How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005

by King, Richard

  Neither the film nor the soundtrack was ever released commercially. Drummond and Cauty returned from Spain with their spirits dampened and gradually started to overhaul the material. Cauty lived in a large five-storey Georgian squat in Stockwell on the side of which he had painted a JAMs/KLF logo, as well as knocking out the first floor, creating a cavernous atrium. In the basement the duo had built their own version of the Hit Factory, a small studio with up-to-the-minute samplers and sequencers, which they called Transcentral. The basement, and the many parties held in the squat, echoed to the sound of acid house, the bleeps and low-end frequencies of which the duo mixed in with the aborted White Room material. Two pieces from the proposed soundtrack emerged as possible releases: ‘What Time Is Love?’ and ‘3 a.m. Eternal’. Both tracks throbbed with submerged frequencies and shifts in dynamic intensity and were released under the duo’s new name: The KLF, an opaque and meaningless acronym – as far as any activity by Drummond and Cauty could be considered meaningless – chosen, in tune with the emerging acid house zeitgeist, for its anonymity and emphasis of tunes first, personalities later. It was a zeitgeist that the duo greatly enjoyed.

  ‘We went to lots of clubs,’ says Cauty, ‘and raves. I never used to go clubbing, really, but when acid house happened I really got into that, and that sort of influenced the types of records that we made. We wanted to make some records that could be played in those clubs and at those parties.’ In KLF Drummond and Cauty had found their next direction but, having spent The Timelords’ profits on film stock and a production crew, had run through their funding stream. In an attempt to raise some capital, they released a pop single culled from the White Room sessions: ‘Kylie Said to Jason’, not quite a novelty single but certainly not a KLF acid instrumental. It proved a disaster.

  ‘At that point, we were £110,000 down at the bank,’ says Drummond, ‘with nothing to back it up. But then we decided to do a series of 12-inch singles. We wanted to do total minimalist stuff, not even using drums, just using pulses and things. We did all the sleeves – I think it was a series of five sleeves. We had a thousand of each of these sleeves printed up – had the titles, everything – before we recorded. And we did the first one, the “What Time is Love?” instrumental – put it out, and it starts taking off in Italy in the clubs. English DJs think it’s an Italian thing and they start playing it over here. KLF means nothing: the sleeves have no reference points, everything was really minimal, the music was really minimal – there was nothing for journalists to get into. It could only work on the dance floor.’

  Cauty in particular was spending more and more time on the dance floor or, in the case of Heaven, in the pioneering chill-out room at Paul Oakenfold’s Land of Oz nights. Along with Alex Patterson, a former colleague of Youth’s in Killing Joke, Cauty started a side project called The Orb. Cauty and Patterson would play Steve Hillage and Steve Reich tracks over early Seventies Black Ark dubs as ravers would sink into beanbags to recharge among the beatific textures in the sounds and the films The Orb projected. Using the Land of Oz sessions as a template, Patterson started recording as The Orb while Cauty released the album Space on KLF Communications, an ambient masterpiece that relocated the pastoral, almost geological, starry-eyed minimalism of Eno’s Ambient Series in the early morning dawn of London rumbling awake. The Orb and Space had created a new genre at Land of Oz, ambient house, a genre of which KLF would be part with their first album, Chill Out. ‘Chill Out’s an imaginary journey through America,’ says Cauty, who has mixed feelings about the record. ‘Mostly it’s just a list of places. It was another disaster, really.’

  The duo briefly resurrected the JAMs name for the track ‘It’s Grim Up North’, a harder-edged track which consisted of Drummond reeling off places names from the upper half of the country over a heavy beat, or as the accompanying broadside from KLF Communications put it, ‘Through the downpour and diesel roar – Rock Man Rock and King Boy D can feel a regular diesel thud.’ The release was accompanied by another graffito, the song’s title, located on an underpass on the M1 near the Watford Gap.

  Alongside a further single in the Pure Trance series, ‘Last Train to Transcentral’, Chill Out helped KLF gain an underground reputation in the hazy network that was beginning to develop into an acid house industry, and the band were starting to be invited to play at raves, organised in such a haphazard fashion that even Drummond and Cauty’s logistical prowess was put to severe test. ‘It was always a nightmare,’ says Cauty. ‘I can’t remember how many we did, maybe about five or six, and I’d always start off with the best intentions – have everything set up with samplers and sequencers ready to go and attempt to play or at least mix live – but we were either too out of it on drugs to be able to see anything, or the equipment always broke down, so usually what I’d do is then, I’d just turn the DAT [tape] on, which would sound much better anyway. And everybody was so out of it nobody cared. The focus wasn’t on the group, it was on the music, so we sort of got away with that, but it was a total shambles. Half the time there was no stage. You’re just, “Oh well, we’ll go and over there then, next to Adamski, and just stand on the floor.” They were so badly organised’.

  However messy or impractical, the rave culture was one Drummond and Cauty wholly embraced and enjoyed, much to the amusement of Mick Houghton who, while capable of psychedelic odysseys himself, was yet to experience acid house in its purest and communal form.

  ‘One of the things I used to think was vaguely ludicrous, was that Bill and Jimmy were part of this world,’ says Houghton. ‘Bill was a married man living in Aylesbury with a wife and two kids, but nobody ever questioned what they did, whatever kind of flaws there might be, because it was just such amazing copy. The other side of it was that the music press wasn’t at all geared towards acid culture. It was such an antithesis to indie music that KLF almost gave them a way in, and it was also very playful for The KLF.’

  One of KLF’s first public displays of playfulness was at the Helter Skelter rave in Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire, midsummer 1989. In was also one of the first of the band’s gestures to involve their complicated relationship with money. The KLF performance consisted of Drummond and Cauty positioning themselves halfway up a lighting gantry and taping a plastic keyboard to its side which Drummond, can of lager in hand, pretended to play while Cauty played a DAT. A bug-eyed KLF, who had asked for their fee up front, then emptied a binliner’s worth of Scottish pound notes – roughly a thousand pounds’ worth – over the heads of the crowd.

  ‘They got a wind machine and blew the money out into the crowd,’ says Houghton. ‘They used Scottish pound notes because basically they were the only pound notes you could get, otherwise they would’ve had to use fivers. I think they’d always had this thing about money, and I think they’d talked about burning money before. Like a lot of their recurring ideas it got adapted, and they upped the ante the more successful they became.’

  ‘It was only that one summer, and then by the end it was over anyway,’ says Cauty. ‘It was good fun at first trying to get into a rave that was trying to be shut down by the cops, and the whole excitement of it all – half the time you couldn’t even get the van in, let alone get yourselves in. It was a pretty mad time really, obviously.’

  By the end of 1989 The KLF was immersed in rave culture and were starting to think about reworking the Pure Trance singles, taking the space and pulse of the tracks and giving them a bigger, more euphoric, pop sound. ‘By the time we’d started becoming The KLF, we’d got ourselves organised a bit more; we could sort of try and work out a bit more of a long-term strategy,’ says Cauty. ‘We were just winging it from day to day, but we could see slightly further into the future and sort of plan things a bit, and because we were small we could move fast on our feet and react to what was going on around us. We were in the office of a rave promoter who was putting us on at raves; he also promoted Guru Josh, who was this real sort of lowest-common-denominator rave person, and he’d just had a massive hit sin
gle, and these people, who I didn’t really like, were saying, “Why don’t you do what you’re used to doing and have a hit single?”’

  In 1990 more and more acid house singles were entering the charts. Guru Josh’s ‘Infinity’ reached the top five in the UK and was an equally big hit across Europe. ‘Infinity’ consisted of little more than a ‘Baker Street’-style saxophone riff and a suitably charged BPM over which Guru Josh intoned to his listeners that it was ‘1990, time for the Guru’.

  ‘I thought, it’s come to this,’ says Cauty. ‘We’re in competition with Guru Josh, and I remember saying to Bill, “Well, come on, let’s have a hit single then, ’cause we know how to do it. We haven’t really been trying that hard.” And so we went in to remix “What Time Is Love?” with the definite intention of having a hit single with it, and luckily it worked.’

  The reworked ‘What Time Is Love?’, for which the duo were joined by engineer Mark ‘Spike’ Stent, included every hook, production trick and gigantic keyboard sound that a 45-rpm single could handle. The band added a rap and an insistent series of siren-like bleeps that attacked the listener in a thrilling pop rush. The production was also filled with sufficient crowd noise, a thumping bass line and a propulsive house beat so that, for three and a half minutes, the listener was transported and submerged in the disorientating euphoria of a rave in full swing.

  ‘It didn’t look like it was gonna work. You know, we were putting it out and the radio play wasn’t very good,’ says Cauty. ‘People weren’t really getting on board. It took ages for it to gradually go up the charts, then it got to number five, so that was it, really – we’d done it.’

  ‘What Time Is Love?’ was released in August 1990, and was the first of what became known as The KLF’s Stadium House Trilogy. Part of the record’s success was down to Scott Piering, who along with Houghton was now part of the band’s inner sanctum. After leaving Rough Trade, Piering had established himself as one of the country’s leading pluggers. A thoughtful man who devoured music, he was the antithesis of the jokey tour-jacket-wearing, larger-than-life personality plugger.

  ‘Scott Piering had a huge influence on how the finished record was edited and put together,’ says Cauty. ‘Scott was saying, “No, boys, you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have that, you’ve got to have …” We would have a lot of meetings with Scott and a lot of meetings with Mick. Scott was brilliant because he’d sort of tell us things like, “If you want to get a record played on the radio, you’ve got to have the chorus coming in first,” something we didn’t know about. So we always did what he said. He was really brilliant and Mick was great. There’d be strategy meetings, and we’d let Mick speak to the press on our behalf so we could get on with everything else.’

  ‘What Time Is Love?’ was followed by ‘3 a.m. Eternal’ five months later in January 1991. The single reached no. 1 and like ‘What Time Is Love?’ was an international hit. An album, The White Room, followed in March, a reworking of the initial White Room material; it also reached no. 1.

  ‘The first no. 1 was so euphoric,’ says Cauty, ‘just out of the blue with ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, that it just seemed like some sort of dream, and it only lasted for a week and then it was all over. You know this incredible thing, that it sort of dissipated in front of us. So with The KLF it was a much more of a sort of long term. We’d strategised it a bit more, had a bit more of a plan, so it was still kind of exciting but, obviously, the more it happens, the less exciting it gets and [it] just becomes the normal.’

  Throughout their exploration of pop stardom The KLF were keen to retain the air of anonymity and mystique around themselves, both as a protective layering to keep them at first remove from the press and also to play around with their ongoing roles as discordians. ‘The more successful you get, the more calls you get from people wanting you to do things,’ says Cauty. ‘Quite early on in the sort of hit sequence, we decided to not do any more interviews or have anything to do with the outside world – just cut ourselves off completely and not say anything to anybody about anything – and that kind of worked in our favour, ’cause it made people even more interested in what we were doing. We got all the journalists who’d been wanting to do things, got them all together in one group, and that was our way of interacting with the media.’

  Pressure on the duo’s time increased as Houghton was permanently handling requests, not just within the UK but also from abroad, for interview face-time with The KLF. As the world’s media started to enquire about the masterminds and master plan behind their releases, Drummond and Cauty’s solution was a remarkable piece of theatre. Over a hundred international journalists were invited by Houghton, at his most adroit, to meet at Heathrow airport for the solstice date of 21 June.

  ‘The KLF chartered a plane, and basically invited one representative of the press from every European territory. The only person from the UK was actually Sheryl Garrett who covered it for i-D magazine, and they flew to Jura, the island where they eventually burnt the million quid. Nobody was told where they were going, they were just told to bring their passports. Jura is obviously in the British Isles but it’s a very small airport, and as they got off the plane they had to go through passport control, which was actually Bill dressed up in a customs official-type uniform, and he stamped everybody’s passport with the pyramid ghetto-blaster logo. Even by then people didn’t really know what they looked like and nobody realised it was Bill.’

  As confused representatives of the world’s media disembarked on to a remote island at the height of summer, they were handed robes and instructed to follow a horned figure into the sunlight. In silence a robed procession moved slowly across the island until it reached its destination, a giant wicker man.

  ‘We got them to process down the island to this little peninsula where we’d built this huge wicker man,’ says Cauty. ‘We did this whole sort of fake pagan ceremony and had this big PA system hidden around, and it was all really loud and I had a little radio mic on Bill, and I was working the mix. He was up on a sort of platform in front of the wicker man, dressed with this horn, and did this whole speech in a foreign language he’d just made up. It was totally, totally brilliant, everybody was completely gobsmacked, ’cause they didn’t know where they were going or what was happening. And then we put everybody back on the plane and took them down to Liverpool and we did this performance in the theatre in Liverpool that night where we first used the ice cream van. We were on a roll and, obviously, your worst fear in a situation like that is you’ll put a record out and nobody will buy it or they won’t like it – but we became so popular that virtually anything we did would be a hit.’

  As the record sales began to escalate so did the group’s sense of theatre. For their first Top of the Pops appearance the duo had appeared in KLF T-shirts, hunched anonymously behind keyboards while a rapper and dancer performed stage front. By the time The KLF were promoting ‘Last Train to Transcentral’ on the programme, they had converted the Top of the Pops studio into a rave-saturated version of the stage production of The Illuminatus! as hooded figures appeared in a pyramid formation and Drummond and Cauty played sitars with feet on the monitors. ‘I think they got to the point where they thought they could almost do anything and people would just go, “Wow,”’ says Houghton. ‘What I love about The KLF was that for all the bravado of it and the scale of it that went on, there’s almost an Ealing Comedy element to it, a touch of the Whisky Galore or Passport to Pimlico.’

  Such acts as flying journalists to Jura and having the event filmed and shown on Channel 4 were testament to Drummond and Cauty’s grand-scale thinking and their capacity to produce such grandiose events. For a band that was also selling millions of records, their activity was, astonishingly, still the work of six or seven people. Other than an international network of distributors, The KLF had no office, record or management company. ‘There was Bill and there was Jimmy,’ says Houghton. ‘There was Cress, who became Jimmy’s wife, and Sally Fellows, who used to wo
rk for Rough Trade as well, who then became Bill’s partner for a while, and there was myself and Scott Piering, and that was it. That was everything, and even though I only did what I did, which kind of went beyond just press really … it was just extraordinary that such a small group of people, who in a sense weren’t remotely business-oriented, managed to keep it going.’

  In America The KLF were courted and eventually signed by Clive Davis of Arista, a venerated mogul who was in thrall and fully approving of the band’s approach to pop stardom. ‘The interesting thing about America,’ says Cauty, ‘was that labels always say, “Well, if you don’t come over and tour, nothing’s gonna happen,” and they always say that to bands, and in fact we didn’t go over and tour but we had a massive hit there, so I don’t know what that’s all about. You’re told you gotta tour round, do what all bands do, you tour round all the radio stations, you do your shows, you do your interviews, you do this, that and the other and it just turns out that it’s absolute rubbish. Record companies just say that to bands to get them to go away for a while and do something, otherwise they’re sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs.’

  Such success and the attendant Olympian feats of planning were starting to take their toll on The KLF operation, whose workload was increasing daily. On the back of doing well in America Drummond and Cauty decided to make a series of high-end videos with large-scale productions for the MTV market, which meant they started booking weeks in Pinewood Studios using the sound stages usually reserved for Bond films.

  ‘When we went to no. 1, I remember I was helping unload the van,’ says Drummond. ‘There was never a point were I wasn’t unloading vans. From the beginning of Jimmy and I working together, Jan. first 1987 through to the Brits, 1992, you could be having no. 1s in eighteen countries but still be unloading vans of records.’