ONE LOVE NATION (April 1988) A surprisingly half-hearted attempt at transforming “The Candystore”, an album track from Who Killed the JAMs, into a commercial top-40 track, this particular single is a curiosity that serves as one final flop single before the big-time beckons with their next commercial release. It confounds mostly with its existence; why is it here? Is it really a second kick at the can to launch Cressida and June as pop stars? Is it an attempt to get a second single release from an album whose credited artist name they had already retired? Whatever the reasons, it was largely bound for failure; for a band who, in just a few months, will be bragging about a Midas touch as pop aesthetes, this is a track that was never going to be burning up the charts. There was only one release, the 12” D2002, with the three tracks discussed below. A footnote is that the Hot Tracks series of exclusive DJ mixes (like DMC except that I’ve never heard of it) had an exclusive remix of “One Love Nation” on one of their releases. The remixer was someone who worked for the Hot Tracks series, so it’s not an in-house remix. Whether it was sanctioned or not isn’t clear, but in either case it represents the first KLF-related release on another record label. It isn’t radically different to the full length version, though. One Love Nation (radio edit): The raw material of “The Candystore” is by and large preserved here: out are Bill’s meaningless shouted comments and many of the traffic sounds, still in are June and Cressida’s original “come into my house” chorus and the entire musical backdrop. In addition, June and Cressida do the unison-shouting on two new verses and a new refrain that follow the ‘partying as a means to global peace’ conceit that the advent of ecstasy briefly popularised. Also, they say “jack your body” about 1500 times. A Bugs Bunny sample provides some humour, but I personally confess that due to June and Cressida’s banalities and - more importantly - the morse code synth line that goes throughout the song, I find this tough to listen to all the way through without getting a headache. I prefer “The Candyman”. One Love Nation (full length): So as the name suggests, this is not a remix but the “standard version”. Whatever. A few extra samples show up here and there (“can you dig it?”), but it’s not really different to the radio edit. It’s more than two minutes longer than what would have been the seven-inch version if a seven-inch had come out. Just long enough to size the required aspirin up from standard to extra-strength. One Love Nation (Club Mix): So… take a mostly-instrumental song, transform it by add lyrics to it, and then make a mostly-instrumental remix of that one… and what do you get? Well, you’re not quite back to square one, because what survived this time of June and Cressida’s lyrics is not the “come on into our house” line but their tongue-twisting refrain. Other than that, all the shouting is gone, be it from Bill or from the girls. The morse-code is, unfortunately, still present, but by and large this stripped-down version is less busy and allows a bit more aural space for the groove to breathe. It’s probably the most enjoyable of the three tracks here and is a surprising omission from the instrumental Shag Times disc.
So next step is "the big time", their first number one single. Before we get there, I'm going to do something I should have been doing all along, which is to give these songs grades. I'll catch up right here and then, from now on, I'll include the rankings as I talk about them. Feel free to rank as well. ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE (March 1987) “All You Need is Love (original)” ★★★½ “All You Need is Love (106 bpm)” ★★★½ “Ivum Naya (ibo version)” ★★½ “Rap, Rhyme and Scratch Yourself” ★ “All You Need is Love (Me Ru Con mix)” ★★★★ 1987 (WHAT THE **** IS GOING ON?) (June 1987) “Hey Hey We are Not the Monkees” ★★★ “Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want)” ★★ “Rockman Rock (parts 2 and 3)” ★★½ “Me Ru Con” ★★★★ “The Queen and I” ★★★½ “All You Need is Love” ★★★½ “Next” ★★★★ 1987: THE JAMS 45 EDITS (October 1987) "1987: The Jams 45 Edits" ★ WHITNEY JOINS THE JAMS (September 1987) “Whitney Joins the JAMs” ★★ I GOTTA CD (October 1987) “I Gotta CD” ★★★½ “I Love Disco 2000” ★★★★ “I Gotta CD (7” edit)" ★★★½ DOWN TOWN (November 1987) “Down Town” ★★★★½ “Down Town [no bill vox]” ★★★ “Down Town (edit)” ★★★★½ WHO KILLED THE JAMS? (February 1988) “The Candystore” ★★★★ “The Candyman” ★★★½ “Disaster Fund Collection” ★★★½ “King Boy’s Dream” ★½ “The Porpoise Song” ★★★★★ “Prestwich Prophet’s Grin” ★★★★ “Burn the Bastards” ★★½ BURN THE BASTARDS / BURN THE BEAT (March 1988) “Burn the Bastards (lp mix)” ★★½ "Burn the Beat (Mu Mu Mix)" ★★★½ "Prestwich Prophet’s Grin (instrumental version)" ★★★★ "The Porpoise Song (instrumental version)" ★★★★ "Burn the Beat (Club Mix)" ★★★ ONE LOVE NATION (April 1988) "One Love Nation (radio edit)" ★★ "One Love Nation (full length)" ★★ "One Love Nation (Club Mix)" ★★½
DOCTORIN’ THE TARDIS (May 1988) The week of June 12, 1988 was nothing particularly special on the UK singles charts. Truth be told, it was pretty dire. Rather amazingly, fully three different Beatles covers, in addition to a Cat Stevens cover, could be found inside the top ten, alongside such nobodies as Sabrina and Desireless, flashes in the pan now lost to history (actually, the former is known to the Internet today for the comically tawdry video accompanying the song, wherein she attempts in vain to keep her bikini top on throughout the song). Topping it all off was a throwaway novelty described as “probably the most nauseating record in the world”, a cheap-and-dirty amalgam of 1970s glam rock and 1960s sci-fi television, a vulgar chant concocted under a pseudonym by two misfits who had also traded under the names “the JAMS” and “the KLF” but for this release christened themselves “the Timelords”. Tongues were so firmly in cheek on this one they could have caused a canker sore. The “nauseating record” quote is their own, written right on the label of their first number-one single, which they claim to have known would have been a number one hit as soon as they finished recording it. The name change, the new names they gave themselves (Lord Rock, Time Boy), the deliberately low-quality music video… the song came wrapped up in an entire package and more situationist pretense than anything they’d come out with since their debut single. They certainly appear to have known what they were doing. For perhaps the only time in their entire career. Bill and Jimmy have offered two different, equally plausible, explanations for how the song came to be. The first is that Jimmy’s trusty American police car suddenly became sentient and instructed them to make the record. The second is that they had intended to do a house version of the Doctor Who theme song but found the theme’s 6/8 time signature incompatible with house’s four-on-the-floor rhythm, thinking instead of Gary Glitter’s signature triple-time rhythm with which he scored a series of hit singles in the 1970s. Either way, the two components fit together like hand and glove, and the commercial potential for the catchy result was self-evident. The title is a take-off of the seminal Coldcut classic “Doctorin’ the House”, released just that February, whose title is, of course, a take-off of the modern cliche “Is there a doctor in the house?” As the KLF’s commercial breakthrough, “Doctorin’ the Tardis” is a discographical nightmare. Discogs.com lists fully fifty-four different releases for this single across fourteen different countries. It might be fascinating to look at the nooks and crannies of that wealth of product, but I’m going to focus on the three chief UK releases, one seven-inch single and two different twelve-inches. The seven-inch, KLF 003, contained the (Radio) and (Minimal) versions of the song, and a novelty car-shaped 10” picture disc (KLF 003P) did as well. The main 12”, KLF 003T, added to those same two versions a third, the (Club Mix). And finally, a second 12”, KLF 003R, slapped Gary Glitter’s image on the cover and featured “Gary in the Tardis” on the a-side in both a (Radio) and a (Minimal) version (both distinct entities from the tracks on KLF 003T) and, on the b-side, a further remix titled with self-referential humour “Gary Glitter Joins the J.A.M.S.” “Doctorin’ the Tardis (Radio)” (★★★★½): I hate novelty music. Jokes can’t sustain the kind of repeated play that characterises the songs we love best. After just a few listens, the best “Weird Al” songs will find their jokes running dry and turning from clever to annoying. So why do I love “Doctorin’ the Tardis” so? It does have a special place in my heart as that particular stop where I myself hopped on the KLF train, but beyond that I find its absurdity easy to appreciate, and furthermore it is an extremely well-crafted song, grafting two completely different types of song together so expertly that it’s tough to extricate them in the mind (there is a third, “Block Buster” by the Sweet, whose octave-leaping “ah-aaahs” show up at opportune moments). The source songs are also brilliant, catchy and evocative, and they carry their strengths to this new proto-mashup. It caught a moment, and can instantly bring you back to 1988, though it doesn’t feel as stuck in that era as a lot of other songs in that year’s charts do. It’s all down to Gary Glitter, really, and that monster groove he and his co-writer Mike Leander came up with in 1972. In its original form, it’s a thing of wonder, at once familiar and alien, no “song” at all by traditional definitions but still a great groove all along. It’s timeless - or, of course, would have been if it weren’t for Glitter’s crimes. Those events have sullied “Rock and Roll” and, by extension “Doctorin’ the Tardis” to an arguably unfair degree, but in our blissful ignorance in 1988, it rocked. It took three weeks for this very British creation to hit the top of the British charts. It also went top-10 in five other countries according to Wikipedia, while managing only a 66 in the United States, where the future industrial-music imprint TVT Records, at the time still transitioning out of its childhood as a label that chiefly released compilations of television theme songs, took a chance on Bill and Jimmy. I have no records of its chart performance in my native Canada, but I can anecdotally recall that it was on the 13-year-old tongues of me and all of my friends, at least. The craziness that was the KLF machine at full force was a wonder to behold. They performed this on Top of the Pops, and the silly, chaotic results make for great television. If considering the KLF story from the perspective not of their musical evolution but of the drama of their lived experience, then “Doctorin’ the Tardis” is, after “All You Need is Love”, the second essential moment in their career. But I would sooner listen to this than to that. The money came raining in, and of course they blew it all chasing white rabbits of creativity. They wrote a book with a “money-back guarantee” of a number-one single if you follow the rules dictated inside (one group, Edelweiss, is known to have done this and was rewarded with a continental number-one for their effort). The book is a decent read, by the way. “Doctorin’ the Tardis (Minimal)” (★★★★★): In some ways the most interesting and novel piece the duo had put out until this point, the so-called “Minimal” mix of “Doctorin’ the Tardis” is superficially an instrumental b-side version, but it’s a track of no genre that befuddles as much as it intrigues. Some people label it “ambient house”, but it’s not quite that (and not only because it’s still 6/8), but it is a rather radical deconstruction of the song, stripping it primarily down to a kick drum, the bassline, the atmospheric background wails of the Doctor Who theme, and a waves of whooshing and burbling synths. The mood it establishes is quite a bit more pensive than the cheap thrills of the a-side, at least until the “Doctor Who” chorus breaks through all the same. In comparison to the house piano lines that had dominated their instrumental work to this point, it’s a curiosity to see a step forward in maturity on an intentionally cheesy novelty single. But there you have it. What is the KLF if not curiosity? “Doctorin’ the Tardis (Club Mix)” (★★★½): The single came out on both seven and twelve-inch, and twelve-inch singles demand twelve-inch remixes. Is “Doctorin’ the Tardis” a dance song? Not really; it has none of the supple subtlety that characterises the most danceable songs. It’s good, really, for little more than an oafish stomp, a particularly masculine kind of clodhopping best seen at football terraces instead of nightclub dancefloors (the Gary Glitter source was, of course, a mainstay at North American stadiums for many years). Not to say there aren’t plenty of people who appreciate a good oafish stomp every now and then, but is eight minutes any better suited to that purpose than four minutes? Because this twelve-inch mix doubles the song’s length without adding any new elements, merely shuffling through the seven-inch version’s component parts twice as many times. For that, it’s perfectly fine. But you could also just play the seven-inch twice and get more or less the same effect. “Gary in the Tardis (Radio)” (★½): Paul Gadd was a washed-up 70s relic by 1988. Tough to say he had “descended into self-parody” when it’s Gary Freakin’ Glitter we’re talking about, but the most recent singles he had released were, ahem, “Rock and Roll Part 3”/”Rock and Roll Part 4”, and “Rock and Roll Part 5”/”Rock and Roll Part 6”. He was four years removed from his last pop chart entry and ten years removed from his last number one. It’s easy to imagine how Bill and Jimmy might have decided to add an extra layer of cheese to their concoction by inviting the actual performer of the song they had built their hit around to appear on it, on a second 12” single rush-released and in shops the day after their song hit number one, for maximum exploitation. Like Bill and Jimmy themselves, Gary Glitter completely blurred the line between sincerity and ridicule. Unlike Bill and Jimmy, he seems to be completely oblivious to the joke. It was perhaps this glaring lack of self-awareness - doubled with a ghastly sexual perversion - that led him down the road to life imprisonment. I can’t hide my absolute revulsion at Gary Glitter, so it’s tough for me to talk about him and his presence on this song. He adds very little, but what he does add is rather gross. Primarily he screams the titles of old hits of his in an exaggeratedly slimy manner, cackles like a witch, and sings “I’m the Leader of the Gang” over the chorus, even though that’s the title of a different hit of his to the one whose melody he’s using. I get why Bill and Jimmy did it. It does make total sense. It’s silly to speak about “cheapening” a song that was designed to be as cheap as possible. But it’s the one Bill and Jimmy larf I find hardest to join in. “Gary in the Tardis (Minimal)” (★★★★): In its own way perhaps just as extreme as the other “Minimal” mix, this sadly forgotten track is a very interesting and rather prophetic piece of music that would have gone down just fine at those ‘chill-out room’ events that Cauty and Alex Paterson were starting to experiment with at around this time. The track is - in its entirety - a 6/8 hi-hat line with an envelope filter, under which are a variety of burbling-synth “sci-fi” effects (some carried over from “Doctorin’ the Tardis (Minimal)”, many not). And nothing else, beyond one or two stray pads from the original recording. It’s - blessedly - nothing to do with Gary Glitter at all and barely anything to do with Doctor Who either. Given the “sci-fi” aspect of so much of Cauty and Paterson’s future work together (under the name “The Orb” and otherwise), one wonders if Paterson was involved in this track, or indeed whether Paterson was even in the picture at this point (I can’t figure out a reliable chronology here). “Gary Glitter Joins the J.A.M.S.” (★): Okay, so they weren’t “the JAMS” anymore, but this title was too good an in-joke pun for them to overlook. This is, for all intents and purposes, the “Club Mix” of “Gary in the Tardis”, more playing time meaning more opportunity for Glitter to cling onto the vestiges of his 70s glory. It starts interestingly enough, with some eerie wails from Glitter himself and a unique spoken introduction from Drummond, who considers Glitter’s presence a coup that even outshines James Brown. After that, though, it’s just more Gary, processed and looped and cut up. And haven’t we all had enough by now?
I am. Next one's a big one and it's been 40 degrees here in Toronto, so it's been a challenge. Next one is a really big one too ("What Time is Love"). In the meantime... discuss?
Michigan is more than happy to give you this unusual 90 degree heatwave we've been experiencing Jerry
I've just now started to gather up all of my KLF related stuff and started listening. Haven't heard most of this in years. Played it all to death back in the day. I'm enjoying all that you're writing even if I don't agree 100% all the time with it. When I'm into a group I love it all and they can do no wrong.... pretty much. Anyway I've got most everything on CD and or digital files. I dragged a bunch of the digital files into a player and I see that it adds up to 16 hours 37 minutes, and that's not everything.
Oh, and I want to say how impressive it is, all you are finding to say about this stuff. Do you write for a living?
That's very kind of you. I don't write for a living (I'm a teacher), but I'd like to. I'm actually doing this partly as a way of kicking my own butt and actually get writing stuff. And yeah, every nook and cranny of the KLF world is impossibly huge, which is why I've decided to limit it strictly to KLF Communications releases, even though that cuts out some of my very favourite tracks ("Feel This", "Go to Sleep"). It's also tough to know what's legit and what's some kid somewhere futzing about on Ableton to create a "new lost KLF track".
Just discovered. Great thread. 1987 (What The **** Is Going On) was played over the in-house sound system at Virgin, Dublin in June 1987. I think it was the week after release - because I had just finished my Inter Cert the previous Friday. Anyway, I was inspired to buy it there and then. It disappeared fairly soon afterwards.
I bought 1987 back in the day, sold it for an ok price later on, can't remember if I taped it or not. Probably did. Anyway, probably easier to find it on YouTube than my tape box
I don't want to jump to far ahead, this mix of Build A Fire has had me baffled for quite some time. Jerry is this a fan mix?
I figure it's got to be. It's beats on top of the White Room recording, which, in the background, is completely unchanged. So it's not sourced from stems, which a band would usually provide to a remixer (of course, the KLF remix of "It Must be Obvious" isn't sourced from stems, but it hardly counts as a remix). AFAIK the only legit "Build a Fire"s are: the original OST version, the Lenny Dee remix, and the final album version. Nice, though.
Thanks for the breakdown. A few years ago I spent an un-Godly amount of time on Discogs looking for it
WHAT TIME IS LOVE? (PURE TRANCE) (October 1988) Scant months after climbing to the toppermost of the poppermost, the KLF do about as extreme an about-face as imaginable, releasing the defiantly anti-commercial acid house/”trance” anthem “What Time is Love?” Has any other artist released in immediate succession two singles as radically divergent as “Doctorin’ the Tardis” and this one? Where “Doctorin’ the Tardis” sealed their place in the pop history textbooks, it was this song that secured their legacy and gave them the direction they would follow until the end of their brief career together. And in so doing, precipitated one of the hallmarks of the KLF’s career: recycling and repurposing material to the point of absurdity. “What Time is Love?” does not mark the first time this Ouroboros got sustenance from eating its own tail, but it is the first of a trilogy of three songs that redefined the extent to which remixing could go. To the despair of the neophyte, “What Time is Love?” was released a total of four times, each time radically different to the other. And each time accompanied by a barrage of remixes. We’ve got our work cut out for us. If reading the name of this song brings back memories of a soulful female voice wailing “Gonna make you sweat” while a rapper spits out barely comprehensible verses… wait. We’ll be looking at each of the four major release waves separately (actually, as the fourth release was on Blast First, it won’t get an entry devoted to it). The hit version is from the “Stadium House” series. Here, we’re looking at the “Pure Trance” version of the song, which is purely instrumental. And which was not a hit, except in dance clubs throughout the European continent, where it served to birth an entire genre. Before the Stadium House version was released and broke the gates wide open, “What Time is Love?” did appear on a few indie labels in a few other countries. Not many offered anything new beyond a “Power Remix” that appeared on an Austrian label in 1990 and was mixed by some guy with a German name in Munich. We’ll be looking at two different domestic 12” singles here, the seminal “Pure Trance” single (KLF 004T) with two different unnamed seven minute mixes on each side (which I’ll be calling “Pure Trance” and “Mix 2”), and the 12” “remix single” KLF 004R, which put a “Primal Remix” and a “Techno Slam Mix” on the a-side and repeated the “Pure Trance” version on the b-side. In fact, KLF 004R came out fully nine months after KLF 004T, which really qualifies it as a fifth release of the song, but its cover art is modelled on the first release and it’s not a radical re-imagining, so I’m combining them here, even though much had changed in KLFland by July 1989. “What Time is Love (Pure Trance)” (★★★★★): In his 1994 book Revolution in the Head, the late Ian MacDonald goes into a fabulously insightful discussion of every song the Beatles had ever recorded, writing with an obvious love of music. And then, in one of the worst cases of get-off-my-lawn-ism out there, ends it with an out-of-place screed about how horrible the music of today is, its lack of “harmonic mobility” and its repetition symptomatic of a lack of ingenuity on the part of modern musicians and the damned machines they are seemingly slaves to. He claims then-modern music had reduced the “transcendence” of his beloved 60s music into a “crudely erotic sound accessory”. Every generation decries what came later, but I feel nothing but pity for someone who has never experienced the communal elation, togetherness, and indeed transcendence of dancing to a song like “What Time is Love” in an environment like a dance club or an outdoor rave. The lack of chords and the repetition are not the products of a paucity of imagination but are the very point of a track like this, transcendent and trance-inducing in the way (monochordal) mantras have been since the dawn of time. The word ‘trance’ is, at its heart, a spiritualistic word, a word used to describe states of consciousness not attainable through mundane means. The breakthrough I think this song (and perhaps others of its era) achieve is this: in discarding the rises and falls, the tensions and releases, that signified most dance music, house music included, “What Time is Love?” creates a state of constant motion, a paradoxical feel of time moving quickly and standing still at the same time. And does so with an economy of musical elements that would give a 60s devotee heart palpitations. After all, Bill Drummond describes “What Time is Love?” as the KLF’s “three-note warhorse of a signature tune”, and it’s completely accurate: the entirety of the melody is a four-bar sequence made out of only three notes. No chords, no harmonies, no chorus or refrain or middle eight… a two-note countermelody shows up, but that’s all you get. And yet across seven minutes, the song isn’t for a second boring, entirely due to Jimmy’s (because I presume it’s Jimmy in the driver’s seat here) expert use of the filters, modulators, envelopes and other settings on his Oberheim synth and his SSL mixing board. Waves of different loops rise and fall, moving into sync and out, subtly altering the shape of the overall groove and giving the track’s innate simplicity a complexity and depth that brings up new unheard elements after dozens of listens (I’m also convinced that a psychoacoustic phenomenon occurs due to the overlay of the different elements in this song that causes the brain to hear even more elements inside their own head). It’s an incredible accomplishment, and it’s a brave gambit, throwing this song out there with no sense of where it might land. It’s still classifiable as “acid house”, and while it makes an obvious precedent for the future genre known as “trance”, it doesn’t quite fit that bill. The song might well have bombed and been forgotten. As it was, it turned into one of the most seminal releases of the KLF’s career, their signature song. And for a pair of Discordian clowns, there is no clowning around at all in it. “What Time is Love (Mix 2)” (★★★★½): The b-side of the single is a different version that, while very clearly not the same, is not especially different either. It’s more or less the same components of this modular track, assembled in a different order. It feels like an alternate take, or another seven-minutes taken from a much longer recording. It is probably designed to allow a DJ with two copies of the single to keep the groove going on for as long as required. Alternately, it was designed to fulfil the desperate need for a b-side (almost no KLF singles feature different songs on the b-side) and they hadn’t yet stumbled across this song’s massive potential for radical remixing. I’m tempted to say that, given that they contain more or less the same elements just mixed together differently, that there is no reason outside of familiarity to say that the a-side is in any quantifiable way “better” than the b-side. But I can’t avoid the feeling that the elements do gel together better on the main version, and that this mix by comparison is just a tad more disjointed, a tad less accomplished. It also has a slight demo feel to it, though that might just be in my imagination. The chief feature on the b-side not found on the a-side is some rapid fingerwork with the faders at certain points, cutting the elements in and out more quickly. “What Time is Love (Primal Remix)” (★★★½): With a handful of then-current house tropes laid over top of the original version, the Primal Remix is clearly designed to appeal to DJs a bit nervous about the original version’s out-there nature. The end result, then, is something more “conventional”, fun and enjoyable in its own way but more conservative, less fulfilling and ultimately significantly more dated. There are plenty of rises and falls, and more prominent drum lines, giving the remix the appearance of actual song construction. A bevy of sampled hollers and chants keeps the track thoroughly grounded in 1989, although a rather masterfully-utilised sample of the “My God, it’s full of stars” like from 2001: A Space Odyssey does give it a bit of a timeless feel. The second 12” single is much less radical and, therefore, essential than the first 12”, however it is indicative of a critical breakthrough in the KLF’s story: the realisation that “What Time is Love”, while at the same time great by itself, can also serve as a bed onto which any number of radically different musical phrases could be put, moving the piece in absolutely any direction possible. Jimmy and Bill - and a cast of dozens across the continent - would spend a few years working with the implications of that. “What Time is Love (Techno Slam Mix)” (★★★★): Not at all related to the remarkably similarly-named Techno Gate Remix, which came later, this is clearly a step further from the Primal mould. Many of the samples and musical elements from that other mix are still here, but it’s taken a step further, especially in the percussive drum pattern, which seemingly belongs to no genre. It’s the more interesting of the two remixes here, with two DJ-friendly breakdowns in the second half of the mix. Like the Primal mix, this is a surprisingly short track, and with the entire b-side of the 12” given over to the original version, it’s not immediately obvious to me what Jimmy and Bill were hoping to accomplish with this second 12”. Subsequently, 12” singles featuring additional remixes would inevitably be more enlightening, containing within their mostly-forgotten grooves some of the KLF’s most interesting music. Here, though, it’s a bit underwhelming. Though not by any means ‘bad’.
wow this is a great thread! I had no idea they put out so much early stuff; always wondered how they made the sonic jump from the primitive "doctorin' the tardis" to the much more polished "white room" and "chill out" this explains it all thanks for posting all of this
Nope. That's coming soon, with its bevy of remixes... There's an album and two singles left to go before that.
Great thread, huge fan since I first started buying their records in 1988. The WTIL Pure Trance B side is criminally underrated/unknown, far more trippy than the A side. I have about 20 KLF Communications on vinyl, a few more on cassette and CD, as well as the original 'The Manual' book, bought new in Chichester WHSmiths. I will be following along closely! Also, for anyone who is more interested in the history, back story, and philosophy of The KLF, (covering such things as psychedelics, Robert Anton Wilson, Discordianism, and Chaos Magic), I can highly recommend John Higgs' book, 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic & the Band who Burned a Million Pounds': https://www.amazon.co.uk/KLF-Chaos-Burned-Million-Pounds/dp/1780226551 I interviewed John a couple of years ago, when I was researching a book on Brian Barritt, and can highly recommend his other books too, for people interested in the counter culture etc. Looking forward to getting to the ENT version of 3AM Eternal! And finally, Jimmy did this amazing poster in the 70's which graced many a student apartment in the 80's and 90's:
Excellent! Glad to have you along for the ride. I'd really love your input on the philosophical side of the story, since while I know that all that Discordian stuff is an important piece of the puzzle, I have never really been able to appreciate it, so I've tended to leave it out of my analysis. I've never read the Higgs book - though, by odd coincidence, I've listened to an interview with him about it.
No worries. For the Discordian type stuff, a good place to start is Robert Anton Wilson's 'Illuminatus!' trilogy, or his 'Cosmic Trigger' book (former fiction, latter more like a weird autobiography). He could explain it all so much better than me! Daisy Eris Campbell brought a stage production of 'Cosmic Trigger' out recently, and I was lucky enough to work on some of the audio (editing Alan Moore's voice). She was also involved in various ways with the recent JAMM's book launch weekend in Liverpool, so it all kinda ties up (there are lots of crazy synchronicities in RAW/KLF land!): The return of the KLF: pop's greatest provocateurs take on a post-truth world Tattoos, gravediggers and traffic cones: the KLF take Liverpool KLF Welcome to the Dark Ages review – what time is chaos? https://www.amazon.co.uk/2023-trilogy-Justified-Ancients-Mu/dp/0571338089
