KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  This was the background to Moore's thinking when he viewed the film of Drummond and Cauty burning the million quid. "I thought it was awesome in some ways, very funny in others. It burned well – very clean flames," he told them.

  What was more significant, though, was that the idea of burning the money had been found in their local area of Ideaspace in the first place. The idea had bewitched Drummond and Cauty so strongly that they had been compelled to act upon it, despite not knowing why they did so. Of course, there was no reason why they should understand what it meant: their reaction to it was largely irrelevant. What was important was that the idea had found them in the first place. Its very violence and its shocking nature indicated that something significant was happening, deep down in the depths of our shared mental world. It was like a volcano that heralds an imminent shift of the tectonic plates. If the physical manifestation of this eruption was anything to go by, it seemed to be linked to one of the most powerful magical ideas we have: money.

  "It was a powerful magical event," Moore told them afterwards. "I can't see any other explanation for it. You're dealing with a form of language, a conversation – but you're not sure what the conversation is... you're waiting for a reply."

  As noted earlier, neither Cauty nor Drummond claim that their actions are magical, nor do they adopt the trappings, clothing, and affectations of the occult world. Nevertheless, Drummond's behaviour consistently displays a strong resonance with Moore's belief that the mental world is more important than the physical, that ideas possess validity in themselves and that they can affect the physical world. His visit to the manhole cover and his obsession with Echo are good examples of this.

  Moore's opinion of the burning, that it was a conversation and that they were waiting for a reply, also seems to have resonated. As noted earlier, Drummond still waves away questions about the burning by saying that they are 'still waiting for a response.' So while Moore's ideas about the nature of magic may not help us to understand Cauty and Drummond's personal motivations, they are a valid way to view actions that were the product of magical thinking.

  Alan Moore would also later say, "I like Bill Drummond a lot, I really do, but you have to understand that he's totally mad."

  5: THE MAN AND THE MU MU

  On New Year's Day 1987, Bill Drummond was visiting his parents and went for a walk in the morning. He had left the music industry.

  On July 21st the previous summer, at the symbolic age of 33 and a third (or near enough), he had issued a press release to announce that he was quitting his job as A&R man at WEA records. It was, he said, "time for a revolution in my life." His time would now be dedicated to writing, art and climbing mountains. But first, he'd mark both this totemic age and his retirement from the music industry by releasing a solo album.

  The album was called 'The Man.' It was, somewhat unexpectedly, an album of low-key, acoustic Scottish folk in which Drummond sang songs of love and music in a pronounced Scottish accent over blissful slide guitar. Recorded in five days and released on Creation, song titles such as I Believe in Rock & Roll, I'm The King Of Joy and the opening instrumental True To The Trail reaffirmed his dedication to the potential of music. This was no bitter dismissal of his career or the music industry that he was leaving. Still, it was a deeply odd affair. His voice brought Ivor Cutler to mind, the closing track featured his father reciting Burns and the cover showed Drummond sitting on a Scottish dock holding a guitar whilst dressed in an outfit of blue jeans, white socks and brown shoes. It is remembered mainly for the track Julian Cope Is Dead. After the demise of The Teardrop Explodes, Cope had gone on to have a long, erratic solo career in which he combined moments of visionary genius with a considerable amount of pig-headed noodling. Julian Cope Is Dead was seen by many as Drummond’s response to a song of Cope's called Bill Drummond Said, and it gives some insight into Drummond's complicated relationship with Cope. Its jaunty chorus begins, 'Julian Cope is dead / I shot him in the head.'

  With that record made, Drummond was out of the music industry. He sat down and began to work on a book entitled Why Andy Warhol Is Shite.

  But work on the book did not go well. Two things distracted him. One was listening to Schooly D. The other was his decision to start re-reading Illuminatus!

  Drummond returned from his New Year’s Day walk and phoned Jimmy Cauty. He told Cauty that they should form a hip-hop group called The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the misspelling appears to be accidental, for it wasn't until 2007 that Drummond realised that Wilson's spelling was 'Mummu'). Drummond knew that Cauty would understand what he meant by the name. The other reason he called him was because Cauty had recently bought a sampler.

  Cauty did indeed instantly understand where Drummond was coming from. The act of taking that name, of adopting the mantle of The Justified Ancients of Mummu, may have seemed a simple, trivial act at the time. That day, the 1st January 1987, was the official birth of the JAMs. The Justified Ancients of Mummu had stepped from fiction into reality.

  Drummond and Cauty became partners. The fact that this version of their story talks more about Drummond than Cauty should not be taken to imply that Cauty was in any way a junior partner. Had this account been a traditional music biography, filled with details about what track was recorded in what studio when, then Cauty could have had a more prominent role. A simplified description of their partnership would portray Cauty as the musician and Drummond as the strategist, but this view doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. All the products of their partnership, whether musical or otherwise, came out of mutual agreement. Cauty is just as capable of burning stuff as Drummond.

  Any difference in their roles comes down to their own individual characters. Cauty is practical and above all curious, quick to get his hands dirty, experiment and see what happens. He is a catalyst. Drummond, on the other hand, is not so much curious but driven. The difficulty of defining exactly how he is driven is what makes this narrative spend more time on him.

  Drummond met Cauty in 1985. Cauty played guitar in a band called Brilliant, alongside Youth from Killing Joke and the singer June Montana. Drummond had signed Brilliant to WEA where they had made an album with the pop producer Pete Waterman. "It was a complete failure," Drummond has said. "It was an artistically bankrupt project. And financially deaf. We spent £300,000 on making an album that was useless. Useless artistically, useless... commercially." Still, the pair had learnt a lot about making pop records by watching Pete Waterman work. More importantly, they seemed to understand each other. Cauty and Drummond had what the writer Richard King describes as "an almost telepathic way of communicating."

  "We'd never had to discuss anything because we knew we both liked exactly the same thing," Cauty has said. "There was never any disagreement on music or anything. It was quite weird, actually."

  So when Drummond mentioned The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu to Cauty, he understood exactly what that meant. Cauty had seen the Ken Campbell's production of Illuminatus! at the National Theatre. He knew that the name would represent the principle of chaos working against the corporate music industry, a guerrilla band of musical anarchists who existed to disrupt, confuse and destroy. Taking on that name certainly appealed.

  In this context, hip-hop was a good fit. This new, emerging form of music had no need for 'proper' bands. It wasn't interested in songs and it wasn't even interested in singing. It certainly had no need for virtuoso musicians. It was quite prepared to take a chunk of someone else’s record and use that for its own ends. To many, it almost seemed to be anti-music. Drummond may have been of the opinion that hip-hop was the only music "fit for these modern times," but this was a minority view at that point. Rap and hip-hop had yet to become the all-conquering commercial and cultural force that we know today. If anything, it seemed like a novelty or a brief fad at best, especially when older white Brits tried their hand at it. Many of the bestselling rap records in the UK were spoofs, such as Roland Rat's Rat Rapping or Stutter Rap by Morris Minor and the Majors. There was
still a considerable body of opinion that dismissed rappers as people who talked over a record because they couldn't sing.

  But taken together, the ideas of sampling, hip-hop and Discordianism made a strange sort of sense. Drummond could see that. Cauty could see it also. There was no need for further discussion. They got to work.

  The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - the JAMs - existed for one year. They released an album (1987: What the Fuck is Going On?) and split exactly twelve months to the day after forming. Or at least, that's the official narrative. The actual history is messier, for there was a posthumous album in 1988 (Who Killed The JAMs?), a greatest hits compilation (Shag Times), and the It's Grim Up North single in 1991. But in broad terms the story of the JAMs, and Drummond and Cauty's interest in hip hop, took place in 1987.

  If and when the JAMs are remembered today, it is usually for their pioneering role in establishing sampling as a legitimate creative act in modern music. In many ways, however, that misses what it was that they were doing.

  Sampling, as we now understand it, consists of taking individual parts of an existing record - a drum beat, perhaps, or a melody line - and making something new out of them. It is about finding a loop or a beat that is good in itself, and using that to build something else. The JAMs, on the other hand, took whole sections of someone else's record and used them as they were. They took things not for how they sounded, but for what they represented. When they took parts of ABBA and The Beatles it was not because of the quality of the sound, but very specifically because they were records by ABBA and The Beatles.

  The bluntness of the JAMs musical thefts can be seen as being an unsophisticated, early attempt at sampling. With the art or craft of sampling still being developed, this argument suggests, it is not surprising that these pioneering records have a naive quality. Again, this misses the intention behind what they were doing. A more useful model would be to view them as what the Situationists called détournements.

  The Situationists were a group of thinkers and critics who were active in the 1950s and 60s, mainly in France. At the heart of their thinking was the concept of the spectacle. The spectacle can be thought of as the overwhelming representation of all that is real. In the simplest possible terms it can be understood as being mass media, but that simple definition should really be expanded to include our entire culture and our social relations. The spectacle is both the end result of, and the justification for, our consumerist society.

  The spectacle draws our attentions away from what is real to what is merely a representation. The Situationists saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately. This absorption in the image of things, they felt, was the cause of our modern alienation. The Situationists were not keen on the spectacle, needless to say, yet it is the central idea at the heart of their self-referential reality tunnel.

  The thinking behind Situationist détournements goes like this: every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated. Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honourable response is to fuck with it.

  Détournement, then, involves taking the cultural images that are forced on us and using them for our own ends. It involves changing the text or context of an image in order to subvert its meaning. The Situationists altered cultural images in the pages of their pamphlets, perhaps by taking a newspaper advert for a consumer product and replacing the text with quotes from Sartre about alienation. These days it is more frequently seen in graffiti, or across the internet on Tumblr blogs and social networks like Facebook, where it is known as 'culture jamming.' Company logos are a frequent target. The idea, as the Situationists put it, is to "turn the expressions of the capitalist system against itself." The aim is to break their spell.

  In this context, consider the first JAMs single All You Need Is Love. As its title suggests, this begins with a steal from The Beatles' song of the same name. The Beatles, of course, are the highest expression of the 'proper band' model and generally considered to be the unarguable kings of modern pop music. The highest point of The Beatles, many would argue, was their psychedelic explosion in 1967 and the highest point of this was All You Need Is Love. This song was the UK's contribution to Our World, the first live global television programme. This event was made possible by the recent invention of communication satellites. For the first time in history, people around the world would come together and watch the same thing at the same time. For such a symbolic event the Beatles boiled down the message of the age into a simple melody and the beautifully sung refrain "Love, love, love." Then, surrounded by flowers and the beautiful people of Swingin' London, they sent that message, in the form of pop music, around the entire globe.

  So when the JAMs started their first record with 15 seconds of All You Need Is Love, this was no mere sampling. The way they ended the sample, by slowing down the final 'love, love, love' refrain until it collapsed into nothing, can only be seen as a rejection. This was a statement of intent. It was about claiming - and then dismissing - the height of the Beatles and, by extension, pop music as a whole. Such were the ambitions and the acts of the two men who had taken on the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.

  That intro was followed by an MC5 sample, the shout of 'Kick out the JAMs, motherfuckers!' which Robert Anton Wilson had mentioned in Illuminatus! This was followed by a sampled voice which states 'Sexual intercourse - no known cure,' and introduces the lyrical theme of the track. This is a song about AIDS, a disease which had only become known to the general public a few years earlier and which brought an end to the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 70s. The Beatles' historic expression of the 1967 summer of love had been détourned and subverted into an opposite, more contemporarily relevant message.

  This basic principle, that you have the right to do what you like with whatever culture is thrust at you, is made explicit in their reworking of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's Take Five, which the JAMs retitled Don't Take Five (Take What You Want). The idea would later take on a more political tone in the internet copyright wars of the early twenty-first century. It is the (frequently unspoken) heart of the philosophy behind torrent sites such as The Pirate Bay and related political organisations such as the Pirate Party. It is an argument that is still being digested by our culture.

  The finished record was shit, of course. There are very few people who could listen to it today and say, with their hand on heart, that as a record it has merit. This is all the more apparent if you play it after listening to The Beatles' All You Need Is Love, which retains its innate quality to this day. As Drummond and Cauty's press agent Mick Houghton told the writer Richard King, "[Drummond] came up and played me the JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish... I just couldn't take it seriously because it was a racket. It was Bill Drummond pretending to be some kind of Glaswegian dock worker over a load of Abba samples, and I thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him."

  Faced with the difficulty of promoting such a band, Houghton made it clear to the press exactly who the JAMs were. The pair had adopted pseudonyms - King Boy D for Drummond and Rockman Rock for Cauty - and were trying to hide behind the persona of Scottish dock workers, rapping in the pronounced accent that Drummond used on his solo record. The revelation of their true identities was a wise move on Houghton's part, for the press knew of Drummond and Cauty and knew enough to be curious about what they were up to.

  The press were also intrigued by the mystique that the JAMs were beginning to weave around themselves. Drummond's first lyric on All You Need Is Love was "We're back again," not a typical o
pening line for a debut single by a band that only formed a few months earlier. The rap continues, "They never kicked us out, 20,000 years of 'shout, shout, shout'." Again, it is not usual for rap artists to announce themselves as a continuation of a 20,000 year history. The line "They never kicked us out," is a clue here. It is a direct reference to Illuminatus!, and to the Illuminati's attempts to kick out the Discordian splinter group The Justified Ancients of Mummu.

  By 1987, however, Illuminatus! was not widely read. Even those who had heard of it were unlikely to read it, for by then it had the unacceptable air of a hippy text. Yet without knowledge of this book, the JAMs' lyrics appeared to be extraordinarily enigmatic, and certainly unlike anything else around. Even their name was otherworldly - 'Justified?' 'Ancient?' These were not words used in pop music. Their strange mystique seemed to have an internal logic to it. It wasn't meaningless or surreal nonsense, but it somehow meant something on its own terms. Even when their name was explained as being taken from Wilson and Shea's books, as it was in almost every article written about the band, this didn't reduce the mystery, for very few people went on to read the books. Discordianism was largely unknown then, as indeed it remains to this day. In this context wherever the JAMs were coming from - wherever that was - seemed to be somewhere new.