THE TIMELORDS - DOCTORIN’ THE TARDIS @ 35

 

Screeching into its 35th anniversary today is the one hit wonder from The Timelords, aka Ford Timelord, aka The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, aka The KLF, aka Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, with Doctorin’ The Tardis, which was released on May 23rd, 1988. Roaring into the number one UK single spot, it was a novelty record which helped set the stage for one of the most notorious musical careers of the late 20th century.

The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu were founded on January 1st, 1987 whereupon they spent the next year pumping out a couple of LPs and a handful of singles. Those had limited exposure and commercial success, though they had more prominent legal troubles thanks to their unauthorized use of copyrighted music from other artists. ABBA’s legal challenges ultimately resulted in their debut LP ending up as a bonfire when courts order the destruction of all remaining copies.

After that rough startup Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond were looking to take a break from The JAMs to clear their heads and regroup. They were looking for a musical palate cleanser and something unabashedly accessible, rather than the eccentric limited releases of The JAMs with Drummond’s strident rapped social commentary. Initially, the idea was to make a dance record, something grounded in the 4/4 disco beat being rehabilitated by House music. Yet, as the fates would have it, their decision to pillage 1970s nostalgia drove their groove in a slightly different direction.

The rhythmic bed they chose for their “hit single” was lifted from Garry Glitter’s 1972 smash, Rock ’n’ Roll Parts 1 & 2. At first they tried to fight against the song’s boogie-woogie, bump & grind swing in order to shoehorn it into a more disco friendly rhythm, but after three days of struggling, they came to realize that it was useless to resist. Augmenting this groove with a bit of The Sweet’s Blockbuster, they next spliced that rhythm with the sequencer driven pulse and sine wave wail of the Dr. Who theme song. The whole thing was topped off with a football chant style chorus, mindlessly repeating “Dr Who, The Tardis”. It was an admittedly stupid juxtaposition, but something about it seemed to work. It had a kind of rousing brutishness to it, though inter-cut with a sci-fi sense of drama. The pair self-proclaimed their new product, “probably the most nauseating record in the world”, adding that "we also enjoyed celebrating the trashier side of pop”.

They then set about creating a new alter-ego for their creation, based on Cauty's 1968 Ford Galaxie police car. It had been featured in the cover graphics for the second JAMs LPs, but was also Cauty’s regular ride, which he dubbed, “Ford Timelord”. Rather than list Cauty and Drummond on the single, the song’s creation was credited to the car, which was prominently featured on the single’s cover. Cauty and Drummond were only hinted at as “Lord Rock” (controls) and Time Boy (navigation) and the duo claimed the car had issued instructions to them on how to create the record. A music video for the single showed the car chasing various cheaply made Daleks around the countryside, with sirens blaring throughout.

Numerous formats for the single were produced including CD Maxi Singles, 12” EPs, 7” singles and a special remix featuring Gary Glitter on guest vocals. Of course, this was all before Gary’s legal issues and conviction as a sexual predator. After its release, it quickly climbed the charts until it hit the number one spot in the UK, where it stayed for precisely one week. Critically, the single was seen as nothing more than a bit of novelty pop trash. Melody Maker described it as "pure, unadulterated agony ... excruciating”. Yet its creators were entirely aware of the song’s nature and had conceived it as a kind of tribute to the genre of novelty records. After its release, they followed up the single with the publication of “The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way”, a guide booklet to chart success. The text meticulously laid out the entire process by which one can compose, record, release and promote a number one single. However, while such hubris might indicate a fool-proof methodology, the fact is that the pair’s subsequent attempts at chart success were far less successful.

Success did eventually come to them again after they rebranded themselves as The KLF and began to issue a series of singles, which became exemplars of so-called “Stadium House”. In the early 1990s, these records achieved incredible chart success around the world, including the US. They were considered the most successful group of the era, topping it off with the massively successful White Room LP. But then, just as mysteriously as they rose to fame, they abruptly pulled the plug on their career, deleted their entire record catalogue and vanished from the music industry, leaving behind only a hail of blank bullets, a dead sheep and a pile of burnt money.

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.