— Sylvia Patterson
When your pop group philosophy is based on (a) getting maximum value out of minimal talent and (b) constantly retooling of the same half-dozen songs, you're probably not going to have a lengthy run in the charts. While this would no doubt disappoint many, those who lean towards "bird-watching and the countryside" might have found an upside in it.
On the surface, The KLF seemed like ideal pop stars. While their music was rooted in the clubs and the raves of the era, their innate pop sensibilities lent themselves to a world of Smash Hits and Top of the Pops. They even created this fictional universe of themselves being the Justified Ancients of a country called Mu Mu whose capital city was this place called Transcentral. It was like Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars only they didn't have to create a concept album around it: they were the concept. Though they were both in their mid-thirties at the time, they seemed to immature with age, fawning upon the Pet Shop Boys, writing songs that name checked Kylie and Jason and getting into a minor pop star squabble with EMF, accusing the Forest of Dean indie rap rockers of stealing the 'F' in their name.
Relying on samples so heavily that they barely had to play any instruments, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty showed how punk values could be transferred over into the nineties — but then again, so did plenty of others. It was irrelevant that DJ's couldn't play the guitar or keyboards: they had their turntables to "play". But what set The KLF apart was the fact that they had no more training on a deck than on "proper" instruments. This meant that their love of pure pop as well as a myriad of other genres could augment their sound more easily. It also ensured that they never got clever with their mixing. Updates of older JAMMs tracks managed to be improved upon whereas other house music boffins tended to get it right on their first try. Remixing may have been the bread and butter of DJ's yet few of them ever managed to get it right.
"America: What Time Is Love?" was yet another re-working of a chill out track that had evolved into a stadium house number and had now become a rock anthem. North America had mostly ignored the UK Top 5 hit "What Time Is Love?" when it first emerged in late 1990 and the title suggests that they were intent on belatedly breaking it into the US market. The video (a considerable departure from the group's previous promos) even hints at them leaving Britain in order to conquer America. Perhaps coincidentally, this was also the time in which "cracking" the States had become an increasingly daunting task for bands from the UK.
It was only after "Justified and Ancient" came close to giving them a third UK number one that "America: What Time Is Love?" came out in Britain. Americans had been immune but Drummond and Cauty's countrymen once again fell at their feet, with this new version actually outperforming the original's chart peak of number five. This is partly due to the mini-imperial period they had been enjoying but one should never underestimate the power of the US to get the British all giddy. They may have altered the song in order to sway the Americans but this only managed to reaffirm just how beloved they were in their homeland.
And, yet, it was all coming to a close. "America: What Time Is Love?" proved to be their swansong. Sampling Motörhead's iconic "Ace of Spades" and having former Deep Purple/Black Sabbath vocalist Glenn Hughes screaming all over it put them in harder, thrashier territory (additions which happen to give it the edge over the more standard house version from a year and a half earlier), something that they clearly used to the extreme when they performed an almost unrecognizable rendition of "3 a.m. Eternal" at that year's BRIT awards alongside Ipswich hardcore metal band Extreme Noise Terror just a week after this issue of ver Hits hit the shops. They closed out the show by announcing their retirement from showbusiness. Not long after this fiasco, they had their entire back catalog deleted.
There we have The KLF. They would have preferred to have gone bird-watching but their reluctance to embrace the spotlight only made them more intriguing. When they did try to pursue publicity it was in aid of firing machine guns loaded with blanks at those same BRIT awards or infamously setting a million pounds on fire. They crafted brilliant pop records with unusual methods and then fled while still on top. They boasted of the fact that they could have hits with cover versions of their own work. They don't make bands like this anymore. Hell, they didn't make 'em like this back then either.
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Massive Attack: The Hymn of the Big Wheel (aka the imaginatively titled Massive Attack E.P.)
Last week I argued that Primal Scream's Dixie-Narco E.P. was a more than adequate replacement for the group's not-especially-thrilling album Screamadelica. Massive Attack also released a big LP in '91 and they too decided to start the new year off with an extended play — but in this instance it is a poor facsimile of debut Blue Lines. The KLF were good at remixing and retooling older numbers like "What Time Is Love?" but this is something most who worked within house music struggled to match. The Paul Oakenfold remix of "Be Thankful" is rather good but the other two tracks from Blue Lines are pointless. New offering "Home of the Whale" is as dreadful as Sylvia Patterson reckons, so it's obviously not just remixes that they could get wrong. Not a great sampler for what made Massive Attack special but a useful reminder that they were a lot more hit-and-miss than many would care to admit.
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