the KLF

659. ‘3A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.)’, by The KLF

/ UK #1s blog / 3 Comments

I’m going to stick my neck out here, and claim that we’re in the midst of what is the strangest run of number one singles. From ‘Unchained Melody’, past Vanilla Ice and Christian Cliff, Iron Maiden bringing our daughters to the slaughter, Enigma’s Gregorian chanting, and Queen’s ‘other’ epic single… to the KLF.

3A.M. Eternal (Live at the S.S.L.), by The KLF (their 1st and only #1)

2 weeks, from 27th January – 10th February 1991

And on the face of it, ‘3A.M. Eternal’ is a return to the dance music that’s shaped the early ‘90s. If you were being harsh, you could claim it to be a rehash of Snap!’s ‘The Power’, with its Russian radio intro, and its mix of a male rapper with a big-voiced female (the singer belting it out at the start is soul legend P.P. Arnold). But this is The KLF, and with them nothing is what it seems.

For a start, the sound that immediately follows the radio intro is a machine gun, strafing the listener into pieces. There’s all the chanting about the ‘Ancients of Mu Mu’ (the band’s former name). And then there’s the crowd noise, and the announcement at the end that KLF have now left the building… It’s all fake, the S.S.L. in the title refers to a Solid State Logic mixing desk. And there’s the fact that this is actually a remix of a 1989 release of the same name: a deep trance track that failed to chart and that sounds unrecognisable from this much poppier version.

But above all that, one fact remains: it’s a banger. All my talk of comparing it to ‘The Power’ fades away because this, in my opinion, is the far better song. It’s dance music with rock chords, and with about three different hooks: the KLF is gonna rock you chant, the uh-huh-uh-huhs, and the Ancients of Mu Mu. And as fake as it may be, the soaring crowd noise adds an epic, stadium quality to the track. (This was #1 on my fifth birthday, and it’s one of my very favourite birthday chart-toppers.)

This being the KLF, you do wonder if this remix was done with the aim of aping the big dance hits of the age – all the ingredients are there – and in the end making a song that betters them all. They’d done it once before, as The Timelords (they’ve gone under quite a few names over the years…) and the ridiculously catchy, sample-heavy ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ from three years earlier. And they weren’t done remixing ‘3AM Eternal’, as a year later they recorded a thrash metal version with crust punk group Extreme Noise Terror, with whom they duetted at the Brit awards, and pretended to machine gun the audience (the original plan had been to disembowel a dead sheep live on stage, before the lawyers stepped in…) The performance is on YouTube, and it’s amazing to think that it was broadcast on primetime BBC.

You’d need an entirely separate blog post to go into sufficient detail on the KLF, Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, their many guises and their many moments of notoriety. Aside from their Brits performance, shout outs need to be made to their duet with Tammy Wynette on ‘Justified and Ancient’, which made #2 later in 1991, in shades of the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty. And their retirement, when they deleted their entire back catalogue (it was only restored a couple of years ago) and set fire to their remaining one million pounds in royalties on a remote Scottish island.

So there you go. As talented as they were tasteless, and responsible for yet another weird and wonderful number one. You’ll be glad to hear that things aren’t getting any less bizarre either, for up next is the most famous pop star of the age, with the most famous animated family of all time…

610. ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’, by The Timelords

/ UK #1s blog / 12 Comments

My first reaction upon seeing the title of our next #1 was: “Oh God, not another song based on a popular sci-fi series!” The scars from having to write about ‘Star Trekkin’’ still cut deep…

Doctorin’ the Tardis, by The Timelords (their 1st and only #1)

1 week, from 12th – 19th June 1988

But wait… Is that glam classic ‘Block Buster!’ mixed with the ‘Dr. Who’ theme? And is that a refrain based on ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Part II’? Plus lots of obnoxious punk chanting? Is this not actually quite great? Stupidly brilliant? Brilliantly stupid?

It takes two very separate strands of music – the sample-heavy house scene that has already given us a classic #1 (‘Theme from S’Express’) and a couple of others (‘Pump Up the Volume’ and ‘Jack Your Body’) and the glam scene of fifteen years previous – while throwing a TV theme into the mix. It shouldn’t work, they shouldn’t be able to meld, but it does. In fact, it sounds incredibly like Muse. Genuinely – and I say this as someone who loves Muse – as if Matt Bellamy has based his band’s entire recent output around this novelty song.

The Daleks are a bit much, mind (I say that as someone with next to no interest in ‘Dr. Who’) but I suppose they’re the most identifiable thing from the programme, and so we need an Exterminate! or two. Oh, and we haven’t mentioned the fact that the You what? chant is from Harry Enfield’s ‘Loadsamoney’ character, and so we have an added undercurrent of Thatcher-era social commentary thrown in too: Loadsamoney presumably being as cheap and as vacuous as this song is meant to be. (Enfield had also taken a single based on the Loadsamoney character to #4 just a few weeks before ‘Doctorin’ the Tardis’ made #1. ‘Enjoy’ that here…)

And then… ho boy, this is a real cluster bomb of a record… Gary Glitter jumped on the bandwagon and helped record a new version, called ‘Gary in the Tardis’ with chants from his big glam hits: He’s the leader, Of the gang… Do you want to touch me…? and so on. That version featured on some of the various 12” mixes, but he wasn’t officially credited. He performed it live though, I’m guessing on TOTP. (And I’ve just realised the twisted irony in Gary Glitter deposing a record that had been raising money for Childline…)

This has so many strands running through it that we haven’t yet mentioned the Timelords themselves. This was their first and only hit under that name, but we’ll meet Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty again shortly, as The KLF. They had released a few underground sample-heavy hits before, as The JAMs, but this was the big time. The song’s title was presumably a nod to Coldcut’s recent sample-tastic hit ‘Doctorin’ the House’. Drummond called their first big hit ‘nauseating’, and then released a book based on making the song called ‘The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way’.

But hey, never has a cynical grab for chart glory sounded so catchy. Glam is back! For one week only, Britain’s pop past and future – glam, punk and house – mix in a riotous mess of a chart-topper. And I love it! If nothing else, it’s flushed the last remnants of ‘Star Trekkin’’ out of my system…