KELLY: “Er, no… I’ve seen them before though. Cor, I didn’t know The KLF looked like that.”
SUSAN: “Er, I don’t know. Blimey, I thought The KLF were young.”
- Two Smash Hits readers after being shown a photo of Drummond and Cauty and asked to identify them
Early in January 1992, Music Week took its annual look at the most successful bands, artists and record companies of 1991. The most remarkable figure appeared on a bar chart that gave the breakdown for total singles sales in the UK for the year by company. Polygram were at the top with a 21.3 per cent share, followed by EMI at 16.7 per cent. The most interesting figures, though, were at the bottom of this top ten chart, where KLF Communications accounted for 1.9 per cent of the total number of singles sold in the UK in 1991. Just above them with 3.5 per cent of the total market were Peter Waterman’s PWL. The most interesting fact was that The KLF only released a total of four singles in 1991 – 3AM Eternal, Last Train To Trancentral, It’s Grim Up North and Justified And Ancient – whereas companies like Phonogram and EMI would have, through their own labels or subsidiaries, released hundreds. The chart also showed that Warner Brothers only had 8.8 per cent of the singles market, which was only around 3 per cent more that KLF Communications and PWL combined. Another chart showed that, in 1991, The KLF were the third biggest selling singles artist in the country after Bryan Adams and Queen, whose sales were bolstered at the end of the year by the death of their singer, Freddie Mercury.
Considering that KLF Communications was not a big corporation with hundreds of staff, marketing, A&R and publicity departments, this was an amazing performance. The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) couldn’t fail to take notice of these achievements, so The KLF was asked to appear in the annual Brit Awards that celebrated the successes of the industry, to be held at the Hammersmith Odeon in February 1992. “The Brit Awards are going European in an attempt to make them compatible to the Grammy Awards,” stated a news report in Melody Maker in late 1991, “Organiser Lisa Anderson says that, as 1992 approaches, Europe will be treated more and more as a single market by the record industry, rather than as a number of different countries.” Crucially, this meant that the show would be broadcast on prime time TV in the UK to showcase British musical talent, who would not only receive awards but also perform some of the best-selling songs from 1991. The KLF were not only on the shortlist for three awards – Best Album, Best British Group and Best Single - but were also asked to perform. Remarkably, they agreed to serve up a live version of 3AM Eternal.
Typically, Drummond and Cauty decided to do something unique and perform the song with hardcore band Extreme Noise Terror. As to how this collaboration came about, Dean Jones, lead singer of the Norfolk band, later told the New Musical Express that, “Bill heard us on Peel when he was in the bath and got in touch. They wanted to do rock versions of their songs with Motörhead but something fell through, so he rang us.”
At this time, Extreme Noise Terror was one of the pre-eminent hardcore bands in the UK. They’d formed in 1985 in Ipswich, and became part of a scene, along with bands like Napalm Death, whose music was brutally loud, powerful and well-known for its remarkable brevity. System Shit, on their first release – a split LP with fellow grinders Chaos UK called Earslaugher – clocked in at just over a minute. John Peel quickly became besotted with Extreme Noise Terror, especially after they recorded a session for him in November 1987. When this was issued on Strange Fruit in 1988, he gave six of the seven tracks three stars – his ultimate seal of approval – with only Use Your Mind – ironically the longest track, clocking in at 2m 10s – getting two stars.
“I like the sons of Hüsker Dü bands,” he told the New Musical Express in July 1988, “and I play them a lot, but once you get beyond two and a half minutes I think you’re on dangerous ground. I like the idea of doing ludicrous tracks that are only half a second long, although I realise there’s more to life than that. I find brevity really attractive.” As for Extreme Noise Terror, “sooner or later I knew Peel would catch on to hardcore and he has,” drummer Mick Harris said in the same feature “It’s great. He treats it seriously, whereas that pillock Steve Wright’s just using it as a piss-take.” After another LP, shared with Filthkick - In It For Life, issued in 1989 - Extreme Noise Terror released their debut LP, A Holocaust In Your Head, later that year.
Whether Drummond and Cauty did contact Motörhead is a delicious unknown, but hearing Extreme Noise Terror on Peel in his bath chimed with Drummond (and Cauty’s) plan to record metal versions of KLF material - this was The Black Room project, which they had first talked about when It’s Grim Up North had first been sent out to DJs as a one-sided 12” promo. Sessions with Extreme Noise Terror must have started in late 1991 as there was a version of 3AM Eternal in the can that Drummond and Cauty wanted to perform on the Christmas Day edition of Top Of The Pops at the end of the year, but the BBC turned it down as it was so radically different from the original version that had been in the charts. Instead, this Extreme Noise Terror recording was pressed up as a limited edition 7” early in 1992 and sold via mail order (for £2, including P&P) via the KLF Communications PO box in Aylesbury.
With the idea of performing with Extreme Noise Terror rekindled for the Brits performance, Drummond and Cauty decided to deploy some extreme terror themselves, and discussed a number of ideas as to how to make the performance memorable. At one point, Drummond was going to cut up a dead sheep live on stage and, at the end of the performance, throw buckets of blood over the front rows of the audience. To this end, he got up very early on the day of the performance and drove to an abattoir in Northampton to collect a dead sheep he’d pre-ordered, as well as the blood.
Although there were some misgivings amongst the organisers during rehearsals over a rendition of 3AM Eternal several nautical miles removed from the version that had stormed the charts, it was agreed that Extreme Noise Terror would be allowed to perform it with Drummond and Cauty. The master of ceremonies that night was, ironically, Jonathan King, who had form after accusing Bello of being a white man blacked up and wearing a wig, and he introduced Extreme Noise Terror/KLF. Drummond performed wearing a kilt and brandishing a crutch as the band sawed and growled through the song. Cauty, for his part, planned on doing a Jimmy Page, “I’ve always had this rock star fantasy, ever since I was young, that I’d have this massive guitar solo,” he later told writer Richard King, “I’d been rehearsing it and rehearsing it. This was it. Hammersmith Odeon – I’m gonna do my guitar solo at last, then I’m finished. So of course, I come up to the front of the stage and go “wram” and my lead gets pulled out of my guitar. I’ve only got, like, twenty seconds to do my solo and I spend the whole time just finding the end of the lead to plug it back in and that was it – that was the last thing I ever did in the music business.” Drummond was probably unaware of Cauty’s impression of an ambient Jimmy Page as he disappeared off stage, returned with a machine gun and, with a cigar clenched between his teeth, proceeded to fire blanks out into the auditorium. This was fifty shades of Sid Vicious in the Great Rock N Roll Swindle. At that point King picked up the baton, and it was on with the show.
Once the performance was over, Scott Piering announced that, “The KLF have left the music business.” They’d also left the Hammersmith Odeon, and sent a friend dressed as a motorcycle despatch rider to collect the Best Group award that they shared with Simply Red – which must have made Rob Dickens at Warner Brothers, their label, very happy.
But Drummond and Cauty were not done. They had abandoned the plan to cut up the sheep onstage due to protests from Extreme Noise Terror, who were all vegetarians, and plans to throw the blood out into the audience were thankfully headed off by publicist Mick Houghton. Instead, the sheep was dumped on the steps of the Royal Lancaster Hotel, where the post Brits party was to be held, with a note attached which read, “I died for you. Bon appetite.”
“It was awful - really terrible,” the manager of the hotel told the Daily Star the following day, “Police were called after our duty manager saw a man leap out of a van and roll the dead sheep onto the red carpet. There was blood coming from its mouth. It was one of the saddest things I have ever seen. But it did not ruin the party because the police managed to move the carcass.” Amazingly, The Sun missed out on the dead sheep scoop but ran with a story that stated, “The KLF proved pop’s biggest wallies by ‘firing’ a realistic machine gun at the star studded audience.”
The biggest question about the Brit Awards performance was, what were Drummond and Cauty hoping to achieve? The KLF had dominated the single charts and scored a massive selling hit album, and had done this on their own terms with their own company and with independent distribution. It’s ironic that the biggest problem they’d encountered in 1991 had not been from the establishment but from their independent distributor, Rough Trade, who had gone out of business and probably cost them hundreds thousands of pounds after the company had gone into administration. If the former credit control department of Rough Trade and some of the management had been given seats in the front row at the Brits, one might grasp the logic behind the plan to throw the blood, but they were not. Was it really a loathing for the business that had contributed to their success that drove them to take their ideas about self-promotion to such an extreme? Or was it a case of trying to defenestrate their reputation with an act of outrage? To self-destruct like a Mission Impossible recording, live on TV? Or was it simply the result of sheer mental exhaustion brought on by the heavy workload of maintaining creative forward momentum for the last five years?
The Brits performance was pre-taped and, when aired that evening, probably confused readers of Smash Hits and a broader range of KLF fans used to their more lavish theatrical TV performances, chart-tooled music and expansive videos. But as The KLF had, by now, obtained a reputation as “pranksters” and “master media manipulators” it was probably seen by most as just their latest, attention seeking publicity stunt in a business that was all about self-promotion. Many probably thought the sight of Drummond firing a gun whilst dressed like some kind of kilt-wearing Arnold Schwarzenegger was quite cool.
A journalist and photographer from the New Musical Express had been with the band all day at the Brits, and had even gone back to BENIO after the show, where, after members of Extreme Noise Terror had called their parents to make sure they watched them appear on TV that night, he received an urgent phone call from Bill Drummond asking, “Where are you guys? You should be with us… we’re doing stuff….” This stuff specifically involved the placing of a dead sheep at a hotel entrance, which was, of course, snapped for the readership of the New Musical Express.
The next day, Drummond spoke to the magazine, “There is humour in what we do, and in the records, but I really hate it when people go on about us being “schemers” and “scammers”. We do all of this stuff from the very depths of our soul, and people make out that it’s some kind of game. It depresses me.” Drummond expanded about entering the dark side of the soul, and even stated that he and Cauty had mentally gone to a similar place to Charles Manson and “that bloke who shot up Hungerford”. When questioned as to whether he was serious about this and believed it, he fired back, “I do actually. Yes I do. It is the same area. Someone recently used the phrase ‘corporate rebels’ - about the Manic Street Preachers I think – and both Jimmy and I did not want just to be corporate rebels, because there’s just so much of that, shameless, in the music business. We felt that we were head butting…. head butting, trying to push at what’s acceptable. It was completely pointless, and you don’t know why you are doing it, but it has to be done.”
Drummond confessed that the plans for the performance kept changing, with options ranging from cutting his age – 38 - “Manics style” into his chest with a knife to the more romantic image of snogging Cauty onstage. He also stated that well before the Brits he’d bought all of the tools required to cut the sheep up on stage, “But of course in the end Extreme Noise Terror made it blatantly known that they were totally against the idea.”
Whatever the intention or the perception of what happened at, and after, the Brits, The KLF remained at the top of the tree. When former Bunnyman Ian McCulloch was asked to review the singles for the New Musical Express in February, he was dismissive of the Art Of Noise’s Paranormia, “That was just nowt. Have they been dropped from their record company? It sounded puny, cheap and weak, like they were back on the eight-track or something. The question is, why did they bother when The KLF do that kind of thing so much better?” It was a good job McCulloch hadn’t heard The Ambient Collection issued by Art Of Noise in 1990, which showed that even Youth couldn’t polish a turd.
Laurence Colbert, from Ride, also told the New Musical Express around this time that, “We want to be the ultimate pop band. That’s what we’re most keen on. At one point it was considered cool to not go on TOTP. Now it’s cool to go on, everyone wants to be invited. Which is how it should be. Get on there and make it better. I think The KLF handle it really well. There’s this slight sense of outrage in the midst of all this tepid stuff.” Saying that, some of the outrage had been in the North Lambeth Housing co-op, as Cauty later related to Bo Franklin, “Co-op meetings were a bit weird, because people would say ‘I just saw you on Top Of The Pops, what’s going on? You’re not supposed to use the co-op van for things like that, you’re supposed to use it for picking up materials…’ We were earning a huge amount of money, which you could in music in those days. So in the end, in about 1992, I just had to move out and buy a house. It was becoming ridiculous.”
The same week that Drummond was baring his dark soul, all of the music papers contained a full page advertisement showing a two speaker stack covered in an American flag, with text beneath it which read, “In the year of our lord 992, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu set sail in their longboats on a voyage to rediscover the lost continent. After many months on perilous stormy seas, their search was fruitless. Just when all seemed lost they discovered… America!”
For all the talk of The Black Room with Extreme Noise Terror – which was to include a track called 38 - there would not be, at this point, anything other than the limited edition 7” released. Indeed, Extreme Noise Terror issued Phonophobia in March 1992, their own mini-LP containing eight tracks clocking in at a total of seventeen minutes. The record received fulsome and positive reviews, as well as obligatory KLF references, “After the BPI fiasco I would forgive them almost anything. Stand aside Fruitbat! Some spikier heroes of the anti-crap jihad deserve a place on your podium.” But by that time The KLF were back in the top five with America – What Time Is Love?
Ironically, this new single was a somewhat spikey affair, being a heavy rock version of an old KLF warhorse. America - What Time Is Love? had probably been recorded and mixed at the end of the summer in 1991 when the dust was still settling from the collapse of Rough Trade Distribution, and, crucially, it was first issued in America in October 1991, where it went top twenty and, one imagines, gave the KLF finances a positive boost, especially as The White Room album also sold strongly Stateside.
In the studio, Drummond, Cauty and their team had pulled out all the stops to give the song a hard rock edge. This not only saw Cauty playfully adding Ace Of Spades guitar riffs, but they also drafted in former Deep Purple vocalist Glenn Hughes to bellow out the main chorus lyric. Nick Coler recalls that, on coming into Olympic Studios in Barnes to lay down his parts, “he blew the mike up as his voice was so loud.” Hughes seized the chance to get his career back on track, and told Select, “I mean, the KLF guys were aware of my previous record of drug-induced unreliability, but were willing to give me a chance… I did ten vocal tracks for them in just twenty-five minutes and realised that America would be huge, and probably my last chance to make a go of my career again.”
Azat Bello also had to take time out from his work with Outlaw Posse to retool his original rap. “That was all fresh,” adds Coler, “It was a completely different tempo, around 140 or 150 beats per minute. Most rock stuff is around 145.” Bello remembers that, “I came in, Jimmy started the track and I started rocking to the beat. He gave me a piece of A4 paper and said, ‘That room over there that is the writing room, so go and do your thing.’ So I got a pen, and twenty minutes later I came out thinking, ‘what’s going to happen now?’ I tell him I’m ready, so I go in the booth and I put it down one time. I’m thinking, that will be a good guide (vocal). I walk into the studio from the booth and say, ‘What do you think?’ They said, ‘That’s it.’ I’m like, ‘Do we need to do it another time?’ but they were, ‘Nah, nah, nah, nah. That is it. Trust me – it’s banging.’ Well, he didn’t say it was banging, but whatever banging means (in Cauty-speak). So I said, ‘You mean I’m done?’ He says, ‘Yeah, man. You can bust out now, we’re going to mix the tune.’ I was like, ‘Wow!’”
When it came to finishing off the track, Nick Coler recalls that, once again, they added the “Mu Mu” chants recorded so long ago at Dagenham, “that one in particular, we thought, someone is going to come around and kill us soon, as we were just (re)using ‘Mu Mu’ or ‘KLF’ on every track. We thought, surely someone is going to turn around and go, ‘Fuck off.’ The submarine noises sampled from the film The Boat and used on 3AM Eternal were also recycled. “All of the drums at the end were played by hand on the drum machine. It was all machines, except for Jimmy playing the guitars.” The cherry was added to the cake at the mixing stage by Spike Stent, who, having previously worked with The Mission, knew how to break a heavy rock.
America – What Time Is Love? was another kitchen sink production affair, and when it came to the video Drummond and Cauty used the largest kitchen sink in England. Bello remembers walking into Pinewood Studios, “That was crazy. They had all of these extras, and they had the ship. It was proper, like we are going into a movie, with ‘Take one! Take Two!’ It was not like a normal video shoot.”
The ship in question was actually a full size replica Viking longboat, one of two made for the 1989 film Eric The Viking. The Pinewood stage had been filled with water to accommodate the ship, which was actually set on hydraulic rollers and would be stationary in the water for filming. The impression of a raging open sea would be provided by huge hydraulic wave and rain machines that also sucked up water and sprayed in onto the boat. To help the musicians and extras mime their parts in time to the music, there was a 10,000 Watt PA system to one side that would play America - What Time Is Love? once Director Bill Butt screamed, “Action!”
Bello performed his rap in a black waterproof and was literally sheeted in water, “My memories of it are Jimmy’s wife (who was on the stern dancing with just tape over her nipples and a machete in one of her hands) and the singer, the rock singer (Glen Hughes). He was pretty crazy because he was going for it! He was going for it like he was actually in the studio. I though, mate, this is a video - you don’t have to, but he was on full throttle! He was going for it! He was going for it, man, and it made the video.”
As well as Cressida’s brother gyrating in the rigging and Zodiac Mindwarp’s drummer hammering a sodden kit, somebody else who appeared in the video was Andrew Swaine. He was a student in St Albans, and in his spare time was a member of a society called Regia Anglorun, which was basically a Viking re-enactment society. Regia had been asked to provide rowers dressed in authentic Viking clothing to act as extras in the longboat, and in return not only would each person be paid but at the end of the shoot Regia Anglorum would be given the boat to take away and use for their re-enactments. Whether Drummond and Cauty had bought the boat or the prop manager at Pinewood decided to give away this rather large item is unknown, but it was good news for Regia Anglorum.
According to Swaine there were two days of shooting, “the guys who had been involved in the first day didn’t show up again on the second day as it had been such a miserable experience, so they put the call out again to get more people in. I was involved in the second day and spent that day in the studio.” As with all film and video shoots, there was a lot of standing around, although it appears that the band had their own trailers to rest up in. As for Swaine, “I can’t remember how many takes there were, but we would jump in the ship and you could hear the beat and some music playing over it and we would row like crazy. But we weren’t going anywhere - the oars were just splashing around and these rain machines were sucking water out of the pool and blowing it onto us and it was really, really cold. Our kit was genuine Viking stuff, made out of wool, and just became heavier and heavier as we got colder and colder. Then we would stop and the crane would pull the ship back to the side and we would jump off and stand around these heater things to dry off. Just as we got comfortable again it would be back in the ship and we would be off again. We would repeat that throughout the day.”
The worst thing for Swaine was that the set for the Justified and Ancient video was still standing on the edge of the water - he could see it from where he was sitting at his oar, and it looked like a tropical paradise compared to his rain and windswept position.
The rowing Vikings were supposed to get £30 each for oaring themselves out, but as they‘d worked so hard and suffered so much were actually given £60. Swaine also received a special bonus, “I was standing to the side having a cigarette, and I became aware that somebody was standing beside me. He was fairly distinctive, with the hunched shoulders and the hair – I thought, ‘Hello, I’m in the presence of royalty here,’ – and I just said “’Hello,’ (to Jimmy Cauty). We had a few words about this and that. He said, ‘I appreciate that it was rotten out there, and it was very cold. I could see it was unpleasant out there. Thanks very much, and good luck with the ship when we’re done with it.’
“I said, ‘I don’t want to be cheeky but that gold disc (screwed to the mast) that’s warped. I suppose no-one is going to want that now?’ He said, ‘Do you want it?’ I said, ‘If you don’t mind,’ and he said, ‘No. No problem at all,’ and called someone to get the crane driver and pull the ship in, then called someone else over with a screwdriver and said, ‘Can you go and get that for me please?’ The man gave it to him and he said, ‘Do you want me to sign it for you?’ and he did. I said, ‘Thanks very much - it was a pleasure working with you.’ And that was it, my brush with pop stardom was pretty much over.”
Of course, when the shooting was over Pinewood studios had to strip down the sound stage in preparation for the next production company that wanted to use it. “It took five days to fill it up with four feet of water,” laughs Nick Coler, who took his young daughter down to watch the shoot, “and at the end of it they just pulled out a plug and it ran off across the car park!”
The resulting video was as stunning as the music was powerful. Drummond and Cauty had even worked a chorus of America from West Side Story into the music as an operatic refrain – recorded by one male opera singer doing loads of overdubs. Nobody knew, but this was a song Cauty had rehearsed with Angels One 5 nearly a decade before!
Again, press releases and reviews – “the tusk-wearing terrorists have gone full-tilt trouser-exploding metal, with Deep Purple’s Glen Hughes bursting his lungs over massed choirs and screaming guitars and crackling thunderclouds and walloping skyscraper-sized disco beats!” – were almost superfluous. Not only did the record go top five in the UK in March 1992, but it also charted in Europe. The KLF were on top of the world.
As ever, rather than resting on their laurels Drummond and Cauty drove themselves on. They were soon back in the studio, not only working on another single but also with Extreme Noise Terror on the Black Album. “The most awesome track for me was one called The Black Room And Terminator 10,” Spike Stent later stated, “which was like a very slow tempo thrash. It was mad. It was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and it would have shown a lot of people up because it was ballsy as hell. Guitars screaming all over the place, Bill doing his vocals and Dean doing his. There was such a raw power to it. It was so different from anything anyone had ever heard. This was really heavy.”
But at this point things began to unravel. Part of the problem was expectation - how they could top what they’d already done? “Bill and Jimmy started to get more and more carried away and wanted to do a Swingle (Singers) type thing,” recalls Nick Coler, “(then) they got two Mexican guys in, they came in and sang Make It Rain in Spanish. They had sombreros on as they played their guitars. I think Bill and Jimmy made them wear the sombreros. It was getting madder and madder. There had been so many ideas that I suppose were trying to be fresh and original.” Ideas ranged across the cosmos, from having a stonemason chip out statues of themselves to laying down real grass in a recording studio, bringing in a load of sheep and recording the consequences. Spike Stent later related to Select magazine how their success in using Tammy Wynette and Glen Hughes led to a veritable deluge of calls from potential collaborators, “I was in the studio and we had Neil Sedaka phoning up, we had Sweet phoning up, we had all kinds phoning up. I mean, that’s just when I’ve been there.”
According to Nick Coler, the end came when thoughts turned to recording a single with one of the greatest soul singers of all time. “We were all in Marcus (studio) and Spike was making the (Black Room) album with Jimmy on one side, and Bill and I were on the other side making another single, and he wanted to get Barry White. By this time, I had a huge pile of stuff, and all of these things were going on. We were going, ‘Yeah, Barry White!’ Then Jimmy walked in and said, ‘It’s shit. It’s all over.’ And that was it. That was the end of it. It was like someone pulling the rug from under you - there was no more making or doing what you wanted to do for the hell of doing what you wanted to do – that’s what appealed to me about it. Bill and I sat around the piano for a bit, then we all went home.”
In many respects, Drummond and Cauty were burnt out. They were not musicians signed to a major label with management to sort out their affairs and take care of everything, from arranging photo shoots to making sure records were mastered and cut properly - the main burden of running the business that was The KLF fell upon their shoulders. The fact that Drummond had driven up to collect the dead sheep himself on the day of the Brits was symbolic of how much hard work he put into oiling the wheels of the KLF machine. The core of The KLF who got things done involved Cressida – very much a power behind the Cauty throne - Sallie Fellowes, Mick Houghton and Scott Piering. Gimpo was also involved to some degree, but apart from a few other friends that was it. There had also been the stress and uncertainly surrounding the collapse of Rough Trade Distribution, which led to worries as to exactly how much of the money owed they would eventually receive, as well as the basic day-to-day administration involved in booking recording studios, paying musicians, making sure that records were pressed and sleeves printed, as well as the logistics involved in setting up and editing expansive video shoots. At the end of the day, whilst Bill Butt would direct the videos, Drummond and Cauty still had to view and approve the final edit as it was their label, as well as listen to and approve final mixes of songs and remixes.
In addition to this, success in America led to another problem with Wanda Dee, whose husband Eric Floyd arranged a club tour of the US in late 1991 which included the name The KLF in the billing. Whilst the settlement with Dee over the use of her sampled voice on What Time Is Love? and Last Train To Trancentral had given her songwriting credits – which also applied to the tracks appearing on The White Room LP – there was certainly no permission asked for or given to Dee to tour as The KLF, or use their music as backing tracks for performance. Drummond and Cauty contacted Clive Davis at Arista in America in an attempt to stop Dee touring, and may have put the matter into the hands of their solicitor, but she would continue to tour America, and worldwide, deploying the KLF name, which, in the world that she and Eric Floyd inhabited, meant, at that time, the Kinky Love Force. Of course, Drummond and Cauty could have solved this particular problem by taking The KLF out onto the road themselves, but, despite having a willing core company of players – Nick Coler, Errol Nicholson, Maxine Harvey, Azat Bello, Ricardo Lyte, Tony Thorpe and Cressida – and a number of lucrative offers, this was simply something that they had no appetite for.
After Cauty had drawn a line under that final session at Marcus Studio, he and Drummond probably got together to discuss the present situation, as well as their future together. As a two-man partnership there had never been – it is believed – any great tension or artistic differences between them. Both stated in interviews that they enjoyed working together, and when they were not working together they did their own thing with partners, family and friends, rather than go to clubs and gigs or hoover up mountains of cocaine. They were, after all, both married men in their late thirties, although the unravelling of Drummond’s marriage at this time must have contributed to the amount of stress and pressure that he was under. Lyrics from the unreleased track 38, concerned with losing control among other things, probably summed up his feelings at the time.
“The KLF have left the music business,” stated Scott Piering at the end of the Brits performance, and Drummond and Cauty now decided to make this official. To this effect they sat down and drafted a statement, then Drummond rang Mick Houghton. “When he actually told me, he read the statement out, it was quite a shock, because even though I could see it coming I thought it was just that they were both mentally and physically exhausted,” Houghton told Select magazine, “and to hear that statement… Bill told me that was it, we’re not going to exist anymore, we’re deleting the records. There’s a finality to it.”
The statement was not just released to the press but placed in full-page advertisements in the major music weeklies. It was, in some respects, a harking back to the letter Drummond had written when leaving Warner Brothers, when he had started out on this journey, “There is a mountain to climb the hard way, and I want to see the world from the top.” He’d certainly achieved his aim, but now it was time to descend from the summit.
“We have been following a wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path these past five years. The last two of which have led us up onto the commercial high ground - we are at a point now where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what. For the foreseeable future there will be no further record releases from The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, The Timelords, The JAMs, The KLF and any other past, present and future name attached to our activities. As of now all our past releases are deleted. Our P.O. Box will be open for correspondence. Our fax machine will remain switched on and our answerphone ready to record. From time to time these may be responded to. We would like to thank everybody (Friends and enemies alike) that have played a part on our journey (so far). If we meet further along be prepared… our disguise may be complete. In the meantime, the dark dip beckons. There is no further information. Rockman Rock and Kingboy D.”
Fittingly it was Scott Piering who went into the KLF office to change the answerphone message to “This is the last recorded announcement from KLF Communications. Listen carefully, because it’s the only and the last statement that will be made. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty have left the music business. This answering machine and the KLF fax number will be operative for one month only from 13th May 1992. Do not expect a response, but all essential matters will be responded to. That’s it.”
It’s the nature of the music business that bands split up, but no band had announced their departure in such a high profile manner at the peak of their commercial success, and stated that they were going to delete their back catalogue into the bargain. This was a bit of a jolt to Extreme Noise Terror, who were awaiting a call to go back into the studio to carry on with The Black Room. A few days later they began to worry about the £7,500 owed to them by The KLF. Presumably this payment would have been one of the “essential matters” that would be dealt with, one assumes, by Sallie Fellowes.
The news was widely reported in the music and mainstream press, and even got into The Sun. Beginning to establish a solo career, and working in Denmark on a track with Dr. Baker, Ricardo Lyte was even asked for his opinion on the demise of The KLF by a local journalist, although he had no real insight, “You never know. People can just believe what they want.” Drummond and Cauty wisely removed themselves from the equation and flew off to Mexico. They did not announce whether it was to check out ancient Mayan temples or just drink lots and lots of tequila.