The KLF were cool and other shock revelations from a 90s pop childhood

Plus Holden and Zimpel, Gazella, Shanti Celeste and more

Bullghost with Relatives, Photo by Éliane Excoffier, Anna Jane McIntyre @annajanemcintyre

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Today on the Line Noise Substack, I bring you another extract from my unreleased book on rave music and childhood memories, Weird 90s.

Long story short, I wanted to write a book looking back at the rave hits of my childhood, what happened to the people who made them and how listening to these weird electronic smashes influenced a generation of British kids. It never found a publisher; I’m writing another book; and Weird 90s is shelved, for the moment.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about The KLF these past few weeks and I thought it would be fun to bring you my chapter on them and their gloomy (but very funny) rave hit It’s Grim Up North. I hope you enjoy it.

Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - It’s Grim Up North

Released: October 1991

UK chart peak: 10

Top of the Pops performance: November 7 1991

If it is weird to find out that a song you loved in your youth is credible - see: LFO’s LFO - then it is positively bizarre to discover that a band you adored as a child were not only credible, they also had the weight of intellectual theory behind them.

Such was the case with The KLF, the enigmatic British electronic duo behind some of the greatest dance pop hits of the late 1980s and early 90s, including Doctorin’ The Tardis (as The Timelords), What Time Is Love and, in November 1991, It’s Grim Up North, a work of weirdly dour rave music that glanced the British top ten in November 1991, the same month that The KLF’s ludicrously upbeat remake of Justified & Ancient with Tammy Wynette was released.

By this point, the jig was almost up for The KLF - aka Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty - putting an end to what was one of the most remarkable hot streaks in British chart history. Between August 1990 and December 1991, the group wracked up four top five hits in the UK, including a number one (3AM Eternal) and a pair of number twos (Last Train to Trancentral and Justified & Ancient). In 1991 The KLF were apparently the highest-selling singles group around the world, which is a remarkable achievement for a duo of anarcho pranksters on their own independent label.

In February 1992, at the back-slapping Brit Awards, The KLF then took dramatic leave of the music business, performing a thrashed-up version of 3 AM Eternal alongside Suffolk grindcore merchants Extreme Noise Terror, which ended with the recorded voice of their publicist Scott Piering announcing “The KLF have now left the music industry.” In May, Drummond and Cauty deleted The KLF’s back catalogue and, a few months after that, apparently burned £1m on a remote Scottish island.

It was a remarkable end to an extraordinary career, one that had started on New Year’s Day 1987 when Drummond - a former A&R man - decided he would form a hip hop duo with Cauty, who he had signed to WEA as part of pop three piece Brilliant. The duo’s debut single, as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - a name taken from The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a satirical trek through conspiracy theory written by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - was released in March 1997. All You Need Is Love sampled heavily from The Beatles’ song of the same name as well as Samantha Fox’s pop hit Touch Me (I Want Your Body) and dealt with the media coverage around the AIDs crisis.

The duo’s debut album, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), was released later the same year, laden with uncleared samples that led to a complaint from ABBA and Drummond and Cauty subsequently burning most of the copies of the album in a Swedish field. This sacrifice was alluded to in the group’s debut single as The KLF, 1988’s Burn The Beat.

But it was under another name that I first got to know the music of Drummond and Cauty: The Timelords, a one-off moniker that released the monstrous hit single Doctorin’ the Tardis in May 1988, the record going to number one in the UK and New Zealand and number two in Australia.

Looking back now, Doctorin’ the Tardis was an extension of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu’s experiments in sampling. The song lifted huge sections of the Dr Who theme tune, Rock and Roll by now disgraced 70s pop star Gary Glitter and The Sweet’s glam smash Block Buster, putting them back together at fantastically obtuse angles to create a pop smash that was both other-wordly and strangely familiar.

Considered like that - in the wake of All You Need Is Love’s pointed sample messaging, the band’s legal tangles with ABBA and Whitney Joins the JAMs, a 1987 Justified Ancients of Mu Mu single that re-contextualises Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me) to suggest that the American singer has, in fact, joined The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - in that context Doctorin’ the Tardis is a very clever song, a tongue-in-cheek piece of art that celebrates sampling technology and using other people’s work in a joyous fashion, which made its mark by getting to the top of the charts.

Later on, when Drummond and Cauty - as their final act as The Timelords - published their celebrated book The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way), they painted Doctorin’ the Tardis as a calculated attempt to write a number one hit. But I never quite bought that. It felt, instead, that they were working backwards in the book from the success of Doctorin’ the Tardis, a song that was created in chaos that went on to become a hit.

Whatever the case, as a nine-year-old child when Doctorin’ the Tardis hit, I knew none of this. I had never heard of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu; I had never listened to a second of the duo’s previous work; and if someone had told me that this was a deliberate attempt to make a hit record I would have laughed in their faces. Hit records, I believed at the time - and perhaps still do - are magical events when the cosmoses align. Because, sure Kylie Minogue was in Neighbours which even I could see gave her a better chance than most at having a hit song. But you couldn’t manufacture a hit, any more than you could shoot a new star into the sky. And the short-lived musical career of fellow Neighbours actor Stefan Dennis proved that.

Doctorin’ the Tardis was a hit; a really great one: catchy, silly, funky and strange, jamming together parts of pop ephemera in ways that really shouldn’t work but did. If Drummond and Cauty had gone ahead with their plan of making a house music version of the Dr. Who theme tune, rather than putting Glitter beat drums to their song, then Doctorin’ the Tardis might have been the first cartoon rave tune. As it was, it fit nowhere: a novelty pop hit made with cutting-edge technology that you could dance to in a glam rock fashion. Like all the best pop records, Doctorin’ the Tardis was a freak.

This dichotomy, between musical theorising and pop release, would be typical of The KLF’s output. Doctorin’ the Tardis was a novelty hit and even, perhaps, a joke but it wasn’t cheap or thoughtless in any way. Clearly a great deal of effort had gone into the song, based on Drummond and Cauty’s previous year of experimentation. Music journalists - who loved Drummond and Cauty right from the beginning - viewed Doctorin’ the Tardis in an entirely different way than I did, as a child. But we were still responding to the same song.

The Timelords even appeared on the cover of the NME, not an honour extended to The Firm, whose 1987 novelty hit Star Trekkin’ I considered to be in the same basket as Doctorin’ the Tardis. As Mick Houghton, the KLF’s publicist, puts it in his book Fried and Justified: “The Timelords were an extension of the music press’s love affair with the JAMs… The Timelords were acceptable; this wasn’t Joe Dolce or Timmy Mallet.”

It was several years later that I discovered that The KLF were a hugely credible pop act, one fawned over by journalists in a way that Candy Flip were not; and only years after that that I found out about The Illuminatus! Trilogy, 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?), The Manual and all the fascinating cultural jamming that lay underneath The KLF’s work. None of which changed my opinion of Doctorin’ the Tardis as an utter pop banger. of course.

After Doctorin’ the Tardis, The KLF sputtered into life. According to Houghton, it was while making remixes for their number one song that the duo hit on the idea of making minimal dance twelve inches, which they described as “Pure Trance”, a name that has often seen the duo fingered as one of the pioneers of the whole trance music phenomenon. (I don’t necessarily agree with this - The KLF’s music is too weird and disjointed to be considered as trance - but I can see where the argument comes from.)

The first of these, What Time Is Love, was released in October 1988, while the second, 3AM Eternal, came out in May 1989. Attentive readers will recognise these songs as pop anthems but on initial release they were underground hits, only hitting the mainstream charts when they were re-released in 1990 and 1991. The KLF’s big attempt at a hit at the time was Kylie Said to Jason, an entirely cynical attempt to make money out of the Neighbours phenomenon that didn’t even make the UK’s top 100. (And which, for me, is more fuel to the fire that you can’t just manufacture a pop hit.)

What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral), a reworked version of the Pure Trance song and the first of The KLF's “Stadium House Trilogy”, gave The KLF their first proper hit in summer 1990 and from there the group took off.

While the original Pure Trance version of What Time Is Love? is a masterpiece of deep, electronic brooding, Live at Trancentral is a pop wonder, still recognisably the same song but with its beat subtly shifted up, new vocal samples and - most importantly of all - the addition of a rap by MC Bello from UK hip hop outfit Outlaw Posse, in which he talks of positive vibes, ways of life and getting hype to the rhythm in a way that appealed to grannies, ravers and children alike.

It was a deliberate move into the mainstream, as the KLF looked to fend off bankruptcy but (Live at Trancentral) felt entirely natural, like the logical end point for the song. “Stadium House” might sound like a bad move for a musical genre born in the disenfranchised underground of Chicago and New York but it’s hard to think of a more appropriate term for the huge, easily digestible hooks of What Time Is Love? (Live at Trancentral).

Boosted by a Top of the Pops performance of manic rave energy - and just a little bit of mystery, courtesy of Drummond and Cauty’s hooded appearances behind the keyboards - the single climbed to number five in the British charts. Naturally, I wolfed it down.

Two more re-worked Pure Trance tracks, 3AM Eternal and Last Train to Trancentral, followed What Time Is Love? into the charts and The KLF also released their fourth and final studio album The White Room in March 1991. In each dose of the Stadium House Trilogy the formula was basically the same: Drummond and Cauty took the bare bones of the Pure Trance song - usually riffs and chord sequences - and threw the rave sink at it, plastering it in samples, raps, crowd noise and vocals.

For children like me, who had grown up to electronic hits on the radio, this was pure pop sugar, the sound of house music filtered through ice-cream-stained, rose-tinted glasses that sounded fantastic in the mainstream. The duo’s videos and Top of the Pops performances were even better, a combination of shock theatrics, rave imagery and pantomime that had just enough references to “proper” dance music culture and Illuminatus! theory to keep older fans amused, while younger viewers reacted to the ever-green sight of older people behaving stupidly.

And if those some older music fans thought that the new KLF songs were a little too bright and beautiful for their tastes, they could go back to the Pure Trance versions of the songs, or check out the Moody Boys/z remixes that came among the many 12 inch releases, and revel in what was “proper” dance music.

Alternatively, the occult-minded could pick the obscure cult references out of the band’s ephemera, which had to be one of the most intriguing treasure trails ever seen in a mainstream chart band.

Did I know, at the age of 10, that the KLF’s Pyramid Blaster logo was a reference to the Eye of Providence icon, which was found in the Illuminatus? Was I aware that the number 23, referenced throughout the band’s work, is another Illuminatus! reference? That Trancentral was, in fact, a South London squat where Cauty lived and recorded? That, in 1990, KLF Communications released both Chill Out and Space, two fundamental albums in the history of ambient music?

I did not. And neither would I have particularly cared.

Years later, as I gradually figured it all out, this discovery was as much of a shock to me as the fact that the Pet Shops Boys were a venerated band and Altern-8 were seen as rave candy.

The one KLF song that really stuck with me as a child, though, was the one I could never quite figure out. It’s Grim Up North was first released as a club 12 inch in December 1990 with vocals from Liverpool singer / songwriter Pete Wylie. But I didn’t I hear the song until a re-recorded version was released in October 1991 with Bill Drummond taking the spotlight.

This was just a few months after the day-glo explosion of Last Train to Trancentral had stormed the charts and only just before the release of Justified & Ancient with Tammy Wynette, perhaps The KLF’s tenderest hit. But It’s Grim Up North was nothing like either song. It was dark as hell, minimal, pounding and didn’t sound a lot of fun. And this was on purpose.

"We went to this rave and the sound system was broken. All you could hear was this kind of screeching top-end and a really low bass drum and we thought, ‘Wow, this is what the kids are into’,” Jimmy Cauty told Record Mirror in December 1990 of the genesis of the song.

It’s Grim Up North apparently only took 45 minutes to record, a world away from the elaborate, bells and whistles productions of the Stadium House Trilogy. “While we were doing the [White Room] album, we went into another part of the studio for light relief. We started recording some stuff in a different style. There is no structure to it, just noise - it’s horrible! It’s definitely not a chart-bound sound,” the duo told Rage in January 1991.

This left turn was deliberate. It’s Grim Up North was intended for The Black Room, an (unfinished) album that Drummond once referred to as “the complete yang to the yin of The White Room. It’ll be very, very dense; very, very hardcore. No sort of ‘up’ choruses or anthems,” he explained.

The album was originally meant to be based in hardcore techno; later on it was mooted that it would be a collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror. Pop house, this was not. And neither, logically, was It’s Grim Up North, a work of nasty, industrial techno, creeping dread and factory whistles, over which Drummond lists the names of towns based in the north of England, from Bolton to Bramhall.

It’s potentially grim listening. And yet… not really. Or not for me, anyway, at the age of 14. Children like consistency, in music and their every-day lives. If you have kids, you will doubtlessly know of their habit of listening to the same song over and over and over again, or eating the same sandwich filling for three weeks straight. So It’s Grim Up North should, perhaps, have been scary to kids.

But children also look for consistency, where other people might see change. And, while I didn’t quite understand It’s Grim Up North, the song has enough of The KLF’s habitual gift for a melody among the clattering drums - as if they just can’t resist - to make it seem enough like yet anther KLF single, if that’s what you’re looking for.

And also, isn’t It’s Grim Up North kind of a novelty single like Doctorin’ the Tardis before it - not that I connected the two songs at the time? Why else would this Scottish man be reciting the names of these Northern English town he claims to find so grim? Isn’t he, you know, trying to be funny?

And then the song, as if to prove this point, ends up with a fully orchestrated take on Jerusalem, a song we were used to hearing at our schools, which gradually fades to nothing, to be followed by the sound of wind and crows. That’s got to be funny, right? A joke even a school boy could grasp. Jerusalem, as we used it in our schools, is a celebration of England’s “green & pleasant Land”; but It’s Grim Up North is telling us how unpleasant the North of England is. We get that.

(The fact that Jerusalem really isn’t the celebration of England that so many people imagine it to be and is rather a call to create a utopian society among the country’s “dark Satanic Mills” is an added layer of irony.)

Then there’s the song’s Top of the Pops performance, from November 1991, where Drummond, looking particularly anguished, recites the list of Northern towns from a piece of white paper, like a man at the very end of his tether, while Morris dancers prance in the background. What the hell does it all mean? I wasn’t sure as a kid; I’m not really sure now; but it was certainly funny.

Three months after that, The KLF were no more. There would be no Black Room and, after Drummond and Cauty deleted the band’s catalogue, it was hard to even hear The KLF’s music for years. This left It’s Grim Up North as a nagging kind of negative space in my head. Did The KLF really release a grinding minimal techno track with lyrics that consisted of Northern English towns? It seemed unlikely. But then so did so many things that The KLF got up to over their briefly stellar career. Did they really perform with Tammy Wynette, dressed as ice cream cones? Did they leave a dead sheep outside the Brit Awards after party? Did they really burn £1m? (Answers: yes; yes and maybe.)

Drummond and Cauty didn’t disappear from public life after the death of the KLF. As The K Foundation, One World Orchestra and 2K, the duo released a handful of tracks during the 90s, even performing a gig under the latter alias. In 2017, after years in which Cauty and Drummond had concentrated on art, books and outlandish solo projects, The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu made their return, publishing a science fiction book, 2023: A Trilogy, and hosting a gloriously strange three-day event in Liverpool, titled Welcome to the Dark Ages.

The duo also announced plans for “People’s Pyramid”, which would be built with bricks each containing 23 grams of human ashes. The first brick was laid in November 2018; it contained the ashes of Cauty’s brother Simon, who had taken his own life two years previously. “It's easy to make it sound like a joke,” Cauty told The BBC. “But it isn't a joke, it’s deadly serious and it’s a long-term project.”

You could almost say the same thing about The KLF. OK, maybe the group weren’t deadly serious all the time; but their brilliantly crafted music certainly wasn’t a joke. And while the group itself might have only lasted five years, the idea of the KLF lived on, lingering around our heads and our hearts in their retirement.

The more I read about The KLF, the more I appreciated the obscure references and bizarre inspiration behind their music. And yet I don’t think I ever really understood The KLF; I’m not sure if Drummond and Cauty themselves understood what they were doing. Why should they? What would be the point in that? And where would be the fun in understanding?

I often wonder what I learned, as a child, from all this weird electronic music on Top of the Pops and Radio One. What did I learn from The KLF in general and It’s Grim Up North in particular? That pop music is adaptable, maybe, and nothing is too weird to be a hit; that novelty songs can hit hard; and that minimal bass drum thud is nothing to be afraid of.

This, it would turn out, is a lesson I would make very good use of over the next few years.

Some listening

Holden and Zimpel - You Are Gods

After seeing James Holden and Wacław Zimpel live at the Mira festival in 2023, I was inspired to write a piece about how Holden had solved the problem of live electronic music. Now the duo - Holden the electronic visionary, Zimpel the brilliant multi instrumentalist - have made an album, The Universe Will Take Care Of You, a comforting name in these troubling times. The album itself turns out to be similarly freeing, a tangling tumble of psychedelic electronics, musical improvisation and sheer vision, of which the crumpled yet soaring melodies of You Are Gods is the stand out.

Sault - I.L.T.S.

Bands who are both mysterious and prolific are relatively thin on the ground; ones who can do both and produce the goods of such insanely high quality are even rarer. And so we come to Sault, who low-key released their 12th studio album on April 19 when we were all busy with the Easter holidays. 10 features the band in sprawling funk mode, which is probably my second favourite incarnation of Sault, after orchestral jazz Sault, and I.L.T.S. is a jewel of rolling, insouciant groove whose melody is so damn irresistible it feels impossible that it didn’t exist somewhere before April 19.

Air - Sexy Boy (Vegyn version)

As a massive fan of Air’s Moon Safari I was wary about UK producer Vegyn’s remix of the album (even if Vegyn is the son of Phil Thornalley of The Cure, a fact that isn’t really relevant but I appreciate anyway). Moon Safari is an album that really doesn’t need a remix, quite perfect in its own little way. But Vegyn has done a surprisingly stellar job, beefing up the production a little - the album feels quite steely - and revving up the beats. His version of Sexy Boy sticks a breakbeat under the original’s Gallic groove, which sounds like the kind of thing that might entirely break the song’s delicate balance but actually works wonders.

Shanti Celeste - Unwind

Unwind is clipped, funky, airy and very pop. If someone told you this was a 90s remix of a Madonna track you would probably believe them (if you gnored the voice) and praise doesn’t come much higher than that. I’ve said it many times before but Shanti Celeste’s album is going to be quite something.

Gazella - Kim y Jimmy

I’ve written about Valencian shoegazers Gazella before on the Substack but this week I had the pleasure of seeing them live in Barcelona (supporting Dean Wareham) and it gave a me a far better understanding of their subtly profound pleasures. I had the group pegged as shoegazers - and they are - but there is also a touch of electronics to their mix, a little Boards of Canada melodic wash, and even a 2-step-ish beat on occasion (see: Cielo Gris).

Importantly, there is also an enticing flavour of flamenco to the vocals, which I thought I was imagining until I spoke to genial guitarist Adrián when I bought a T-shirt at the Barcelona gig and he mentioned it too. You can hear this flamenco touch towards the end of the band’s recent single Kim y Jimmy, when singer Raquel Palomino really lets loose, like Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell unchained. Why is this important? Because it makes them different, among a world of shoegaze imitators. Gazella’s is a gorgeous musical mix and I advise you to go and see them live.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise podcast with Tangerine Dream

This week on Line Noise I spoke to Thorsten Quaeschning, the musical director (and longest-standing member) of foundational German band Tangerine Dream, a group whose influence looms over ambient and electronic music. We spoke about black metal, where to start with Tangerine Dream, founder member Edgar Froese’s plans for the band after his death in 2015 and how the current band (in which Quaeschning is joined by Hoshiko Yamane and Paul Frick) are carrying these out.

Beirut - A Study of Losses

What would it take to make you return to the one place you never wanted to go back to? To embrace the thing that everyone thinks they know about you? If you’re thinking, ‘good question’, then may I gently nudge you towards the new Beirut album, A Study of Losses, which I reviewed for Pitchfork? TL;DR for Beirut’s Zach Condon it took a circus- specifically, the Swedish troupe Kompani Giraff, which commissioned the 18 tracks on A Study of Losses for a stage show of the same name. And the results are wonderful.

The playlists

“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by playlist.” So (almost) spoke Plato. And he knew what he was talking about. (Most of the time anyway.) Luckily, I have two playlists: The newest and bestest 2025; and The newest and the bestest (unbridled by time). Do follow them for all the best new music.