“If a magazine wanted me to pose naked with just my socks on, I might not be completely comfortable with the idea, but I’d do it if the deal was right. £100,000?”
- Bill Drummond to Melody Maker, April 1987
“And a week later, after my piece, I think the NME did a tiny little piece about it but no one else took any notice. I honestly think that if I had not done that we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
- James Brown to the author, 2016
Just when is a mid-life crisis supposed to occur? Has anyone written a PHD thesis on the subject or a clickbait article for Daily Mail Online? The common perception is that that most men hit the crisis button in their late forties and early fifties, when sexual prowess begins to decline, the hairline recedes and drinking and eating catch up with the liver, kidneys and stomach. We could be here all day on this particular subject - my own mid-life crisis just saw me cycling more and more, which shows how boring I am, although I do now have chunky thighs that would put a free-range chicken to shame. But, thighs aside, the strangest thing about all of this is the maths. If you have a mid-life crisis when you’re, say, forty four or fifty five, then that suggests you’re going to live until eighty eight or peg out a decade or so after receiving a telegram from the current monarch. In fact, the life expectancy of a man in the UK is seventy nine.
Bill Drummond, being Bill Drummond, chose the exact date of his midlife crisis. He scheduled it in his diary for the day he turned thirty-three and a third years old, on the 11th September 1986. We’ve seen that, by this point in his life, Drummond had enjoyed something of a roller coaster career in the music business. He’d cut his teeth musically in Big In Japan, then founded Zoo Records, where he nurtured The Teardrop Explodes and Echo And The Bunnymen to critical and commercial success and world tours. But, as we’ve also seen, his most recent professional low was not being able to turn Brilliant into a hit machine, despite throwing in excess of £300,000 into the oven and baking a cake that refused to rise.
Although he was apparently disgusted with the music business and wanted to have nothing more to do with it, Drummond was so embedded in the mechanics of the industry that he trumpeted his departure through the medium of a press release on Korova headed notepaper, dated 31st July 1986. Here we go:
I will be 33 1/3rd years old in September, a time for a revolution in my life. There is a mountain to climb the hard way, and I want to see the world from the top. These foothills have been green and pleasant but I want to smell the rock, touch the ice and have the wind tear the shirt from my back.
I entered this party on May 5th 1977, forming a band that had no right to be, and I leave by leaving two gifts, the first, Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction, the only band that can save us from the future. The second is yet to come, and in between was the greatest album ever made.
In the last nine years, I gave everything I could, and at times some drops too much; and to those who wanted more, I’m sorry it wasn’t for the giving.
The reconnaissance party arrive to pick me up on September 11th, on which date my office will be empty. Gold discs will gather dust and telephones will be left to ring.
Comrades and rivals, thanks.
Bill Drummond
Drummond was not giving notice of an assault on Ben Nevis or Mount Everest but a determination to swim to the other side of the lake and carry on in the music business as an artist, rather than a label boss, producer, cajoler-in-chief, manager and A&R man. He later wrote that he’d intended to hire a sledgehammer and destroy the piano in his office on his last day, but didn’t get around to it. In fact, he left on good terms. “People were very upset, Rob (Dickens) the most,” recalls John Hollingsworth, “Bill was unique. Most people in the building thought he was a bit of an oddball, and that’s fine because you want an oddball because most people there were kind of straight, it was old school record industry. But the people who knew and valued his work, people like myself and those in creative areas of the department, really missed him.”
Working at Warner Brothers had allowed Drummond to meet fellow Scot Alan McGee, who’d begun working closely with Rob Dickens funding his Elevation label, which saw him yoking bands like Primal Scream and the Weather Prophets to a major label’s extensive promotional and distributional organisation. In an interview with Richard King in 2012 for his excellent How Soon Is Now? Drummond stated that, “One of the major differences between us was Alan would think everything he was working on was brilliant – ‘This is the future of rock ’n’ roll’ - whereas I spent all my time thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is just the worst record ever made. How can we put this out? I’m letting the band down so much…’”
Ironically, then, it was McGee’s enthusiasm and gung-ho approach to A&R that allowed Bill to make a record of his own. According to his biography, Creation Stories, signing Drummond for a solo LP was an intriguing and no-risk option to McGee, who later wrote “when he quit, still in his early thirties, he decided to record his own solo album and asked me if I would put it out on Creation. He was disgusted with the industry. He wanted to say goodbye to it with an album he’d write in five days and record in five days, and thought I’d be the only one mad enough to put it out. Even so, I think he was surprised when I agreed without having listened to a note. I just thought that the guy was probably a genius and he was offering to cover the cost of recording himself.”
So Drummond signed to Creation records to record a solo LP. “Originally I thought the record was going to be a thrash record with really loud and noisy guitars, then I started writing the songs and it came out like this,” he told the Melody Maker in November 1986 whilst doing promotion for The Man. According to John Hollingsworth, the LP was supposed to be called The Manager, “Apparently on the release schedule they couldn’t fit on The Manager, so they just typed it as Bill Drummond The Man, and he went, ‘That’s a much better title.’ Typical Creation-like bumbling.”
As for The Man being recorded in a week, that was true. “Just to see if it could be done,” stated Drummond, “Also, because I’d spent so much time telling other people to re-record and re-mix, going behind their backs sometimes to add things onto their tracks so’d they’d be played on Radio One.” The Man was recorded at The Village in Dagenham, with a range of musicians that included Nick Coler. Drummond had first met Coler whilst wearing his A&R hat at Warner Brothers and overseeing album sessions for a soft rock group called Ya Ya - although Coler was not a full member of the band, he played keyboards with them live and was asked to play on recording sessions Drummond had scheduled in Los Angeles with Mike Chapman, who, as a writer and producer, had a long string of hits to his name, from Suzi Quatro to Blondie.
Ya Ya flew out to America and, as he’d toured there before, Coler was more than happy to man the wheel. “We got a massive Lincoln Town car and I was driving down to LA, down the freeway, and every time we got to a set of lights there was this massive ‘Boof’ noise. I saw a Nissan 280X (behind me) and saw this guy (at the wheel). What was he doing? Every time we stopped at a traffic light he was ramming me! When we got to the other end I said, ‘Are you having a bit of trouble with it?’ He said ‘I’ve never driven an automatic before,’ and at that time – I’m sure he’s a lot better now – he was a dreadful driver. It was Bill running into the back of me all the way.”
Although the sessions for the Ya Ya album were aborted due to a problem with the lead singer, Drummond obviously liked what he heard Coler play and asked him to work on his solo LP. “He did it with his brother in law, who was a guitar player,” Coler recalls, “We came in and a guy who was in Ya Ya played drums and bass on some of the tracks. The Voice Of The Beehive also sang backups, and The Triffids were also on it. I played all the organ parts and stuff - in fact there is one of my favourite organ solos on that LP. We would just go in and do it, as it was all done quickly in a few days.”
There was not much chance of The Man getting played on the Radio One breakfast show. It wasn’t a bad record, it was just not that sort of record. Instead, it blended instrumentals and folk with echoes of ‘60s pop, over which Drummond sang in a thick Scottish accent that made Rod Stewart, Jim Kerr and Edwin Collins sound like public schoolboys. He even brought his father, the Reverend Jack Drummond, in to narrate on one track, Such A Parcel Of Rogues In A Nation, a folk song based on a poem by Robert Burns. “The King Of Joy was the last track I did for The Man,” Drummond later told journalist Roy Wilkinson when discussing the LP, “The night before the last day that we were supposed to be recording I got these two tunes – The King Of Joy and I Want That Girl. The King Of Joy was celebrating having finished the record – it’s just how I felt that morning. One doesn’t feel like that all the time. Just enough of the time.”
The LP received some excellent, as well as baffled, reviews - “ripe with Celtic sentimentality and telling personal revelations, this is surely one of the oddest records of the year,” as one stated. For many, one of the most intriguing songs on the LP was Julian Cope Is Dead. This was Drummond’s recorded retort to the song Bill Drummond Said, which appeared on Julian Cope’s second official solo LP, Fried, in 1984. Whether Drummond ever did say, as Cope sang, “If I sit and pray my Christmas tree will die” is something only he and The Drude will know, but the song fell into the memorable Cope category, with the lyric “Bill Drummond Said” serving as part of the chorus. On Julian Cope Is Dead, Drummond put into folk song a fantasy master plan about killing Cope by shooting him in the head, thus making him immortal, increasing sales and turning gold selling records into platinum.
In addition to the LP, Creation issued The King Of Joy as a 12” single. As well as an instrumental version of the title track, the B-side was a spoken word piece called The Manager. This was the soundtrack to a ten minute video funded by Creation records to the tune of £1,000 and directed by Bill Butt, wherein Drummond pushed along a rubbish cart containing an electric guitar and a broom, ruminated upon the music business and offered to become The Manager for every band, record label, music newspaper and TV programme in the UK. He had some conditions, including musicians not being allowed to spend more than ten days recording an LP - “and no remixes” – and there also had to be one standard contract for all musicians and record companies, and no more advances. Drummond offered anyone his sage advice in return for £100, which he would send by letter, “once the cheque has cleared.” The video ended with the address of a PO box in Aylesbury, where Drummond lived. It’s believed that this short promotional film was not shown at the time, although Drummond later told a journalist that he did receive two cheques, “before the record had even been released,” although he would not say who they were from or what advice – if any – he passed on.
As well as speaking to the music press, promotion for The Man also took another form. According to Nick Coler, there was a Bill Drummond solo gig at the Knitting Factory in New York sometime in 1986 or 1987. By this time The Proclaimers had signed to Zoo Publishing, and it appears Drummond may gone to New York on Proclaimers-related business. Coler also had to visit the Big Apple as he was working with a singer based there. “Bill was like, ‘I’ve got this gig.’ So we rehearsed in a hotel room with all of this shit (musical equipment) that we got from somewhere and then just went on stage. He just went ‘Shut up!’ to all of these super trendy people.” At that point, the band began to play. As for the reception, Coler states today that, “They loved it. They didn’t have any choice, otherwise they would have been beaten up. The place was full. You know what he’s like - he can take command when he wants to.”
Although Drummond had started writing a book before recording The Man, he took command of his life on New Year’s Day 1987, when he began brainstorming a rap whilst out walking and he decided there and then that he wanted to make a hip-hop record. Clearly, making a hip-hop record would be nothing like recording an LP like The Man - it needed to be fabricated rather than played, and Drummond needed somebody who not only had a sampler but also knew how to use it. Fortunately, all of that money invested in Brilliant hadn’t been wasted – Drummond knew that Jimmy Cauty owned a sampler and, as they got on personally, decided to call him and ask him to collaborate on the proposed track.
Drummond later related that the phone call took place on Cauty’s 30th birthday, and he didn’t take kindly to a “happy birthday” wish at a time when his own musical and artistic career was at something of an impasse. Cauty was also setting up a studio in the basement of his shared squat BENIO, and although he had some instruments and the Greengate sampler acquired during his time with Brilliant, some of the funding for the additional gear was to come from an unusual source - Lambeth Council. Many years later, Cauty shed some light on this when talking to Bo Franklin about this period of his life. “They basically made all the squatters join housing co-ops,” he recalled, “otherwise you’d get kicked out. So we joined North Lambeth housing co-op.” This meant Cauty could apply to the Council for funds to improve his house. “The council actually gave me about £3,000 to put into my private account to do the house up, which seems bizarre. Especially as we were a band and needed to buy equipment… I put a studio in the basement. I don’t know how I got away with it. The poor neighbors. I mean now I really feel sorry for them, but at the time it didn’t bother me.” This studio later became known as Trancentral.
Drummond and Cauty first got together to record one track. Drummond knew what he wanted to do and it was just a case of he and Cauty getting on with it. The fact that it was a hip-hop track and new territory for both of them was not an issue - both were musicians with a lot of experience under their belt, and when it came to sampling some of the music to build up the track Cauty had the means. The Greengate sampler, better known as the DS:3, had been developed in 1984 by a team of UK computer programmers and made commercially available for £350, although it only ran on an early Apple computer, which also had to be purchased in order to use it.
“The DS:3 is, in effect, an instant four channel digital tape recorder with the added capability for unlimited sequence creation and storage,” ran the first press release for the product, “The unit will accept ANY audio signal, real sound or otherwise, up to 15kHz and will store this sound first in the computer memory for instant replay, or it can archive the sound to computer floppy disc for future recall.” It was this facility to ‘sample’ brief chunks of other songs and mix them with other music that allowed Drummond and Cauty to craft a track that was groundbreaking not because of how it sounded, but what it sounded like.
With the track recorded and mixed, a small batch of one-sided 12”s were pressed, and in March 1987 Drummond started sending out packages containing letters like these:
DEAR MIKE,
THIS IS OUR FIRST 45. WE ONLY HAD THE MONEY TO PRESS UP 500 WHITE LABEL COPIES BUT AS SOON AS WE GET OUR HANDS ON MORE CASH WE WILL HAVE IT OUT PROPER AND FINISH OUR LP.
YOURS,
KING BOY D
DEAR JOHN,
THIS IS OUR FIRST 45. WHEN WE GET SOME MORE CASH WE WILL RECORD A B-SIDE AND GET IT OUT WITH A PROPER SLEEVE & LABEL.
HOPE IT ISN’T TOO OFFENSIVE TO PLAY.
WE CALL OUR MUSIC “HIGH COURT” CAUSE THAT’S WHERE WE’RE GOING
YOURS, KING BOY D
Mike was Mike Reid, a DJ at Radio One, and John was John Peel, who was, well, John Peel! As well as radio DJs, the record was also mailed out to journalists at all of the major UK music papers, where one of them found its way to James Brown, at this time an up and coming freelance writer at Sounds. “I was on a little bit of a roll in discovering new acts that were actually getting into the charts or getting deals,” he recalls. One morning he was on his way to the office and “there was a huge forty eight sheet billboard opposite Capital FM, a huge photo of James Anderton the cop. It was for (the) Today (newspaper) and the advert said, ‘People With ideas Above Their Station’. It was when he was pretending to be in touch with God. So they were quite striking looking, newsy sort of ads. They were statement ads. Anyway on this one had been pasted – which is quite common now, people paste up their graffiti – it was bubble writing that said, ‘Shag Shag Shag.’ I just noticed it and wondered what it was.”
Once he got to the Sounds office there was a pile of 7” and 12” brown and white mailers for him, records he’d been sent to either listen to or review. One of them was from what he assumed was a new band, who called themselves The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu. It was a white label 12” with a pasted on logo depicting a beat box on a pyramid as part of the band name, and beneath that a title, All You Need Is Love.
Brown: “There was a letter scrawled in massive handwriting, purporting to be from somebody called King Boy D. The address was in Glasgow or somewhere in Scotland. It said, ‘We like the Beastie Boys, we really like your writing, we hope you like our debut record.’ So they were passing themselves off as being young Scottish rappers. I took it home with the other records and played it. It was great! It was really good. It was really noisy, it had (the) “Kick Out The Jams Motherfuckers” (sample). It was full of samples, and then this sort of rapping over the top of it. One of the reasons I liked it was that I knew it would have a story behind it. Because I was freelance and inquisitive and wanted to find new things, I rang the number. I went ‘Hello, Is King Boy D there?’ and somebody, some English voice, went, ‘Oh hello, hang on.’ Then King Boy D came on the phone and we had a bit of a chat and I think I arranged to meet up for an interview or something.”
As luck would have it for King Boy D, Brown was reviewing the singles for Sounds that week and was in a position to make All You Need Is Love Single Of The Week. He didn’t just review the record, he raved about it: “The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs) have produced the first single to capture realistically the music and social climate of Britain in 1987.” He was quick to point out the list of bands sampled on the record – The Beatles, MC5, Hall & Oates, Samantha Fox and the Government Aids advert. “The Jams overlay sweetly sung rhymes, inject funk action drum beats, splice in dirty metal guitar riffs, heavy breathing and some Clydebank rap, and then scratch it all to a seething terror ridden pulp.”
At this time, for a debut single to get a positive review in any of the music press was important. To get Single Of The Week meant readers would take note and be curious enough to go out and buy the record. Distributors would also take note, contact the label and offer a deal to get the record into the shops all over the country for these very readers to buy. Even A&R men and women at record companies would take note and wonder if this was an act they could sign and develop into the next big thing. Back in 1979, this had happened with the Zoo label when reviewers had slavered over The Teardrop Explodes and Echo And The Bunnymen singles, leading, in turn, to both bands establishing internationally successful careers. It all started with a review.
Ironically, in the case of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, the fact that the record featured a number of purloined samples from other records meant that distributors like Pinnacle and The Cartel were, when they read about this, a little nervous about taking copies. The only shop that had no qualms was the independent Rough Trade in Talbot Road, Notting Hill, who took a hundred copies from Drummond and Cauty – or, to use the names under which they were now operating – from King Boy D and Rockman Rock. Faced with the dilemma of a record that had piqued interest and had a market but could not be distributed, Drummond and Cauty soon retooled the track so that Samantha Fox’s Touch Me, The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love and The MC5’s Kick Out The Jams were, “sufficiently trimmed from the new version to allow the single to slip through the lawyer’s fingers,” as the Melody Maker reported on 9th May.
There was also a bizarre report that Alan McGee had taken out an injunction against the original version, “claiming he had given Bill Drummond an advance to record a follow up to his The Man LP, not a Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu single.” As Drummond had financed the recording of The Man himself, this may have been just another spin of the publicity wheel to get more attention for the JAMs single when it was being reissued and made more widely available. In later years, Drummond stated that he actually spoke to McGee about releasing the debut single by The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu on Creation records.
Was the first JAMs single intended to be a Bill Drummond solo record? Or were The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu from the outset a two-man collaboration? It was, after all, Cauty who designed the arresting label artwork - actually cut out by hand and stuck onto one side of the first 500 white label copies - as well as the headed notepaper upon which Drummond wrote his letters to DJs and music journalists. Cauty was also behind the “Shag Shag Shag” artwork that was pasted on the Today newspaper billboard, although getting it in place was a two-man job.
Shortly after making All You Need Is Love, Cauty pondered moving to America. With the failure of Brilliant, and legal action against Warner Brothers souring matters further, he was at a loose end and possibly contemplating - along with his wife Cressida - a fresh start. James Brown, who recalls speaking to Cauty in recent years on his radio show, remembers, “I talked to him on or off the air about that period and he said it was over. ‘We made the single and thought, no-one is going to get into this’ and he said as far as he was concerned it was a dead project - it was finished – and he had moved to New York. He said Bill called him and said, ‘You have to come back, there’s this kid and he’s really championing us.’ That’s when Jimmy came back and we did the interview that went on the Sounds cover.”
As a freelance writer, Brown pushed his editor and was given a green light to write a feature on The JAMs, which duly appeared on 16th May 1987. Brown had gone the whole hog, speaking to the band on three occasions at their “south London studio,” which was basically Cauty’s squat, the Sounds conference room and, “on top of the twenty storey block of flats where they were painting the name of their LP, 1987 (What the F*** Is Going On), on the lift for use as record sleeve artwork.”
Although The JAMs didn’t know it, Brown had encountered some resistance because Drummond was a known quantity in the music business. Also, “Jimmy had been in that sort of glam pop band who made a record with Peter Waterman - Brilliant – but then again they were one of many record company bands who didn’t get anywhere. And Bill had been an A&R man and obviously knew more people in the music business than I did, but I was kind of fresh and up for it and didn’t give a fuck where they came from.” For Drummond, All You Need Is Love was his new beginning, and he gushed rather than spoke to Brown;
“I had this idea as I was walking around with this pretty crap hip hop tune, MC Story, in my head, and I just started rapping this thing that became All You Need Is Love. All the samples on the single came into my head on that first day. They don’t fit beat wise, but I knew I had to find out how to put it together. I had no idea how to go about it, but I was down in London at the beginning of the year and I met Rockman and we got talking and he was into it.”
As well as the genesis and recording of the single, the interview was wide ranging and covered the recording of their upcoming debut LP. Cauty was prescient in his sparse comments, “I used to play electric guitar, but now I’d rather sample someone else’s guitar and just play it on a keyboard. I get more out of it than playing a guitar. Because if you’re playing a guitar you’re always trying to be a good guitarist. You’ve got to practise playing it and I just can’t be bothered anymore. Sampling now is like the electric guitar thirty years ago.” Whilst Drummond made reference to Cauty’s possible flight to America - “Rockman is going to be sorting out our first gigs in New York next week” - Cauty was defiant about accusations of theft through sampling other people’s material: “It doesn’t bother us. Their records are still there. It’s not as if we’re taking anything away, just borrowing and making things bigger. If you’re creative you’re not going to stop working just because there is a law against what you’re doing.” Drummond was quick to back him up, “It’s like saying Andy Warhol just stole other people’s graphics, which he didn’t. He took other people’s images and re-cycled them and reused them. That doesn’t mean he’s robbed them and left them with nothing. We’re just doing musically what he did with Campbell’s soup cans and a picture of Marilyn Monroe.”
By the time the interview ran, All You Need Is Love was in the shops, and the Sounds feature was followed up by a short piece in the New Musical Express, which described The JAMS as a five-piece (Rockman Roc, KingBoy D, Nigerian born Chike and “Lovers rock duo Burning Illusion”). An unattributed quote, one assumes from the lips of Drummond, also bent history into new shapes, “No, we’ve not been in bands before, and, yes, I suppose we were originally influenced by The Beastie Boys to actually get up and do something. I mean, if you were fifteen and living in America you’d be getting up and doing something after hearing The Beastie Boys.”
Drummond even pretended to be a young, eighteen year old kid called King Boy D, “who says he’s never heard of Bill Drummond,” on the phone to another interviewer. Unfettered, Drummond then waxed lyrical, “Forget all these drongos discovering Led Zeppelin and the equally misguided Edwyn Collins and Buzzcocks clones. The JAMS are coming to town, stealing everything in sight and giving back more – this means real change.” It did, although Drummond soon dropped the pretense and had to step forward as King Boy D after a photo shoot for the Sounds cover.
John Higgs referred to All You Need Is Love as being “shit” in his 2013 book on The KLF, which suggests that, whilst he is widely read, his adventures in sound are less extensive. All You Need Is Love was, and remains, a wonderful musical sophon. It’s an incredibly detailed and imaginative price of music that, when unfolded, contains all of the elements that make up the rest of Cauty and Drummond’s musical adventures. There is the crude but imaginative purloining of sampled music, the deadly beats and smears of lyrics, the melodic hooks, ranging from an insistent synth line that sounds like a singing cat to sing-song female backing vocals from Cressida, and more sexual panting than a porn film. It also has, like many game changing records, an unmistakable energy and panache that is hard to contain, especially in Drummond’s vibrant rap about sex and AIDS. It has something magical about it, even if today it’s seen as something of a musical curio.
Crucially, Brown’s championing of the band, and the energy of the record itself, gave The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu a small shop window, and they were quick to produce more goods for sale. The most important thing, though, about All You Need Is Love is that Drummond and Cauty discovered that they could work together. There were common interests, and although Drummond played down his Bunnymen period interest in ley lines when talking to the Melody Maker in April 1987 – “I don’t know anything about ley lines, never read any books about them or anything… it started out as a myth, then everybody would ask me about it, then people like Killing Joke’s Jaz started going on about them…” – this may have been something he could discuss with Cauty, who’d been interested in them in the 1970s after reading the works of John Michell. The fact that Drummond had been the record company executive who’d signed Brilliant wasn’t an issue as Cauty had witnessed first-hand how hard Drummond had worked to try to break the band, even if that had involved musically frustrating time spent on the sidelines as Pete Waterman and his team crafted the records.
The crude sampling of other people’s material to create the debut JAMs release inspired them to begin work on songs for an album with the subtle title, 1987 What The Fuck Is Going On?, and to promote the LP Drummond and Cauty decided to create an enormous advert. So, on the night of 11th June 1987, whilst the nation was celebrating or bemoaning the re-election of Margaret Thatcher for a third term of office as Conservative Prime Minister, Drummond and Cauty climbed up onto the roof of the National Theatre on the South Bank of the river Thames and painted the album’s title onto this iconic concrete building. It was Big Hair all over again, but on a somewhat larger scale. “It took us two hours and we could be seen from the road,” Cauty later told Face journalist Ian McCann, “But we got away with it.”
The LP – released on the 12th of June – comprised of six tracks, kicking off with Hey Hey, We’re Not The Monkees, whose opening rhythm was comprised of ‘shag’ noises similar to those heard on All You Need Is Love, before Drummond began rapping in his distinctive Scottish burr. The track developed into a clever wrestle between Monkees samples and Drummond hilariously screaming about his dislike for the band, and eventually everything drops out, to be replaced by a female chorus singing what would become a familiar “Justified and Ancient” refrain. This was, in fact, the core of the song, rather than the Monkees concoction, and the first aural manifestation of what would become one of Drummond and Cauty’s most memorable musical calling cards.
Next, Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want) sampled the JB’s Same Beat. At this time, everybody was sampling the output of James Brown, from Public Enemy to Jazzy Jeff, and early in 1988 Housemartin Norman Cook, who would soon begin to craft his way towards a famous career as an international DJ and remixer, compiled a list of artists who’d done so, as well as the purloined sources, for the New Musical Express. “This list is by no means complete. By this time I was sick of listening to grunts, screams and that snare sound. You could write a weekly column of updates,” he joked, after listing twenty five tracks, which included Don’t Take Five… The track also featured a purloined sample of Paul Desmond’s famous alto saxophone line from The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s jazz standard Take Five, recorded in 1959, and was, all told, an excellent slice of funk, underpinned by a beatbox and a number of sampled effects.
The album’s third track, Rockman Rock Parts 2 and 3, meanwhile, was a fantasia of stolen riffs and samples, ranging from Led Zeppelin to Jimi Hendrix, and saw Drummond, like many rap MCs, take time to pay fulsome credit to the man behind the music - Rockman Rock. Again, female backing vocals played a strong part, and amongst many things included a reference to the famed Roland TR-808 drum machine, as well as stroking Cauty’s ego by informing us that Rockman ‘showed them the way’.
1987’s second side, however, kicked off a million miles away from Side One’s sample-fest, with a short, fetching ballad sung in Vietnamese by Duy Khiem and titled Me Ru. Khiem was actually a session musician, who Drummond had first encountered when working with the Bunnymen and later drafted in to add some parts to this new LP. As Drummond later wrote on the Edits sleeve, “We never planned to have this on the LP, he just sang it while the tapes were running when he was down in the studio doing the bits of tenor sax and clarinet that are on the other tracks. It blew our minds.” The piece was later issued on a 7” titled All You Need Is Love (Me Ru Con Mix), although it had nothing to do with All You Need Is Love and featured no samples whatsoever.
The track that followed Khiem’s was The Queen And I, which revolved around the sun of an ABBA sample. Next, Top Of The Pops, was composed of a number of sampled song introductions and chart rundowns from various editions of the popular BBC show of the same name, including the Beastie Boys. Next came a version of All You Need Is Love, upon which Drummond and Cauty cut their musical teeth, before Next provided another Drummond rap and sampled inspiration, ranging from Stevie Wonder’s Superstition to The Fall’s Totally Wired. Sampling The Lonely Goatherd from the Sound Of Music soundtrack and underpinning it with a beat was inspired, and the track again showed that Drummond and Cauty could create driving music, albeit of a rough and ready nature.
Unlike their debut 12”, 1987 not only had a sleeve but also labels which, in keeping with their position as musical outlaws, stated around the rim that, “All sounds on this recording have been captured by the KLF in the name of Mu. We hereby liberate these sounds from all copyright restrictions without prejudice.” Publishing and Copyright were not credited to Zoo but attributed to the Sound of Mu(sic), and review copies were quickly sent out to journalists and DJs, including John Peel:
There was rabid approval from James Brown, and Melody Maker also got onboard with an analysis headlined Licensed To Thrill, a pun on the Beastie Boys’ Licensed To Ill album from the previous year. “This is a roller coaster ride through rock history, the tapestry wrapping itself around your head as Samantha Fox strokes Totally Wired and Top Of The Pops gets a particularly glamorous skin disease… The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu have made a scabrous celebration of 1987’s dizzily wide eyed appeal, while still managing to kick the people that count in the kidneys with more grace than the rickety spliff Red Wedge could ever muster. Inspirational.”
Reviewer Paul Mathur was soon in front of Drummond and Cauty with a microphone for a Melody Maker feature article. “The thing about The JAMs that annoys a lot of journalists is that there’s no theories, no manifesto,” waxed Drummond, “Manifestos are usually for people to hide behind when they don’t know what to do. So many people come along to us and try to get us to be something that we’re not.” He also conveniently let it slip that they’d received a letter from an American warning them not to try to contact Robert Anton Wilson, who had co-penned the Illuminatus! trilogy of books which The JAMs had “sampled” their name from, as if they did they would end up in “deep shit.” Drummond loved it, “Deep Shit. That’s brilliant. It’s going to be the working title of our next album.” Another wide ranging interview included mention that the entire project was only supposed to generate one single before it evolved into an album. “It’s like when you have a crap and you squeeze it out and think I’m never going to need another one. Then half hour later you’re thinking maybe you will.”
Moving away from the bowels of The JAMs, Drummond was incisive when discussing the possibilities of the sampler for creating new and exciting music, “I haven’t a clue about technology, but Rockman has and, between us, we spend lots of time touching things and seeing if it hurts. Whereas we have people like the engineer who got all stroppy about us putting a Phil Collins bass drum on the record like it was sacred or something.” This Engineer was Ian Richardson, Nick Coler’s musical partner at the time. He was no fan of what Drummond and Cauty were doing in the studio and let them know about it. As for the interview, there was even talk of The JAMs playing live gigs, with Drummond musing about starting at Hammersmith Odeon, “but not telling anyone, so there’d be no one there but a few roadies and a pile of unsold T-shirts. We just want to see what it feels like.”
There never were any live performances in 1987, but there were Cauty designed t-shirts that were sold mail order, although the “JAMS axes, skateboards, pneumatic drills, cars and rocket launchers,” and even a helicopter, that were advertised in the 1987 insert never did roll off the assembly line. The mail order side of the equation would carry on, with Cressida taking charge, and many visitors to Cauty at BENIO would later recall records being put into mailers as three rings blazed on the hob in the kitchen to keep everybody warm. Even Rolo McGinty pitched in, “I enjoyed that. It was really interesting watching that work as I had record company management and all I’d done was make music and worry about that. I never had anything to do with the background stuff.” Of course, the background stuff was part of parcel of the JAMs/KLF operation and would carry on throughout their existence.
Drummond and Cauty were also interviewed by the Record Mirror, who had seen positive merit in the album - “at times their adventures are a little too freestyle, too busy, yet there’s never anything mundane here. An extraordinary heist indeed.” Once again Drummond rolled out the story of how he’d been inspired to record the original single, as well as giving his thoughts on the legal aspects. “We were aware of copyright, but it was only once we’d done All You Need Is Love, finished our album and been told that we couldn’t do this sort of thing that we came out with The KLF - the Kopyright Liberation Front. It’s like 1955, and you’ve got yourself an electric guitar, and then somebody from the Acoustic Guitar Society comes around and says, “I’m sorry you can’t do that, it’s against the law to use electricity in instruments”. And that’s what it feels like - we’ve got these samplers, how are we meant to use them?”
It was also here that Drummond tied up, for the first time, the link between the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu and the messages about the AIDS situation on All You Need Is Love. “In the book I was re-reading, it was saying there was this disease that was going to be manufactured and was going to get everybody. The swinging sixties was a front to get everybody into freer sex, and then they were going to throw in this disease.” That Drummond was re-reading the Illuminatus! trilogy – or trying to – was prescient, although it was Cauty who’d taken more inspiration from its pages, including the formation of his earlier band, The Tets. The trilogy had also informed his design of The JAMs’ pyramid blaster logo, and lyrical references to Mu were also purloined from its pages to serve as JAMs choruses. The book was a handy reference point to Drummond and Cauty for visual and lyrical ideas, rather than a deep well of philosophy that informed and guided their every action. It was ‘sampled’, just like music, for their needs. Indeed, they even spelt the name of The Justified Ancients of Mummu incorrectly. Illuminatus! was tangential rather than central to their story, and whilst they played around with the number twenty three they never contemplated, to my knowledge, issuing a record as The American Medical Society, a fictional band referenced in the books.
On 17th August 1987, either Bill Drummond alone or he and Cauty had a meeting with the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, probably in their offices in Streatham, at which they presented the MCPS with copies of the All You Need Is Love 12” and the 1987 LP. At that point, the MCPS referred the matters to their solicitors and wrote to Drummond and Cauty on the 28th August with some bad news. Not only had they not complied with Section 8 of the Copyright Act 1957, but, “even if you had abided by the above, the very nature of making a record of a work which comprises a part of a work takes this outside of Section 8 and would, therefore, require the prior permission of the copyright owners. Certain works which you have used have also been clearly arranged, which may not be done without the consent of the owners of these works.”
In effect, in lifting samples of other artists’ materials and working them into their own songs without prior permission, The JAMs had breached copyright. There was further grief in that, “One of our members, whose work is used substantially on the 1987 album, is not prepared to grant a license in respect of their work. We must therefore insist that in respect of this record you:
(i) cease all manufacture and distribution
(ii) take all possible steps to recover copies of the album, which are to be delivered to MCPS or destroyed under the supervision of MCPS
(iii) deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers and any other parts commensurate with the manufacture of the record.
The question of damages or the infringement will still need to be assessed, but these may be minimised by your co-operation in the above.”
The one member concerned was ABBA, whose hit Dancing Queen was the fundamental backbone of The JAMs’ track The Queen And I, which appeared on the second side of 1987. To say Drummond and Cauty had been creative with Dancing Queen was an understatement - alongside Drummond’s Clydebank Beastie Boy rap about meeting the Queen, the ABBA track was, at times, played unadorned, whilst at other times it sounded as if it was being sung by a very tuneful South London tomcat. The track was, and remains, unbelievable fun, and even features a snip of the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen. We assume they, along with other members, did not object at this juncture.
Being told to cease and desist production and destroy all copies of the album was, in some respects, Mu(sic) to the ears of Drummond and Cauty. Whilst the threat of possible legal action and having to pay unknown damages hung over their heads - and must have created some worry - it did give them a platform upon which to generate more publicity. What they chose to do was a case of wish fulfillment - on The Queen And I Drummond asked, “Have you ever met ABBA? I’d love to meet ABBA” and so a plan was made to go and meet the band in Sweden. “I want to see the band personally,” Drummond told the Melody Maker in early September, at a time when they were also getting ready to release their next 12”, Whitney Joins The JAMs.
Drummond and Cauty’s adventure in Sweden is one of the cornerstones of the JAMs/KLF mythology. Whilst it’s not without question that ABBA or their management objected to the sampling of their material, and that the MCPS were in a position to issue their cease and desist letter, lest we forget Drummond had worked in the music business since 1978 as a label boss, A&R man and producer, and still owned Zoo Publishing, so he knew exactly how the music business worked. He’d read Music Week and sat in numerous executive meetings - if he’d wanted to contact ABBA or their management he would have been able to find a phone number in quick order. This was, after all, a man who, a few years later, recalled being able to speak to Tammy Wynette around twenty minutes after he and Jimmy Cauty first thought it would be a great idea to work with her.
Of course, what Drummond also knew was that a few letters back and forth between himself and ABBA’s management, and maybe more meetings with the MCPS to agree a royalty percentage to be paid to ABBA, was not going to generate any media traction to add to The JAMs’ reputation as South London sampling pirates. So he came to the decision - along with Cauty - that it would be more fun and, importantly, more newsworthy to go to Sweden to try to confront ABBA. The duo’s main champion in the music press, James Brown, was now on the staff of the New Musical Express and didn’t take much convincing. He cleared it with his editor and, along with photographer Lawrence Watson, jumped into Cauty’s battered old American police car and rode shotgun to Sweden.
The subsequent feature appeared in the New Musical Express in October 1987. Written in the best Hunter Thompson style, it told the tale of a breathtaking journey that saw the car run down and kill a moose before Drummond and Cauty indulged in a ceremonial burning of copies of the 1987 LP that was only halted by an irate farmer, who blasted at them with a shotgun for trespassing and burning the records on his land without permission. In Stockholm, unable to find ABBA or anyone connected with the band at 3am in the morning, they gave a gold record to a local prostitute, carrying the dedication “Presented to Benny, Bjorn and Stig, to celebrate sales in excess of zero copies of The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu’s LP 1987.” This was cracking copy, and was accompanied by suitable photographs of the burning and the prostitute holding the record, as well as Drummond (with binoculars) and Cauty (in cowboy hat) standing on the stern of the ferry.
As for the real story of what happened, here’s James Brown today, “Basically, we just went to Stockholm and it was the middle of the night and we came home. That is what happened. That was the reality of that. Basically, we went to Stockholm and back in a police car that broke down. Jimmy and I hung out in this little town. Bill went to bed early in the motel we checked into. I don’t know what Lawrence was doing, maybe he was with us….”
It may have been the following night, after the car broke down, that Lawrence Watson recalls, “we ended up crashing in someone’s house and being chased out by his drunken father, who thought we were hitting on his wife and daughter. His son had been locked up the week before for scaring horses on the estate with his motorbike. It was very surreal, all the things that happened. The father woke up pissed out of his head and came out in his little Y-fronts and chased us. We grabbed everything and ran for the door, afraid that he was going to beat us up.” Sadly for Brown’s diary of purple prose, the angry Swede did not give chase riding a moose with a shotgun cradled in his arms.
Brown had to justify to his editor - and probably the accounts department - spending four days travelling to Sweden with a photographer with not much to show for it, and thus added lashings of purple prose to the feature. “I had to turn it into something as I’d told the editor that I was going to Sweden to meet ABBA (laughs).” Also, it became evident once in Sweden that Drummond and Cauty, “didn’t know what to do when they got there – didn’t even have ABBA’s address.” In fact all they had was a PO Box!
“It was all flannel on their part,” recalls Watson, “they were going to present this disc for no sales, but all we did was buzz the intercom of Polar Music and were told to bugger off in no uncertain terms around three or four in the morning.” That said, for Watson the photographer, from a visual perspective everything was perfect. “When we met them they turned up in the old American police car, and that began the fun from the start. It was a gift having that as a backdrop all the time, that car, as it looked so photogenic, although we got loads of looks as we drove through Sweden in it. Jimmy would occasionally shout at people through the loudhailer.”
On the way out, Watson also snapped photos of Drummond and Cauty throwing copies of the 1987 LP off the back of the ferry, although sadly he kept his camera in his bag when Drummond entered a karaoke contest on the ship and won a large Toblerone for his efforts. On a mad early morning dash to catch the ferry back, just before Cauty’s car broke down, “Jimmy pulled over into a field and in the corner of that field they proceeded to set light to all of those 1987 albums,” Watson remembers, “I think James slept through all of that in the back of the car!” Watson photographed the burning, although even this set piece was nearly ruined when Cauty ran over his camera bag when reversing in the car. Luckily, Watson’s cameras were around his neck at the time.
When the car broke down shortly afterwards, they missed the ferry back and had to wait a couple of days for the next one. Watson recalls that Cauty or Drummond had wisely joined the AA the day before the trip, which not only allowed them access to roadside assistance in Sweden but also gave them a book of AA vouchers, “that you could use in certain restaurants, so we were living off AA vouchers. I’d just got my first credit card but I didn’t let that be known until the last night, when I bought some beers and stuff. I was not going to let that lot – James Brown and The KLF – loose on my credit card. So I kept it quiet until the last night.”
One of the most interesting things James Brown recalls about the Stockholm trip was a telephone call that Drummond made or received from - I assume - David Balfe. “Bill said to Jimmy, ‘I might have to go home. There’s a problem with the Zodiac album.’ That was the only chink, a glimpse that Bill was kind of playing at it. Despite saying ‘we’re confronting the record industry’, he was in the pay of Warner Brothers.” Indeed, in an earlier JAMs interview with Melody Maker, Drummond had described recording 1987, as “five days in the studio like one long, mad party,” and then continued, “I have to admit, it does get difficult when I do things like what I’m doing at the moment (producing one of the King Grebos). Fortunately, he’s a good bloke so I can get back to that more.”
Whilst Drummond was no longer working at Warner Brothers, he still had a working relationship with David Balfe. Not only did they co-run Zoo Publishing, but the pair were still a coalition on other fronts. Whilst Balfe was taking his early steps towards becoming a record company mogul by taking his Food label under the umbrella of a major, he was also undertaking production work and managing the career of a number of artists, including Mark Manning, aka Zodiac Mindwarp.
As we saw earlier, Balfe had initially put Manning, Youth and Jimmy Cauty together for the first Zodiac Mindwarp live gig, but when that hadn’t worked out Manning and Balfe recruited other musicians, including guitarist Cobalt Stargazer, to form a new incarnation. It wasn’t long before Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction exploded with the Wild Child EP, a mini album, a top twenty hit in Prime Mover in May 1987 and the kind of bad behavior that garnered plenty of press coverage - both positive and negative - and put swaggering rock back on the map. It appears the call Drummond handled in Sweden was related to the somewhat difficult sessions for the first full-length LP, which the record company and their sales staff were gagging for. Manning was living the rock and roll life to the full and, according to one source, amongst other things drinking a bottle of vodka a day. This may account for some issues in the recording studio, and according to my source, “Zodiac was terrible at remembering melodies, so we had him hypnotised into thinking he was Bon Jovi, it did improve things.” To be fair, if you or I had drunk a bottle of vodka we’d probably encounter similar difficulties walking in a straight line, let alone recalling melodies to songs.
Crucially, Drummond and Balfe were helming the sessions for the Mindwarp album and, speaking today, Manning gives an interesting insight into their production dynamic. “It was always unique. I don’t know if you know about Bill and his recording techniques, but he does very strange things. He wears costumes and stuff. He was wearing Ghandi outfits when we were doing that album. Big nappies and stuff. That’s one of his things, as other people will tell you - he has a fondness for wearing costumes, really bizarre costumes. A lot of the time he was doing it bollock naked. Cobalt (Stargazer) really didn’t like it. I just said, ‘Look, that’s the way he works Cobalt, don’t take it personally.’ ‘But he’s sitting there completely naked!’. ‘Just ignore him, pretend you’re in India and you’re not looking at people shitting on the street and that kind of thing.’”
According to Manning, Drummond’s off-the-wall behavior created a good working environment. “They were a good team because Bill is completely wild, he’s like wandering around in the studio, peeing in the car park, not wearing any clothes, and Balfe is sat there with a calculator actually counting the beats, timing the beats so he can say that is thirty-three or something or other. He does it with a calculator, and Bill is the complete opposite.”
As David Balfe declined to be interviewed for this book, I was unable to confirm whether Drummond did wear his birthday suit at this recording session, but in a wide ranging interview about Food Records in the New Musical Express in April 1989 he not only reflected on how Zodiac Mindwarp laid down the template for bands like Guns ‘N” Roses to follow him to the bank, but also stated that, “He’s also largely responsible for the fact that it’s now totally OK to like heavy metal.” Whilst not mentioning his calculator, Balfe added, “He is so megalomaniacal, he got a bit deranged for a while and we cocked it up.” A reference, perhaps, to these fraught LP sessions, some of which were attended by Nick Coler, who has a great tale to tell, “Him and (friend and roadie) Gimpo had been drinking all day. Zodiac was drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels and Balfe was being Balfe and saying, ‘Can you do it with a bit more…’ All I heard (from Zodiac) was ‘I’m going to go round to your house and fuck your wife!’ Then he (Balfe) went, ‘No, lads could you do a little more…’ Then we heard him go right over and fall down behind the desk - this was Zodiac - and I thought, where’s he gone? He came up, and he used to wear these little round glasses, and the glass from one had gone right through his skin here (indicates right cheekbone) and there was just blood pouring everywhere. He was still going, ‘Gonna fuck your wife!’ Gimpo just got a bit of gaffa tape and stuck it over the cut, then he stuck Z on his motorbike and off they went into the night.”
When the Tattooed Beat Messiah LP was released, Manning told the New Musical Express, in March 1988, that “I’m one of the Morrisseys, the Bill Drummonds, the Mark E Smiths, I’m one of the crazy gang. But the real beauty is, nobody really knows what the fuck I am.” He turned up to the interview wearing John Lennon glasses and told the interviewer “If you find them disconcerting I’ll take them off. I can’t see a thing without them though.”
This digression illustrates that Drummond would have received cash flow from his production duties, which was probably channeled into his work with Cauty and the JAMs, which itself might have been generating ideas, great music and coverage in the music press but no significant cash flow. It must have also helped pay for studio time, printing costs and the pressing of records. It was also Manning who later brought Gimpo (Alan Goodrick) into the orbit of The KLF after he’d served time as Manning’s roadie and, later, his manager.
So, when he returned to London from his adventures in Sweden one imagines that Drummond had to go back into the studio and help Balfe wrestle Zodiac Mindwarp And The Love Reaction into musical submission. But in the meantime there had actually been another Justified Ancients of Mu Mu 12” released to the public. Whilst All You Need Is Love was a vicious piece of spiteful sampling, almost polemical in nature, the one-sided 12” Whitney Joins The JAMs was the complete opposite. The title sums up the song perfectly – after opening with the sampled theme to Mission Impossible and a driving beat, Drummond dives straight into the fray - “Mission impossible we were told, she’ll never join The JAMs” - before a blast of the Theme From Shaft blows in. Drummond sounds like he is just having the greatest time of his life, and when Whitney Houston joins the song - and thus The JAMs - through a sample of I Wanna Dance (With Somebody) he is so excited – “Whitney!” - he sounds as if he’s about to have kittens. Running for seven minutes, the purloined samples are used to craft an excellent dance track. Apparently, the original plan was to record a song based on Isaac Hayes Shaft, but when Drummond went to a record shop to buy the album he ended up purchasing the Whitney Houston LP instead, and the rest is, as they say, is history.
Whitney Joins The JAMs received positive reviews, and would not only be repressed but was also the first song the duo filmed a video for, when one was requested by The Chart Show after it reached number three in their independent chart. “They keep pestering us for a video and we were saying, ‘Oh no, we haven’t got one and we don’t want to do one. Just get it out of your charts fast’”, Drummond stated at the time, “Eventually our ego won and, with the loose change we had in our pockets, we hired a video and got one of our mates to film us driving in the JAMMmobile to the place where they made The Chart Show. When we got there, we took out the cassette, handed it in at the gate and said, that’s your video! The next day it was on national TV. It cost us £19.96. Most record companies spend up to a hundred grand on their videos and almost as much on lunches trying to get people to screen them. We did it for under twenty quid.”
One imagines that their reluctance to provide a video stemmed from their troubles with the continuing saga over the 1987 LP, although at this time they were not the only ones swimming in increasingly hot waters. Pump Up The Volume by M/A/R/R/S was near the top of the singles charts in early September 1987 when Pete Waterman arranged for his lawyers to take out an injunction against their parent label 4AD because the song used - among many other samples - part of the Stock, Aitken and Waterman track Road Block. “Our claim is that they don’t have any right to use Road Block without our permission and without paying the artists and the writers,” Waterman told the music press at the time, “We both have to go to court for the law to decide what the law is on sampling, because nobody knows. We are the first to say, ‘You cannot sample somebody else’s talent, put it on a record and get away with it.’ We’ve got nothing against 4AD or the record.” Although the matter was settled, it was ironic that part of the tools in the Stock, Aitken and Waterman armory that served up so many hit singles at this time included the sampling of bass and drums!
Whilst the Swedish trip and the subsequent feature helped to maintain The Justified Ancient’s Of Mu Mu’s profile in the music press and attract curious readers to their music, they didn’t have the financial resources to fight legal cases, or the balls of Peter Waterman. But the next step in the 1987 saga was a brilliant piece of vinyl theatre – the genius idea of re-releasing the 1987 album as a 12” single with all of the offending samples removed, but giving details on the rear of the sleeve as to how to re-create the original album with the aid of the 12”, a turntable and the original records from which the samples had been taken. Thus, in early November the music press began reporting that the edited version of 1987 was now in the shops, “it’s been available for some weeks but only on an exchange basis for people bringing in their original copies of 1987.”
In many respects, the release of this 12” record was something of a watershed in the development of the Drummond and Cauty partnership. Musically, it made no sense - after all, parts of the tracks were missing - but it was another brilliant opportunity to garner publicity for The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, not just as musicians but as an artistic project that was challenging the existing order through the medium of sampling and graffiti. Although The JAMS 45 Edits was reviewed and there were some more extended pieces written about the band on the back of it, the most interesting consequence of this act was the fact that the reputation of The JAMs broadened sufficiently for them to start appearing on TV. Both Drummond and Cauty were always open to interviews, and Cauty’s BENIO squat was fast becoming their acknowledged headquarters and, as such, a location not only for interviews but for visits by television film crews. With Cauty’s American police car parked outside it was more in keeping with their image that Drummond’s suburban Aylesbury home, where his wife and children were based.
In one TV feature, Drummond was interviewed sitting on the bonnet of the police car holding, for some reason, a set of stag’s antlers, and gave a condensed history of the band so far, including how they’d ended up getting into hot water with ABBA and the MCPS. Drummond and Cauty then became actors, driving to a Virgin Record store in Marble Arch, London, to retrieve banned copies of the 1987 LP. “Our case went to court,” continued Drummond as the piece cut back to him sitting on the bonnet of the car, “we ended up being fined and were told we could release the same record without the offending parts. So we did this edited version with all these gaps, with instructions on the back on how to put the whole thing back together again in your own at home. But it was really just to send up the situation we found ourselves in.”
The next segment showed Cauty playing a JAMs fan going into the Rough Trade shop on Ladbroke Grove to return a copy of 1987, where he is given a free copy of the Edits 12” as a replacement. The man serving him behind the counter was, of course, Bill Drummond. Cauty returned home to BENIO with the 12”, started playing it, and then, at one point, declared, “Shit! I can’t hear anything. What’s the matter with it?” He goes back to Rough Trade, where Drummond gives him copies of albums by Fred Wesley and The Sex Pistols and Dave Brubeck’s Greatest Hits - three artists sampled on the LP. Returning to BENIO, Cauty attempts to recreate a track from 1987 following the instructions, which include deploying three turntables, a video machine and a TV. When he gets frustrated he not only breaks a record in two - not one by The JAMS - but symbolically throws a record player at a poster of Samantha Fox which is conveniently hanging on his wall. A poster of 2000AD anti-hero Judge Dredd gazes on with approval from another wall.
Meanwhile, whilst this 1987 related drama was being played out, Drummond and Cauty had been busy in the studio, and the third JAMs single, Downtown, was issued in December 1987. In an interview given to the New Musical Express in December 1987, King Boy D was keen to throw out a vision of musical chaos when it came the recording of the new track. “This is going to sound ludicrous. We didn’t even know it was going to be called Downtown, we didn’t even know what it was going to be like when we started doing it. One day I was in the studio and I just started humming the chorus of Downtown over the intro. I thought, ‘That’s funny, I wonder what key it’s in…’”
A snatch of the famous Petula Clark record soon found its way into the mix, along with beats and a gospel choir. What’s intriguing about Downtown is that Drummond and Cauty were already displaying a skill for collaboration, bringing in DJ Cesare to work on a version of the track that appeared on the flip of the 12”. Cesare had gotten involved in music after giving Adrian Sherwood a tape he’d mixed in his bedroom that saw him invited to do a session in the studio with the On U Sound boss. As well as artists like Tackhead, and even M/A/R/R/S, Cesare also now worked with The JAMs. “I mixed Pet Clark’s Downtown into the JAMs single, but that was a straight session job. I turned up with the idea, “I’m the arms, you’re the brains boys - use me”. As it happened they left the studio and left the mix totally to me since they weren’t really interested in making a statement so much as squeezing the juice out of the JAMs concept.” This quote was from March 1988, when Cesare was promoting his first 12”, Drop, wherein he’d remixed a number of Public Enemy tunes, and by which time he’d also worked on other tracks with the JAMs, like Burn The Bastards. “I’d rather work in the underground indie market in a dance field rather than, say, become the new Stock, Aitken or Waterman. I match beats and I like to do it in as adventurous a way as possible. I’ll mix Adonis into Front 242 or Skinny Puppy into Wagner.”
Although Downtown was officially the last JAMs 12” of 1987, there had also been another single issued by the KLF axis that year. This was a 12” by Disco 2000, who were marketed as a couple of raunchy girls The JAMs had discovered whilst on patrol - “Cress used to work in a Sten Gun factory greasing barrels, she met Rockman at an Army and Navy fashion show where The JAMs’ sample sergeant was modeling camouflage underwear. It wasn’t long before the pair had moved into a South London munitions dump.” As you’ve probably guessed by now, the wonderful, free flowing fictional style was the output of James Brown, writing in the pages on the New Musical Express. In fact, one half of Disco 2000 was Cauty’s wife, Cressida, who, with her own musical background in The Whippets From Nowhere, The 39 Steppes, Big Hair and Angels One 5, was not going to let her husband have all of the musical fun and limelight. The other member was Mo Brathwaite, who had, at one time, sailed on the good ship Brilliant when they had enough members to man the ferry Drummond and Cauty sailed to Sweden on.
Musically, I Gotta CD was pop-house, clubby electro with smears of guitar, scratching and even those JAMs cats. It was a crucial record, in that it showed that Cauty, who, one assumes, did most of the spadework, was starting to draw from the well of Chicago house and early techno from Detroit that was, by now, filtering into clubs around the country. Over this broth, Cressida and Mo rapped in unison like a deranged version of chart duos such as Mel and Kim or Pepsi and Shirley, and King Boy D made a brief contribution. What’s particularly interesting about the Disco 2000 release is that Drummond and Cauty used a PR company - 10 Better - to service the record to radio stations and the music press, although the press release was probably still penned by the duo as it was somewhat raunchy, “Mo has her fingers in quite a few pies (not to be mistaken for pants). ‘What’s that smell Mo?’ ‘Oh that’s the last A&R man I was sampling.’”
When Disco 2000 were interviewed by James Brown for the New Musical Express, the resulting feature carried on this theme and read at times like a cross between a Carry On film and an episode of Benny Hill. “You’ve got to come across as sexy feminists. Not having huge bottoms, always wearing dungarees and never a bra. You’ve got to have feminists who wear mini-skirts.” But Cressida did find time to talk about the song, “We didn’t want political slogans or anything like that, we just wanted it to be funny. The use of abbreviations is a comment on the planned obsolescence in today’s society.”
It was a funny and frothy feature, much in keeping with the record itself, and one of James Browns musings on this release, and the earlier Whitney Joins The JAMs, was to prove spookily prescient, “Likewise the accessibility of I Gotta CD can’t go ignored. And though The JAMs only produced it, the surprising dance-awareness that has infiltrated both releases has come as a surprise to both The KLF and myself. If they were prepared to destroy their abstract political ideas, The KLF could quite rapidly become something akin to King Boy, Rockman and Waterman. A wall of sex and a string of hits could be built in no time.”
Speaking of walls, in December 1987 Drummond and Cauty rabbited on to Melody Maker on a range of subjects, from sampling to Pete Waterman, as well as creating a photographer’s dream by backing Cauty’s car up onto the pavement and defacing a billboard with the message MERRY XMAS FROM THE JAMS. “We do it all the time,” boasted Cauty, “I can’t believe that nothing ever happens.”
By this time Drummond and Cauty were already recording their second LP, which was “written, recorded, pressed and packed” in two months between late November 1987 and January 1988. Drummond explained why the finished product had no track listing to the growing army of JAMs fans in their second information sheet, sent out in March 1988 to those on their mailing list:
“The reason there was no track list with the record was to enable us to get the record out as fast as possible after we’d finished recording it. We had to deliver the artwork to the printers before Christmas, at which time we didn’t know what the tracks were to be called.” This was because Drummond and Cauty were still recording them, but the key point here is the urgency with which the duo were operating, which was going against all of the normal record company policies of a considered release schedule that they were both used to working with. Drummond sounded like Miles Davis in his fertile electric period of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when he told one journalist that, “as soon as we’ve finished doing something we’re itching to get onto something else, so by the time the people who have bought the record have got into it, we’ve moved on.”
Unlike 1987, the cover art for Who Killed The Jams LP was full colour, featuring a photo taken by Lawrence Watson during their ill-fated trip to Sweden. It showed Drummond and Cauty standing by the door of Cauty’s Ford Galaxie police car amidst a pall of white smoke generated by the burning of copies of the 1987 LP - conveniently shown on the back of the sleeve. Their status in the music press saw album reviews that were mostly positive, although in his analysis Edwin Pouncey did muse in the New Musical Express that, “Twisting the existing ideas of others into the shape they want and hammering them home is a cute trick, but for how long can the boys keep pulling the same rabbit out of the hat?”
Released in February 1988, Who Killed The JAMs? was, in fact, a musical step forward from 1987, and showed, in some respects, the duo’s future direction of travel, and that their rabbit ears were tuned into wider listening habits. Candystore opened with a sample of The Shirelles’ Leader Of The Pack, with Drummond adapting the song’s lyrics before it quickly moved into a driving dance track, complete with piano parts played by Nick Coler and a house-themed chorus from Cressida and Mo. This was Chicago house, South London style, and the track would be retooled and issued under the name One Love Nation as the second Disco 2000 single in April 1988. There was even a video shoot, and a journalist from the New Musical Express was on hand to document the event. Cressida was quick to pass on the plot, “Yeah, tons of people crowding around… Then we jump up as if to start rehearsing the song in our bedroom. Then Mo starts to… she sort of…” Mo: “I start to masturbate!” It was Carry On again, and all that was missing was a cackle from Sid James.
Disaster Fund Collection, with its pulsating synth line, female chorus lines and brass, again dropped anchor into the realms of house music and was again much more musically - and in sampled terms - sophisticated. Whilst Drummond railed - “I’ve paced the cage of freedom for all it’s worth!” - it was sonically more Pet Shop that Beastie Boys. Next, King Boy’s Dream started as a pure rap and saw the inspired use of a sampled Cauty cough as part of the rhythm before shifting into the Porpoise Song, electronically prowling terrain that, at times, sounded like an updated version Riders Of The Storm by the Doors. Here, Drummond narrated about his days as a nineteen year old working on a fishing trawler, as well as trying to get a porpoise to join The JAMs. It was an excellent track.
The lyrical content of Drummond’s rap on Prestwick Prophet’s Grin told of his epiphany to create the music that became All You Need Is Love, as well as the story of The JAMs so far, but the charm was in the wonderful music, underpinned by a funky, almost jazzy, guitar riff, organ and a winning beat that sounds like it was constructed from the barking of a musical dog. Female backing vocals took the track into the realms of gospel, despite a short Indian music interlude.
The album’s final track, Burn The Bastards, drove the record home with a JAMs version of Sly and The Family Stone’s Dance To The Music, with Drummond singing lyrics tweaked from the original as the song pounded away, driven by house piano (again provide by Nick Coler) and an insistent chorus of “Dance Everybody.” There was also the first deployment of the famous “Mu Mu!” chant, sandwiched between Drummond’s demands to throw the bastards on the fire. The record wound down with the chimes of Big Ben, from Westminster, counting in the New Year, before Drummond declared the party ‘crap’ and asked Rockman if he knew of any others.
The album ended with the sound of a collaborator who would be central to Cauty and Drummond’s next major musical step forward - the engine of Cautys’s Ford Galaxie police car, soon to be rebranded as Ford Timelord.