BOOKS
THE KLF scandalised the 1992 Brit Awards by opening fire on the audience with blank bullets and then dumping a dead sheep at the entrance to an aftershow party. It could have been worse – the night before, publicist Mick Houghton heard the pop-art terrorists’ dangerously over-stressed Bill “King Boy D” Drummond wondering aloud whether he might conclude their Brits turn by lopping his hand off with an axe, an act that would have made their subsequent burning of a million quid seem vanilla.
A softly spoken sphinx in. Julian Cope greeted him as “the legendary Mick Houghton” when he met his long-term publicist for the first time in 1979, with Houghton’s musical smarts (and arcane use of the word “shag”) endearing him to The Teardrop Explodes, Echo And The Bunnymen, and later The Jesus & Mary Chain, Spiritualized and Sonic Youth, among myriad others.
