2007: What the fuck happened?

2007 will be just another year to these trance DJ's who parade around with their rockstar shades and record crates full of boring Miami South Beach trash. For me, however, a person firmly planted in the love and lust of acid house, 2007 is a time to remember the groovy majesty that was Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. For it was those two, under their guises The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, The Timelords, The KLF, whatever, that brought acid house and sampling to grand heights and fiery crashes. If I am not mistaken, they were the first UK house act to have a Billboard Top 5 hit in the USA with "3 A.M. Eternal [Live At The S.S.L.]", and they were the last act to drop a dead sheep onto Brit Awards partygoers enjoying their cocktails, awards, drugs, etc.

The story is, well, storied, well travelled, etc. Drummond was a Scot who formed a Liverpool label called Zoo, putting out early singles by the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, The Teardrop Explodes and The Wild Swans. Cauty was in a going-nowhere mid-80's act called Brilliant, working with Killing Joke's Youth in the process. When Drummond decided to make a hip hop album in 1987, he and Cauty got together and the rest is history. The album was called 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On? and was 40 minutes of schizophrenic UK hip hop, acid house, bleeps, blips, and cuts. Only 25 minutes of the album was void of samples, and it was those other 15 minutes that prompted Abba to sue the band, thus halting all sales of the album. The duo was ordered to turn over the master tapes and destroy all the unsold copies, and they did so in a field in Sweden during a trip to meet Abba, which never happened anyway. 1987 is an album that is highly sought after these days, trading for upwards of $50-100 depending on the condition.

A few more guises afterwards [The Timelords, with their classic Dr. Who/Gary Glitter inspired dance track "Doctorin' The Tardis", The Jams] brought the duo into KLF phase, with classic singles ["Kylie Said To Jason", "What Time Is Love?"] and classic albums [Chill Out, The White Room]. From hip hop to ambient house to stadium house, the duo has done it all. The Orb's Alex Patterson and Jimmy Cauty worked on a project called Space, which was to have been the debut Orb album, and Chill Out is regarded by many as the best ambient album of all time, a 44 minute journey, in Drummond's mind, through the American Gulf Coast, from Texas to Louisiana. The White Room brought them into the mainstream and remains a classic from the early rave days.

One could go on forever with the stories about Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, and this blog tell the story with 3264398 entries. The reason 2007 is important in KLF Communications history is quite obvious. For starters, the entire KLF Communications catalogue will have been deleted for 15 years in 2007. After the dead sheep incident, they released a statement basically saying they were retiring from the music industry and deleting all the back catalogue. In the UK, where most of these releases came out, they are still out of print. Additionally, it's now been 20 long years since they lost a lawsuit and changed sampling and copyright laws forever. A classic album is long gone, relegated to bootlegs running for $30 and originals going for much, much more. I am fortunate to have a copy of it, albeit bootleg cd, and I am thankful every time I put it on. It's a mess...one glorious mess. God bless the Church of The KLF. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers...all aboard the train to Trancentral.