How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (45 page)

‘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 single, 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 work 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.’

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.