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Inside The KLF | |
KLFArticle from Sound On Sound, April 1991 |
Mark J. Prendergast looks behind the anonymous front of the KLF, riding high on the success of 'What Time Is Love' and '3am Eternal'.
The connection with the late '60s and early '70s is undoubtedly strong in Ambient House, where the Floyd helped Innocence score a hit single with 'Natural Thing', a track which used David Gilmour's famous guitar golo from 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond'. In fact, for a while the likes of Can, Manuel Gottsching and early Eno were sampling staples for Ambient House DJs.
KLF's Chill Out album came after a year of classic dance 12-inchers like 'What Time Is Love', 'Kylie Said To Jason', '3 AM Eternal' and 'Last Train To Transcentral', with its incredibly wide bass sound. 1989 was the year that KLF immersed themselves in all night House raves. 1990 was the year of coming down, the year of Chill Out, an album of cool washing chicadas and Tex-Mex guitar pulled together by elements of progressive guitar playing and direct quotes from Pink Floyd's Dark Side Of The Moon.
BD: "Chill Out was a live album. It took two days to put together. It was made from a lot of stuff we already had, bits and pieces, but it was kind of jamming, so it was done in real time. Some of the sounds were off LPs, some off tapes — we'd run around having to put an album on there, a tape on here."
JC: "There are no edits on it, and quite a few times we'd get near the end and make a mistake, and so we'd have to go all the way back to the beginning again and set it all up from scratch. It was like spinning plates (laughs). We used two DAT players, a record player, a couple of cassette players and a 12-track, feeding through a mixer and back to a DAT."
BD: "And we'd bounce things from DAT to DAT as we went along. We started Chill Out with 20 minutes of pads and went from there."
Recorded at the mystical Transcentral, Chill Out sounds as conceptually composed as any Eno or Roedelius CD. Transcentral, in fact, is anywhere Cauty sets up his 12-track recorder, his S900, the computer, the Oberheim OB8 and a digital delay.
JC: "When we started we just had one synth. If you've got the least amount of equipment it makes you want to push it to the limit; you have to. By doing that you get something more coming through."
BD: "You get bored with most of the keyboards, most of them sound crap."
JC: "There's about £20,000 worth of keyboards in there, and we just never use them because they all sound horrible."
The subject of Cauty's 'Space' project naturally comes up after Chill Out. At one stage Cauty and one Alex Patterson formed a House group called The Orb, who made an infamous 25 minute track based on Minnie Ripperton's 'Loving You'. When Ambient House became hip they gave interviews together, and played records at The Land Of Oz and Chill Out. An album was mooted, but Patterson pulled out to go back to A&R work at EG. Cauty decided to take the plunge, and out came Space in the Autumn of '90. A grand album of instrumental snatches, it conjured up vast vistas of the outer limits, the American west and space exploration, by combining the 70s sound of Tangerine Dream, Tim Blake and Pink Floyd with snatches of opera, House, and whatever else came to hand.
JC: "That's a record for 14 year-old space cadets who want to take acid for the first time. It all came out in one long process. It was all done on the Oberheim keyboards. There were loads of samples, different bits and pieces chucked in all over the place. There's some really good big-sounding classical bits that have got a really deep sound, and they were all sampled and looped up. I hadn't got anything written, so I just jammed the whole thing. I started on a Monday morning and by Friday it was all done. With Chill Out a lot of the parts we had prepared and mixed and so it was a case of mixing them together in the right way."
In essence what KLF do is subvert the modern myth of high-tech music creation. Via House they have cut through years of industry constipation to come up with a sound very much of today — post-industrial, elegiac, frenetic and at times awesome in its power. The White Room, for its sheer bravado, eclecticism and sonic stylisation, is as innovative as anything coming from the avant-garde. From a different perspective it proves the ubiquitous and democratic nature of today's technology. Anybody with a little money and imagination can now make popular chart-oriented music from their bedrooms.
BD: "You can't help but make House music when you are using computers and samples. The minute you strap on an electric guitar you are playing rock music. House music is always independent, all of it originally comes from independent labels and it's got nothing to do with indie guitar music. It doesn't make a lot of sense to major labels because you can't go and sell bucket-loads of albums or develop somebody's career."
And yet KLF have done it themselves. They profess to only being interested in popular music because they are in the business. Drummond even let it slip that when he has time he will get into classical music — another mature pursuit to add to his fellwalking and bird watching activities. His weekends are devoted to his family in Buckinghamshire. Cauty meanwhile is working on some paintings and a comic strip. In between he fiddles with the Transcentral equipment in his ramshackle South London squat. And sometimes they even re-mix other peoples' records.
BD: "We have been offered quite a few things. We did Depeche Mode's 'Policy of Truth'. We went into a proper studio and remixed it all in one day. We also did the Pet Shop Boys' 'So Hard'. They actually sent us a 48-track mix, and all we had was our 12-track multitrack. We told them for various artistic reasons we had to start again. Jimmy had one listen to a DAT of their mix and we just completely re-recorded the lot. Neil Tennant came down and put down his vocals again, and from those sessions we chose whatever bits and pieces seemed right. It ended up being a complete re-model and remake. It came out as KLF versus the Pet Shop Boys, but in reality it's all a horrible experience. We aren't really re-mixers. We've got too much of our own stuff to be doing."
In truth Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond are not that interested in other peoples' music. They claim to have grown out of it.
"I don't know how these people can stay interested in music for so long. If they were into it in the 1960s and they are still into it, I find that bewildering. We stopped being into it a long time ago", says a smiling Cauty. He continues, "It's just that I don't have time to listen to much other music. We hear things all the time. You go to a club and get inspired by what you hear, or turn the radio on. You can only have so many ideas in your head at any one time and with too much input it can be an overload. Adds Drummond, "Top Of The Pops, chart run-down on TV and radio... You hear enough as it is just going down to the paper shop where there's always something playing on the radio. Neither of us have got big record collections."
KLF don't see themselves ever being involved with a large record company. The initials stand for Kopyright Liberation Front, and derive from the debut JAMs LP where all sampled sounds, including Abba's, were 'liberated' from their copyright restriction. Many credit Cauty and Drummond with inventing this kind of sampling, which wouldn't endear them to record company execs. Cauty just puts it down to artistic freedom and ploughing their own furrow.
BD: "But the rules of the game are still the same, whether you're independent or not. If you want a hit single you still have to be on Radio 1, you still have to be on Top Of The Pops in one form or other. If you are an unknown band and signed to a major label you are at their mercy, especially as they've invested all this money in you."
If you asked many people what KLF look like they would shrug their shoulders. In videos and in public Cauty and Drummond have always preferred to be the anonymous techno-wizzards, fiddling in the background with sequencers as a hired troupe sing 'Last Train To Transcentral' or 'What Time Is Love'. During the recent crop circle and ley line controversy, KLF turned up in photos of the famous natural aberrations. Again the public were confused, and the record sales increased. At the end of the day Cauty and Drummond know instinctively how to sidestep the British music scene. They make enjoyable and stimulating music, harnessing electronics and chance to their best advantage. In an industry fatigued by unimaginative recycling and derivation, KLF are probably a much needed light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.
BD: "There's always a millions things to do. Sometimes we realise we've got a record coming out in two weeks time and we haven't had time to think about the sleeves, the videos or the adverts. To be realistic, up until now we've ploughed everything back into what we are doing so we've always been skint. We don't expect much from this album, I tell you that. It's just getting old stuff out and done!"
Who's kidding who?
FURTHER INFORMATION
For complete KLF discography and other Information write to:
KLF Communications, (Contact Details).
Interview by Mark Prendergast
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