It’s what disgruntled employees scheme for and aspire to at their farewell drinks, but only get as far as “accidentally” forwarding a telling e-mail to “everyone”. But the KLF were at the top, and their jump from the parapet was a wheeling and kicking powder-keg dive. A rather extreme performance… (Do You See!!! it was with Extreme Noise Terror ha ha ha)
I’m pretty sure I watched that Brit Awards, but I don’t recall the performance – was it even transmitted? But, as an FT reader you’re pretty much guaranteed to know the details of the story – it has become the “out on a high” story – and that’s the point of including it in this list. By comparison, kicking over a speaker stack at a gig is the act of a petulant toddler. No, if you are going to end your own very successful pop-cultural creation, the best way is to mock kill the audience (i.e. THOSE THAT CREATED YOU), announce your retirement from the biz at “the man”s biggest bun-fight and then both leave the country and delete your back catalogue. Hardcore. Spectacle. Totally shameless.
Another site’s old Top 10 Walkouts article seems to thing the KLF wanted it to be “two fingers in the face of the image-obsessed, profit-mad record industry”. Well possibly – but imagining the record industry would give a stuff doesn’t chime with anything they’d done before. I like to think that instead they consciously decided to make ending the KLF a MEMORABLE THING. And love or loathe what they did – they achieved that.
Other notable cultural creations consciously killed off at popular high-point (CCCKOaPHP)
Harry Enfield killed Loadsamoney This character made a novelty single that was riffed on by the Timelords shortly afterwards.
Judith Kerr killed Mog Nigel Kneale’s better half carefully explains to impressionable young children that there is such a thing as ghosts, souls, and that even animals have them. Should have been the subject of a Christian fundamentalist vendetta on the proportion of The Jerry Springer Show.
Dave Lee Travis announces he’s leaving Radio 1 ok ok NOT technically a popular high (no not even with the advent of snooker AND DARTS on the radio), but this rule-proving exception is important because the modibund DJ’s departure has become “A MEMORABLE THING” despite it being blatantly obvious that he should have left about 10 years before hand. Well done.
Derek Acorah admits he is a sham live on TV His apology for blatantly exploiting the emotionally frail moves him to extremes as he rams nails into his chest. At time of writing, this hasn’t actually happened.