The KLF: "America: What Time Is Love?"

5 February 1992

"Get stuffed, Grandad — The KLF, The Voice Of God!"

— 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.

R.E.M.: "Shiny Happy People"

15 May 1991

"Summer's here and everything's groovy."

— Mark Frith

It is a song that everyone allegedly hates. Michael Stipe supposedly can't stand it and neither can his bandmates, to the extent that they chose to leave it off of their In Time greatest hits album. Hardcore R.E.M. enthusiasts deplore it. Many of those who were involved in indie rock at the time didn't care for it. Critics who aren't Mark Frith say it's a blot on an otherwise classic album and, indeed, a rare botch in one of the more sturdy and admirable discographies in all of popular music.

I always feel that R.E.M. ended the eighties in a bit of a slump. After putting out four straight top quality albums, they began to slip, first with 1987's Document and then with Green, released the following year. The two are sometimes lumped together due to both having socially conscious material but their faults are in opposition to one another. Document has three brilliant singles — "The One I Love", "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)" and "Finest Worksong" — but many of its deep cuts let it down; Green, in contrast, has some wonderful album tracks but its singles — "Stand", "Orange Crush", "Pop Song '89" — are uncharacteristically weak. Nevertheless, their trajectory was still looking up as their records were selling better. After a decade on the fringes, word of mouth had finally begun to spread.

1991's Out of Time sees them begin to reclaim their lofty status as one of the finest groups in the world. Melancholy but catchy first single "Losing My Religion" was everywhere for a while; in terms of airplay it certainly seemed like a number one smash. A Top 10 hit in several countries, it got no higher than number nineteen in Britain. This may seem like a modest peak for such a popular song but there's a little more to it. The single remained in the Top 20's penultimate spot for three weeks and then took its sweet old time to tumble out of the charts. Meanwhile, Out of Time proved to be the chief beneficiary: it entered the album charts at number one and remained in the Top 10 for twenty-one straight weeks. Not bad for a group who had previously been bit players in the UK.

Out of Time should have produced hit single after hit single but in effect it resulted in only two hits anyone remembers. ("Near Wild Heaven" and "Radio Song" both made only brief appearances on the charts but, significantly, their third substantial hit of '91 was a reissue of "The One I Love", a single that ranks right up there with "Losing My Religion") Instead, there was just one more record to consolidate their position and it just so happened to be the most commercial tune they would ever craft.

Frith loves "Shiny Happy People" (I'm going to assume that he didn't grow sick of it within a couple weeks of this issue of Smash Hits hitting the shops and that it remains a firm favourite to this day), I quite like it but, as I say above, it has many detractors, including R.E.M.'s own lead singer. Over the years, however, Michael Stipe has softened his stance on it.. He has stated that it's one of R.E.M.'s "fruitloop songs" along with "Stand", "Pop Song '89" and "Get Up". What makes it superior to any of those efforts is that it isn't so damn repetitive and that it makes no bones about it being a piece of pure pop. There's no indie rock bullshit here.

This is where the naysayers miss the point. As an alternative rock group, R.E.M. weren't supposed to have a pop song in them. Those fellow "fruitloop" tracks off of Green benefited from having more musical muscle behind them (at least in the case of "Get Up") and "Pop Song '89" had that naughty video with topless girls but there was no hiding what was behind "Shiny Happy People". I didn't care much about college rock and it didn't irritate me. I even liked it a bit. Not as good as "Losing My Religion" but plenty good enough to have on and not switch off. Pop you don't especially need but pop you're rather glad to have.

But just who are these Shiny Happy People anyway? I remember hearing that it was meant to be a touching tribute to mentally challenged people who we may pity but who often go about their lives seemingly happier to be alive than the rest of us. Stipe has said that it was originally a propaganda slogan used to calm the masses down in post-Tiananmen Square China, a claim that I don't recall being made at the time. To Frith, however, they're simply "those types you'll see wandering around the streets this summer being friendly, giving big hugs left, right and centre and being generally amiable". This is the most probable interpretation. The lyrics are straightforward and minimal. If Stipe is feeling down then it's best he see some smiling faces to cheer him up — though it doesn't always work that way.

Released in May of 1991, it came out a little too early to really qualify as a summer hit. No doubt Britain was experiencing yet another scorching spring that got headmasters to decree the dispensing of blazers and jumpers from school uniforms and those maddening hose-pipe bans but I was back in western Canada which was entering a pattern of cool summers with afternoon showers at ten in the morning. A lot of the those nineties' summers were miserable so we needed shiny happy pop more than ever to help get us through them. Is it any wonder I was dying for some old school jangle pop, especially since I was fourteen and in serious need of curing some of my angst.

In the end even if you don't care for it, "Shiny Happy People" has its place. Hardcore fans of their's from the eighties hated it, likely viewing it as proof that popularity and being signed to a major record label had sucked the life out of them. And the band may well have agreed. Notably, R.E.M. didn't tour their first blockbuster album, promotion of follow-up singles was minimal and they promptly went back to various favourite studios around the US to record 1992's Automatic for the People. Not only had they returned with one of their finest albums but the material was much more serious. (The only two numbers that dealt in lighter matters — singles "Man on the Moon" and "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight" — did so with absurdity rather than cheeriness). Rather than doing a sprightly line dance, their videos were edgy and filmed in black and white. The album was even tipped to be a return to more plugged-in rock in the vein of Document, though this is something they would eventually decide to put off until 1994's Monster. They had indie cred to be worried about, even as they were set to once again become the greatest group in the world.

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

Massive Attack: "Safe from Harm"

Like Out of Time, Massive Attack's Blue Lines was a popular and influential album that failed to launch a half dozen or so memorable singles. There's a reason "Unfinished Sympathy" is the only song anyone remembers off of it. As Frith states, there's really no need for "Safe from Harm" to have been released in 45" form (unless it encouraged a few more people to go out and purchase a copy of the album, that is). In fact, it could have enjoyed the reputation as an outstanding deep cut — not unlike "Country Feedback" and "Texarkana" on Out of Time — but I guess being a quite-like-the-last-one-only-not-as-good hasn't really harmed its reputation. Massive Attack have had some glorious moments but they've also been ordinary and even awful at times. I'll go right out and admit it: "Safe from Harm" is no "Shiny Happy People".