KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  For the music press, this was all good. The music press are, by necessity, more drawn to something that is good to write about rather than something that is good to listen to. And there was much about the JAMs that made them good to write about. Their habit of publicising themselves using graffiti - another nod to the Situationists - was something that the press approved of, for the resulting story would automatically be more interesting than an announcement made by a press release.

  It did not hurt, of course, that many of their records quickly became unobtainable. Within a month of the independent release of All You Need Is Love, three major record labels had taken out injunctions. The court order they obtained required the record to not merely be withdrawn, but that all existing copies had to be destroyed. In this instance, they were too late. Only 500 copies had been pressed, and they had all been sold. All of this created great publicity for the release of a subsequent version, which had reworked or re-recorded all the samples in order to make them more-or-less legal. This legal attention took The JAMs by surprise. "We just thought that no-one was going to take any notice of [the record]," Drummond has said.

  The JAM’s legal problems reached a head with the release of their album 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, which included ABBA on the track The Queen & I. 'Included' is probably not the correct word here, for so liberal were The JAMs with their use of long chunks of Dancing Queen that it would be more accurate to call it an ABBA track that featured contributions from the JAMs. ABBA's lawyers, needless to say, were having none of it. Shortly after the album was released Drummond and Cauty were contacted by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, or MCPS. "One of our members, whose work is used substantially on the 1987 album, is not prepared to grant a license in respect of their work," the MCPS wrote. "We must therefore insist that in respect of this record you (i) cease all manufacture and distribution, (ii) take all possible steps to recover copies of the album which are then to be delivered to MCPS or destroyed under the supervision of the MCPS, and (iii) deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers, and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record."

  Drummond and Cauty took legal advice and were informed that it would cost them £20,000 to fight this in court. And that they would lose.

  Publicity wise, of course, this was terrific. Drummond had initially thought that if he met with ABBA and explained his reasons, then they would be able to come to an agreement as artists. It had quickly become clear, however, that no meeting would ever be granted. Nevertheless, Cauty and Drummond headed to Sweden with the NME journalist James Brown in tow. Here they played the offending song outside ABBA's publishing company and presented a fake gold disk (marked 'for sales in excess of zero') to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA. They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their troubles. On the ferry home they threw the remaining copies into the North Sea and performed an improvised set on the ferry, the only known JAMs live performance, in exchange for a large Toblerone.

  This was the start of Drummond and Cauty's reputations as being masters of the publicity stunt. It is worth noting, however, the gulf between this reputation and how they actually behaved. The traditional role of media manipulator is a scheming, cynical one, where intricate plans are mapped out in advance and followed to the letter. The archetype of the manipulative producer is perhaps best embodied in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle. This presents the story of the Sex Pistols as a grand scheme by their manager, Malcolm McLaren, who is shown manipulating the band like a sinister puppet master for his own financial gain.

  In contrast The JAMs, on adventures such as the Swedish trip and others, are simply winging it. The impetus here was that they had to destroy their stock of the album and they wanted to make that act a thing in itself, something symbolic and interesting. Beyond that however, they were scrabbling around for ideas and just trying to make something happen. Hindsight may fix these events into a narrative that makes them appear symbolic or almost pre-ordained, in the way that the bonfire of their debut album mirrors the later bonfire of their money. But whilst they are being enacted, they are chaotic. They lack aim and purpose. To quote one of their press releases, “The plot has been mislaid.”

  Drummond now had a band that had the mystique he looked for in Echo & the Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes. But there was still something missing from the picture, and that was the very something that had seduced him into the music industry in the first place. This was the magic of a perfect single, the creation of a single slice of plastic containing a song so universally appealing that it speaks to everyone, outlives its creators, and makes the world a better place. Critical mystique was nothing to be sniffed at, of course, but it was a shame that their records were so shit.

  You can see this lingering love of the great pop single in the second JAMs single Whitney Joins The JAMs. This begins with the Mission: Impossible theme, with the impossible mission presented by the song being persuading Whitney Houston to join their band. During the early parts of the track Drummond pleads with Houston over a bog-standard dance rhythm ("Whitney, please! Please, please join the JAMs. You saw our reviews, didn't you? Please Whitney, please!") This builds until Houston's biggest pop single I Wanna Dance With Somebody is dropped into the mix. Again, this is no normal sample, but a wholesale stealing of the track. But that is not how it is presented by the logic of the song. On The JAMs terms, this is Whitney Houston deciding to join their band, and Drummond sells this angle by whooping "Whitney Houston has joined The JAMs!" with such excitement that you can't help but feel delighted for him.

  It is tempting to see this as a turning point, the moment when the anti-music hip hop band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu started to turn towards the pro-music dance band The KLF. Certainly, you can no longer see the Houston sample as an act of détournement in the style of the 1987 album. Unlike the Beatles or ABBA samples, this is no subverting the meaning of the spectacle. It is about celebrating how brilliant the song they are stealing is. Many critics viewed this lauding of Houston's single as ironic, but it was nothing of the sort.

  It grew out of an attempt to make a credible record that sampled the Theme From Shaft. They booked a studio for five days and Drummond went to the record shop to buy the Isaac Hayes record. "In the window [of the record shop was] a big cut-out of Whitney Houston," Drummond has said. "I love that track, and I loved Whitney Houston then, and I just said 'Wow', and bought the album... We just played that track over and over again, and we just thought, 'There's no point us making records when such fantastic records as this have been made.' And that's how that track [...] grew into a celebration of Whitney Houston."

  And just before 1987 ended and the JAMs were disbanded, they very nearly made a fantastic record of their own. The song was their third and final single of that year, Downtown. Apart from samples from the Petula Clark song of the same name, it had far fewer stolen elements than other JAMs records. It also featured a specially recorded carol sung by the London Gospel Community Choir. Drummond's lyrics revolve around homelessness, to contrast with Petula Clark's romanticising of London ("Neon lights are pretty," she sings whilst Drummond snarls "In Leicester Square, did you do it clean?")

  But it is Drummond's interaction with the Gospel Choir that makes Downtown so interesting. The choir start the song with a burst of "Jesus Christ is born today!", and power through the rest of the song, never appearing phased or threatened by the blunt drum beat that keeps everything moving. Drummond starts addressing his lyrics at them in a similar way to his conversation with Whitney Houston, like a drunk shouting a monologue at passers-by. In response to their chant of "Glory!", for example, he asks "What glory? In a wine bar world?" Finally, however, he succumbs to their vision and begrudgingly asks "Okay, let’s hear it," just as they shift up a gear, change key and deliver the chorus. And the chorus is pure Christmas Christianity, a song
of Hallelujahs, Glory, Angels looking down and Jesus Christ being born. The combination of the single minded drum machine and the joy in the voices of the London Gospel Community Choir transcends anything else that The JAMs produced. It is hard not to get swept along by the uncynical religious outpouring.

  It was not a hit, nor was it going to be with Drummond's aggressive Scottish rap and the abrupt placing of the samples. But it was a good record and, more importantly, it showed that perhaps they were capable of producing the great pop record that Drummond had for so long been bewitched by after all. But to do so they would have to produce something that matched the religious spirit of the London Gospel Community Choir. How, exactly, could they repeat that transcendence?

  6: FORD & FICTION

  A significant upturn in Cauty and Drummond's financial circumstances occurred in June 1988, when they accidentally produced a hit single. It was called Doctorin' The TARDIS and they released it under the name The Timelords.

  It was a novelty record.

  It started with a desire to make a credible dance record based around the theme music of the science fiction series Doctor Who. Lovers of electronic music consider this theme to be something of a classic, and the pioneering work of its creators, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, is much admired.

  The problem was that Cauty couldn't get a standard 4-4 dance beat to work with it. After some experimentation, he came to the conclusion that the only drum beat that would fit was the Glitter Beat. As a result, samples of Gary Glitter's Rock n' Roll (Part Two), plus the odd bit of Blockbuster! by Sweet, were added to the mix. "Not until a couple of days into it did we realise how terrible it was," Cauty admitted to the writer Richard King. Yet by the time they had added samples of Daleks quoting Harry Enfield's Loadsamoney character, it was clear that they had a potential hit on their hands. "We justified it all by saying to ourselves 'We're celebrating a very British thing here... you know'," Drummond told BBC Radio 1, "Something that Timmy Mallett understands."

  Having accidentally created a potentially massive selling novelty record, the question then became how to publicise it. Drummond and Cauty themselves were both in their mid-thirties and neither were natural front men for a mainstream pop record. They decided to claim that the record had been made by Cauty's car. This was a huge American cop car that looked like a beaten-up version of the Blues Brothers' Bluesmobile. It was, if nothing else, an original idea. No car had ever had a hit record before.

  Drummond and Cauty thought that this gimmick would make a nice little gift for the newspapers, handing them an easy little story on a plate. The press did not agree, by and large, finding the idea idiotic and wondering, perhaps for the first time, if Cauty and Drummond were taking the piss. Regardless, the single sleeve was printed featuring a photograph of the car, now renamed Ford Timelord, complete with a speech bubble saying "Hi! I'm Ford Timelord. I'm a car, and I've made a record." The name 'Ford Timelord' was an echo of Ford Prefect, a character in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy by the Doctor Who script editor Douglas Adams. This was nicely fitting, as Ken Campbell's follow up to Illuminatus! was a production of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

  In three weeks, despite not being playlisted by Radio 1, the record reached the fabled position of number one in the charts. It would go on to sell more than a million copies. A video was shot showing the car driving around locations in Wiltshire, including the Avebury stone circles. It included a couple of home-made Daleks which avoided legal problems by being so poorly constructed that no one could claim they contravened copyright with a straight face.

  Another problem was that the producers of Top of the Pops believed that a car sitting by itself on stage for three minutes, flashing its lights in time to the music, would not make an interesting performance. The solution was to recruit Gary Glitter himself to front the performance, for which he donned a silver cape and hammed it up for all he was worth. His reward was to find himself on the cover of the NME for the first time in his career.

  The car itself, a 1968 Ford Galaxy, had originally been shipped to England by Pinewood Studios and it had been used as a prop in a number of films, including the first Superman movie. It was then bought from Pinewood by a young artist named Gary Mitchell, who painted it to resemble a police car, attached a pirate flag to its aerial and largely trashed it off-roading and driving doughnuts in the fields around Godstone in Surrey. Mitchell then sold the battered wreck to Cauty for a few hundred pounds.

  Mitchell himself then moved to Avebury in Wiltshire, where he worked as a tour guide around the same Neolithic stone circles that his old car had driven past in the video. He then met Julian Cope and the pair became close for a short period in the early 90s. Cope was writing a book about the Stone Circles of the British Isles and, as he could not drive at that point, Mitchell drove him around the country to research stone circles, and he also accompanied him on his solo Highlands and Islands tours of Scotland.

  Drummond's influence over Cope at this point was complex, to say the least. Cope, who saw no humour in Drummond's Julian Cope Is Dead song, had taken to wearing a 'Julian Cope is Dead' T-shirt on stage every night, but he wore it inside out so as not to display the slogan to the audience. He also felt the need to make a pilgrimage to Drummond's home town, where he spent a night walking around, thinking about Bill.

  Mitchell was with Cope on the Isle of Lewis undertaking research for the stone circles book when Cope received a phone call, and was told that Drummond was planning to flatten Silbury Hill with earth moving equipment. Silbury Hill is a massive man-made Neolithic mound at Avebury, of intense personal importance to Cope. Mitchell recalls how shaken up by this threat Cope was. "He went white [after the call], it was a shock to see him like that actually. No-one else had that power over Julian. Bill was the only person that he was scared of."

  Mitchell, now going by the name Flinton Chalk, moved to London and ran the Tom Tom Gallery in New Compton Street, the first gallery to display and sell the works of Banksy. This was opposite the old Ministry of Defense building, which was frequently visited by the Duke of Westminster around the time of the Iraq war. The Billionaire Duke, a cousin of the Queen and the wealthiest man in Britain, was then the head of the Territorial Army (and, according to the Daily Mail, a serial user of prostitutes who used to brag about knowing the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden). He would often park outside the Tom Tom Gallery when visiting the Ministry, arriving in full military uniform with a huge SAS-trained chauffeur and bodyguard, only to be confronted with the shop's window display. It was for this reason that Chalk used to display a large Banksy canvas in the window called Monkey Queen, which, as the name suggests, featured the queen as a monkey.

  Around this time, in 2003, Chalk also stocked prints by Jimmy Cauty, including a series of stamps featuring the Queen wearing a gas mask which was intended as a comment on the Iraq war. These resulted in legal action against Cauty and Chalk from the Royal Mail, and led to Chalk defending Cauty's work in the Evening Standard.

  All of this is, of course, a string of random coincidences, for there is no reasons why the man who sold Ford Timelord to Cauty should go on to have so many KLF related connections. Synchronicities seem to prefer some stories more than others, and this is one that they flock to. We can see this clearly if we look a little closer at the use of Doctor Who for their novelty record.

  From the perspective of the early 21st Century, making a Doctor Who record appears to be an obvious populist choice. It is, after all, one of the most successful and best-loved series on British TV. This was not the case in 1988, however, when Doctorin' The TARDIS was released. At that time, Doctor Who was largely considered to be an embarrassment, by both the BBC and the viewing public at home. If Drummond and Cauty had been drawn to it for populist reasons, their timing was way out.

  Doctor Who began way back in 1963. Its first episode was broadcast on the Discordian holy day of November 23rd, a date the Discordians honour because it is also Harpo Marx's birthday. The day before, Novem
ber 22nd 1963, brought the assassination of JFK and the deaths of C.S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Huxley, through his relationship with Timothy Leary and his book The Doors of Perception, had been a big influence on Robert Anton Wilson. We have already noted the role of the Justified Ancients of Mummu in Kennedy's assassination in fiction, as well as how the real-world assassination impacted on the growth of Discordianism. C.S. Lewis, meanwhile, was a big influence on Doctor Who itself, for the wardrobe in his Narnia books was a simple wooden box that was also a gateway to another world. Right from the start, then, the programme seems tangled up in many of the threads in this narrative.

  For roughly the first twenty years of its life, Doctor Who was generally thought of fondly. It could be cheap and it could be daft, but it brought families together and it had imagination, charm and a clear moral centre which made its faults easy to forgive. It had the ability to change all its actors and behind the scenes staff every few years, which kept it fresh. But eventually, towards the end of Peter Davison's time in the role, something started to go wrong.

  It wasn't just one thing, of course. There were many factors. The Star Wars films had upped the bar for special effects so high that the BBC could not compete. The rise of Michael Grade, from Controller of BBC1 to Director of Programmes, effectively turned the BBC against the series. Grade disliked sci-fi in general and Doctor Who in particular, and as is usual in hierarchical organisations the boss' prejudices were soon reflected by those they manage. The series' budget, in real terms, was dwindling away into almost nothing.