Next month, in Birkenhead Park — a Victorian green space best known for its ducks, dog walkers, and architectural influence on Central Park — a small crowd will assemble to build a pyramid out of human ashes.
The occasion, called The Birkenhead Day of the Dead: Calling the Ancestors, is the latest installment in an ongoing public artwork by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, the British duo formerly known as The KLF. In the early nineties, The KLF topped the charts with acid-house anthems before quitting music in a blaze of self-destruction, later earning tabloid immortality by setting fire to some cash on a Scottish island. Now they build things, mostly pyramids.
Their current project, The People’s Pyramid, involves bricks made with the ashes of the deceased—each participant, when alive, having opted for what the artists call MuMufication. Ninety-two Ancestors are already interred. This year, several more will join them, accompanied by a soundtrack from Cauty (performing as TowerBlock1) and a newly commissioned short film.
The ceremony follows a particular order: families carry the ash-bricks in procession; Cauty and Drummond oversee the laying; onlookers, instructed to wear hi-viz vests, look on like spectral construction workers. Once the building stops, the living decamp to Future Yard, a nearby venue, for the Afterlife Party, where DJs from the fashion collective Sports Banger will play until 1 a.m.
These are the people whose remains will now be built into the pyramid.
AMANDA | PAUL ANSTEY (BONGO PAUL) | JOHN BARBER | JOHN BOATFIELD | CHRIS CHESTNUTT | JENNIFER MARIAN CLARK | NICK CLARKE | KIERON CLOUGH | VAL CULM | DAVID CULM | MELANIE GRINDROD CHRISTOPHER GWINNELL | RICHARD HEARNSHAW | ANDREW GEORGE HENDERSON | KERSTIN HULTGREN | PETER KIRK | ALAN MACARTNEY | SALLY MADGE | DOUGLAS J. MCCARTHY | TRACEY MEEK | KEVIN PRICE | MARTIN PRYCE | PAUL SWITHIN RUANE | SCHMIT | JAMES SELF | GREG SMITH | IAN SMITH | CLIVE WHITEHEAD
TO BE MUMUFIED
23rd November 2025
Drummond and Cauty’s pyramid began in Toxteth in 2018, emerging from a prior performance called Welcome to the Dark Ages, which involved public lectures, funeral marches, and several unexplained moments of silence. The duo say they intend to continue until the pyramid holds 34,592 bricks—one for every person who wishes to be MuMufied. At that point, it will be complete, and they will, presumably, stop.
Until then, the structure grows by inches each November: a slow, handmade monument to the British art of turning grief into a happening, bureaucracy into performance, and death into something you can dance to.
