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.
