John Higgs, COMPLOTTO!, 2018

The history of KLF is without doubt the most absurd, delirious and incomprehensible in the history of pop music. At the beginning of the nineties they were among the most famous producers of house music and their singles were at the top of the charts of half of Europe. So what prompted them to withdraw from their account a million pounds and then burn them in a senseless bonfire of banknotes? Was it a political provocation? A gesture of two fools? Or was it a magic ritual? But above all, what does this have to do with conspiracy theories about the Illuminati, the secular sect that secretly rules the world?

John Higgs answers these equally senseless questions with this crazy book. The parable of KLF is in fact the starting point for an intertwined plot in which the paths of some of the most deviant experiences of utopian and radical thought intersect: not only raves and house music, but also situationism, magic of chaos, esoteric experimentsanarchists and a whole series of media jokes that will lead to the spread of conspiracies that we have learned to know in the 21st century.

Written in an irresistible prose halfway between gonzo reportage, pop biography and history of countercultures, Conspiracotto! lined up a series of protagonists including Hans Arp, Julian Cope, Alan Moore, Doctor Who, Robert Anton Wilson, the goddess Eris, Guy Debord, Carl Jung, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the ABBA and the number 23. You can read it in one breath, it’s very funny, and you can also learn a lot of things from reading it.

John Higgs is a novelist, essayist and counterculture historian. Among his books, the biography of Timothy Leary I Have America Surrounded, and Stranger Than We Can Imagine, an alternative story of the 20th century.