J: So, why did you burn it? A lot of people don't know the background, they'll think you were the KLF so you took a million quid and thought 'oh we'll burn it for a laugh, it'll be a bit of a giggle and that's it'. Is that why did it?
JC: It wasn't really a giggle. We were deadly serious about it. It's something we've always wanted to do.
BD: Anybody that has followed what we have done as The K Foundation closely would see that that could be a logical conclusion.

J: What was the background with this money? Was this the money that was nailed to the wall?
BD: When we decided to have a thing called the K Foundation, it was the money that was going to be, or was, "the K Foundation". That money was the foundation.
J: When you set up the foundation, wasn't it an art foundation for struggling artists to apply for money - and then you'd help them out?
JC: That was the original idea but luckily we managed to get out of that. We decided not to do that.
BD: We realised that struggling artists are meant to struggle, that's the whole point.
J: And they don't deserve any money?
JC: Not from us, not our money.

D: When you tried to give the money to Rachel Whiteread when she won the Turner Prize in 1994, she tried to refuse the money didn't she? You offered her £40,000 and she turned round and said she didn't want it.
BD: We weren't giving it to her because she was a struggling artist. We gave it to her because people had voted her as the worst artist in the country that year. She had originally given us the details of her bank account so that it could go straight in there if she won. As it turned out, she won but a couple of days before the announcement she decided not to accept the money.

D: What happened after she refused?
BD: We phoned her up and said, "Look. You have won and if you don't accept it we're going to burn it."

J: Is that where the idea started? If you could say to someone "We're going to burn forty grand", why not go all the way and burn a million?
BD: There's a man in this room who thinks it's all his fault and he's called Gimpo. It was his job to either give her the money or burn it. He thinks if he'd actually got it burnt that night, we wouldn't have needed to burn a million pounds. I'd never really thought that through, but then about a month ago Gimpo told us this, that he'd been harbouring this guilt, that it was his fault.
Gimpo: I should have burnt it. I had petrol all over the £40,000, but we'd waited until two minutes past eleven. We were due to wait until eleven o'clock until she came out, but we were told to wait another two minutes and I was well pissed off. I had these matches ready to burn it with all these journalists around me. But then she sent one of her people out and he said "Oh, the money's not real." So I ripped this a wad of £50's off and gave it to him. He looked at it, ran in and then Rachel Whiteread came running out. She just grabbed the money and dragged it over the fence. I was well pissed off because I couldn't burn it.

D: How did you actually go about burning the million? A lot of people might have heard the story, but like a lot of things you do it's shrouded in folklore and mystery.
JC: Well, I had a box of matches...
BD: We were going to do this exhibition called "Money: A Major Body Of Cash" which we were going to exhibit nailed to a wall and it was a million pounds, a hundred bundles of ten thousand pounds, each one numbered. For various reasons we knocked that on the head. Jim Reid had written this 15,000 word catalogue for this exhibition, so when it evolved into us going to burn the money, we said to him "Sorry we're not using your catalogue, but we're going to do something else and you can witness it. And you can do what you like with that information." He decided to sell his story to The Observer. He didn't know where he was going. He didn't know what was going to happen. And Gimpo didn't know what was going to happen at all.

J: You didn't just go to bank and take the money out of a cash machine...
BD: We'd organised to get the money. In the morning we went and got two suitcases, drove down to this money warehouse in South Croydon. It had come from a bullion centre and a security company were holding it. We then drove to a little airstrip where we'd hired a plane. They didn't know what we had on board. Jimmy and I knew where we going and the pilot knew, but Gimpo didn't know and Jim Reid didn't know. We flew from Isla and then we went from Isla across to Jura and booked in. We then did what we did.

J: A lot of people are going to think "This is easy". You're former pop stars, wadded up to the hilt. Was this your last million or have you got loads more stashed in the bank? Surely that puts some bearing on the burning? If you've got five million and you burn a million, it's no great loss, you've still got some cash.
JC: There would have been no point in us burning it if we had five. It's not a sacrifice, we weren't sacrificing everything. We've both got a house and we both still get PRS cheques from our back catalogue.
J: Didn't you delete your back catalogue?
JC: Yes, but you can still buy it in Japan and Germany...
BD: We weren't doing it to say "Look how heroic we are, we burnt all our money". We burnt a million because a million is the symbolic figure.

J: How did you feel after burning it? Liberated? Exhilarated? Or just fairly nonplused?
JC: I was fairly nonplused really. We'd known we were going to do it for about six weeks before hand and during that time you go through all those "thing" you go through when you know you're going to burn a million quid.
J: I don't know that feeling...
JC: It's quite intense. By the time you get to it, you've done it all. You're burnt out. You just have to go ahead and do it.
BD: What we did by burning it is... and I'm not saying it's art... we created something there. That thing there now exists. The fact that that million pounds exists in your mind - maybe you'll walk away and forget about it - but it exists there. Maybe it'll gnaw away at you, it might make you giggle sometimes, you might see other things in it. It evolves in peoples' minds in different ways.

J: Was your piece intended to shock and horror?
JC: We didn't want it to be shocking because the shocking-ness would spoil it.
BD: Burning is steeped in all sorts of symbolism, going all the way back. When we were burning it, we thought "any second now, God's going to say - it's okay boys, there's a ram out there in the bush."
D: You thought it was a religious experience then? A sacrificial act? With spiritual connotations?
BD: God didn't show up.