THE KLF - THE WHITE ROOM @ 30

 

Thirty years ago today, on March 4th, 1991, The KLF released their second and final album, The White Room. It was the culmination of four years of work which began on January 1st, 1987, when founding band member, Bill Drummond, was possessed by the notion that he must create an Illuminati inspired hip-hop band to be called, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (The JAMs). Drummond quickly recruited Jimmy Cauty, whom he knew from managing his band, to be his partner in art-crime and the duo set about concocting the ultimate pop-music heist, stealing the charts in the early 1990s before disappearing in a hail of fake bullets, dead sheep and a cloud of smoke from a million burnt one pound notes.

After two albums and a few singles under The JAMs moniker, the project morphed into The KLF (Kopyright Liberation Front). The White Room album then began as a film project in 1989, funded by the money made by the group’s one-off alter-ego, The Timelords, and their smash #1 hit single, Doctorin’ the Tardis. The idea was to do a road movie with an accompanying soundtrack. Rough versions of both were produced (and subsequently bootlegged over the ensuing years), but before the project could be properly completed, funds ran out and an attempt to refill their coffers from another hit single failed when that single tanked on the charts and didn’t generate sufficient sales. With the project at a standstill, the duo regrouped and came up with an entirely new concept for an album when they started releasing singles in a style they dubbed “Stadium House”. This involved taking songs from the soundtrack, re-recording elements and adding rap vocals with cheering crowd sounds to emulate live performances. The results became instant hits in the club circuit and soon on radio. Accompanying videos also received heavy rotation on the MTV channels and, once the album was completed, it became a world wide hit.

The KLF were, all the while, also working on a conceptual level that went far beyond making hit records. They were actively and self-consciously creating a mythology around themselves, integrating arcane symbolism and conspiracy theories into their lyrics, advertising and graphics. This wasn’t the kind of anti-intellectual nonsense that gets passed off as “conspiracy” now in the age of QAnon. This was something that drew from a deep well of cultural symbolism and they expertly wove those ideas into their works while simultaneously treating the music industry as a bank vault and their career as the ultimate heist. It had the spirit of a grand prank while maintaining its internal artistic integrity. They climbed the mountain of success and popularity and then jumped off when everyone expected them to keep suckling the pop music cash-cow. They undermined the corporate capitalist value system and then stuck to their guns, only emerging again 23 years after their demise to survey the landscape of the dark ages they’d predicted.

Since the beginning of this year, The KLF have begun to reissue some of their catalogue which was deleted upon their retirement in 1992. The White Room, as yet, remains in the this deleted state, though one can hope to see a reissue, in some form, in recognition of its status, sometime soon. It’s an album that encapsulates a short, yet vital career that redefined what it meant to have hit singles and success on the pop charts and brought a raft of unusual ideas into the mainstream consciousness.