SAW stripped the recording process back to a minimal operation of state-of-the-art sampling, programmed drum machines and vocals. Not only were the conventions of a band playing live in the studio dispensed with, there was nowhere in the Hit Factory for a live band to play.
The production-line method worked perfectly for one-off singles as SAW started a run of chart success that peaked in 1989 with seven no. 1 singles, all of which were distributed by Pinnacle, Rough Trade’s arch-competitor in independent music distribution. Such were the technicalities of the Indie chart, whereby any independently distributed record qualified, SAW releases were no. 1 in both the Indie and Top Forty singles charts. Brilliant were, nominally at least, a band rather than a vocalist working with the production company, and the process of recording their album became, by SAW standards, longer and altogether more convoluted. Cauty and Youth had a background in rock and the group dynamics of albums and tours, where performance and integrity were touchstones of musical creativity. Waterman, in no uncertain terms, had told them from day one that the last thing he cared about was how well a guitarist thought he had played a solo; furthermore, if there were to be any guitar solos on the Brilliant album, they would be played by one of the SAW team. ‘I’d turn up at the studio with my guitar,’ says Cauty, ‘and they’d go, “Well, we did the guitar last night.”’ Rather than storming off with bruised egos Cauty and Youth were intrigued by SAW’s working methods and settled in at the back of the studio to observe the technological prowess of Stock, Aitken and Waterman at work in the Hit Factory.
‘We’d just sit there, gobsmacked, listening to Pete, ’cause he’d sort of hold court,’ says Cauty. ‘He’d start this little speech at the beginning of the day, and you’d just sit there and listen, and agree with it, because he really knew what he wanted, so you put your trust in him. Me and Youth sat there for a year watching them make these records, figuring out how they did the mixes and stuff. It was brilliant, we learnt a hell of a lot. They were sampling like crazy, everything – drum sounds, bass sounds – and nobody really knew they were doing that, they kept quiet about it all.’
As the Brilliant album started being pieced together, Warners were beginning to lose track of the band’s progress. Having signed them as a priority a few months earlier as a dance/pop/rock crossover act in the style of Prince and the Revolution, the label was in the dark as far as the events in Borough were concerned. ‘We were billed to be the next big thing,’ says Cauty, ‘to have everyone at WEA saying, “You’re gonna be massive, just go along with this. You’re gonna be huge” – and then you’re not. That was interesting as well.’
In the end, frustrated by the lack of progress and with Drummond having left the company, Warners decided to intervene. Balfe’s response was a typically counter-intuitive piece of music-biz theatre. ‘Dave Balfe took Warners to court,’ says Cauty. ‘He had this great idea that we’d take them to court, to try and get out of the record contract, for some bizarre reason that he’d thought of, so, of course, we went to the high court, and we were in court going, “Oh yeah, we hate them,” and they’re sitting there going, “We hate that band,” and then we lost the case, and then we split up, and then that was it, that was the end of that episode.’
Drummond was considering his next move. Having released the quasi-autobiographical The Man on Creation, he found himself re-reading books that had influenced him in his youth including The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s work of meandering science-fiction conspiracy theory for which he had designed the set of the Liverpool School of Pun’s production a little over a decade earlier. Rather than setting off a glow of nostalgia for the bohemian days of Mathew Street, The Illuminatus! brought Drummond’s thinking right up to date.
‘Re-reading it triggered something off in my head, about doing a hip hop record,’ he says. ‘I was totally bored with aspirations of modern music and how it always seemed to be about looking for integrity or something from the past that makes the bands seem authentic. Oh fuck that. So when hip hop happened – particularly it was the Schoolly D album. There was something about the way he ditched everything, even though they were using old albums, but the hallway, couple of decks, beatbox, somebody on the mic and they could just do it on the street and just do it anywhere.’
Inspired by the stripped-back and practical immediacy of Schoolly D and remembering SAW’s equally functional approach to music making, Drummond made contact with Cauty. ‘Bill just phoned up out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting a call from him,’ says Cauty, ‘and said he’d got this idea for a record, was I interested. We nicked a lot of stuff obviously, from Illuminatus!, which sort of helped us.’ Cauty, in the kind of serendipitous moment in which Drummond, with his love of myth and happenstance, placed great stock, had seen the production of The Illuminatus! when it had played at the National Theatre.
Drummond’s idea for a record was to combine Schoolly D’s futuristic disregard of the past with the chaotic time-travelling mischief of The Illuminatus! and the beatbox immediacy of sampling. The band’s name, the JAMs, ‘sampled’ from Shea and Wilson, was an acronym of Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who feature in the trilogy as the Mummu, spreading counter-factual messages of conspiracy and misinformation known by the ruling illuminati as discordians. For the next five years Drummond and Cauty would act as discordians, running rings around the music industry and media while selling millions of records.
‘A lot of the time, if we couldn’t decide what to do, we’d say to ourselves, “What would The KLF do in a situation like this?”’ says Cauty, ‘so we were always able to stand outside the band – the JAMs, The Timelords, The KLF – and say, “Well, look, there’s The KLF, this is the sort of thing they’d do, what would they do now?” It was almost like we were managing them, and we were able to go, “Well, if you do this, that’ll happen.” So that was very useful. We’d never have been able to have done it on a record company, ’cause everything we did was something that a record company would have said, “But you mustn’t do that.”’
The JAMs agreed a set of criteria: Drummond would be known as King Boy D, a rapper who delivered his rhymes in a Glaswegian accent, and Cauty, who retained a fondness for flowing locks and leather jackets, called himself ‘Rock Man Rock’. The painted JAMs would exist for only one year, during which they would sample their way through their record collections – cutting up the canonical history of music to present the JAMs’ version. The first single, ‘All You Need Is Love’, spliced the Beatles’ original with Sam Fox’s ‘Touch Me I Want Your Body’, and investigated the media’s response to AIDS.
An album, 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?), came out along with an accompanying JAMs act of self-promotion, a large white-washed graffito of ‘1987’ on a tower block. The press, initially intrigued, became supportive of the JAMs interventions and gave the album positive reviews, something that Mick Houghton, as the JAMs’ press spokesperson found perplexing. ‘There was a period, of about a year I suppose when I didn’t see that much of Bill,’ he says. ‘He came up and played me the JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish … I just couldn’t take it seriously, ’cause 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 just thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him.’
Drummond and Cauty had pressed up the JAMs releases as white labels with no press release, biographical information or publicity photos. The duo recognised that a few small-scale reviews would, however, generate enough interest to achieve some sales. ‘It was very much on the kind of level of, here’s a box, can you just get them round to the papers,’ says Houghton, ‘and in a way the only thing I could exploit – and I mean I really thought the music was awful – was that Bill had a reputation. Even though there was this nonsense that it was King Boy D, I don’t think I ever denied the fact that it was Bill Drummond and journalists loved him, journalists loved Bill Drummond, so they
kind of bought into this thing, much to my surprise.’
Drummond and Cauty had wanted the anonymity of aliases to act as a wall between their past lives and the instant communication of the JAMs. The audacity of the project – the wholesale sampling of the Beatles and Abba along with Drummond’s somewhat theatrical lyrical flow – made instant and entertaining copy and the duo found themselves on the front cover of Sounds. ‘At first we decided to pretend that we were just two people from Scotland who nobody even knew about,’ says Cauty,’ ’cause we thought, if anybody knew our history – like I’d just been in this terrible pop band, and Bill being an A&R man – it would just destroy the whole concept of being, you know, two Scottish rappers from the estate.’
Under threat of an injunction from Abba’s management, 1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?) was withdrawn from sale and the last remaining copies were destroyed. The JAMs turned the legal action into a small-scale media circus by travelling to Sweden with a journalist and photographer, to try and explain their motives to, if not negotiate with, Abba’s management company. The accompanying feature contained stories of copies being thrown overboard from a ship into the North Sea, and the JAMs’ first and only live performance: taking over the ferry band’s PA as Rock Man Rock and King Boy D freestyled to the amusement of Scandinavian long-haul HGV drivers.
Within less than a year the JAMs had instantly earned themselves a reputation for extreme risk-taking and an irreverent approach to music-making and the orthodoxies and legal technicalities of copyright and sampling. The element of risk and disregard for music industry professionalism was highlighted in their media coverage. The duo became synonymous with pranks, a charge that would dog them for the next five years, much to their annoyance and frustration.
‘I’ve got an artist’s ego but what I haven’t got is a front man’s ego,’ says Drummond. ‘I wasn’t twenty-one or twenty-two – what happens when you’re twenty-one or twenty-two [is] you want to be taken seriously. I knew I was fucking serious. Jimmy and I were in our thirties. We weren’t looking up to somebody, trying to be like David Bowie or Jim Morrison. That didn’t exist, so people didn’t know what to make of us.’
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 stag
es 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.’
How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 Page 36
