Bill Drummond Lecture

Check this out: a rivetting lecture on the death of recorded music given by Bill Drummond at Radio 3’s Free Thinking ‘08 festival in Liverpool. It’s a charismatic, wise and uplifting performance. The idea of recorded music as “product” is, he thinks, an outdated concept unique to the 20th Century that spawned. The rapid collapse in value of recorded music is, he thinks, A Good Thing. In the future, music can once again become connected with time, place and occasion. And of course with musicians. This talk was included in full on the Arts & Ideas podcast from R3’s Night Waves programme. It’s an exceptional listen:

podcast

Bill Drummond’s Penkiln Burn

Interview, November 2004

KLF: The Manual

publishing info	Author |	Tom
	Source |	freshonthenet.co.uk ^
	Date |	January 14th, 2009

42. KLF – “Last Train To Transcentral”

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s

“MU MU! MU MU! MU MU! KLF!“. No band understood the possibilities for mass lunacy contained in the new music as well as did the KLF. Their ‘Stadium House’ trilogy of singles – “What Time Is Love”, “3AM Eternal” and “Last Train…” are as ridiculous as the most reviled Aqua or Cartoons outing, and at the same time are awe-inpsiring, colossal, unprecedented dancefloor bulldozers. Read a copy of The Manual, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty’s pricelessly cynical dissection of the process needed to have a No.1 hit, and the depth of their understanding begins to show through. For novelty scam-mongers and pranksters, they knew the public well, particularly that strain in British pop listening which likes an occasional brush with the gigantic. The KLF did to house what Jim Steinman did to rock – they turned it into a thing of tottering grand opera absurdity, pushed the excitement in the music to hysteria, traded content for ever-huger gesture. The difference being that the KLF never lost track of what made the music special in the first place. Maybe because there’s less inherent ‘meaning’ in the KLF’s music, or maybe just because the ‘meaning’ in house music is less fragile, I don’t know, but no matter how vast “Last Train To Trancentral” sounds, it never loses its happy grip on your feet and heart.

“Last Train…” is the least bombastic of the ‘Stadium House’ triad, in truth, but it has the best moment of the three, maybe the best single moment of the 90s. The wonderfully named Ricardo Da Force drops his duff Euro-rapping and comes on like a music hall MC to introduce the KLF, “also known as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu / Furthermore known as the JAMMS…” and the beat stops, and instead of a fanfare there comes this arpeggiated melody, deeply corny (but so what?) and infinitely pure, building up and up like the whole history of dance music has been leading up to this heavenly snatch of music. There have been build-ups before and there will be build-ups to come, but for me, nothing touches this. And then it fades away and the chanting begins – “MU MU! MU MU! MU MU! KLF!”. And you move from the sublime to ridiculous, and you find that they were the same place anyway.

publishing info	Author |	Tom
	Source |	freakytrigger.co.uk ^
	Date |	October 28th, 1999

75. THE JUSTIFIED ANCIENTS OF MU MU – “It’s Grim Up North”

Tom Ewing’s Top 100 Singles Of The 90s

Even before they put their money where their matches were, the KLF, also known as the Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, furthermore known as the JAMMS, were the most brilliant pop-artists of the decade. They were witty with the left hand and baffling with the right; they had a sense of timing and event like nobody since Maclaren; they appeared to not give even the merest hint of a fuck; and they made records which were the best shotgun wedding of concept to rhythm this side of Kraftwerk. Ladies and gentlemen, they were a quite extraordinary band.

The general dreadfulness of their big-hit album The White Room and their typically quixotic decision to delete all their product on the day they called it quits has left pop’s memory of them fuzzy, and a couple of legend-sullying comebacks haven’t helped either. But before they quit in 1992 they never, ever, put out a bad single, though they did put out a couple of incomprehensible ones. One of which is “It’s Grim Up North”, which….well, which starts with steam train noises and keyboard shrieks, and turns into a list of Northern England towns and counties (“Grimsby…Glossop…Hebden Bridge…”) recited in an urgent, sinister Scottish accent over crashed-sequencer squiggles and a juddering bass pulse. A voice repeats the title over occasional clattering crescendoes, and then, gradually, the dance music drops away to be replaced with an immense orchestral arrangement of Parry’s “Jerusalem”. And as that too swells and recedes, we’re left with the sound of the wind across the moors and the occasional crake of a lone crow.

Maverick and compelling, “It’s Grim Up North” may be some kind of tongue-in-cheek tribute to the glory of the North, and if that’s the intention it works. As a Southern jessie born and bred, I’ve put it here for two reasons. Firstly it makes for a gorgeous sound. Bill Drummond’s delivery is syllable-perfect, reciting the history-steeped placenames like a great psychogeographical spell; the music which backs him up is restless and grand; the segue into the hymn is funny, audacious and surprisingly powerful. But secondly, “It’s Grim Up North” is a document of one of pop’s most individual bands at their imaginative peak. It boils down to a man in his late 30s, and a mate, doing exactly what they want to do, without fear or compromise or cant, and getting it into the Top 40 to boot. And that makes this not only an excellent single, but a genuinely inspirational one.

publishing info	Author |	Tom
	Source |	freakytrigger.co.uk ^
	Date |	September 12th, 1999