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.
