Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  As with disco, different European countries developed their own strains of Dionysian dance music: the R&S label in Belgium, Harthouse in Germany and Djax-Up-Beats in the Netherlands were all reliable signs of quality control. Local scenes mutated: in the Netherlands there was a demand for ever harder, faster beats, until gabber appeared,7 the Oi! of dance music, while the Germans – led by Sven Väth – pioneered trance. Sometimes you couldn’t dance to dance music at all. The KLF’s 1990 Chill Out album had pioneered the tautological ‘ambient house’, mixing train noises, post-punk dub and pre-punk Floyd; DJ and KLF associate Alex Paterson took this gag to another level with the Orb, who had tracks with giveaway titles like ‘Back Side of the Moon’. Sniggering stoners, they were silly at best, but proved hugely popular with students and worn-out ravers – U.F.Orb was a number-one album and ‘The Blue Room’ a number-eight single in ’92, the longest hit single ever at just under forty minutes. They appeared on TOTP playing 3D chess rather than miming on unplugged keyboards, which may have seemed like a bit of a jolly at the time, but caused a complete rethink of the show’s policy.8

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  Who are your favourite pop group? It’s not easy, is it? I could plump for the Beach Boys, but there’s always the difficulty of loving Mike Love. The Who? Far too patchy. The Pet Shop Boys? They didn’t know when to quit. The Bee Gees? Oh, too much to explain.

  If you were forced to name your favourite group of all time, then the Beatles would be a hard one to argue with, but so would the KLF. Their catalogue is patchy, deeply flawed, and they never made a consistently strong album. But they showered the crowd at an Oxfordshire rave with £1,000-worth of Scottish pound notes bearing the legend ‘Children we love you’. They played at the 1992 Brit Awards with vegan punks Extreme Noise Terror, before picking up guns and firing blanks at the audience. They were independent, euphoric, iconoclastic, and they were enormously successful in 1991.

  The KLF – Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty – epitomised everything that had changed in pop since acid house. They weren’t young, or pretty, but they had ideas, a lot of good ones, a lot of stupid ones, and they were smart enough to put them all into practice. They weren’t afraid to be held up as fakes, or derided as insincere. They welcomed it all.

  Originally, Bill Drummond was an art student in Liverpool, where he had joined a band called Big in Japan. Staying in the city, he had run the Zoo label and handled the affairs of Echo and the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Primarily, he was a music fan. One day in the late seventies he had written to Seymour Stein, head of Sire Records, explaining how albums were bringing about the destruction of pop music, and that pop was always about singles. He told Stein that Sire had released two of the greatest records of the decade – ‘Shake Some Action’ by the Flamin’ Groovies and ‘Love Goes to Building on Fire’ by Talking Heads – and that, having created such perfection, neither group should have been allowed into a studio again. ‘Both bands’, he wrote, ‘should have been forced to disband instantly.’

  Drummond was in his mid-thirties when the KLF broke through, and he had a talent to annoy that a younger, more obviously attractive pop star might have used in a misguided way. Shortly after the KLF – under the name the Timelords – had scored a 1988 UK number one with ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, Drummond wrote The Manual. It purported to be a guide on how to create a number-one hit. Its rules included using the latest dance beat, a direct title and universal lyrics. That ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ broke all these rules was irrelevant. You willed them on, and when a Swiss group called Edelweiss did score a pan-European hit called ‘Bring Me Edelweiss’ (UK no. 5 ’89) by following The Manual to the letter, it perversely restored your faith in pop’s sweet little mystery. It was rare enough for journalists to jump from one side of the fence to the other – the Pretenders’ Chrissie Hynde and Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant had been by far the most successful – but for a manager to do it? Only Malcolm McLaren had made it before. The KLF were the return of McLarenite new pop pranksterism – justified mischief. While detractors saw rave as faceless, tuneless, mindless, the KLF showed how calculus and intellect could operate in the brave new world.

  In the beginning, Drummond and Cauty’s efforts had seemed like little more than novelty records. ‘Whitney Joins the JAMs’ from 1987 had sampled Whitney Houston’s ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’ and may have sounded pretty rum in a student disco, but no better or worse than Sonic Youth’s wry noisenik cover (as Ciccone Youth) of Madonna’s ‘Into the Groove’ – nothing to trouble Radio 1’s playlist meetings. Drummond, though, was clearly as excited as a twelve-year-old by the endless possibilities of sampling, and they followed ‘Whitney Joins the JAMs’ with an album called 1987: What the Fuck Is Going On? If you caught them on a good day, as the NME did in 1990 at their commercial peak, you could even get straight answers out of them. ‘At the time I was getting really pissed off with the way the whole history of music, from Marvin Gaye and James Brown to the present day, was treated so reverentially. Hip hop seemed to tear right through that.’ 1987 was an incredibly crude album. ‘Neither of us were DJs. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing so it came out in a very British punk, white, ungroovy kind of way.’

  But they learnt quickly, helped out by the addition of rapper Ricardo Da Force and Nick Coler, an engineer who’d had a stint in the Rubettes and knew how to make records that sounded as ebullient as the inside of Bill Drummond’s mind. After spending all the money they had made from ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ on an aborted film called The White Room, Jimmy Cauty wrote and recorded a song called ‘What Time Is Love’ on an outmoded Oberheim OB-8 in his Stockwell basement – the song had what Nick Coler described as an ‘all-encompassing drug thing’, an unforgettable three-note hook, and it became one of the biggest club tracks of 1989. Suddenly, Cauty and Drummond became in-demand DJs at raves all over the country. The Face wrote that ‘with their pervy mail-order black-hooded packamacks, their propaganda and their perfect assimilation of rave culture, they are corrupting a generation of pop kids brought up on Lucozade and Technotronic’. It all happened very quickly. With ‘What Time Is Love’ they invented stadium house; with a fresh mix from Coler it became a number-five hit at the end of 1990, and now the KLF became stars: ‘3 a.m. Eternal’ (no. 1), ‘Last Train to Trancentral’ (no. 2) and ‘Justified and Ancient’ (no. 2, with a guest vocal from Tammy Wynette) followed in 1991, a year in which they sold more singles than anyone else in Europe.

  The KLF took people by the hand, they said mischief is fine, mischief is good. They dumped a dead sheep at the 1992 British Phonographic Industry awards aftershow party; everyone present pretended to be ignorant of its meaning. And with this they bailed out, deleting their catalogue with immediate effect just as the record industry started to go into irreversible decline. In this way they were truly heroic. They could have claimed magic powers.9 Very few had been this smart, subversive and successful.

  The KLF could have turned Britain into a nation of art terrorists. Theirs was the kind of misbehaviour that had made up the spine of twentieth-century art, but the KLF weren’t underground pranksters, they were on Top of the Pops! They were number one! They had five-year-old fans who would send them crayon drawings of the band. The Pet Shop Boys’ Chris Lowe said they were the only other worthwhile group in the UK. And when they called it a day at their peak in early ’92, they must have been shocked that nobody picked up the baton. Beyond a rough musical template, their influence would be almost non-existent. The only group who cited them regularly were Scooter, a European techno-pop act who eventually sold even more records than the KLF. Scooter may have borrowed the air horns and the trappings of stadium house, but they left the dead sheep and the situationist pranks at home.

  Drummond and Cauty called it a day at precisely the right moment. The Shamen’s ‘Ebeneezer Goode’, a 1992 number one, would encroach on their territory and show how bad their brand of pop could sound without the necessary brio: like a cross between Teutonic tran
ce and Blur at their most gauche. With the KLF’s split, though, the unitary forward motion of rave began to falter. It was inevitable. It could not self-sustain as so much of its charm had been about an interruption of the status quo. How could you extend and regularise the project? No one was in agreement on where it should head next. This uncertainty coincided with a surprise Tory victory in the May ’92 election; the mood of the country began to darken, and the fragmentation of house, techno, rave and hardcore soon followed.

  By late 1992 house appeared to have run its course entirely, as it mutated into the joyless, functional grooves of progressive house.10 Without the KLF as a guiding light, rave’s consciousness began to wander aimlessly over the pop-cultural landscape. Candy Flip’s baggy makeover of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ (no. 3 ’90) had had a canontrashing point to make; now rave was chewing up odd bits of history – public-information films, Dickensian characters, children’s TV themes – and spitting them back as Smart E’s’ ‘Sesame’s Treat’, Shaft’s ‘Roobarb & Custard’, the Prodigy’s ‘Charly’, the Shamen’s ‘Ebeneezer Goode’. Climactically, Slipstreem’s ‘We Are Raving’ – to the tune of Rod Stewart’s ‘Sailing’ – breached the Top 20 over Christmas ’92. If Scooby Doo had turned up on Top of the Pops with a dummy round his neck, nobody would have been surprised.11

  1 In 1989 Guns n’ Roses were called ‘the most dangerous band in the world’ by the LA Times, who, in the same article, called the 1989 Rolling Stones ‘the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world’.

  2 NKOTB scored seven Top 10 hits in Britain in 1990, but had managed only one in ’91 as they faded fast, which may explain Wahlberg’s behaviour.

  2 ‘Lollapalooza’ was an antiquated term beloved of P. G. Wodehouse that meant ‘something rather extraordinary’. Perry Farrell picked the term up from a Three Stooges film.

  3 Primal Scream therefore became the first group to develop feet of clay after winning the prize. The curse of the Mercury follow-up also struck Pulp (the low-selling This Is Hardcore), Suede (who split during the making of Dog Man Star), Roni Size, Speech Debelle and Gomez (whose careers sank without trace). The follow-up to Screamadelica – Give Out but Don’t Give Up – was panned by critics. ‘Don’t expect any expansionist moves towards a gleaming polycultural future à la Screamadelica here,’ warned Melody Maker’s Paul Lester. ‘Give Out but Don’t Give Up is authentic, all right – an authentic Rolling Stones record. What is the point? What is the fucking point?’

  4 Though people had never left the dancefloor, the blanket term ‘dance’ had first been used to indicate a vaguely ‘other’ subset of pop in the late eighties. The compilation series Now That’s What I Call Music began releasing twelve-inch albums called Now Dance in 1985, while The Chart Show included a weekly Top 10 ‘dance chart’ from its launch in 1986 (initially it also featured a reggae Top 10, which suggests that either the programme’s producers didn’t dance to reggae, or the term ‘dance’ already meant something different from Jamaican rhythms). These were big, broad definitions of dance, though, suggesting little more than a twelve-inch mix that wouldn’t get airplay but might get played by a DJ in a club. By 1989 ‘dance’ was a ubiquitous enough term for the likes of the Stone Roses to be tagged ‘indie-dance crossover’. As an umbrella term, in the nineties ‘dance’ seemed to elbow out previous names – like ‘nightclub’, ‘disco’, ‘hi-NRG’ and ‘Eurobeat’ – some of which had been narrow, but useful. Many are now used retrospectively.

  5 Adamski, whose ‘Killer’ (with a little help from Seal) reached number one in 1990, wasn’t much of a looker but he was young, blond and had an ego. He was no interloper, having played live at the opening party of Amnesia nightclub in Ibiza in 1989, with future KLF MC Ricardo Da Force. As soon as he started acting like a star, like he might engage in Donnie Wahlberg-like hotel-room behaviour, he was dropped by the scene like a hot potato. After one more hit, the appalling ‘Space Jungle’ (no. 7 ’90), he disappeared from sight.

  6 Their manifesto included adapting police uniforms to include smiley faces and bandanas; changing the BBC’s classical Radio 3 into a rave station called Radio 303; and free raves funded by the despised poll tax.

  7 Gabber sounded more like war than music. It was gleefully unpleasant, with a thudding, distorted 909 kick drum always to the fore. Melody was entirely absent. Rotterdam had been razed to the ground by German bombers and here was its soundtrack, on the dancefloor, forty years later (the more cultured techno-producing cities of Amsterdam and Eindhoven, home of Djax-Up-Beats, were roundly ridiculed on records like Euromasters’ ‘Where the Fuck Is Amsterdam’). ‘Poing’ by Rotterdam Termination Source is maybe the single most belligerent and uncomplicated record to ever reach the UK Top 40 (no. 27 ’92). When the tempo of gabber reached 300 bpm in 1994, it was time to call a halt to the bombardment. DJ and gabber overlord Paul Elstak started creating happy gabber at much the same time as the UK’s hardcore scene, descending into drug paranoia, developed its happy-hardcore splinter.

  8 The BBC felt foolish, and declared that dance acts would be forced to sing live, no matter if the front person for Capella would have to sing a cut-and-shut Loleatta Holloway sample. Radio 1 was similarly averse to dance music. As 1991 bled into 1992, 2 Unlimited’s ‘Twilight Zone’, the KLF’s ‘Justified and Ancient’ and the Prodigy’s incendiary ‘Everybody in the Place’ all peaked at number two, but Radio 1 was spiritually closer to the singles keeping them from the top: Wet Wet Wet’s ‘Goodnight Girl’, Shakespear’s Sister’s ‘Stay’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ by (the recently deceased) Freddie Mercury and Queen.

  9 ‘The urge to make recorded music is redundant and a creative dead end,’ said Drummond when they split. The KLF’s records haven’t been in print since. Their intention to leave a KLF-shaped hole in pop history, a moment that could never be revisited, has since been undone by their presence on Spotify and YouTube, but you’ve got to admire their effort.

  10 Progressive house lost the peaks and troughs – the rave gaps – and the wailing diva vocals that were central to the music’s excitement. Gat Decor’s ‘Passion’ (no. 28 ’92) was one of the few hits in the genre, and it did much better (no. 6 ’96) with a remix when house had its first rebirth – as handbag house – in the mid-nineties.

  11 The raver’s habit of sucking on a dummy led to them being banned at some schools in Britain – it’s quite likely that kids hadn’t associated dummies with drugs before this. Vicks inhalers, which ravers stuck up their noses to intensify their rush, led to the company publicly stating they had nothing to do with illegal drugs.

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  ALL EYEZ ON ME: HIP HOP

  Tracy Marrow parked his sleek black Porsche turbo next to his customised vintage Ford Model T and walked through the front door of his home, halfway up a hill above the Sunset Strip. Sitting on the enormous black leather sofa in his LA moderne sitting room, he contemplated a pair of large California abstracts on the wall, which sat either side of a poster for his movie, New Jack City. He got up and walked onto the sun deck, taking in a view of the city below him: Hollywood, Downtown, Westwood, beyond that LAX and the suburbs; Hawthorne, home of the Beach Boys; Downey, where Richard and Karen Carpenter grew up; closer to home there was Crenshaw, where Tracy had spent his scuffling days.

  One clue as to how Tracy could have come to live in a home with an ‘Armed Response’ sign in the garden could have been gleaned from his clothes – jogging sweat pants, Air Jordans and a baseball cap. Then there was Tracy’s pet pit bull, Felony, pacing around the house’s internal courtyard. If that didn’t give you any clues, there were the CDs on his Noguchi coffee table. One was called Power, and the cover featured Tracy, his shapely, near-naked girlfriend Darlene and DJ Evil E holding Uzis and pump shotguns; another was called Rhyme Pays. Tracy had changed his name to Ice-T some years back and made his millions from hip hop – more specifically, from a subgenre he had invented called gangsta rap.

  Grandmaster Flash and Melle Mel’s ‘The Message’
(‘It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from going under’) was ten years old when Ice-T released OG: Original Gangster in 1992. As Ice was taking in the panoramic view from his LA home, Melle Mel was sparring in a run-down boxing gym, reduced to humiliating defeats in amateur bouts, out of the rap game, broke and desperate. ‘The Message’ counted for nothing in 1992 – Ice-T romanticised street crime rather than bemoaning it. He dealt in instant gratification, not analysing the ghetto’s social infrastructure (unless you counted ‘Cop Killer’ as a viable solution). This was Ice-T’s LA. Hollywood, another world of desires, was just next door.

  The millions to be made in hip hop, the gold discs, the LA vistas and Porsches, none of these would have seemed remotely plausible a few years earlier. At the beginning of 1984 rap music had the air of a modern pop trend in its terminal phase; after all, it had been five years since ‘Rapper’s Delight’, and five years was a genre’s standard life cycle. Recent hits had included the Rock Steady Crew’s electrifying Jackson 5 update ‘Hey You (The Rock Steady Crew)’ (UK no. 6 ’83) and Grandmaster and Melle Mel’s anti-coke ‘White Lines’ (UK no. 7 ’84), but there were also the telltale novelty hits – Roland Rat Superstar’s ‘Rat Rapping’ (no. 14 ’83) and Mel Brooks’s ‘To Be or Not to Be (The Hitler Rap)’ (no. 12 ’84). When Mel Brooks has caught up with you, you know your number’s up.