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

by King, Richard

  Drummond’s relentless work ethic and his determination not to be categorised meant that his drive was becoming almost maniacal. Genuine international chart success was vindicating his thoughts on the convention and consensus of how the music industry, particularly the cosy and self-important world of indie with its running music-weekly narrative, behaved.

  ‘It was important for me that The KLF was successful worldwide because I hated bands that somehow thought they were big, and really they were big in this fake world of the NME, Melody Maker,’ says Drummond. ‘They would have a fan following that could put them into the Top Twenty, but I was thinking, that’s not a real Top Twenty record, that’s just your cult following all buying it in a week, and I’m not interested in that. I want to know that the records we’re making are touching a vast amount of people that’s actually plugging into something that – that is what pop music is – that reaches out and people don’t care who the fuck these people are: this record makes me feel a certain way, I want it and I want that. And so that was incredibly, incredibly important to me.’

  While Drummond was more theoretical and forthright in his ideas of what should constitute success, Cauty was equally driven as to their vision of what The KLF could achieve. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever worked with two individuals where [neither] one was more important than the other,’ says Houghton. ‘I think Bill was always perceived as the front man – and Bill already had a reputation – and Jimmy, by his nature, was very quiet and shy, but it was just one of those marriages made in heaven. They just complemented each other. A lot of it was just thought up around a kitchen table. I honestly believe they felt at the end that we could do anything and people would just accept it, and, because of that, there’s just no point in carrying on. It’s just like … we could do the most ridiculous thing on earth and people would say, “Genius.”’

  ‘Everybody else was sort of one layer back,’ says Cauty. ‘And people would always say, “Well, you two have got this sort of in-joke that nobody really gets.” Obviously Scott and Mick and Cressida and Sally, they did get it, but really it was only ever me and Bill who had the proper overview of the whole thing.’

  The Stadium House Trilogy was completed in January 1992 with ‘Last Train to Transcentral’. A further single, ‘Justified and Ancient’, featuring Tammy Wynette, went straight to no. 1. In little over a year The KLF had sold two and a half million singles; in 1991, the band were the biggest-selling singles act in the UK.

  In the video for ‘Last Train to Transcentral’ a model of the Ford Galaxie drove off the edge of an unfinished motorway flyover and became airborne. For those closest to them it seemed that an out-of-control car flying through the air was as apt a metaphor as any for the duo’s state of mind. Cally Calloman, who had known both members of The KLF, and the members of the inner sanctum had, along with the rest of the industry, looked on at the ascent of The KLF in wonder. At the back of his mind Calloman realised that the size of their success was bound to have repercussions.

  ‘KLF was so condensed and so crazy. Everyone at Island said, “Oh, Cally, you know Bill Drummond – do you think you can get him to do a remix on the new this single or that single?” Their ascendance from The Timelords on was so steep … it was fantastic, but they were sort of uncontactable apart from Mick, who I like a lot. Mick was the earthbound member of planet KLF. It was a tiny coterie. If you said, “I think Tammy Wynette would be a great voice on this,” you’d get Tammy Wynette, and they went to Clive Davis, to get Tammy Wynette … and he is very much from that school, an old guy who could turn round and say, “Fine, I’ll give you Tammy Wynette” … not “You’re crazy, the demographic is all wrong.” … Bill didn’t even have to explain.’

  ‘Justified and Ancient’ was a reworking of a track on 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On), another example of how the duo liked to play around with the same themes and ideas or, put another way, were able to rework the same material within the elevated aspect of The KLF. Drummond and Cauty certainly mined their recordings at length for source material – some of the pedal steel on Chill Out dates back to Drummond’s solo LP The Man.

  ‘The Stadium House Trilogy records are classic,’ says Houghton, ‘but they had recycled ‘What Time Is Love?’ three times, and got away with it. They weren’t exactly brimming with ideas but it didn’t matter, they just went, “Well, let’s do a rock version, ‘America What Time Is Love?’” and they got away with it. What Bill and Jimmy had was an incredibly strong sense of commercial potential.

  ‘America What Time Is Love?’ was the last KLF single and featured former Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes who sang over a frenetic stadium-rock-house version of the track. Seasoned KLF watchers sensed that the song was a carefully constructed, if blatant, attempt to ‘crack America’. ‘A lot of people probably thought that maybe we did have a proper vision,’ says Cauty, ‘but we didn’t really. We were just making it up from day to day. I’m still not sure how any of it would look from the outside.’

  The ideas were becoming more and more grandiose. The video for ‘America What Time Is Love?’ featured a longboat being lashed on the high seas and driving rain of Pinewood’s submarine studio as Drummond and Cauty, dressed as knights and playing Gibson Flying Vs urged the boat’s crew and passengers to row harder and faster. The song sampled Motörhead’s ‘Ace of Spades’, and the duo’s work rate was running at an equally frenetic pace that was becoming untenable as thoughts within the camp suggested that The KLF might now have become something of a monster.

  ‘By the time we got to the end, to “America What Time Is Love?”, it was getting a bit weird really,’ says Cauty. ‘It seemed like it was so easy to have a hit, even though we’d still be putting everything into these records. “America What Time Is Love?” has got so many things in [it]. We had to get two 48-track machines going in the studio, all at the same time, just to get everything we wanted in. It was ridiculous, it was like a Meatloaf record. I think we’d pretty much said everything that was possible to say on a record. It had reached its peak and then really really there was no more.’

  The duo began work on a new project, The Black Room, a title that was representative of their mental state and their decision, having sampled Motörhead, to further explore metal and thrash music. They enlisted the help of Ipswich’s Extreme Noise Terror in the studio, starting to lay down tracks of aggressive rhythms and punishing vocals, but the sessions started to stall.

  ‘The risk just went on being even braver,’ says Calloman. ‘The self-destruct button just went on to be an ogre. They got bigger and bigger and bigger because they could say, “Oh we’ll destroy all this one day,” and one of them would say to the other, “Oh great, destruction that’s fantastic!”’

  The KLF signifiers of horned men, capes, mise en scène on the grand scale, the Ford Galaxie 500, the duo’s choreographed dance ‘routines’ were all now facets of their lovingly created mythology. While they were always taken seriously by the media, the sense that Drummond and Cauty’s greater role was as pranksters or situationists is a charge that still rankles with them both.

  ‘Even though there was humour in it,’ says Cauty, ‘we were deadly serious about it, and really meant everything we did. I think that’s one of the reasons why it sort of worked so well, because people can tell when they hear something that these people really mean this. It’s like any kind of art that you do: you have to put everything into it, and if you don’t, then people can tell.’

  For Drummond, who has continued to resist any attempts by the media to define whatever his particular preoccupations are at any given time, the idea that The KLF was a project or a scam is one that haunts him still. ‘Every note we played, every single thing that came out, I felt’, he says. ‘We completely meant every moment.’

  The KLF’s runaway commercial success meant that they would be duly honoured by the BPI at the 1992 Brit Awards. The band were nominated for Best Artist and Best Single and were invited to perform at the ceremony.

>   ‘Towards the end, because of the scale and success, and the sort of blind acceptance of whatever they did, I think they just felt that what they were doing was meaningless,’ says Houghton. ‘I think they were both pretty close to nervous breakdowns. I think they could have done serious damage to themselves at that point, when they did the Brit Awards. There were bits of that that were totally Ealing Comedy, like when they sent a motorcycle courier up there to pick up their awards. The courier gets there, he picks it up, walks off and then goes back and gets it signed for.’

  Drummond and Cauty had planned to mark the Brits with a series of gestures on live television that would be an unforgettable assault on the sensibilities of an audience comprising the great and the good from an industry whose conventions, protocol and standards they had mistrusted and abused since the first JAMs release.

  ‘I remember meeting them, about six in the morning, that day and they had the dead sheep in the back of the van,’ says Houghton. ‘This is typical of what they would do. They did it all themselves. Bill had driven up that morning to somewhere in Northampton, to pick up this dead sheep, and they really were going to throw blood over the audience and I said, “You can’t do that, you really cannot do that,” and I did put that in the Mirror or the Sun, and it ran that morning: “The KLF are going to throw buckets of blood everywhere” and they were actually stopped from doing that.’

  While their plans to cover the music industry in sheep’s blood had been scuppered by Houghton, The KLF still staged a career-ending performance to end all career-ending performances. An unhinged-looking Drummond, wide-eyed, on crutches and wearing a kilt, staggered onstage alongside the members of Extreme Noise Terror and Cauty, whose zipped-up clothing made him look like a petrol bomber. Drummond announced their arrival with the cry of ‘ENT vs The KLF This … is Freedom Television’. As the two bands launched into a hardcore thrash version of ‘3 a.m. Eternal’, the massed black ties of the phonograph industry sat in dumbstruck horror, as ENT treated the Hammersmith Odeon to the sort of set they were used to playing to a wall of stagediving hardcore thrash fans in a rock dive. The spectacle concluded with Drummond chomping on a cigar and firing round after round of blank ammunition from a machine-gun he pointed at all corners of the audience.

  One crucial detail had been lost in the chaos of the performance, however. ‘I’ve always had this rock star fantasy, ever since I was young, that I’d have this massive guitar solo,’ says Cauty. ‘I’d been rehearsing it and rehearsing it. This was it. Hammersmith Odeon – I’m gonna do my guitar solo at last, them I’m finished. So of course I come up to the front of the stage and go “wrram” and my lead gets pulled out of my guitar. I’ve only got, like, twenty seconds to do my solo and I spend the whole time just finding the end of the lead to plug it back in and that was it – that was the last thing I ever did in the music business. So tragic, but I’m OK now – but what a lost opportunity that was, ’cause it was a brilliant solo.’

  As the band walked off stage, Scott Piering’s voice boomed out over the PA: ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, The KLF have left the music business.’

  The performance left the audience feeling aghast and assaulted as, for the first time in its history, a performance by a multimillion selling band at the Brits Award Ceremony was met with silence.

  ‘It absolutely fucking terrified people,’ says Houghton. ‘Sir George Solti was up for a lifetime achievement award and he was in the front row, and as soon as they started up, he fled the building, hotly pursued by people with clipboards, “You can’t go, you’ve got an award to accept.” There was just stuff that people didn’t even notice, it was fantastic.’

  The KLF had ended their career live on TV in a hail of hardcore metal and machine-gun fire, an act of visceral aggression that was indicative of the fragile mental state of both Drummond and Cauty. ‘We were both exhausted,’ says Cauty. ‘It just happened overnight. Nobody knew it was coming. We just said, “That’s it, we’re deleting all the records, we’re going away, goodbye.”’

  With the studio bill and Extreme Noise Terror’s fee still owing (both were later settled), The KLF ceased to exist the moment they walked off stage at the Hammersmith Odeon. Drummond and Cauty, at least in the territories where the decision was theirs to make, deleted the entire KLF back catalogue.

  ‘I genuinely believe that Bill actually was of a mind to chop his hand off or, who knows,’ says Houghton. ‘They were so crazed at that time that nothing would’ve surprised me. It was kind of spiralling out of control, I think, at that point.’

  ‘We’d been going so flat out and then we both literally woke up one morning and went, “Well, that’s it, there’s no more,”’ says Cauty. ‘I just remember it was such a relief. It was so exciting, you know. We put this full-page advert in the NME and it was great, something new at last.’

  Such was The KLF’s popularity and reputation for double bluff that the press second-guessed the duo’s announcement and assumed the band were performing another piece of KLF theatre. The reality was that the non-stop sidestepping and widescreen success of The KLF had tested the limits of both its members. ‘I couldn’t carry on,’ says Drummond. ‘I was about thirty-nine then, and I just had to stop, you know. This had taken over every area of my life. There’s a lot of other things I wanna do. I’m not saying I had a breakdown, in a classical sense, but that’s what it felt like. My marriage came to an end.’

  Houghton had been on the journey, if once removed, from its beginnings and had seen their meteoric success and self-imposed isolation from the outside world combine to affect their health. ‘They could’ve done something which I think would have to have bordered on self-harm of some sort,’ he says. ‘That’s kind of where it was heading – or something that was actually seriously illegal to the point of getting them into serious trouble.’

  The band’s success and legacy and the adventures of the K Foundation that followed are still something Drummond and Cauty are processing today. ‘We never did it for the money,’ says Cauty. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody, as a job, being in The KLF.’

  15 Leave the Planet

  Cover of Rough Trade’s in-house trade paper, The Catalogue, October–November 1989 (author’s archive)

  When Rough Trade Limited went into administration in 1991 the news was met with a mixture of incredulity and resignation. While more hardened observers in the business had long assumed it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened to a company run by amateurs, Rough Trade’s turnover in the late Eighties had been increasingly on the up. By 1989 the independent distribution sector – Rough Trade and its more successful and more orthodox rival Pinnacle, plus a handful of specialists – accounted for over 30 per cent of the music market. Rough Trade was, on paper, enjoying its most profitable period; following the no. 1 success of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, along with a series of Top Ten dance singles it was distributing, the company had shown itself capable of competing tooth and nail in the market.

  Within Collier Street, despite the steady flow of chart-bound releases, it was becoming apparent that there were financial problems. Office Christmas parties were cancelled in 1989 and Richard Powell resigned, leaving the critical path in the hands of a new layer of management. If the London office was often volatile, the roots of the company’s demise lay further afield, in New York. Robin Hurley was running Rough Trade Inc., the American division of Rough Trade. As a former member of The Cartel he had an insider’s understanding of the company’s ethos and working methods which he had attempted to re-create in America.

  ‘When I moved to [the] USA in ’87 to run Rough Trade, it was in San Francisco,’ says Hurley. ‘It was really a shop and a wholesaler. It was run by a bunch of hippies and anarchists and it was really off the radar from what was going on in England. Rough Trade had had success in Germany, and there was an admittedly naive thought at Distribution, that, if we’re going to sign bands like The Smiths, we should have them worldwide
and have them for the US, which at that point was half the world’s record sales. San Francisco had the best pot, was the nicest city in the USA to live in, as thought by a number of people in RT, and it was thought of as the right place to be. But when I lived there I realised, lovely though it is, it was something of a backwater both musically and in terms of the industry. For us to grow in the States we’d need an office in either New York City or Los Angeles. New York was closer to England there was more going on musically and we already had an office on the West Coast. So New York at that point was where the label happened: the A&R and the radio people and San Francisco was where the stock was held and distributed.’

  Underestimating the size of the American market, which often required a chain of separate distributors to move stock from one coast to another and had a similarly fragmented media, Rough Trade did manage to successfully sign a number of American acts which gave the label a strong run of releases in its final years. Regularly spending time in New York, Travis’s downtown links remained strong. In 1987, to almost total indifference, he released World of Echo, Arthur Russell’s meditative tone poem for cello, voice, noise and filtered space,* one of the first records to address AIDS. Rough Trade’s release schedule featured one-off records by East Coast bands the Feelies and They Might Be Giants; Travis also signed Boston’s Galaxie 500 to an album deal along with San Francisco’s Opal and the band who subsequently emerged from their demise, Mazzy Star.

  ‘Geoff was the driving force,’ says Hurley, who oversaw the bands’ domestic careers in the US. ‘Galaxie, Mazzy Star, along with Camper Van Beethoven and Lucinda Williams, were all signed in the USA. And we kept trying to grow the distribution in the States. I was in touch with Ivo and we licensed the first two Pixies records, the first Breeders record and the Wolfgang Press album for Rough Trade USA.’