THE JAMS - WHO KILLED THE JAMS? @ 35

Released 35 years ago today, on February 8th, 1988, it’s The JAMs (Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) and their sophomore and final LP, Who Killed the JAMs?. Not that Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond stopped recording, but they’d go forward predominantly as The KLF after a short stint as The Timelords for their Doctorin' The Tardis hit single.

After forming The JAMs to kick off 1987, their debut LP, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) literally went up in flames, with all unsold copies roasted in a bonfire after losing a copyright complaint from ABBA and the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society, who ordered all remaining copies of the album destroyed. After toying with the media by musing about their second album being a heavy metal cover of Deep Purple songs, in the end, the real album followed many of the same paths as the first one, taking samples from popular hits and reworking them into new pieces with drum machines, synths and vocal choruses added. This time around, however, the samples were a bit more stealthily handled in order to avoid legal issues. The cover of the LP shows photos of the burning of the first album with the front long shot showing Jimmy & Bill with the car that would become known as Ford Timelord, who would be credited with composing Doctrorin’ the Tardis. The back cover image is a closeup of the pile of burning LPs.

Though it was not formally announced at the time, the music press, based on the album title and some cryptic comments from the group, assumed this was the swansong for the JAMs and, in a sense, they were correct, though the group would issue the album Shag Times to collect together a number of singles from the era. Upon its release, Who Killed the JAMs? was met with generally favorable critical responses. Melody Maker declared it to be "divine nihilism", "an outward show of self-deception, irrationality and bankruptcy that worries and rejoices itself to death". Sounds thought the album "a masterpiece of pathos", referring to its "hopeless bravado in the face of massed corporate opposition", and awarded the maximum five stars. While the duo were still refining their methodologies and mythologies, the album definitely contains seeds of what they were trying to grow, with themes and hooks that would continue to resurface throughout the KLF's career in the early 1990s. Since its initial release, however, it has never been reissued except in a very limited CDr unofficial edition of a couple of hundred copies.