more polish here and there. We've done it proud, in other words. Early word suggests it will be £9.99 paperback and £4.99 in ebook.

Note that this only applies to the UK and Australia/New Zealand - the original ebook will remain on sale in the US and Europe. What has disappeared from sale in the US is a Kindle edition of I Have America Surrounded which was not... strictly legit, shall we say. Rest assured a new version will appear in the not so far future. Until then, if you looking for a book about Timothy Leary, you could do far worse than the new biography by R.U. Sirius, which you can download for free from TimothyLeary.org

The KLF paperback: September

I am very happy to announce that the paperback version of my KLF book will be released on September 26th and can be pre-ordered here.

And because this is a story that grew out of a fire, I'm quietly delighted that the imprint of Orion which it will be released under is... Phoenix.

One of the many Phoenixes I've been spotting recently.

Thanks for your patience while all this was being arranged. The book is largely the same, although we've added some photographs, a bit more polish, a 'notes & sources' section, a discography and a timeline. It'll be as good as it can be with a less-shit cover, basically, and should satisfy everyone who's messaged me to ask for either a physical copy, an ePub version, or the option to buy it from places other than Amazon.

The paperback - now going under the name The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band who burned a Million Pounds - is being released by Orion in the UK and Commonwealth (accept Canada). Note that the original ebook is still available from Amazon in those territories, but not for much longer - I'll be taking it down very soon (it will remain up in the rest of the world, of course).

And as for what's coming after that, there's some exciting news here.

Update on the KLF paperback

So where's the bloody KLF paperback, then?

I get asked that most days and the short answer is that it will be a while yet - but it will be a much nicer edition when it arrives.

This is the longer answer:

My original plan was test the reaction to last November's Kindle version (ie, to see if led to me being sectioned), and if all went well I was going to put a print-on-demand paperback out via The Big Hand this month - along with iBook, Kobo etc versions.

Except things didn't go to plan. Things went far better than planned. The reaction to the book was *blushes* pretty damn great. It was apparent that the book could be published "properly," and indeed there is a small publisher that is a perfect fit, and who do lovely, lovely stuff, that are keen to do so.

Which would be great except - well, for years I have been wanting to write an alternative history of the 20th Century. Why? Well, almost all 20th Century histories are written by politicians or political journalists who, unsurprisingly, attempt to understand the period through the actions of the political class. Yet the ideas and innovations of the 20th Century - relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, postmodernism, psychedelics, DNA, The Somme, video games, cosmology, the subconscious, moon landings, Dada, chaos maths, Hollywood and so on - don't make any damned sense from that perspective. Surprisingly, though, those things make far more sense together than they do when studied separately, because a few key ideas run through 20th century science, art and culture which are, I think, the key to unlocking the whole period. Hence my stupidly-ambitious intention is to write a book that will be a fun, easy read and which will casually make sense of the entire brainmelting, fascinating period. In less than 100,000 words.

This has never looked like a sensible, achievable ambition, but it's my ambition and I'm sticking with it.

The problem has always been that to write such a book properly you would need (a) a big publisher, and (b) credibility. One result of the fallout from the KLF ebook, however, is that I am now represented by one of the biggest and most prestigious literary agencies in the UK. It's nuts - I am now represented by the same agent as the likes of Julian Barnes, Blake Morrison and Ben Goldacre (who is responsible for this turn of events, and to whom I owe a massive debt of thanks). As a result I have received a unexpected blast of credibility and, as I'm sure you'll understand, am attempting use that to get the 20th Century book off the ground. The proposal and the Einstein chapter are currently landing in publishers inboxes.

So how does this effect the KLF paperback? Well, the aim is to get a good, long term relationship with the right publisher for the 20th Century book, and the KLF book has got caught up in this. Its sales for the first 10 weeks, all through word of mouth with no real effort at promotion, are such that picking up the paperback rights appears to be a no-brainer. It may well be - in fact, it's likely - that the publisher for The 20th Century wouldn't be right for KLF, in which case all well and good and I can rush the KLF paperback out through the perfect publisher mentioned above. But The 20th Century is the Big Goal, even if this slows down the KLF paperback. Thanks to the swamplike pace of Big Publishing, this means it will be while before I can confirm a release date.

This is far from ideal - making things not available in all formats is not the done thing this day and age, but I have to pursue any hope of getting the 20th Century book off the ground because if I don't get to write it soon I will burst.

So apologies to those who are waiting for the KLF book to appear in paperback, but hopefully no-one wants me to burst. I am leaving the KLF book available on Kindle format, for now at least, so that the text is available for anyone with a PC or a smartphone (details on how to read Kindle books without a Kindle are here). And if it helps any, the first draft of The First Church On The Moon will be done before the end of the month.

KLF fans, of course, understand the significance of waiting:

The Red Room & The White Room

Are there connections between The KLF's 'White Room' and David Lynch's 'Red Room' from Twin Peaks? Both are unreal places which represent a certain state of mind, but are there any, more concrete, links between the two?

Richard Murkin (@richmurkin on Twitter - go follow!) has pointed out the musical similarities between the track Build A Fire on The White Room album - specifically, the bit from 1:02 to 1:11...

...and Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks Theme:

The White Room album was released in 1991 and Twin Peaks debuted in 1990, so could there be a deliberate, conscious link between the two? Or to put it another, did The KLF, who openly stole from many, many records, help themselves to the Twin Peaks Theme as well?

It seems not - true, Build A Fire (and it bloody would be Build A Fire, wouldn't it?) was released in 1991, but it dates back to 1989. It first appeared on the original, unreleased version of The White Room - the soundtrack to The KLF's unfinished road movie. So The KLF version predates the Twin Peaks theme and, as it was unreleased when Antonio Badalementi was scoring Twin Peaks, it seems unlikely that he could have been inspired by them.

It's all just one of them wild coincidences, in other words. You know the ones.

Those who have read my KLF book may remember that I refer to David Lynch's creative process (which he writes about in this book here) and compare it to Jung's Collective Unconscious and Alan Moore's Ideaspace. All these are models which allow a number of artists to stumble upon the same idea at the same time. In light of this, I find this interview with Badalamenti fascinating - he demonstrates how he and Lynch almost pulled the Twin Peaks music, fully formed, out of thin air.

(That video - which I highly recommend you go back and watch, if you skipped past it - is an excerpt from the extras of the complete DVD set. The full version also includes Badalamenti's anecdote about how The Queen snubbed Paul McCartney in order to watch Twin Peaks.)

So a musical motif which Badalamenti and Lynch uncovered for a series underpinned by the idea of the Red Room matched one from The White Room. Both stories are centred on fire, which is highly significant for both the KLF and Twin Peaks ("Fire walk with me"). They both include an otherworldly figure named Bob. Agent Dale Cooper seemed destined to remain in the Red Room for 25 years, while The KLF have vowed not to discuss their money burning for 23 years. Twin Peaks features a Black Lodge and a White Lodge (with the Red Room being linked to the Black Lodge), and this nicely echoes the KLF's Black Room and White Room.

All in all it's a nice example of how Alan Moore's Ideaspace can be seen at play in the world at large, how the synchronicities keep coming, and of how much fun utter coincidences can be. It might be worth noting that @richmurkin, who alerted me to this on Twitter, has a large scary rabbit avatar.

In 1992, incidentally, The KLF began (and abandoned) and album called The Black Room, whilst The Orb - who originally included Jimmy Cauty - released the forty minute long Blue Room, which has been called "the last truly original thing to ever appear on Top of the Pops." Clearly if coloured rooms are your thing, the early 90s was the place to be.

The owls, incidentally, are still not what they seem.

(***UPDATE*** It seems there may have been a window of a few months when The KLF could have been 'inspired' by Twin Peaks - see comments for details...)

Danny Boyle's Jerusalem: The High Magic of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony

Bruce Robinson's 1989 film How To Get A Head In Advertising ends with Richard E. Grant paraphrasing William Blake's Jerusalem: "I shall not cease 'til Jerusalem is builded here, on England's green and pleasant land."

This comes at the end of a monologue about the triumph of consumerism. Its inclusion makes more sense in the context of the original screenplay, which differs from the scene as filmed. In the screenplay, Grant also quotes the opening lines of that poem, "And did those feet in ancient time / Walk upon England's mountains green?" and denounces them as pure marketing. The idea that Jesus visited England is obviously bollocks, he points out, regardless of what myths they tell you around Glastonbury. Blake was using the old advertiser's trick of false suggestion in order to make his audience believe that England was more special than it really was.

I read that screenplay twenty years ago, but I remembered it whenever I heard Jerusalem. Bruce Robinson had made a strong point and he had skewered the poem for me. I wondered if the reason why those lines were cut was because they were too close to the bone - Jerusalem means a lot to many people, both politically on the left and the right, and exposing the poem as a manipulative sham seemed cruel.

Watching Danny Boyles 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, however, showed me the error in the screenplay's logic and allowed me to understand Blake's poem. To understand why, it is necessary to appreciate why Boyle's ceremony was such a success.

Those involved in creative work have two different approaches that they can take in order to make their audience feel emotion. The simplest and easiest way is to force that emotion on them. This is the approach used in advertising - pummel the audience with emotive music, doe-eyed kids and as much pathos as you can muster. Doing this treats the audience like Pavlov's dogs, and the advertiser knows exactly what bell to ring to bypass the audience's critical mind and force the required emotion on them. It's not just advertisers who use this approach, of course. Writers and directors can make a good living out of it, as Richard Curtis' accountant would be the first to tell you.

Advertisers create that forced emotion in order to link it to a product you would not otherwise buy. The hard cut between a shot of a smiling child and an image of a sugary drink creates a link in a parents mind between their love of their children and the product, and this increases how positively they feel about the sugary drink. Unfortunately, that link goes both ways. Parental love has become linked with some valueless crap, and the parent's personal emotional landscape has been ever so slightly diminished. The arts of advertising are a form of subtle psychic vampire, feeding on what you value most and, over time, leaving you emotionally poorer and unsatisfied. It is black magic. That is why Richard E. Grant's character was evil. This is also at the heart of Bill Hick's advice to those who work in advertising and marketing.

What then, is the other approach?

Instead of forcing an emotion on an audience, it is possible to create a mental environment where that emotion will spontaneously rise within them - when they do not expect it and are unable to say how or why the emotion occurred. This is the approach used by poets and artists, and it is the approach used by Danny Boyle and his team in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony. Who, amongst those who watched it, could explain why they felt the way they did when the torch-petals were lit and rose to form the flaming cauldron, accompanied by the simplest of whistled music? There was no bombast or Eye of the Tiger-type fanfare to demand a reaction. Emotions that arise like this are far more powerful than those forced upon you, because they are genuine and they come with deep roots. They are your own emotions, not ones that have been given to you.

Make no mistake, working on this level is hard. It is with good reason why those who succeed in doing so attract the title of genius, while those who do not attract the title of hack.

None of the decisions made by Boyle to lead you to that moment were obvious - from the sheep and the fake rain clouds, to the recreation of the spoiling of the landscape, or the comedy of James Bond and the Queen's parachute jump. The arguments that followed the celebration of the NHS in one section showed how little people understood what Boyle was doing. The use of NHS nurses was just one element in a much deeper tapestry linking children's fiction, the Exorcist theme, nightmares, protection, care and the value of a national community. The Tory MP only saw the surface of what Boyle was doing, and wrongly considered it to be a standalone item that could have been discarded without affecting anything else. He did not understand that Boyle's work was creating links in his subconscious throughout, or that Boyle knew what he was doing.


Boyles' opening ceremony - and ceremony is absolutely the correct word for it - was deeply inspired by Blake's poem. It began with a single child singing Jerusalem, and it reenacted the spoiling of the Green and Pleasant Land with the arrival of the Dark Satanic Mills. The flags of the nations of the world were arranged on a recreation of Glastonbury Tor (a recreation topped with the World Tree rather than St. Michael's Tower) where "those feet" were alleged to have stood. All this, though, brings up the question of what 'building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land' actually means? With all due respect to the citizens of the real city of Jerusalem, there is no desire to recreate that physical city over here.

It's hard to remember now, but before the London Olympics the expectations were that they would be a shambles. When Mitt Romney publicly wondered how well things would proceed during his visit to London, the negative reaction was caused by his undiplomatic rudeness, not by the sense that he was wrong. The build up to the Olympics, with the Visa-only booking, terrible mascots, McDonalds-only chips and the G4S security debacle did not look promising. The opening ceremony, it was thought, would be a pretentious embarrassment which would pale beside the vast fireworks-and-drumming display of state control seen at Beijing in 2008. It was imagined that it would be a empty, vapid spectacle much like, well, much like 2012 Olympics closing ceremony.

But after three hours of Boyle's magic, things were very different. It was not that a theatrical event had gone well. It was that the British were suddenly living in a different country. Our innate cynicism had been dispelled and we were now able to appreciate the sport on the level that the competitors' deserved. More than this, though, was the fact that we knew things had changed. The weeks that followed were a joy. Suddenly we had different values. We behaved differently to strangers. We celebrated the act of contribution. Perhaps in time we will forget how different we felt during those games, but I suspect that part of us will always remember, deep down.

Boyle and his team could have made a ceremony to please the rest of the world, but they opted to be true to the national character regardless of how baffling or eccentric it made us appear - or just what an effect it would have on those living in the UK. Boyle did not make us "proud to be British," as the political cliche goes, he did something far better. He made us grateful to be British. And he did this by evoking our higher values - acceptance, belonging, humour - and merging those ideas with the actual country itself (Oscar Pistorius' comment that "the world will now have to see disability through the eyes of the British" is perhaps the finest illustration of this). Ed Milliband's use of the political slogan 'One Nation' is a direct reaction to Boyle's work.

The 2012 Olympics opening ceremony was not as politically radical as the end of the Paralympics opening ceremony, or as blatantly pagan as the start of the Paralympics closing ceremony. It had bigger goals than that, because this bringing down and enacting of our higher values was what Blake was referring to when he spoke of 'building Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land'. That was not advertising, for nothing was being sold. Blake was asking us recognise how much better things could be, should we look through different eyes. And the fallacy of Richard E. Grant's character in How To Get Ahead In Advertising is that he does not know that this is possible. Few people did, of course, until Boyle showed us what 'building Jerusalem' actually meant.

It did not last, alas. You could argue that the spiritually empty closing ceremony acted like a banishing ritual, dispelling the changes Boyle had created. The terrible Damien Hirst Union Flag and the appearance of Churchill brought back the "proud to be British" bullshit, and the cognitive dissonance created by Jessie J singing "It's not about the money, money" as she was driven round in a gold Rolls Royce proved that any coherent meaning had left the stadium. The smiling stage-school faces contrasted strongly with the genuine humanity of Boyle's non-professional cast. Others have detailed the problems with this ceremony far better than I can, but suffice to say that Jerusalem was dispelled and business-as-usual returned. We were back to the Spice Girls.

But we know that it is possible now - and that is Danny Boyle's legacy, right there.

Unlike Richard E. Grant's character, we now know it is possible.

The last days of Radio Eris

Radio Eris is still burbling away, but it will shut down for good at midnight on Friday.

If you're not familiar with Radio Eris, it's an algorithmically generated audio stream that takes a bank of samples and the text of KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, and generates a mix of synthetic readings and cut-up soundscapes as it sees fit. It was built by the artist Shardcore, who talks about it here.

If you are familiar with Radio Eris, then you might like to see what it physically looks like.

As you can see, Radio Eris is running on a cronky old 2006 MacBook sitting on a windowsill in Shardcore's home. The stream, therefore, is entirely dependent on this laptop not being knocked to the ground by the cats that prowl around his house, and its continuing ability to broadcast is very much dependent on the whims of fate.

The existence of Radio Eris has been described as a "bloody clever" and the "best book promo in a long while" which demonstrates a "clear understanding of viral marketing and the target audience." This is all very nice but it is more truthfully the result of a purely reactive marketing non-strategy that consists of saying yes to most things, and very little else. Using this method, it is not necessary to go out and proactively pitch the book to all suitable magazines and blogs. Instead, you go to the pub and, when an artist asks if they can build an algorithmic radio stream based on the book, you respond "Sure," and the next thing you know thousands of people have heard of your book.

Followers of the Church of the Subgenius will recognise this approach as 'Slack,' and it is very effective.

There's been a lovely unpredictable air to the whole thing. People and blogs we thought would love it have paid it no mind, whereas others who we never dreamt would mention it have plugged it like crazy. Even the broadcast itself, which is entirely automated, has been constantly surprisingly. It has refused to pronounce the Discordian word 'catma', for example, and instead replaced it with a barely audible grunt as if to suggest that a catma was a fnord. What's that about? The damn thing acts like it's got a mind of its own.

I highly recommend that you explore the other work of Shardcore, for he has created many strange and memorable things. I personally enjoy the flashing eyes in this portrait of Aleister Crowley:

And enjoy the last few days of Radio Eris, for none of us can say exactly what they will bring.