The KLF - Waiting
Waiting is a 40-minute record of the former Jams/Timelords visit to the Scottish Isle Of Jura which captures Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s enigmatic activities in a style somewhere between The Wonderful World Of Nature and a 4AD home video.
Against the ebb and flow of a frazzled soundtrack which mixes KLF hits with bursts of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’, cathedral music, top public school hymns, liturgical chants, wave sounds and samples of the awesome stillness of nature, the men with the improbable hats go about the mysterious business of sitting on beaches and tramping through heather surrounded by the detritus of their recording gear.
Like a scriptless Warhol flick soundtracked by a re-animated Pink Floyd, nothing actually happens. Sheep chew their cud. Bill wraps himself in red cellophane and someone drives a Mutoid Waste-style space buggy. But aside from its general usefulness as a chill out ambient video, there are brilliant moments.
The surreal iconography of a speaker stack on a hilltop blasting out Hendrix while little fluffy clouds float by, for one. The comic genius of a stag beetle which lumbers across the mixing desk, and then obligingly makes a suicide dive off the edge, for another.
Blurring the lines between extreme pretentiousness and extreme silliness, ‘Waiting’ is probably best viewed as a kind of video pet to cuddle up to when you can’t afford a trip to Scotland and you don’t want the after effects of any other kind of trip.
