It turns out that Cauty had become friends with the major landowner's son, Francis Riley Smith, in his late teens. You can file that under 'myth', but you get his point. One man told me he'd been so disgusted by the event he'd burnt the wicker man in advance of the scheduled time and the entire group had been run off the island.

Yet some islanders are still scandalised after all these years. And the wicker man didn't really burn very well because it was so wet.' 'It was a mock pagan ritual,' says Jimmy Cauty now. In 1991, at the height of their success, they had performed a wicker man burning, again at Ardfin, in the presence of 80 specially invited music journalists dressed in saffron robes at the summer solstice. Lie on it and your future will be revealed. I'd assumed they'd been lured by its mystical charms - there's even a huge piece of quartzite on the way to Corryvreckan known as the Future stone. The KLF's connection with the Isle of Jura is perhaps not what you would expect. His band is called The Red Hot Chilli Pipers. I'd been hoping for something more ceilidh and less rock'n'roll, though was mollified by an interview with bagpiping's great young hope Stuart Cassells the next day. The six local lads ploughed their way through a repertoire that took in everything from Coldplay to the Undertones. The weekend I visited Jura, there was nothing more controversial than a performance by Pete Smokes and the Roaches in the village hall. Understandably, this was - and still is - a little outside the average Hebridean's comprehension. They'd successfully accrued a fortune from releasing records that varied from the sublime (Tammy Wynette singing on Justified and Ancient) to the downright charmless (Doctoring the Tardis, which sampled Gary Glitter and Sweet). The KLF's motivation was to rid themselves of the gains they'd made out of an ugly music industry they'd found it so easy to manipulate. People thought they could have given the money to charity.' 'I didn't see the film when they came back to show it in the village hall a bit later, though plenty did and were quite upset. 'We didn't really know who they were,' Steve says of the KLF as he gazes out at the palm trees that flourish in the gulf stream climate. It has been run by Steve and Fiona Watson for 24 years. It houses the island's only bar and its restaurant serves langoustine straight from the sea. The hotel, stark outside and cosy within, has a maximum capacity of 27. The group stayed at the Jura Hotel in Craighouse, the only village on an island which has a population of around 170 and 80 houses in all.

It's just the plentiful details that seem to have been muddied in the retelling. The money-burning, which took place on the little peninsula at Ardfin, just below Jura House, is fresh in the memory here. On an island where myths abound and the wee people are still considered by some to be responsible for most upsets, mishaps and mislaid possessions, the KLF have simply added another story. The result - Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid - is still occasionally screened (it will be shown at PS 1 in Queens, New York, this autumn). Back in 1994, the KLF, a group comprised of jaded ex-A&R man Bill Drummond and commercially unsuccessful musician Jimmy Cauty, who together might be best described as a situationist acid house band, came here to burn £1m in cash and film the event. Not that Cameron was the first media manipulator to lay claim to this extraordinary outlying place.

Scotland isle of jura