The KLF

The KLF (also known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, the JAMs, the Timelords and other names) are a British electronic band who originated in Liverpool and London in the late 1980s. Scottish musician Bill Drummond (alias King Boy D) and English musician Jimmy Cauty (alias Rockman Rock) began by releasing hip hop-inspired and sample-heavy records as the JAMs. As the Timelords, they recorded the UK Singles Chart number-one single "Doctorin' the Tardis", and documented the process of making a hit record in a book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way). As the KLF, Drummond and Cauty pioneered stadium house (rave music with a pop-rock production and sampled crowd noise) and, with their 1990 LP Chill Out, the ambient house genre. The KLF released a series of international hits on their own KLF Communications record label and became the biggest selling singles act in the world in 1991.

From the outset, the KLF adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, making anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of cryptic advertisements in New Musical Express (NME) and the mainstream press, as well as unusual performances on Top of the Pops. In collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror at the BRIT Awards in February 1992, they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance pre-announced the KLF's departure from the music business and, in May of that year, they deleted their entire back-catalogue. Drummond and Cauty established the K Foundation and sought to subvert the art world, staging an alternative art award for the Worst Artist of the Year, and burning one million pounds sterling (approximately £2.35m or €2.75m as of 2022).

The duo have released a small number of new tracks since 1992, as the K Foundation, the One World Orchestra, and in 1997, as 2K. Drummond and Cauty reappeared in 2017 as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, releasing the novel 2023, and rebooting an earlier campaign to build a "People's Pyramid". In January 2021, the band began uploading their previously deleted catalogue onto streaming services, in compilations.

Bill Drummond was an established figure within the British music industry, having co-founded Zoo Records, played guitar in the Liverpool band Big in Japan, and worked as manager of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes. Artist and musician Jimmy Cauty was the guitarist in the three-piece Brilliant – an act that Drummond had signed to WEA Records and managed.

In July 1986, Drummond resigned from his position as an A&R man at record label WEA, citing that he was nearly 33⅓ years old (33⅓ revolutions per minute being the speed at which a vinyl LP revolves), and that it was "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". In the same year he released a solo LP, The Man. Drummond intended to focus on writing books once The Man had been issued but, as he recalled in 1990, "That only lasted three months, until I had an[other] idea for a record and got dragged back into it all". Recalling that moment in a later interview, Drummond said that the plan came to him in an instant: he would form a hip-hop band with former colleague Cauty, and they would be called the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu:

Early in 1987, Drummond and Cauty's collaborations began. They assumed alter egos – King Boy D and Rockman Rock respectively – and adopted the name the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the JAMs), after the fictional conspiratorial group "The Justified Ancients of Mummu" from The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The JAMs' primary instrument was the digital sampler with which they would plagiarise the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms and overlaid with Drummond's raps, of social commentary, esoteric metaphors and mockery.

The JAMs' debut single "All You Need Is Love" dealt with the media coverage given to AIDS, sampling heavily from the Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" and Samantha Fox's "Touch Me (I Want Your Body)". Although it was declined by distributors fearful of prosecution, and threatened with lawsuits, copies of the one-sided white label 12" were sent to the music press; it received positive reviews and was made "single of the week" in Sounds. A later piece in the same magazine called the JAMs "the hottest, most exhilarating band this year .... It's hard to understand what it feels like to come across something you believe to be totally new; I have never been so wholeheartedly convinced that a band are so good and exciting."

The JAMs re-edited and re-released "All You Need Is Love" in May 1987, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples; lyrics from the song appeared as promotional graffiti, defacing selected billboards. The re-release rewarded the JAMs with praise (including NME 's "single of the week") and the funds necessary to record their debut album. The album, 1987 (What the F**k Is Going On?), was released in June 1987. Included was a song called "The Queen and I", which sampled the ABBA single "Dancing Queen". After a legal showdown with ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, the 1987 album was forcibly withdrawn from sale. Drummond and Cauty travelled to Sweden in hope of meeting ABBA and coming to some agreement, taking an NME journalist and photographer with them, along with most of the remaining copies of the LP. They failed to meet ABBA, who they didn't realize already lived in Britain at the time, so they disposed of the copies by burning most of them in a field and throwing the rest overboard on the North Sea ferry trip home. In a December 1987 interview, Cauty maintained that they "felt that what [they]'d done was artistically justified."

Two new singles followed on the JAMs' "KLF Communications" independent record label. Both reflected a shift towards house rhythms. According to NME, the JAMs' choice of samples for the first of these, "Whitney Joins the JAMs" saw them leaving behind their strategy of "collision course" to "move straight onto the art of super selective theft". The song uses samples of the Mission: Impossible and Shaft themes alongside Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance with Somebody". Drummond has claimed that the KLF were later offered the job of producing or remixing a new Whitney Houston album as an inducement from her record label boss (Clive Davis of Arista Records) to sign with them. The second single in this sequence – Drummond and Cauty's third and final single of 1987 – was "Down Town", a dance record built around a gospel choir and "Downtown" by 1960s star Petula Clark, with lyrics that commented on poverty and homelessness. These early works were later collected on the compilation album Shag Times.

A second album, Who Killed the JAMs?, was released in early 1988. Who Killed the JAMs? earned the duo a five-star review from Sounds magazine, who called it "a masterpiece of pathos".

In 1988, Drummond and Cauty released a 'novelty' pop single, "Doctorin' the Tardis" as the Timelords. The song is predominantly a mash-up of the Doctor Who theme music, "Block Buster!" by Sweet and Gary Glitter's "Rock and Roll (Part Two)".

Credited on the record was "Ford Timelord" (Cauty's 1968 Ford Galaxie American police car), "Lord Rock" (Cauty), and "Time Boy" (Drummond). The Timelords claimed that Ford Timelord was the "Talent" in the band and had given them instructions on how to make the record; Ford fronted the promotional campaign for the single and was "interviewed" on TV. The car would later be banger raced at Swaffham Raceway in 1991.

They later portrayed the song as the result of a deliberate effort to write a number one hit single. In interviews with Snub TV and BBC Radio 1, Drummond said that they had intended to make a house record using the Doctor Who theme. After Cauty had laid down a basic track, Drummond observed that their house idea wasn't working and what they actually had was a Glitter beat. Sensing the opportunity to make a commercial pop record they went instead for the lowest common denominator. According to the British music press, the result was "rancid", "pure, unadulterated agony" and "excruciating" and from Sounds "a record so noxious that a top ten place can be its only destiny". A single of the Timelords' remixes of the song was released: "Gary Joins the JAMs" featured original vocal contributions from Glitter, who also appeared on Top of the Pops to promote the song with the Timelords. "Doctorin' the Tardis" sold over one million copies.

The Timelords released one other product, a 1989 book called The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), a step-by-step guide to achieving a number one hit single with little money or talent.

By the time the JAMs' single "Whitney Joins the JAMs" was released in September 1987, their record label had been renamed "KLF Communications" (from the earlier The Sound of Mu(sic)). The duo's first release as the KLF was in March 1988, with the single "Burn the Bastards"/"Burn the Beat" (KLF 002). Although the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu name was not retired, most future Drummond and Cauty releases went under the name "The KLF".

The name change accompanied a change in Drummond and Cauty's musical direction. As 'King Boy D', Drummond said in January 1988, "We might put out a couple of 12" records under the name The K.L.F., these will be rap free just pure dance music, so don't expect to see them reviewed in the music papers". King Boy D also said that he and Rockman Rock were "pissed off at [them]selves" for letting "people expect us to lead some sort of crusade for sampling." In 1990, he recalled that "We wanted to make [as the KLF] something that was... pure dance music, without any reference points, without any nod to the history of rock and roll. It was the type of music that by early '87 was really exciting me... [although] we weren't able to get our first KLF records out until late '88."