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.
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.
But their controversial pranks are just side acts to their fame. The KLF are best known for their ‘Stadium House Trilogy,’ three ridiculously fun dance anthems that smashed the pop charts in 1990 and 1991: ‘What Time Is Love?,’ ‘3 A.M. Eternal’ and ‘Last Train to Trancentral.’ But the album these singles are featured on, The White Room, is not their masterpiece. Before their breakout success, Cauty and Drummond recorded the classic Chill Out, THE ambient manifesto of the ’90s. It was the blueprint for all chill out albums that followed, especially The Orb‘s Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld, which Cauty would help kick-start.
Instead, 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.
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 told Street Sound in 1991. “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.”
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.
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 heeyah that suffuses the whole affair.
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…
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 the future yet 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 with a dark road ahead, keep your eyes on 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