KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS!
March 8, 2013 12:45 AM   Subscribe

In 1987, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu hit the British music scene with a collage of unauthorised samples, beatboxing, and cryptic, political Scottish-accented raps titled "All You Need Is Love".

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, under the assumed names "Kingboy D" and "Rockman Rock", sequenced the single on an Apple II, and quickly followed the single with the sample-heavy debut hip-hop album "1987 (What The Fuck Is Going On?)".

In 1988, they renamed themselves "Time Boy" and "Lord Rock" to release "Doctorin' The Tardis" as The Timelords.

Mashing up the Doctor Who theme, Gary Glitter's "Rock And Roll (Part Two)", "Blockbuster!" by Sweet and "Let's Get Together Tonite" by Steve Walsh, The Timelords reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart. Drummond and Cauty followed Doctorin' with the 1989 book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), which was used by Edelweiss and Chumbawamba to great effect.

Drummond and Cauty first released as the KLF in 1988 with "Burn The Beat", marking a sharp left veer toward house music, followed by the anthems "What Time is Love?", "3 AM Eternal", "Last Train to Trancentral", and "It's Grim Up North". By 1991, the KLF was the biggest-selling singles act in the world. They worked on- but never released- an ambitious road movie titled The White Room, as well as two shorter films titled The Rites of Mu and The Stadium House Trilogy.

On 12 February 1992 at the British Phonographic Industry's annual BRIT Awards, the KLF performed "3AM Eternal" live together with the crust punk group Extreme Noise Terror in what was later described as a "violently antagonistic performance", machine-gunning blanks in front of bewildered music industry executives. As the performance concluded, the KLF's promoter announced "The KLF have now left the music business".

Following their bombastic exit, Drummond and Cauty formed the the K Foundation, which culminated a series of KLF-lucre-funded Situationalist stunts by going to the Scottish island of Jura and burning £1,000,000 in cash.

After exiting the music business and promising not to return, the KLF came out of retirement with the electronic protest song "Fuck The Millenium", featuring brass bands. Bill Drummond has since expressed concern about subpar funerals and a love for damsons, while Drummond and Cauty both have resolved to only answer 100 more questions.

Further Listening:

The KLF - Chill Out

The KLF - Space

The KLF - White Room soundtrack
posted by dunkadunc (74 comments total) 114 users marked this as a favorite
 
So in the summer of 1990 or so I discovered the Illuminantus! trilogy of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson and for about a year or so I entered deeply into that funhouse mirror world of not entirely serious conspiracy theories and secret history.

Then this came out.

Mind.

Blown.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:16 AM on March 8, 2013 [17 favorites]


Kick out the JAMs, motherfucker!
posted by Afroblanco at 1:19 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


They were one of the finest pop creations ever; subversive, funny and great tunes.

I miss them.
posted by gwildar at 1:29 AM on March 8, 2013


I love everything about The KLF.
Except their music.
Gods, do I hate that.
But everything else? Solid Gold.
posted by Mezentian at 1:39 AM on March 8, 2013 [8 favorites]


I love everything about The KLF.
Except their music.


Well, you'd better not stop them because they're coming through.
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:50 AM on March 8, 2013 [19 favorites]


Is it just my age, or do The KLF never sound dated? Other bands associate strongly with an era...
posted by Leon at 1:54 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


KLF seem extremely of the early 1990s what with the rave parties and choons.
Less dated than The Prodigy or Talk Talk. Or Black-Eyed Peas.
Probably because the KLF worked out the formula for hit songs.
posted by Mezentian at 1:56 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


I love damsons as well.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:59 AM on March 8, 2013


On Top of The Pops with about 30 people on stage (& Tammy Wynette on a screen)

I miss Top of The Pops (& the KLF)
posted by DanCall at 2:05 AM on March 8, 2013


Needs more Fnords.
posted by chavenet at 2:08 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


I love them, and choose to believe that every peculiar-to-unbelievable news story I see is a covert KLF operation.

Given dance music's ongoing, tedious fetish for note-perfect recreations of the 1990s house sound (and America's easily-satirised new love for all things 'EDM') I'm surprised no one has dusted off the crowd noise samples and launched a nice wee Stadium House revival.
posted by jack_mo at 2:23 AM on March 8, 2013


The 'What Time is Love?' Story is an interesting bit of KLF related history, post modernism.
By 1989 (see 1989 in music), the popularity of the "Pure Trance Original" of "What Time Is Love?" in European clubs had reportedly spawned eighteen unauthorised cover versions and sound-alikes.[2] In a novel move, some of these were collated by The Orb's Alex Paterson at The KLF's behest, and released as a compilation album entitled The "What Time Is Love?" Story, which was sold commercially for half the price of a conventional album.
Dr Felix / Liasons D
posted by asok at 2:25 AM on March 8, 2013


I love everything about The KLF.
Except their music.


Bill Drummond has that 1/365th covered as well: http://nomusicday.com/home.php.
posted by titus-g at 2:26 AM on March 8, 2013


Seeing the video for "Justified and Ancient" was one of the genuine WTF pop culture moments of my young life. As a dorky kid growing up in southwestern Ontario I really hadn't encountered much of...whatever that was...at that point in my life.

These days, though, I'm more partial to Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul.
posted by The Card Cheat at 2:44 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


along with edelweiss and chumbawamba, i, who am sometimes known as dj kazz, have also read "the manual: how to have a number one hit single, the easy way"

they are geniuses.
posted by messiahwannabe at 2:48 AM on March 8, 2013 [3 favorites]


Superb post. The White Room was one of the albums I grew up with as a teenager: bought for the kick-ass house singles (and man, that intro to 3AM Eternal still sounds as good as it always did), I ended up entranced by the more mellow tracks on the album's second half.
The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid is still one of the most awesomely uncompromising statements about art and life in recent times. I don't pretend to understand it, its compulsions and its repercussions, but damn, I still frequently think about it. I wonder about something Jim Reid says in the film about how journalists just couldn't touch the story after it happened. It's hard to process on any level.
posted by hydatius at 2:56 AM on March 8, 2013


How could you leave out the fact that Whitney Houston Joined the JAMS?
posted by the bricabrac man at 3:00 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Your posting this will be reported to the local LDD cabal.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:12 AM on March 8, 2013


Your posting this will be reported to the local LDD cabal.

No need, we got....they got it. Yes, they got it. Move along.


fnord.
dnodge.
chnevy.

posted by eriko at 3:16 AM on March 8, 2013 [7 favorites]


Kalliste, children!
posted by Samizdata at 3:19 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


They sound like moody Beastie Boys when they spit rhymes.
posted by Redfield at 3:46 AM on March 8, 2013


Thanks for this, filthylightthief! Brought back lots of memories. Despite/because of all their clowning, I thought they were musical geniuses, and their work could be very effective in the right circumstances. Away from the stadium trance, I was particularly partial to some of the prolific remixes and Pure Trance versions, for instance:

What Time is Love (Pure Trance)
What Time Is Love? (Moody Boys vs KLF Mix)
3 AM Eternal (Pure Trance 2)
3 AM Eternal Blue Danube Orbital Mix
Last Train To Trancecentral (Pure Trance)
So Hard (The KLF vs Pet Shop Boys)
Madraguda Eterna Club Mix
posted by carter at 3:52 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Dammit, I just rediscovered the KLF in my iTunes library the other day. Now I am on a KLF/Shamen/Prodigy binge, with added Xymox on top. I am feeling my age ...
posted by cstross at 3:53 AM on March 8, 2013 [6 favorites]


I always felt like Drummond had something to do with twentythree.co.uk. Anyone remember that?
posted by Jofus at 4:01 AM on March 8, 2013


I too worship the KLF - there is something so purely sublime about (e.g.) Tammy Wynette, standing in front of two 7-foot high horse-headed sitar-players, telling you that one is, as we all are, bound for Mu-Mu land. Also, the KLF are both justified and ancient, which is a combination that, I think, approaches the transcendental, in a way that only being justified, or simply being ancient, would, by themselves, not so do. "Justified and Ancient" is in fact that rare event - a work that could defend humankind before God; an explosion of absurdity that, paradoxically, provides the entire world with meaning. I would go so far as to suggest that the whole universe and every known and unknown particle thereof - that exist in quantities and with qualities beyond all human understanding - receive their justification and purpose from the fact that the KLF, otherwise known as the justified ancients of Mu Mu, otherwise known as the JAMs, like to "roam the land". On the other hand, I am a pretentious, brain-damaged idiot whose opinions are of no value.
posted by the quidnunc kid at 4:10 AM on March 8, 2013 [5 favorites]


Let's not forget that their exit from the music business was accompanied by the deletion of their entire back catalogue. In the days before the immortality of uploaded tracks that meant you were not going to get a chance to listen to them unless you heard (and perhap bootlegged) somebody else's copy. The re-appearance of official KLF material on sites like iTunes seems to be a recent (2013) thing.
posted by rongorongo at 4:10 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I love them, and choose to believe that every peculiar-to-unbelievable news story I see is a covert KLF operation.
You know they run Anonymous yeah?
posted by fullerine at 4:14 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Good timing for this post, I've been listening to Chill Out more than a little often during my early morning work hours. It's a weirdly brilliant little thing, for something that's supposed to be ambient music but has a lot more texture and musical depth to it than that connotes.
posted by ardgedee at 4:14 AM on March 8, 2013


Drummond's book 45 is especially good for people interested in his stunts - one piece describes a marathon driving session around the M25 in a van and another about trucking a cube of stacked beer pallets into Parliament square and it collapsing under its own weight and how they subsequently disposed of it.

Mine's a 99.
posted by Molesome at 4:26 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


My favourite KLF conspiracy theory has been on the blue previously, although the link is now dead. I think this just about covers it.
posted by doop at 4:26 AM on March 8, 2013


I don't mean to snark the cstross, but are you the one dude who liked dance-era Xymox?
posted by Mezentian at 4:39 AM on March 8, 2013


Bill Drummond is the greatest living artist this country has. Or at least my favourite.

He still talks a lot of sense too.
posted by anagrama at 4:40 AM on March 8, 2013


So, I see chavenet is pining for the Fnords.
posted by Mezentian at 4:40 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Chill Out is one of my favourite albums and is a work of genius. Graham Lee of the Triffids features as the pedal steel player and apparently all the Triffids, apart from David McComb, worked with Bill Drummond before this. Not a musical collaboration you would pick perhaps.

Awesome post. Thanks.
posted by deadwax at 5:40 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


I just wanted to add that Doctorin' The Tardis also samples The Sweet's Block Buster!.
posted by kimota at 5:51 AM on March 8, 2013


I read The Manual some years ago - the KLF's guide to making a number 1 single. It is, apparently, exactly what they did, culminating in Doctoring The Tardis getting to No.1, and they say if you follow it to the letter, you will see it too.

I was unemployed when I re-read it and was struck by their advice to go onto the dole or quit your job, as making a hit record is a full-time occupation. I was in the pub with my friend discussing whether it would be even more viable now that computer technology has advanced enough for bedroom recording artists to be able to recreate the Wall of Sound (albeit in Lego form) with a laptop.

Then I got a call offering me the job I'm in now. So we will never know.
posted by mippy at 6:25 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Icelandair has Chill Out in its on-flight entertainment system. This is one of the many, many reasons I love that weird little airline.

I rediscovered my copy of The White Room about 8 years ago, and it never really left my rotation again. For giggles I played Justified and Ancient at a New Year's Eve party population mostly with 20-somethings who'd never heard of the KLF, and like Leon says, it hasn't aged. That song STILL gets a party moving in 2013, the confused expressions on one or two faces ("Is that Tammy Wynette???") notwithstanding.
posted by 1adam12 at 6:30 AM on March 8, 2013


I love everything about The KLF.
Except their music.
Gods, do I hate that.
But everything else? Solid Gold.


I'm the same way. I prefer their videos muted. I saw the video for Justified & Ancient on RAGE one night and slowly got all the Illumiinatus! references. I still can't believe they got rich and famous geeking out over RAW and Doctor Who, than burned all the money.

There are about 3 pages in Illuminatus! that are nothing but band names. I keep them bookmarked. Nirvana is in there.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:32 AM on March 8, 2013


Back in the mid 90's the KLF definitely broke the brain of this poor boy from the hills of Tennessee. While off at college I downloaded and read The Manual (from a BBS even, I think), and then the next summer back home working as a photographer at a community event I saw 5-7 year old girls dancing in costume on a stage made from a old semi-trailer to Justified and Ancient.

I'm still not 100% sure I didn't die somehow that year and everything I've experienced since has been pieced together form random snippets of memories of the 80's and 90's. It would definitely explain the whole Lady Gaga thing.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 6:39 AM on March 8, 2013 [4 favorites]




They should have sued Christopher Nolan for ripping off their money burning (what a waste! At least donate it to charity) in Dark Knight. It would have been funny, at least. Though maybe that came from Grant Morrison, another RAW worshipper.

I'm too young and too square to ever understand the KLF, and I'm not sure I want to. When I was a kid I knew lots of self-proclaimed Discordians among the goths and geeks, but its mind blowing these guys made a career out of it. I feel it's somehow connected to remixing and sampling and the decay of coherent meaning. RAW sampled Joyce in Illuminatus, which always struck me as presumptuous...
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 6:47 AM on March 8, 2013


I just said "The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu" to my wife and she said "ugh, I hate that song".

I know what's going to be blaring through the house all this snow day!
posted by DU at 6:48 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


I'm too young and too square to ever understand the KLF

I was seven or eight when they were big, and I LOVED them. To me, they were just pop music. I thought 'they're justified and they're ancient and they drive an ice-cream van' was really funny. They were a massive-selling band, they were on the radio all the time, and there didn't really seem to be anything to 'understand' - perhaps because I was too young to question the weirdness in music, just like I used to read ee cummings all the time at that age and didn't think it was particularly weird to mush your words together or write in lower case.

Around that time there were a lot of bands/dance acts sampling old cartoon theme tunes and riffing on the Acid House scene - there was a band called Altern-8, which performed on TOTP in masks, making references to Vicks Vaporub which went completely over my head. Acid House and its various cousins hitting the mainstream was a weird thing when I look back, but it was all just part of the charts, and as I was too young to know why NKOTB were supposed to be any good it was all just fun.
posted by mippy at 6:57 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Chill Out is one of my favorite driving soundtracks. Many snowy scapes and further dark roads have been illuminated by that work.
posted by pashdown at 7:03 AM on March 8, 2013


I've been hearing good stuff about the ebook KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money by JMR Higgs. Been planning to read it... given this post I think I'll start tonight.

(obligatory link to an old essay I wrote for a mate's zeen)

Mu! Mu!
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 7:03 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Their "Justified and Ancient" video with Tammy Wynette was too full of awesome.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:33 AM on March 8, 2013


Chill Out is not merely "further listening", but one of the greatest albums ever made.

I can't overstate how important that album was in terms of helping me locate a place where the use of collage and found sound could be simultaneously experimental, self-mocking, and deeply, oceanically emotional. There are plenty of classic ambient records that precede it, but this one changed the game in a profound way for me. (Whether it was actually recorded in one continuous unedited take, I highly doubt, but it's a very fitting piece of Drummond/Cauty lore.)
posted by mykescipark at 7:43 AM on March 8, 2013 [5 favorites]


Awesome post! I think it is also worth mentioning that Bill Drummond co-founded Zoo Records in 1978, releasing early records by The Teardrop Explodes and Echo and the Bunnymen. He is featured in a couple Julian Cope songs, "Bill Drummond Said" and "Port of Saints". Drummond's response to the first of those Cope songs was "Julian Cope Is Dead". So, he was also one of the pioneers of diss songs and inter-artist beefs.
posted by snofoam at 7:45 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I am sitting here reading The Manual for what must be the first time in fifteen years and: holy hell, on page 22 there's a Rick Astley "Never Give You Up" reference.

I'm gonna go have a beer and sit in the sun, now. The real world is far too strange.
posted by 1f2frfbf at 8:18 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Tom Ewing wrote a series of articles for the blog One Week One Band on the KLF a couple years ago. A lot of the video links seem to be broken (which stopped me from making a post on it), but it's still a great read.
Twenty years ago, the KLF were the biggest selling singles act in Britain. Nineteen years ago, the KLF “left the music industry”: they deleted their entire back catalogue and stopped making records. And then vanished into legend? Well, nobody manages that these days. You’re a click away from a website on which you can stream everything they ever touched, another away from a video collection and archive of terrifying completeness. This most self-mythologising of pop groups has been dissected and catalogued online with loving rigour, almost from the moment they stopped. Can there possibly be any mystique left? And if so, does anybody still care? Should they?
posted by rollick at 8:42 AM on March 8, 2013


Only yesterday I asked one of the people in my team if they were sorted for Es and whizz. The blank look I got back confirmed that I am indeed very old.
posted by arcticseal at 9:14 AM on March 8, 2013 [5 favorites]


You're doing God's work, dunkadunc.
posted by Pronoiac at 9:42 AM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yikes! I should have said many thanks dunkadunc! Entirely not sure how I got that wrong :(
posted by carter at 11:40 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


If I had a million pounds which could only be used for a situationalist stunt, I'd chop almost all of it into halves and use the reminder to hire choppers to fly over the city of London at lunchtime, pouring the tantalisingly useless halved notes out into the streets.
posted by imperium at 11:42 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


also worth mentioning is The 17, Bill Drummond's latest musical project, which now exists as a book, thusly:
I can feel a book coming on. You know, like when you get the first inclinations you might need a shit. I had my suspicions that this book coming on might be happening because this morning before I set out on the long day’s drive zigzagging up the land, I went into a WH Smith’s to buy a couple of Black n’ Red lined A4 notebooks and a six-pack of pencils.

The book will be about a choir … A choir that has existed inside my head for almost a score of years. About how the voices of this choir torment and inflame my imagination. How they provide my internal soundscapes with some of the most beautiful and terrifying music I have ever heard. And how over these past few months I’ve been dragging this choir out of my head and into some sort of shared reality and, with the grace of God, I will continue this dragging out over the coming months and years.

This choir is called The17.

It will also be about standing at the end of an era, where all the recorded music that has ever meant anything to you or me or anybody else is speeding its way to irrelevance. The whole canon of recorded music that has been stockpiled over these past 110 years is going rotten, rapidly losing any meaning for anybody except historians and those who want to exploit our weakness for nostalgia.The very urge to make recorded music is a redundant and creative dead-end, not even an interesting option, fit only for the makers of advertising jingles, ring-tones and motion picture soundtracks. The sheer availability and ubiquity of recorded music will inspire forward-looking music-makers to explore different ways of creating music, away from something that can be captured on a CD, downloaded from the internet, consumed on an MP3 player; and the very making of recorded music will seem an entirely two-dimensional 20th-century aspiration to the creative music-makers of the next few decades. They will want to make music that celebrates time, place, occasion. There may be those that want to keep the craft of recorded music alive but we will think of them in the same way as we now think of those who work with bygone art forms, irrelevant in tomorrow’s world.
posted by spindle at 11:45 AM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I genuinely think that Bill Drummond is a genius. He's also one of the most important non-musicians* of the past 50 years of British music, having had his hand in so many different pies, from Liverpool's punk/post-punk scene onwards.

The KLF stuff still sounds fantastic. I was listening to The White Room a couple of weeks ago whilst in the car; the production is just pin-sharp, and – as mentioned above by a couple of folk – it seems to hardly have dated, despite coming out in the era of The Prodigy as cartoon ravers and everything being put together on Atari STs and Akai S1000s. And looking back from 20+ years hence, it's odd to be reminded just how huge they were at their peak. They were as pop as fuck, but they were also deeply, deeply weird; that The KLF became as massive as they were is no less strange than living in a world where The Residents are as popular as Madonna.

I'll also sling in a recommendation for The Man, his solo album from 1986, which he made aged 33 and 1/3. Given that he wrote a memoir called 45 when he was 45, I wonder what he'll do to mark turning 78**.


*in the Brian Eno sense, not in the "not actually a musician" sense
**terrifyingly, this is only 18 years away. Bill Drummond turns 60(!) next month.
posted by Len at 12:21 PM on March 8, 2013


The K, the L, the F.
posted by eric1halfb at 1:45 PM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


And the ology!
posted by dunkadunc at 1:49 PM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Fantastic post dunkadunc! 3 AM Eternal has been a favorite of mine since, well, forever. But at the time it came out I didn't consider it much more than a fun anthemic pop song. Years later I became more obsessed with "the ology" of the KLF. Nothing else like 'em.
posted by eric1halfb at 2:49 PM on March 8, 2013


Mezentian: But everything else? Solid Gold.

Is... is that a reference to Jimmy Cauty's side project, Solid Gold Chartbusters? If so, I applaud you.
posted by Pronoiac at 4:17 PM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I was seven or eight when they were big, and I LOVED them. To me, they were just pop music. I thought 'they're justified and they're ancient and they drive an ice-cream van' was really funny. They were a massive-selling band, they were on the radio all the time, and there didn't really seem to be anything to 'understand' - perhaps because I was too young to question the weirdness in music, just like I used to read ee cummings all the time at that age and didn't think it was particularly weird to mush your words together or write in lower case.

I don't think they ever charted in America? That adds to the esoteric weirdness/culture shock of it all. Like I understand them as an esoteric bedroom project but a world where you can sell millions singing about Atlantis and Doctor Who is like a strange, wonderful alternate universe.
posted by Charlemagne In Sweatpants at 4:32 PM on March 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm a fan of Bill Drummond. He's an interesting conceptual artist.

Paraphrase: "People say that we should've donated it all to charity, but if a rock-star buys seven swimming pools, then no-one blinks an eye."
posted by ovvl at 5:25 PM on March 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Charlemagne In Sweatpants: a world where you can sell millions singing about Atlantis and Doctor Who is like a strange, wonderful alternate universe.


Outside of everything else, you have to keep in mind that no matter its status in the US, Doctor Who in the UK is the main-est of the mainstream. To people in Britain, it's probably the single most identifiable British TV show of the past 50 years. I always used to get confused about how much US pop culture comedy traded on jokes about Gilligan's Island and whether one fancied Ginger or [the other one; can't remember her name], because I'd never seen it (still haven't; it's never been shown in Britain in my lifetime) and had no idea how big a thing it was on US telly. And Gilligan's Island is nowhere near as significant to US television as Doctor Who is to British TV.
posted by Len at 5:50 PM on March 8, 2013 [4 favorites]


this

that is all
posted by Merzbau at 8:09 PM on March 8, 2013


There's someone on the planet who hasn't seen Gilligan's Island?
How is that possible?
posted by Mezentian at 9:20 PM on March 8, 2013


There's someone on the planet who hasn't seen Gilligan's Island?

Oh, those poor people.
posted by maudlin at 10:00 PM on March 8, 2013


Pure Fucking Genius.
posted by bongo_x at 1:04 AM on March 9, 2013


Were also involved with Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction.
posted by bongo_x at 1:05 AM on March 9, 2013


I am way, way too drunk to find it now, and this is of interest to conservatives or Australians (or both), but recently a Major Media Outlet decided to photoshop (next PM) Tony "Mr Rabbit" Abbott into Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction for a story.
Our election still isn't for months (September 14) but I am pretty sure it is the most surreal moment of the (not) campaign so far. Despite the fact Prime Mover is an awesome song.

For non Australians: our PM has spent the week in Rooty Hill.
posted by Mezentian at 11:52 AM on March 9, 2013


Zodiac Mindwarp had the best named drummer in rock history... probably the best named anything in all history... Boom Boom Kaboomski
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:49 AM on March 10, 2013


I don't think they ever charted in America?

Billboard Hot 100 positions:

"3A.M. Eternal" hit #5.
"Justified and Ancient" made it to #11.
"What Time is Love?" peaked at #57.
posted by mykescipark at 10:28 AM on March 10, 2013


Charlemagne In Sweatpants: a world where you can sell millions singing about Atlantis and Doctor Who is like a strange, wonderful alternate universe.

Outside of everything else, you have to keep in mind that no matter its status in the US, Doctor Who in the UK is the main-est of the mainstream.


And in Australia as well - Charlemagne in Sweatpants might live there but he has the classic immigrant issue of not recognising cultural touchstones (sorry, Charlemagne, no offence). 'Doctorin' the Tardis' was huge, as we had all grown up with Doctor Who, and KLF were equally huge just by virtue of being awesome.

Great post - thanks. I love love love the KLF, they were the first obviously subversive musical act I was aware of. Fucking genius - although I so wish they hadn't burnt that money. I appreciate the sentiment and the artistic point, but it was a really, really stupid thing to do.
posted by goo at 6:18 PM on March 10, 2013


RIP Ricardo Da Force
posted by stx23 at 12:08 PM on March 11, 2013


I just found this post and want to add two of my favorite KLF bits for posterity:

Kylie Said to Jason

Their second single after the Timelords, intended to raise money for an album. It's a blissful bit of Pet Shop Boys-aping pop that may have been a wee bit generic for the charts' tastes. BUT IT'S SO GOOD.

Disaster Fund Collection

This is the best album-only song from the JAMs albums. This caught my ear the first time I listened to it and it's just such an earworm. Sounds a bit like Chumbawamba.
posted by LSK at 7:24 AM on March 27, 2013


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