by Higgs, JMR
Today, X Factor contestants are unable to get a haircut without permission. Nothing is left to chance. The approach taken by Simon Cowell and his ilk is the exact opposite of the path pursued by Drummond and Cauty. Which is preferable is, of course, a matter of personal judgement, but you are free to hold up Justified And Ancient (Stand By The JAMs) against any X Factor-related record that you choose to see how they compare.
Inside the submarine, Drummond and Cauty turned away from the lost continent of Mu. The submarine was a reference to the Lief Erickson, the golden Discordian submarine that featured heavily in the Illuminatus! trilogy. It was named after the Norwegian or Icelandic explorer who had been the first European to discover North America, around 500 years before Christopher Columbus.
This was relevant because 1992 was the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus' 1492 voyage, an anniversary that was being widely celebrated in the United States at the time. Drummond and Cauty responded by issuing their final (UK) single in 1992 as a celebration of 'the one thousandth anniversary of the discovery of North America by the Justified Ancients of Mummu.' The JAMs had been searching for the lost continent of Mu, it was explained, in the year 992AD. They failed to find Mu, but they did discover America by accident.
That song was yet another reworking of What Time Is Love, which they called America: What Time Is Love. The video recreated The JAM’s mythical voyage. Shot in black and white and drenched by an ocean storm, it showed the KLF on a Viking longboat of the type used by Lief Ericson. The Handmaidens of Lucifer appear as Sirens on the rocks, pointing the way forward. Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple is also on board.
The video ends, needless to say, with the Viking longboat being burned.
It had been an extraordinary, exhausting couple of years. They had produced a string of hit singles and videos, most notably the 'stadium house trilogy' of What Time Is Love, 3am Eternal and Last Train To Transcentral. They had made both the unreleased film and the soundtrack album of The White Room. They had burnt a wicker man in a pagan ceremony on the Isle of Jura, recorded Tammy Wynette in Nashville and fulfilled all the promotional duties that come with being one of the best-selling bands in the country. All of this, they did independently. There was never a point, Drummond has remarked, when he was not unloading boxes of CDs from the back of vans.
John Dyer of Mute Records told Richard King about negotiations that occurred when Rough Trade Records went into administration. The KLF's records were distributed by Rough Trade and Drummond and Cauty were at one point owed over a million pounds by the company. "So in the middle of a meeting we'd say, 'So you agree to that Bill? KLF represents 13 percent of the debt?'" Dyer told King. "And Bill would say. 'Yeah, just a minute,' and then he's on the end of the phone going ‘Yeah, bit more bombastic Jimmy, bit more bombastic,' so he's having to do a mix-down with Jimmy Cauty who's in the studio at the other end of the phone. Then he'd ring up Pinewood and would spend a hundred grand on the video. He was hiring the sound stages saying, 'No, we don't need the submarine stage today.' Incredible, visionary behaviour." Drummond, in particular, looks noticeably older at the end of his five-year partnership with Cauty than he did before.
And what, in the end, was it for? Drummond and Cauty looked out of the submarine at the waving figures on the lost continent of Mu. They had achieved what they had set out to do. They had made a record, a fantastic record, which satisfied all Drummond's punk-era demands on what a single piece of 7" vinyl should be. Justified And Ancient (Stand By The JAMs) was a record that you could play to anyone, from seven year old kids to fifty year old country music superstars, and they would all immediately get it. It didn't need explaining, or placing in a certain context. It is universal. It will still sound great in a hundred years. And they did this entirely on their own terms, swimming against the industry instead of with it, creating out of nothing but their own myth.
So, what now?
The submarine sailed away. It did not sink under the waters, however, because it wasn't a real submarine. Nor was it in a real sea, being a sound-stage at Pinewood studios where Cauty's old car had once appeared in the Superman movies. Cauty had looked into buying a real submarine but this didn't prove to be practical, so he consoled himself by buying a number of armoured vehicles instead. As Drummond said in 1991, "We want to buy ships, have submarines. They really are stupid things I know, but I feel confident that in the event of us selling ten million albums we would definitely go out and buy a submarine... Just to be able to say 'Look we've got a submarine and 808 State haven't."
In Robert Anton Wilson's book, the Discordians could always travel on to further adventures in their submarine, but Drummond and Cauty could not disappear in this fashion. Their achievement was not physical. It was intangible, playing out in the minds of the audience, becoming part of the Situationists’ spectacle and anchoring itself in Moore's Ideaspace. It was very hard, in other words, to see what they had achieved. What, exactly, was all that hard work for?
And what, if Justified And Ancient was everything that they had been aiming to create, could they do now?
11. ENDINGS
With hindsight, it was Jonathan King that killed the KLF. His fatal blow was an innocent-sounding comment. His words may not have split the group immediately, because Cauty and Drummond had too much momentum to stop straight away. But it was only a matter of time, as the implications of what he had said could not be ignored for long. The KLF staggered on for another three months, too stunned to realise that they were already dead.
It was February 1992 and the KLF had just won the 'Best Band' award at the Brits. Jonathan King was the producer of the awards show, and he had been asked what he thought of the KLF's live performance at the show.
"I enjoyed it", he said.
He enjoyed it. There was nothing else for it. It had to end.
King is a music producer, TV presenter and a recording artist who has sold over 40 million records under various pseudonyms, most of them novelty singles. As he busied himself backstage at the Hammersmith Odeon organising the 1992 Brits Awards, he was forty eight years old and dressed in a garish shell suit and a baseball cap with 'KING' stamped in metal across the front. In the coming decade he was named 'Man of the Year' by the BPI, praised by Tony Blair and convicted of multiple sexual offences on underage boys, so in many ways Jonathan King could be said to personify the music industry. King's acceptance had, on a symbolic level, signified the music industry claiming Drummond and Cauty for itself.
Drummond and Cauty's problem with the music industry wasn't the usual adolescent anti-authoritarian posturing that is so common among musicians. It was the result of bitter experience. By that point Cauty and Drummond had twenty-five years’ experience in the industry between them, from running record labels to producing, working in A&R, being in unsuccessful bands and being pop stars. They knew what the music industry did to people, and they also knew what it had done to them. But by then they also knew how much they had been formed by it. It had shaped their lives and left them feeling corrupted, but it was also an integral part of who they were.
It's still surprising that they were asked to provide the opening performance for that year's Brit Awards show. They had been asked to appear the previous year, but negotiations had broken down following their plans to fill a stage with angels and Zulus and arrive on the back of elephants. The deal breaker, with hindsight, was probably their plan to chain-saw the legs off one of the elephants. The elephant, they said, represented the music industry. The organisers understandably walked away at this point, but they should have realised then that they were not dealing with stable individuals.
Cauty and Drummond were never going to stand on stage and entertain an audience of music industry insiders with one of their crowd-pleasing number one hit singles. They did not desire the acclaim of their peers, nor were they focused on using the event as a showcase to further their careers. They were more concerned with the implications of the invitation. The music industry was finall
y reacting to them, recognising what they had achieved, and attempting to embrace them. It was an invitation that demanded a response, and that response needed to be a summation of their feelings about the industry. In the end they did not quite achieve this, but there is no doubt that they tried.
The show began. The audience were seated in rows, dressed as fabulously as their status demanded and looking effortlessly nonchalant whenever a TV camera turned towards them. The KLF were announced as the opening act and the audience cheered and applauded, seemingly delighted. Bill and Jimmy walked out onto the stage. They were accompanied by Extreme Noise Terror, a grindcore band from Ipswich.
At the time, the existence of such extreme metal bands was all but unknown to the mainstream audience. Bands like Extreme Noise Terror and Slayer had been played on John Peel's radio show, and the Midlands band Napalm Death had appeared in a BBC Arena documentary, but beyond a small group of serious music fans most people had no idea that such an extreme type of music even existed. To those unfamiliar with the genre, it did not even appear to be music. It was noise, and it was a shock to realise just how deeply unpleasant noise could be. In an age when speed metal is used to sell energy drinks, it is perhaps hard to appreciate just how incomprehensible bands like Extreme Noise Terror were at that time. With all due respect, they were not how the British Music Industry wanted to showcase British music to a watching TV audience of nine million people in the UK alone.
The band erupted into a thrash metal version of 3am Eternal, although there were few in the audience who recognised it. Extreme Noise Terror had two vocalists, each barking lyrics in incomprehensible, atavistic grunts that sounded somewhere between Beelzebub and the Cookie Monster. Between them stood Bill Drummond, leaning on a crutch and smoking a fat cigar. He wore a kilt of Drummond tartan that he received on his 21st birthday and the battered leather overcoat that Martin Boorman wore when he escaped to Bolivia. He meant business. He spat out new lyrics, full of references to the BPI and the Brits, but the exact words were indecipherable under the volume, speed and sheer presence of the music.
Drummond's interest in Extreme Noise Terror came after he heard them on the John Peel show. He and Cauty had been planning a hard rock follow up to The White Room called The Black Room, and had approached Motörhead about a collaboration. Motörhead declined, knowing full well that their solid metal audience would never forgive them for working with a 'dance music' band. Drummond then called Extreme Noise Terror but the message he left, "from Bill of The KLF," was initially ignored as it was misheard as "Bill from the ALF", or the Animal Liberation Front. Extreme Noise Terror were deeply into the animal rights scene and were considerably more likely to be called by the ALF than The KLF. Eventually, though, they connected, and the two bands started working on The Black Room sessions. That album was never finished.
Earlier that morning, Drummond had driven to an abattoir in Alan Moore's home town of Northampton and bought a dead sheep and eight gallons of blood. The plan was that he and Cauty would dismember the corpse on stage. The KLF had used sheep imagery throughout their career, ever since they appeared on the cover of Chill Out, so destroying one like this had obvious symbolic meaning. They had huge butchers knives ready, and planned to throw hunks of carcass into the audience. It was intended to be an act so appalling that they would never have been forgiven for it. Jimmy also goaded Bill by suggesting that Drummond could cut his own hand off as well. This was dangerous talk, given how psyched the pair were. They both knew as they suggested ideas that there was a danger that they would carry them out.
Cauty's suggestion reminded Drummond of the Red Hand of Ulster. In Irish legend there was a race across the sea from Scotland, and the first competitor to touch the land was to be declared the King of Ireland. One potential king was behind in the race, so he cut his hand off and threw it ahead of his rivals, onto the shore, and in doing so claimed the land as his own. When Cauty suggested that Drummond could cut his own hand off and throw it into the audience, the idea interested Drummond because he immediately saw it as in some way claiming the music industry for himself. Drummond's actions were being dictated by his symbolic interpretation of events, as always, but this potent form of internal logic seemed to be pushing them into darker and more dangerous territory. Drummond's train of thought was, needless to say, not a normal reaction to being asked to cut off your own hand.
Rumours about the dead sheep had spread during the day, thanks to their publicist Mick Houghton wisely informing the press in order to sabotage their plans. Jonathan King and the BBC were horrified and made it clear that no such act could be allowed, and certainly not televised. Extreme Noise Terror weren't too impressed either, being extreme vegetarians who were known to vandalise butcher shops. The sheep remained in the van during the performance, only to reappear later that night dumped on the steps outside the aftershow party tagged with a note that read, 'I died for ewe'. The prompt arrival of the police prevented the eight gallons of blood joining the sheep on the hotel steps. Like so many other times, Drummond and Cauty had failed to implement their plans and been left with no choice but to improvise.
Still, while Drummond may not have butchered a sheep on stage, he did have an antique machine gun. As the song ended he clenched his cigar between his teeth and sprayed bullet after bullet into the audience, the music industry itself. The gun only fired blanks, of course, but it was cathartic.
In a strange way, something about the music industry did die around that point. Music in the twentieth century had shown an incredible ability for invention. New musical genres were constantly created and explored - so much so, in fact, that this was considered normal. The first half of the century had given us such distinctive new genres as Blues or Jazz. The Fifties gave us Rock n' Roll, and the Sixties gave us Psychedelia and Soul. The Seventies gave us Reggae, Heavy Metal, Disco and Punk, and the Eighties had delivered Hip-Hop, Techno, Acid House and Indie.
The assumption was that this level of creativity was normal and would continue indefinitely.
Each of those new genres was a major musical movement, a continent of sound the likes of which had never been heard before. They were usually forged in the crucible of new technology, new drugs or a combination of both. Musicologists have their technical definitions of each of these genres, of course, but non-musicians define them more simply. Each genre makes us feel differently. We know the mood that a Blues record creates in us, and we know that those feelings are different to the ones generated by Jazz, Heavy Metal or Reggae. The musical genres, in other words, map out the various moods and states that the human mind is capable of experiencing.
This constant invention of major new genres was believed to be normal in 1994, and those in the Brits audience had personally seen the rise of Disco, Punk, Hip-Hop, Rave, Madchester and Indie in their own lifetimes. The fact that these genres had appeared alongside other creative bursts, such as the invention of video games or street art, also helped to normalise them. Grunge had just happened and, while it may not have staked out as much new territory as its Punk or Metal parents, it still felt like a distinct and valid invention. It would never have occurred to anyone in those seats, as the blank bullets from Drummond's gun sprayed across their peers, that such invention had come to an end.
In the years ahead, the journalists and A&R men of the industry busied themselves seeking the next new thing. Britpop was presented as such a thing, despite being a coked-up combination of Indie music and nostalgia. It appeared that music which sounded like music used to could be a new thing, if you were having too much of a good time to think about it. But, as the decade rolled on and the twenty-first century began, it slowly became apparent that major new genres weren't arriving any more. Sure, genres split into sub-genres as they were explored more fully, and the space between different genres were colonised by crossover artists. Yet these hundreds of subgenres, from Drum ‘n’ Bass to Black Metal, were considerably more limited than the genres being founded just a few decades early. They were n
oticeably less fertile.
None of this meant that music got worse, of course. There were still great songs being written and great performances given. Recording became cheap, the ability to record music and reach an audience became more democratic, and access to the entire history of recorded music became easy. But the idea that there were major new continents of unexplored music slowly faded away. The frontier had been colonised. We had discovered the edges of the territory.
Bill Drummond did not know this at the time. Despite machine gunning the music industry at the point its engines of creativity died, he did not imagine that he really was killing it. Correlation does not imply causation, after all. But regardless of what he thought he was doing, he was still the one man in the room whose actions were in sync with the wider picture.
As the band left the stage a voice declared over the PA that "The KLF have left the music industry." It was only meant as a joke. They didn't realise at the time that it was true.
There were many people in the crowd who were appalled by the performance. Trevor Horn, who was there to pick up the award for best producer, announced that the performance was "disgraceful". WEA chairman Rob Dickens said the gesture was "pathetic, silly and childish." The classical composer Sir George Solti tried to leave the auditorium and had to be persuaded back to his seat. This was the only reaction from a member of the audience, Drummond and Cauty band felt, that showed any understanding of what they had done. The press were deeply unimpressed, and it can be assumed that many of the watching millions at home were baffled. But there was something about Jonathan King, and the way that he seemed to personify the entire industry, that made his claim that he enjoyed the performance so damning. As the NME has remarked, the music industry would let you sexually abuse its grandmother as long as you continue to make it money. It can absorb any attack, no matter how heartfelt, because it simply doesn't care about anything except the bottom line. As the Situationists put it, "opposition to the spectacle can produce only the spectacle of opposition." Or to quote Raoul Vaneigem, "pissing on the altar is still a way of paying homage to the Church." In this way the music of The Sex Pistols was eventually played to the Queen at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics, and the music of Kurt Cobain was eventually covered by The Muppets.