The KLF - 'Chill Out'
No. 17 in our Top 100 Electronica Albums of the 1990s
“K!” “L!” “F!” “Uh-hun-uh!” “Uh-hun!” “Uh-hun!” Bee-boop! Boo-beep!
The KLF (or Kopyright Liberation Front) were the ultimate rebel act. Post-punk pranksters Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond gleefully tweaked MTV and corporate expectations of their insanely popular sound. They took the anarchic punk ethic far beyond its rock origins, embracing dance rhythms and prog rock, ripping off samples in broad daylight and often getting away with it. Their exploits are legendary and their music mythic. And rave was the ultimate arena for their far-out, brave new sound.
In his essential history of the UK acid house movement, Altered State, the writer, historian and journeyman, Matthew Collin, captured the energy flash of 1988 and 1989 better than anyone, describing a series of summer outdoor events — “festivals” — that took the people higher and higher. Back to the Future. Sunrise. The images just flow in a kind of liquid effortless ease straight from his electrified memory: “the girls in baby rompers, the teens in track pants,” he writes, archetypes, “the cowboys and the superheroes and the dreads and the bad boys, the girl in the silver sci-fi makeup and the man flailing and hopping on crutches, the groups of three or four stepping in unison as if telepathically linked together.” Visions that birth the truest of artists.
Enter Cauty, who had already long walked in the dreams of the mythic, drawing fantastical images of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth when he was only 17 for the Athena retail chain, its bronzed, filigreed lines and tones of Gandalf, Frodo, Bilbo, and Gollum spanning the bedroom walls of teens, the lava-lamp dens of stoners and D&D game masters across the globe — “A guy from Athena actually flew in a helicopter to my house to get the poster and gave me £500 and 12 per cent royalties,” he recalled, “which I thought was an absolute fortune ‘cos I was on the dole.” Myths, indeed.
“Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty hijacked pop in the 1980s and ‘90s with outlandish antics involving lasers, house music, a Viking longship and a million-pound bonfire,” The Guardian’s Andrew Harrison fondly recalled a quarter century later. Cauty and Drummond, a former manager of Echo & the Bunnymen, had met in the UK music scene when Drummond saw and signed Cauty’s band Brilliant to Warner-Elektra-Atlantic Records in 1984. As Brilliant foundered and Drummond meandered, the puckish duo teamed up after Drummond had a vision to create a hip-hop record inspired by The Illuminatus! Trilogy, an absurdist trip about chaos and freedom.
Performing at England’s Helter Skelter rave in outdoor Oxfordshire in 1989, they demanded their pay upfront and then showered the crowd with one-pound notes, each scribbled with “Children we love you!” Voted the Best British Group by BPI‘s annual BRIT Awards in 1992, they fired blanks at the audience of a London awards ceremony and delivered a sheep carcass and eight gallons of blood to the hotel lobby of the after-party. And in 1994, they reportedly made the largest cash withdrawal in UK history at the time, nailing 1,000,000 pounds to a board. They then burned their Nailed to the Wall art piece and its massive cash sum on the island of Jura in the presence of a journalist and cameraman — celebrated as true agents of chaos.
“Drummond and Cauty stole from the Beatles and Abba, then sneaked illegal-rave culture on to Top of the Pops. They memorably hijacked the 1992 Brit awards, as a symbolic massacre-suicide for the entire music industry. In using and abusing graffiti and money as contestable art objects, they anticipated the work of Damien Hirst and Banksy,” Harrison writes. “The raw material of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s esoteric Illuminatus! trilogy fed into their alter egos, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.”
From Beowulf to Meow Wolf, one can perceive a long lineage from the pagan rites animating the pre-Christian world to the art-raves and the immersive 3D interactions articulating our techno-future destiny. As Harrison illustrated, The KLF tapped into something deeper and more timeless — the mythic and the ecstatic. “People kept asking us to come to their countries, to explain, to do interviews,” they said. “We thought it was easier if we brought them to our world.” Their world? Madness.
“It was in a bombed-out Victorian mansion with a police car in the front garden,” remembered Mark “Spike” Stent of their Trancentral studio in South London. Stent, who became their sound engineer, described Cauty as “literally a musical genius.” “I walked up railway sleepers to get into the front door, and when I went upstairs for a pee, I could see right through the floor into the kitchen,” he told Harrison. “It wasn’t anything like a studio but they were brilliant to work with, total anti-pop stars. Their energy was always good. It was: we can do what the fuck we want. And in all the madness there was a genius pop sensibility going on.” Shocks from the future.
If Cauty was the musical genius, then Drummond was the voluble visionary. He provided the framework, starting with his Illuminatus! obsession and their band’s first name, Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who are a secret society of “Discordian” rebels fighting the Illuminati in the conspiracy fiction classic. The KLF’s logo — a pyramid-and-ghettoblaster design — was inspired by the pyramid and eye of Illuminatus! Drummond, a Scotsman who loved the outdoors, loved mythology in general, doubtless one of the bases of his friendship with Cauty, once a Tolkien artist.
Busy and overflowing, The KLF’s imagination was jammed with ur-geek bibles exploding through time. As their first UK #1 hit ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ as The Timelords demonstrated, they were one of the first acts to crack the core pop culture DNA of the English people, using the Doctor Who theme, Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll (Part Two)’ and Sweet’s ‘Block Buster!’ to make the suspect cool. No wonder that they found inspiration in John Landis’ comedy classic, The Blues Brothers — John Belushi’s “Joliet” Jake Blues and his brother Elwood, played by Dan Akroyd, going on an adventure of redemption to save an orphanage, on “a mission from God,” their Bluesmobile chased by neo-Nazis and the police. What they called Zenarchy.*
The Face’s brief report on one of their Jura excursions — titled “Pagan Nights,” documented an outdoor rave thrown by The KLF with yellow robes and Drummond setting a giant tall wicker man aflame. Ahem, Burning Man anyone? Photographed by Paul Graham, the photos captured a clash of the ancient with the Justified Ancients. It’s combustion — fire — in all its forms. Sonic and cultural — a vision perhaps best seen nowadays in their inventive, hilarious and exhilarating music videos. An MTV favorite, on constant rotation in the summer of 1991 — their ultra rave-y yet ultra irresistible punk-pop-dance explosion was embodied in their own old, beat-up talismanic cop car à la The Blues Brothers — both the real and toy versions.
Directed by Bill Butt, a longtime collaborator of Drummond’s from his Echo & the Bunnymen days, the Atlas Adventure collection of videos were equal parts toy train set, up-for-it rap and diva extravaganzas and pyrotechnic psychedelic stage shows — a warped commentary on party vibes, heroic humor and perhaps the Gulf War. One can’t fully comprehend their intended meaning and that’s the point. Answering the walkie-talkie raps and button beeps of Ricardo Da Force and M.C. Bello, with the soulful hollers and soprano of P.P. Arnold and Maxine Harvey, and the ensemble Children of the Revolution from “Live at Trancentral” and the “Lost Continent”…
The two brothers from Mu Mu in trench coats, sometimes hooded, sometimes a blowing wind in Cauty’s hair, sunglasses on, sometimes not, sparks spewing from grinding saws or spraying from their bass guitars — “Bem-bem! Bumm-bem-bam!” — vamping the strings — “Chunh! Chaannh! Chunh!” — spiritual peaks of clarinet by Duy Khiem and drum breaks and grooves by Tony Thorpe AKA Moody Boyz, ally of Future Sound of London too, and Lenny Dee, of New York’s hardcore scene: a high frenzy of absolute insanity, somehow as sweet as strawberry wine, culminating in their toy cop car speeding off a broken bridge and then soaring into the sky, spinning and banking, echoing the hilarious 1980 Blues Brothers scene when the Bluesmobile miraculously backflips up into the air while neo-Nazi pursuers fly past them and off an unfinished overpass, before dropped from the Chicago sky. It’s all ridiculous in the best ways.
Still racking up tens of millions of views decades later, The KLF’s trio of ridiculously over-the-top dance anthems — their “Stadium House Trilogy” — ‘What Time Is Love?,’ ‘3 A.M. Eternal’ and ‘Last Train to Trancentral’ took the world by storm and smashed the pop charts from 1990 to 1991. But like the Bluesmobile backflip, they once again flipped the script. The album these singles are featured on, The White Room, is not their masterpiece. Right before their breakout success, The KLF recorded Chill Out, THE ambient manifesto of the ’90s. It was the blueprint for all chill out albums that would follow, including The Orb‘s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, which Cauty helped kick-start and also drew ideas from, including their ambient Space album.
That is, they had a different myth in mind. Based on travelogue recordings from a fictitious road trip along North America’s Gulf Coast — including birds, trains and radio news of a deadly drag race — it was if they were turning the dial on the car stereo from the classic rock stations on one end of the radio band to the forgotten country blues of backwater towns at the other, while catching flashes of lightning from a mystic storm that ripped holes in the spacetime continuum. Was it sleight of hand? In an interview with Snub TV in 1989, as ever, Cauty drew the finest of fine lines, the ambiguity of ambient perhaps a glimmer in his eye, decoding the pop industry.
Was The KLF just a giant scam? “Well, there is that idea,” he told the interviewer. “That’s because of the things we do. But we don’t plan it like that. It’s just the media think we’re out to get them. In fact, we’re not, really.” As he said the last part, Cauty smirked and looked directly into the camera for a pause, his eyes twinkling. “How about the car? I mean, that’s just such a piss-take, isn’t it?” asked the interviewer. “The police car?” answered Cauty. “It’s actually my car. It’s the car I always drive around in.” “Yes, I know,” she said, “but making, making the car a character…?”
“Oh yeah, yeah, saying the car was fronting the record?” he offered back. “That’s because me and Bill were too embarrassed to front the record. But it sort of backfired on us a bit.” The KLF laughed. “The media hated the idea that, uh, we were saying a car could make a record. They just wouldn’t go for it.” Drummond seconded, “They didn’t believe us.” Was everything a joke? No, not quite. It was simply that The KLF practiced a persistent art-stance. Everything was art. So in many ways, Chill Out couldn’t be more different from The White Room; and yet, they were really just different sides of the same head trip, one going round and round and round.
In fact, it started off as the soundtrack to a trippy KLF road movie, titled The White Room: “The Justified Ancients of Mu, Kingboy D and Rockman Rock, try to find and gain access to the mystical White Room,” goes the film’s description on Vimeo. “They leave a party at their house and drive in their 1968 U.S. Cop Car through night-time London and the dusty plains of the Sierra Nevada region of Spain. There they face judgement: will they be allowed to enter the White Room? Meanwhile, their lawyer David Franks tries to find a loophole to free them from their contract with Eternity.”
“As we were recording the soundtrack of the movie, we were getting rid of more drum sounds and ended up with all this ambient material,” they explained to Street Sound. “So we decided to put it all together on one album. It was a combination of doing the soundtrack, the environmental and ambient tracks, with the remixes, that formed the Chill Out album. It was a work in progress, never completely through.” And the movie itself? “We just drive and we drive and we drive and we drive. That’s all it is. It’s that feeling. Endless. Endless driving. Until we get there.” … up into the mountain snow.
So Chill Out was a dreamy byproduct of their art film ambitions, a super psychedelic twin to their more direct assault on pop music. While 1992’s The White Room album flipped the script on mainstream platforms, from pop radio to Music Television, Chill Out was a more fluid and genuine snapshot of the two masters at work. It channeled everything from Elvis Presley and country music to Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac. Recorded live, it eases the listener into a swamp of fussy and serene sounds, all adhering to a hidden logic frequented by strikes of intense revelation, and awe.
Pink Floyd’s ‘Echoes’ and 808 State‘s ‘Pacific State’ mingle on ‘The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By’ while the steel guitar strums of ‘Madrugada Eterna’ map a lonesome bliss amid sleepy freight trains. ‘Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard’ builds to the joyful symphonic refrains of their later hit ‘Last Train to Trancentral,’ sounding like acid house casked in the Deep South. What makes Chill Out such a timeless album is Cauty and Drummond’s flawless instincts for peace and mayhem. They mellow you out and wake you up at the same time. And their wicked sense of humor and wide-eyed experimentation buoy a world-weary yeehaw that suffuses the whole affair.
"We always try to think of an alternative to an ordinary live show and for one party we played, Energy at the Brixton Academy, we wanted to build a hill on the stage, cover it with turf, put a fence around it and let five sheep with The KLF painted on their sides roam around it while we played a track through the PA,” Drummond described of the bigger ambitions for Chill Out to Melody Maker in 1990. “We thought, Yeah, this is it, this is the future of rock ‘n’ roll. But Lambeth Council refused to let us have live animals onstage.” As ever, Drummond’s ideas dared to conjure the impossible.
In 1992, The KLF voluntarily bowed out of the pop limelight. Despite subsequent projects and one-offs, they mostly stayed silent on the music front. Though finally in 2021, they returned to the fray — releasing much of their catalog of rarities and wild-eyed experiments for the streaming age. The world took note. Would something else come of this? — "From these truths, rumors and half-truths, you can form your own opinions,” read a statement on their Solid State Logik page. "The actual facts were washed down a storm drain in Brixton some time in the late 20th Century."
But from 1992 to the present, their subversive acts have never truly seized. In 1996, for example, Cauty faced a lawsuit from a farmer who claimed Cauty’s outdoor sound experiments were so loud they traumatized his cows. Cauty was apparently testing a custom-built “audio weapon system.” With KLF Communications’ “Samplecity Thru Trancentral,” it was like stepping back through time with the odd sensation that nothing really has changed. Here was a group that captured the surrealistic exaggerations and extremes of the techno age, but with merciless humor…
And it must be said, even poignancy, always poignancy — a kind of compassion. Cultural upheaval often on his mind, in 2016, Cauty unveiled a sprawling and richly detailed artwork, The Aftermath Dislocation Principle, a miniature town in the after-throes of a mysterious cataclysm, perhaps social, perhaps environmental. Touring riot sites across England, the model village was filled with policemen in green vests, at a Burger King, a Chicken Cottage joint, along roadways, in empty lots, in city squares, and of course, crowding at the edge of a collapsed overpass. “ADP” was a bridge.
Something important had happened here. All the intensity, madness, and chaos in 1991 needed a counterpoint. Cauty, who described himself to The Guardian’s Amy Fleming as an “outsider artist,” cutting “a quiet, humble figure in a raver’s bucket hat,” explained to her why he stopped making music after The KLF’s massive success — “I woke up one morning in 1992 and it had gone, flown out the window,” he said. “I don’t care about it. I know how to do it, I’m actually quite good at it, but I’ve expressed myself fully. I do other things instead.” The KLF were artists, not just a pop act.**
With an album that chronicled an imagined adventure through the birthplace of American and thus global blues, Chill Out was a landscape of freedom that reflected Cauty and Drummond’s dream of the endless — a place filled with peace and perhaps even kindness. His “apocalyptic, post-riot townscape” of dislocation echoed the “Lost Continent” and “Trancentral” models he made for The KLF’s “stadium house” music videos. A quarter century later, however, 2016 felt a long way from 1991. Or did it? Ford Timelord, the name for their cop car, provides a clue. A backflip, an escape.
Watching their re-minted music videos on YouTube, ‘3 A.M. Eternal,’ ‘Last Train to Trancentral’ and ‘What Time Is Love?,’ reminds one that the rave generation was on fire, and of just how wild and off-their-rockers The KLF were, like the Blues Brothers road-tripping through the acid sunrise of a future love paradise. Which goes to show once again, while Chill Out aims to soothe, the chaps behind it were anything but chill in the head. They were one with the times and a brighter future still to come.***
And yet they ran counter at the same time. The KLF never compromised in their liberation of mind, body and soul. Everything went so fast in the techno age that being a raver was like living in a cartoon. The KLF, two of the pilots of that revolution, turned off a big swamp and onto a hallucinatory highway. Slow down, they seemed to say — chill out! — and on the long road ahead, drive for the dawn.
Track Listing:
1. Brownsville Turnaround on the Tex-Mex Border
2. Pulling Out of Ricardo and the Dusk Is Falling Fast
3. Six Hours to Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold
4. Dream Time in Lake Jackson
5. Madrugada Eterna
6. Justified and Ancient Seems a Long Time Ago
7. Elvis on the Radio, Steel Guitar in My Soul
8. 3AM Somewhere Out of Beaumont
9. Wichita Lineman Was a Song I Once Heard
10. Trancentral Lost in My Mind
11. The Lights of Baton Rouge Pass By
12. A Melody from a Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back
13. Rock Radio Into the Nineties and Beyond
14. Alone Again with the Dawn Coming Up
*Drummond described Zenarchy’s meaning to Roy Wilkinson for Sounds in 1990: “Zenarchy is Zen without the discipline, my excuse for a philosophy. Although really, it’s just a word that sounded good. I’m kind of resigned to the fact that Jimmy and I will continue to start things, won't finish them and then maybe finish them some time later on. There’ll come a time when what we’ve been doing finishes naturally. Then I’ll get on with the writing."
Or as Simon Reynolds paraphrased in The Observer in 1991: “they’ve been guided only by a loose philosophy that Drummond calls ‘Zenarchy,’ based on improvisation, getting bored quickly, and moving on.”
**One of the “riot” sites that Cauty’s exhibit visited was near Stonehenge, to commemorate the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985: “There was a group of travellers. Stonehenge was their spiritual epicentre and they didn’t know why – they were just drawn there. The police and authorities didn’t know why either, but they had to stop them.” Also, another clearer ADP scene of Cauty’s compassion shows a group of boys crawling up from under a road out of a tunnel outside a children’s prison, a brown doggy either greeting them as they climb out, or sounding the alarm.
In 1992, for Select, the journalist William Shaw, described The KLF HQ in great detail, even excavating “an eleven-page treatment for the aborted The White Room film, in Bill's scrawled upper case…The script is about a search for an unobtainable white room, and there are complicated references to a film within a film.” Very KLF…
“It doesn’t make much sense at all. On one page, Drummond has written, ‘Scene where we came across a beautiful but decomposing eagle by the side of the road. Nobody else would go near it. It stank. King Boy (Drummond) insisted on being filmed with it. As he strode down a one track rail like the significance of this at the time could not be argued. Meaningless. But dramatic.’”
Shaw captures the “retirement” of The KLF from the music industry in great detail and rather poetically encapsulates their wild, legendary run in Zenarchist terms — “Dead eagles and dead sheep,” Shaw wrote. “King Boy D and Rockman Rock, AKA Lord Rock and Time Boy, AKA The Timelords, AKA The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, AKA The JAMS, AKA The KLF AKA The Kopyright Liberation Front, AKA The Fall, AKA The Forever Ancients Liberation Loophole, AKA Disco 2000…”
And concluding with the overall feeling of Chill Out and Ford Timelord and The Blues Brothers: “all driving off together into a typically Western sunset, in the most perfect end ever conceived for a group. Significance? Probably meaningless. But like Cauty’s deceased eagle, decidedly dramatic. For the very last spectacularly insane time, The KLF have done what was least expected of them.”
***It is worth noting here in a bit more detail how The KLF fed off the great tension between the underground and the mainstream. That was their genius, pointing at both but doing seemingly pointless yet irresistibly interesting or attractive things: like their initial run of dance singles as The KLF, the earlier more underground versions of their “Stadium House Trilogy,” released as “Pure Trance” rave tracks.
The three immortalized the arc of a rave night, the build up (‘What Time Is Love?’), the climax comedown (‘3AM Eternal’) and the “taking it home” denouement (‘Last Train to Trancentral’), all released from 1988 to 1989, two years before The White Room. And Chill Out was the afterglow at sunrise, on the road, going home? And turning on the radio, Tammy Wynette singing righteous ‘Justified & Ancients.’
In 2017, as they promised when they bowed out of the pop music industry, they “returned” together 23 seconds after midnight in their KLF ice cream truck, kicking off a series of art events and book signing their dystopian, art-associative, head trip “Trilogy” — “2023” — elevating confusion and revolution.
Ever determined to defy easy definition, they have yet to ever do anything expected but the unexpected, living up to the “weirdo” reputation the New Musical Express’ Roger Morton said was being branded on them in 1991.
“Yeah, well, that’s just something we’ve got to cope with,” Cauty answered. “It could be worse … We could be taken as serious musicians.”