Sometimes at GANTOB HQ we find ourselves drawing on the “teachings” of Bill Drummond. That can be dangerous, because it can pull us back into the challenges of finding a specific quote, particularly when Bill’s internet presence is frequently fleeting and his books and pamphlets can be difficult to source. Ideas land, dissipate with the wind and risk being forgotten, which is a pity. Sometimes I find myself drawing on the library of The (late) Benefaktor to try to reference an idea. Recently, however, I have relied on memory, which can be even more dangerous.
I thought about Bill Drummond on Saturday into Sunday night, clutching desperately for tendrils of sleep while the neighbours had a World Cup party. The 02:00 kick off for Scotland versus Haiti (UK time) presumably boosted pubs and off sales, open well past anybody’s normal bedtime, but has had an as yet unknown impact on the wider economy. We even have a national Bank Holiday to mark Scotland’s participation in the world cup (announced before their first victory). That holiday is today, 15 June 2026. We will come back to the significance of that date later. It relates to Bill Drummond’s former band. Perhaps you already know the specific connection.
My nocturnal ruminations over the weekend were sparked by a recent email from Gillian Finks’ husband Ali, asking whether I had come across any of his farming documentation in his wife’s archives. He had received unanticipated communication from the Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID) and could not put his hands on the paperwork he had printed out back in 2024. I flicked through the unpublished materials from the GANTOB papers – in my possession because of my work editing the magnum opus GANTOB’s 25 Paintings – but could find no official correspondence with mention of sheep tagging or movement of livestock. And so we need to rewind almost 3 years back to the most chaotic days of GANTOB.
When I first entered the orbit of GANTOB, it was to the outer fringes of the inner sanctum. The electron to the nucleus is how The Benefaktor put it when we were first introduced, just as he was closing the door to “The Kino”, his study and playroom. Inside, Reverend Douglas Kanning (aka The Benefaktor) and Gillian Finks were plotting with The Foundation Doktor.
Sitting in the dining room at the other end of the Georgian flat in Edinburgh’s New Town, Ali Finks and I were left to practise our small talk. Urs Kanning (Madame Benefaktor) sat with us initially, introducing topics of conversation and steering us through the stuttering dialogue, like the proverbial Minister’s wife. Eventually, however, even she ran out of steam, though I only realise that in retrospect. It looked quite the reverse at the time as she stood up, rearranged some cushions, scooped up snippings and pencils from the table, chucking them in a box labelled GANTOB A&C and bustled out, offering us hot drinks. The perennially busy bee. Ali and I were left in silence.
I had been invited to join GANTOB as the Deputy General Director of the project. It was arranged through the friend of a friend. My interview – a formality apparently – had been rather like the start of a day on jury duty, establishing that I genuinely knew nothing of pop music from the end of the 1980s and early 1990s. Specifically, that I had no knowledge of The KLF or their subsequent antics, or more recently, the shadowy workings of The KLFRS. The only William Drummond I had heard of was the poet, but without knowing any of his poems.
Successful in obtaining this unpaid role, I was placed on “admin duties plus”. “Managing, not leading” was how Urs had put it. Envelope stuffer in chief, miscellaneous catering duties, minute taker at the proliferation of GANTOB committee meetings at that time, toilet cleaner after The Benefaktor. (The machinations of GANTOB (the project) were opaque even a couple of months into this role, and rarely became any clearer until The Benefaktor and Gillian Finks made their respective exits August to October 2025 and I was left to arrange and edit their materials and, once “25 Paintings” was out of the way, forge my own path).
A few minutes later Urs came back, armed with a tray loaded with a teapot, cup and saucer for Ali, a mug of coffee for me, a couple of ginger biscuits, a saucer for the tea cage and a small jug intended for water for whisky, repurposed for milk. After establishing that we had everything we needed, Urs enquired after Ali’s job and left without acknowledging his noncommittal response.
Once Urs had closed the door behind her, Ali opened up. He clearly felt uncomfortable in the presence of our host (and later I came to realise he was probably terrified of her). She seemed in charge rather than her husband. Ali – lest we forget that he too was a Reverend at that point (and is once more at the time of writing) – explained that the church where he was Minister was being merged with several other churches in the Scottish Highlands, and he was almost certainly out of a job. It was all in the hands of the Presbytery. I was reminded of the ecclesiastical credentials of members of the GANTOB committee and felt rather sheepish about my agnostic ways.
Ali was planning to use his modest savings to start a croft. His explanation veered from a detached dream state to a flat depression. A monologue that led to another uncomfortable silence. It was at this point that – for the first time after my interview – I asked about Bill Drummond. My internet searches had identified a lot of material but without much clarity. His band The KLF had disbanded decades earlier. A splinter group The KLFRS (a reenactment society) had been established from activities around an ice cream van in Liverpool in 2017 and – after initial enthusiasm – had required resuscitation more recently, with the GANTOB project surfing that later wave in August 2023. I read the long screeds of text on the KLFRS website from top to bottom. That period of The KLFRS was steered by The Tillerman, who jumped ship, replaced perhaps by The Otherman. How it all connected remained a mystery.
Ali explained as follows: “Bill Drummond. And his connection to GANTOB. There’s a question. It reminds me of something I read recently about the Moravian Church. It would be an oversimplification to say that the Moravians were inspired by the teachings of Jan Hus who was martyred – burnt at the stake – in 1415. Hus was a reformer whose ideas were seen by some as as heretical. His teaching gained posthumous traction in Bohemia and civil war followed. Forty years later Gregory the Patriarch and colleagues established the Bohemian Brethren, inspired by Hus. They were some of the earliest Protestants”.
Ali continued, barely catching his breath. “All this was sixty years before the school book descriptions of events around the Protestant Reformation, which typically start when Martin Luther nailed his his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, followed by dissemination of his ideas in pamphlets further afield. Forty years after that John Knox, Scottish firebrand, religious reformer and fellow pamphleteer played his part in revolution from the (now genteel) city of Perth, with ideas and revolt spreading to catalyse the Scottish Reformation and Scottish Presbyterianism.”
I wondered where this was leading. The Benefaktor and Gillian Finks had told me specifically that there was no religious dimension to GANTOB. And no Discordian connections. It was all about writing, book drops, scribbles and other creative outlets. There was no rioting or destruction. The closest thing to conflict was the Battle of Perth in August 2023, as covered in the first GANTOB book, but that was about a race around charity shops rather than an all out fight. Ali kept talking: “The Moravian Church is still active in Pennsylvania, County Antrim and its biggest congregation is in Tanzania. The Church of Scotland is the largest of the Scottish Presbyterian churches”.
Almost as if reading my mind, Ali changed track: “Now, the religious aspects of this are not relevant to GANTOB. But the structure and connections have clear parallels. Jan Hus, shaking things up in the years leading up to 1415, threatening the existing order, inspired a movement that took hold 40 years later (1457 to be precise). Bill Drummond, son of a Church of Scotland minister, but iconoclast and maverick to his core, decided to shake up the music industry, first in a folksy LP in 1986, but then more determinedly in the first JAMS LP (15 June 1987), which was quickly banned for its use of unauthorised samples. That act set the course of The KLF and everything that came after it. Bill and his partner-in-illegal-sampling Jimmy burnt the profits from their musical exploits and declared a 23 year moratorium on further joint activities. Bill bought a tower on the Antrim Coast, though completely unrelated to the Moravians. He wrote a lot of pamphlets which, though quite unlike those of Luther or Knox, did sometimes reference his Presbyterian upbringing, and frequently reference the number 40”.
That, we agreed was coincidence, bearing no relationship to the gestation period between Jan Hus’ brutal death and the birth of Gregory the Patriarch’s religious group.
Ali concluded: “If Bill is the Jan Hus figure whose ideas inspired the movement, then The KLFRS’s birth, gaining particular momentum in 2023, makes The Tillerman or The Otherman the equivalent of Gregory the Patriarch, and The KLFRS and its offshoots, like GANTOB and The K-Line, the lasting results, like the Moravian Church. Perhaps. It all seemed so innocent initially, and a great interest and distraction for Gillian, but then she disappeared last August”. He fell silent, busying himself with pouring his tea, dunking his ginger biscuit in the tepid murky green liquid.
It was all rather complicated and highfalutin. I took verbatim notes, and vowed to read up about it. I note, looking at the details that I have edited only slightly above, that the period between Hus’ death and Gregory’s birth of a new religious movement was 42 years not 40.
Despite attempts by GANTOB (the project) to shake off the influence of Bill Drummond, we cannot say that we are entirely free. We have not followed his every diktat – for example his advice to repeat the ideas of the first GANTOB book every year. Like Bill, we do not like going over old ground. Bill has, I think, shared the writing he contributed to the second GANTOB book elsewhere, though I think that GANTOB’s 2023: A trilogy remains the only place where his piece is formally printed, and I am not sure that it is listed anywhere else on the internet at the moment. Nonetheless, the titles of the last two GANTOB books – GANTOB’s 25 Paintings and Who Killed GANTOB? – have clear connections with the works of Bill Drummond, though the contents are largely original. I sent Bill copies of both both, but he has not acknowledged them. I do not know if that is due to lack of interest. There really is no direct or formal relationship between Bill Drummond and GANTOB. The art project that I now run – whatever version of GANTOB that is – is the product of ideas that have been mulling through the minds of various people for almost 40 years (and considerably less for me and, when he was still around, The Benefaktor).
Nobody has the full picture of what has happened so far with GANTOB. Who knows what will happen next? I cannot speak for my predecessors, but the one common thread throughout – and one that is guiding my ideas currently appears to be the question: “What would Bill do?”. There are various interviews, articles, pamphlets and book chapters that explain Bill Drummond’s ideas. Some are contradictory. Perhaps that is part of the fun. There are some common threads however that one can draw from his body of work. One point I remember reading in one of his books/ blogs/ pamphlets is that art should pay its own way. It should not rely on grants or handouts. I am not sure that I agree with that. I have been to many excellent performances and exhibitions that would not have been possible without some external financial assistance. But I have also heard it said that people value things more if they have committed to them – stumped up the cash. They are more likely to attend in the first place, keep coming back and gain something from it, whether it is a cultural activity or an exercise class. A small sum is all that is required.
So that is what we are going to try out for size, charging a small sum for each pamphlet. We will see if it takes us to the 40th anniversary of the 1987 JAMS LP – 15 June 2027. Perhaps even beyond.
I have done the maths for the first 12 copies of The Actuary’s Dog pamphlet (GP001) that have already been posted, purchased over the past 2 weeks, £3 a piece, wherever you live in the world. I spent £20 on materials: card, envelopes, A5 plain white paper, labels, printer ink and postage, including one international order. I received payment of £37.74 for these 12 orders (some people chose to pay an amount above the £3.00 price tag, which was gratefully received). That gives GANTOB £17.74 profit for the first pamphlet. That makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. The pamphlets are, after all, just bits of card and words that I made up. If we do 12 pamphlets in a year that is an expensive way to recount a story. Dickens would have written considerably more for the money. But it seems like a fair deal from other comparisons – e.g. the price of a cup of coffee, or a bassoon reed.
We are, however, going to improve the value for money to the customer, using up the profit accrued for pamphlet GP001 in the process over coming months. Each pamphlet is written in response to a painting received from the GANTOB Artist-in-Correspondence. From now on we will be including a 12″ by 8″ print of the painting (roughly equivalent to A4), on high quality photographic paper. It will be signed and numbered. The overall cost of the “pamphlet package” will remain £3, which will just about cover the cost of materials, packaging and postage. I have been able to arrange some discounts for bulk purchases. I hope to be able to shave some costs with future purchases (e.g. coloured card). Pamphlet GP002 (Past, Present and Future Self) will include the print for the first and second pamphlets.
Here are the costings for the new set up:
Piece of A4 card for pamphlet (bought in packs of 20, single colour) £0.25
Ink for ink jet printer estimated per pamphlet as £0.09
Full colour print (12″ by 8″) of original paintings £0.88
A4 board backed envelope (bought in pack of 100): £0.28
A4 UK second class stamp*: £1.55
Total: £3.05
* £3.80 (Europe) – £4.60 rest of world
The maths will work for a period, depending on how many international orders there are. At some point in the medium future we may need to put up the price, but I will share the figures as we go along, and make the case. You can make up your own mind.
Anyway, in this quiet and secular backwater of the KLF Reenactment Society, we remain inspired by our reading and conversations, learning how to create a sustainable movement, one pamphlet at a time. I would value your comments on this piece, and will amend it accordingly in the final version – a printed pamphlet that will be provided as a bonus pamphlet (on coloured paper to contain costs) with GP002. Order your copy (or copies+) of the “pamphlet package” here.
Let’s make it to 40 years, building on the teachings of Bill Drummond. If you would like to share guidance on another piece of Drummond wisdom (good or bad) please post in the comments below, and we’ll see how that might influence the GANTOB project.
MAUREEN KATZ, 15 June 2026
PS the pamphlets that are being written during this new stage of GANTOB – so far, The Actuary’s Dog and Past, Present and Future Self – have nothing to do with Bill Drummond
+ Note – if you order more than one pamphlet at a time you will receive a refund for the additional postage.
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