How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (44 page)

The JAMs lasted for a year, as agreed, until the end of 1987.
Who Killed the JAMs?
, a posthumous second album, which the duo quickly dismissed, was released in early 1988. The record’s sleeve contained two JAMs/KLF signifiers: on the back of the record, a photograph of copies of 1987 being symbolically burnt and, as a cover star, Cauty’s Ford Galaxie police car which had the JAMs/
KLF logo sprayed on its doors as livery. The logo was a beatbox superimposed over a pyramid, where there might normally be a third eye. It perfectly captured The KLF’s distinct fusion of cheap immediate music technology and the secrets of the universe.

‘Theoretically, we started on the first of January, 1987 and we were to finish on the thirty-first December of that year,’ says Cauty, ‘so it’s twelve months. I can look back and I can see there’s a recurring thing there, but I always think bands just fucking hang around for too long. You should just do what you’re doing, get it done, and get on with the next thing.’

At the end of the year Cauty and Drummond realised that they had found an intuitive working method that had its own internal logic. ‘We got on incredibly well,’ says Cauty, ‘and fitted together creatively very well.’ Drummond and Cauty’s relationship also defied what Drummond considers a too orthodox breakdown of their roles: ‘It wasn’t like, oh, he does the words and he does the music,’ he says, ‘that’s the way a music journalist likes to perceive something. It was far more subtle than that.’

Entrenched in their own set of references and experiences, an indefinable combination of
The Illuminatus!
, the inner
workings
of the music industry, the studio techniques of Stock Aitken Waterman and their own distinct personalities, the duo
established
an almost telepathic way of communicating. ‘We’d always been like that right from the beginning,’ says Cauty. ‘We’d never had to discuss anything because we knew we both liked exactly the same thing. There was never any disagreement on music or on anything. It was quite weird, actually, ’cause I’ve worked with quite a few people since then and it’s never been like that. We were on the same wavelength, that whole period, though, in ’87, ’88, ’89. I guess we were still in a little bubble of our own.’

Having dispensed with the JAMs, Drummond and Cauty went back to the studio and started playing around with a sample
from the
Dr Who
theme. As talismanic a piece of music to British ears as the BBC had ever produced, the
Dr Who
theme was an instantly recognisable and eerie riff, setting off in the listener an emotional connection of mild behind-the-sofa panic and
time-travelling
euphoria. ‘Right after the second JAMs album I think we just wanted to make a record that had the
Dr Who
theme tune,’ says Cauty, ‘but it was never supposed to be a hit. Not until a couple of days into it did we realise how terrible it was. It was just a one-off thing and it was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn’t fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with a glitter beat, which was never really the intention but we had to go with it. It was like an out-of-control lorry, you know you’re just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching.’

Eventually released as ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ by Drummond and Cauty’s new alias, The Timelords, the record was an early example of a mash-up. The single blended the Glitter Band tribal beat with the
Dr Who
theme tune, tapping into the collective memory of every child of the Seventies and sending the record to no. 1.

The duo followed the single with a book,
The Manual – How To Have a Number One the Easy Way
, an entertaining and incisive how-to guide, featuring such insights as, ‘Firstly you must be skint and on the dole … being on the dole gives you a perspective on how much of society is run.’
The Manual’
s narrative differs wildly from Cauty’s account of the record’s genesis, but tallies with Drummond’s interpretation of The Timelords’ motivation. ‘With the Timelords record, that was just wanting to mine that whole ludicrous British novelty record tradition,’ says Drummond, ‘knowing that we were only ever going to make one record like this, and it had to make Top Ten if not no. 1.’

For the first time the duo had a support structure for a release.
Rough Trade distributed The Timelords and found themselves, for the first time since ‘Pump Up the Volume’, at the top of the charts. ‘It was pretty shocking, to be independently at no. 1 like that,’ says Drummond. ‘We didn’t have an office, we didn’t have anything. Rough Trade did a great job just getting those records out, because we didn’t know how they were supposed to do it. Everybody was really behind it, everybody who worked at Rough Trade was willing it to be a hit, and it was great, really good.’

The single reached no. 1 on 12 June and also sold healthily in Australia and New Zealand where the
Dr Who
series had been licensed by the BBC.

Reaching the top of the charts allowed The Timelords, along with Cauty’s police car now known as Ford Timelord, to put on a series of performances on
Top of the Pops
that followed in the lineage of the programme’s Seventies star-making heyday. The single also followed in the crossover novelty record tradition by achieving spectacular sales. ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ sold over a million copies, meaning that Drummond and Cauty now had the means to finance whatever they did next.

‘The thing that brought the money in above all else was the dreaded Timelords,’ says Houghton. ‘That record’s a really good example of what they could get away with. I remember going into the
NME
offices and sitting down there and them saying, “This will be no. 1. We’re going to print that in the paper next week, on the cover.” In the end they didn’t put it on the cover – it was an inside page news story, “This is the worst record you’ve ever heard, it will be no. 1,” something like that.’

With serious financial resources and no overhead other than studio costs, Drummond and Cauty were, for the first time, wrong-footed. Their momentum stalled as a surfeit of ideas was put into various stages of production. After working to the rigorous constraints they had set themselves for the JAMs
and as The Timelords, Drummond and Cauty were spreading themselves thin.

‘After “Doctorin’ the Tardis” was The KLF,’ says Cauty. ‘It was a bit complicated and it went through a lot of different phases. With the money that we made from “Doctorin’ the Tardis” we stupidly thought that we could just go and make a road movie, without a script, without a story, without anything. We thought, well, we’ll just go to Spain in the car, and just film what happens and of course we went there and nothing happened, it just rained.’

The road movie, entitled
The White Room
, was filmed by Bill Butt, a former colleague of Drummond’s in theatre in Liverpool who had also filmed the Zoo videos. Consisting of little more than footage of the duo driving around Spain in the Ford Galaxie the experience was deflating. ‘We came back with hundreds of hours of really boring footage,’ says Cauty. ‘Me and Bill were driving in the car that way, then that way, over a hill, then back up the hill, just tedious, a terrible disaster of a movie. But we learnt our lesson. If you’re making a movie, you have to have talent. You can’t just get away with it, like you can with other things. We hadn’t thought it out. So all we had was lots of bits of footage which we would use later in lots of different contexts, but we tried to finish it and put a soundtrack on it about three times and it was always incredibly dull.’

Neither the film nor the soundtrack was ever released commercially. Drummond and Cauty returned from Spain with their spirits dampened and gradually started to overhaul the material. Cauty lived in a large five-storey Georgian squat in Stockwell on the side of which he had painted a JAMs/KLF logo, as well as knocking out the first floor, creating a cavernous atrium. In the basement the duo had built their own version of the Hit Factory, a small studio with up-to-the-minute samplers and sequencers, which they called Transcentral. The basement,
and the many parties held in the squat, echoed to the sound of acid house, the bleeps and low-end frequencies of which the duo mixed in with the aborted
White Room
material. Two pieces from the proposed soundtrack emerged as possible releases: ‘What Time Is Love?’ and ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Both tracks throbbed with submerged frequencies and shifts in dynamic intensity and were released under the duo’s new name: The KLF, an opaque and meaningless acronym – as far as any activity by Drummond and Cauty could be considered meaningless – chosen, in tune with the emerging acid house
zeitgeist
, for its anonymity and emphasis of tunes first, personalities later. It was a
zeitgeist
that the duo greatly enjoyed.

‘We went to lots of clubs,’ says Cauty, ‘and raves. I never used to go clubbing, really, but when acid house happened I really got into that, and that sort of influenced the types of records that we made. We wanted to make some records that could be played in those clubs and at those parties.’ In KLF Drummond and Cauty had found their next direction but, having spent The Timelords’ profits on film stock and a production crew, had run through their funding stream. In an attempt to raise some capital, they released a pop single culled from the
White Room
sessions: ‘Kylie Said to Jason’, not quite a novelty single but certainly not a KLF acid instrumental. It proved a disaster.

‘At that point, we were £110,000 down at the bank,’ says Drummond, ‘with nothing to back it up. But then we decided to do a series of 12-inch singles. We wanted to do total minimalist stuff, not even using drums, just using pulses and things. We did all the sleeves – I think it was a series of five sleeves. We had a thousand of each of these sleeves printed up – had the titles, everything – before we recorded. And we did the first one, the “What Time is Love?” instrumental – put it out, and it starts taking off in Italy in the clubs. English DJs think it’s an Italian
thing and they start playing it over here. KLF means nothing: the sleeves have no reference points, everything was really minimal, the music was really minimal – there was nothing for journalists to get into. It could only work on the dance floor.’

Cauty in particular was spending more and more time on the dance floor or, in the case of Heaven, in the pioneering chill-out room at Paul Oakenfold’s Land of Oz nights. Along with Alex Patterson, a former colleague of Youth’s in Killing Joke, Cauty started a side project called The Orb. Cauty and Patterson would play Steve Hillage and Steve Reich tracks over early Seventies Black Ark dubs as ravers would sink into beanbags to recharge among the beatific textures in the sounds and the films The Orb projected. Using the Land of Oz sessions as a template, Patterson started recording as The Orb while Cauty released the album
Space
on KLF Communications, an ambient masterpiece that relocated the pastoral, almost geological, starry-eyed minimalism of Eno’s
Ambient Series
in the early morning dawn of London rumbling awake. The Orb and
Space
had created a new genre at Land of Oz, ambient house, a genre of which KLF would be part with their first album,
Chill Out
. ‘
Chill Out
’s an imaginary journey through America,’ says Cauty, who has mixed feelings about the record. ‘Mostly it’s just a list of places. It was another disaster, really.’

The duo briefly resurrected the JAMs name for the track ‘It’s Grim Up North’, a harder-edged track which consisted of Drummond reeling off places names from the upper half of the country over a heavy beat, or as the accompanying broadside from KLF Communications put it, ‘Through the downpour and diesel roar – Rock Man Rock and King Boy D can feel a regular diesel thud.’ The release was accompanied by another graffito, the song’s title, located on an underpass on the M1 near the Watford Gap.

Alongside a further single in the Pure Trance series, ‘Last Train to Transcentral’,
Chill Out
helped KLF gain an underground reputation in the hazy network that was beginning to develop into an acid house industry, and the band were starting to be invited to play at raves, organised in such a haphazard fashion that even Drummond and Cauty’s logistical prowess was put to severe test. ‘It was always a nightmare,’ says Cauty. ‘I can’t remember how many we did, maybe about five or six, and I’d always start off with the best intentions – have everything set up with samplers and sequencers ready to go and attempt to play or at least mix live – but we were either too out of it on drugs to be able to see anything, or the equipment always broke down, so usually what I’d do is then, I’d just turn the DAT [tape] on, which would sound much better anyway. And everybody was so out of it nobody cared. The focus wasn’t on the group, it was on the music, so we sort of got away with that, but it was a total shambles. Half the time there was no stage. You’re just, “Oh well, we’ll go and over there then, next to Adamski, and just stand on the floor.” They were so badly organised’.

However messy or impractical, the rave culture was one Drummond and Cauty wholly embraced and enjoyed, much to the amusement of Mick Houghton who, while capable of psychedelic odysseys himself, was yet to experience acid house in its purest and communal form.

‘One of the things I used to think was vaguely ludicrous, was that Bill and Jimmy were part of this world,’ says Houghton. ‘Bill was a married man living in Aylesbury with a wife and two kids, but nobody ever questioned what they did, whatever kind of flaws there might be, because it was just such amazing copy. The other side of it was that the music press wasn’t at all geared towards acid culture. It was such an antithesis to indie music that KLF almost gave them a way in, and it was also very playful for The KLF.’

One of KLF’s first public displays of playfulness was at the Helter Skelter rave in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, midsummer 1989. In was also one of the first of the band’s gestures to involve their complicated relationship with money. The KLF performance consisted of Drummond and Cauty positioning themselves halfway up a lighting gantry and taping a plastic keyboard to its side which Drummond, can of lager in hand, pretended to play while Cauty played a DAT. A
bug-eyed
KLF, who had asked for their fee up front, then emptied a binliner’s worth of Scottish pound notes – roughly a thousand pounds’ worth – over the heads of the crowd.