It’s probably about lunch time. Which bits of the following you choose to believe is entirely up to you. I’m not even sure how much of it I believe, in truth I don’t much care.
Either way, twenty years ago the KLF brought the curtain down on a relatively short career thumbing the noses of mainstream pop; sometimes from the outside, sometimes from within. Although which side is which, only Sir Cliff will know.
The end came shortly after they fired blanks from a machine gun out over the head of the assembled schmoozers and liggers in the Brit Award audience. If you believe Piers Morgan, which obviously everyone does, wholeheartedly, this was “a stunt that backfired”. Given they soon ceased to ‘exist’, Piers was undoubtedly right. Unless they did it on purpose, of course. Which they might have done. Or not.
The real stunt was due to be a sheep, or rather the liberation of the entrails from a dead sheep that were then to be flung to the far corners of the Brit Awaudience. Legend, or rather Select Magazine’s William Shaw, would have us believe that Ipswich’s vegan guitar murderers, Extreme Noise Terror, were actually responsible for the bloody debacle being dropped. With fresh reason and perspective Jimmy and Bill replaced the dead sheep hurling with machine gun fire and the fluffy cadaver next turned up in the foyer of the Lancaster Gate Hotel.
As if mirroring this blood-letting Simply Red had the audacity to share the KLF’s ‘Best Group’ Brit Award and, as if in protest, the boys left pop citing, among other things, ‘woman trouble’ and varying degrees of madness and disillusionment.
While that was pretty much the end for the band as we know it, it was nowhere near the end (nor indeed the start) of the impact these chaps would have on me. Four years earlier I’d first clapped ears on a track called ‘What Time Is Love’. It was gentle but throbbing, it MooMoo’d, it burbled around a little but, as nice as it was, it had no urgency and lacked a little something.
It was a small disappointment because I knew it to be the work of the JAMMs. The JAMMs had inspired with a catalogue of run-ins with the music rozzers, the BPI, for (mis)appropriating other people’s music. Hello Whitney, hello Petula. After chuckling at chops and cuts and scratches that ranged from the sublime (Shaft) to the ridiculous (Samantha Fox), I, like everyone else, was blasted in the face with a more refined yet almost equally as stolen sound from the same people. Gone were the blatant and deliberate samples, in their place a not-very-subtle nod and a wink at, if not quite a direct interpolation of, Gary Glitter – well, the Glitterband having been forcibly and roughly taken from behind by Mark Moore anyway.
The Ford Galaxie of The Timelords arrived and swiftly went, The Manual told us how we might replicate this simple number one adventure by following their 78 page dictum. And, puff, they were gone again. Damn the JAMMs, damn the Timelords, no sooner had they arrived than they left.
They didn’t leave, they evolved again. They wrote ‘What Time Is Love (Pure Trance 1)’ and invented ambient house. And, as I said, I was a bit indifferent to it. Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond had only gone and grown up, yeah, and only went and invented a musical genre all by themselves. Some hippies liked it, much string was purchased to attach to many dogs to stop them from running away from the damp field in which their owners had set up camp. When you consider they’d had been busy ‘promoting’ a number one hit record in a battered cop car and photocopying ‘The Manual’, it’s a wonder they had time to record the original version of their “Three Note Warhorse Of A Signature Tune”.
Jimmy and Bill became swiftly bored with adulthood and chillout rooms and decided to go clubbing properly instead. ‘What Time Is Love – Live At Trancentral’ insisted, in the very strongest of terms from the very first listen, that I kick out the JAMMs. Muthafucker! It immediately grabbed me by the bollocks and insisted I dance with it. This was an upgrade of the highest order. What time is love? Well, now! The throbbing, bubbling bassline had been embellished with a crisp rap, the MooMoos intensified and the bpm was, seemingly, ramped up a notch, although I suspect actually not. The acidic squelches perfectly married to the bubbling and the affected moos took the dancer to new heights and delights as yet unheard of while raving unaided.
My love had already been turned around and my body jacked but THIS was what house music was supposed to be like. Now was very much the time for love. 22 years later the five and half a minutes of dance pop genius that is ‘What Time Is Love (Live At Trancentral)’ is, for me, yet to be beaten. It may not have the rampant bpm of its various offspring and grandchildren today but it still has a freshness that belies its age. In ‘19’ Bill Drummond said (I paraphrase) music stopped when ‘Strawberry Fields’ was released, nothing has been better since. He was wrong, and he helped create the song that is.
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