In 2003, my band released an album called "A Hostage and the Meaning of Life," a very serious record produced by the great Alex Newport. It sold well for the micro-genre we happened to be a part of, and the reviews seemed to be well above average. Acclaimed, you might say.
We followed it up in 2006 with "The Philosophy of Velocity," trading the clean production values of its predecessor for something far noisier, and its serious themes for absurdist ones. Reviews were mixed.
It was an about face, a coup. A stylistic roll of the dice. If writers didn't quite know what to do with us on the first album other than lump us in with the emerging Mars Volta-led scene, they knew even less with this one. "Your mixes suck," said one label guy unsolicited. "Please, just try harder," said someone sliding into our DMs. But we didn't care. Or at least we pretended not to.
Truthfully, I am only speaking for myself.
Last week, I finished Bill Drummond's memoir "45," and something stirred in whatever old Yorkshire still remains in my blood. A call from the industrial backwaters of our respective homelands. The pull of a rain-drenched Sainsbury parking lot. Me in the Rust Belt with its dead factories, dead malls and dying towns. He from the Borderlands' empty mines, derelict council houses and shuttered British Steel plants.
I first came across the KLF (aka JAMS, aka The Timelords, aka The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu) on the old Planes Mistaken For Stars music forum years ago. The posted tune was a dark snapshot of modern blight and despair against a sonic backdrop of cold train whistles and the caws of crows from the moorlands.
They dressed vaguely like a metal band, playing in front of a huge stack of speakers on a rain-drenched M-number highway. It's grim up north, the frontman repeated between verses that were just names of forgotten towns eaten alive by the hungry maw of the Industrial Revolution.
Something about it felt familiar, as if I could rock out in front of a mountain of speakers blocking an I-69 offramp shouting Muncie. Anderson. Eaton. Selma. Daleville. Elwood. Gaston. Cammack. And it would feel just as relevant.
The video ended with a wide pan of backed up semi-trucks and traffic and a massive choral version of the hymnal Jerusalem, a musical turn that still gives me chills every time I listen to it years later. A de facto national anthem for our shared flyover lands, ending what would become one of my all-time favorite songs.
I looked up the back catalog to find it was a string of happy, danceable techno tunes like America, What Time Is Love and Justified and Ancient, featuring Tammy Wynette. I filed the KLF away as one of those quirky early 90s BYA phenoms like the Spice Girls, Chumbawumba and Damien Hirst's shark tank that I'd missed out on. Too busy sorting through what was happening musically in America's Pacific Northwest and the local stages of my own microscopic local scene to really give a shit.
Reading 45Â (the book, not the felonious ex-prez) would knit it all together half a lifetime later. The grim man in the trenchcoat's name was Bill. Not Thom, not Ian, not Noel. Not some Oxford/London-sounding name. Fucking Bill. Nom de apropos. Do you know how many Bills I know from Indiana? A lot.
Bill's was the "career," if you can call it that, I'd always wanted. A few weird songs, chart-dominating singles. A couple of earworms that took over the world then disappeared to allow space for a litany of other weirder things that never really saw the light of day. His arc seemed to resonate because I've always been a mutt-in-the-middle, calling in from the sticks while my contemporaries were card carrying emo sad sacks, hootin-hollerin folky folk, beatpad addicts and hirsute hessians.
It's why my own catalog is a schizophrenic array of pop brut, metal kitsch and experiments in ambiance. Why I gravitate to the world builders and world destroyers. Music made by creative orphans whose jeans don't fit right. Nick Cave the author, David Byrne the color guard instructor, Bill Drummond the situationist rapper who operates like a Buddhist with a sand mandala creating, organizing, then destroying to start again.
It's in the urge to destroy and rebuild where Drummond and I may share our synchronicity. The perverse and masochistic freedom in starting from zero. Maybe a depression offramp, I dunno. Money and the promise of reward locks things in. A barely-congealed new idea starts to become a predictable thing, where you can start to see around its corners. An out group forms, becoming the in group aligned in the bag of jeans, the tilt of a hat, affectations and of-the-moment slang. The new exciting thing ages like an avocado, good for a few days before turning to tasteless mush overnight.
KLF's exit from stardom and the industry altogether seemed poetic in that regard. After a number of chart-dominating stadium anthems, they performed a final set at the stodgy BRIT Awards with the crustpunk band Extreme Noise Terror and left a dead sheep at the afterparty. They immediately deleted their entire back catalog, incinerated a million quid they'd made in royalties and left with the cryptic statement: We are at a point where the path is about to take a sharp turn from these sunny uplands down into a netherworld of we know not what.
It seemed spiritually linked with a wink and a knowwhatimean-saynomore to the Jerusalem hymn playing across the highway at the end of the song that introduced me to them on the forum a long time ago.
And did those feet in ancient time...
Walk upon Englands mountains green...
And did the Countenance Divine...
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here...
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
I will not cease from Mental Fight...
I imagine if King Boy D ever heard Brazil or any of my music he'd probably think it was shite. I'd expect no less. I've often been too timid to embrace pop's vacuous ugliness and turn it on its head unlike the Ancient and Justified Mu Mu's who gleefully trojan-horsed chaos magik and absurdist agit-prop into its vacuous hall of mirrors.
But I'd like to meet a fellow walker. It's rare that I identify so strongly toward someone's creative urges. We seem somewhat synchronized even in literals, like traversing the length of Iceland, walking through jungles and primordial forests on foot. Been there. A penchant for making up purposefully derivative bands with backstories and mythologies, actually writing their records or singles and then passing them off as character studies.
Doing that.
45 seemed like permission for us perennial outsiders from the small towns, far away from whichever coast the glitz happens to emanate. Permission to let out an ugly regional accent like a political yard sign. To let the intrusive thoughts manifest from the empty factories and people of the mines. To ride a zeitgeist like a sandworm. Create, destroy, wash, rinse, repeat to the throb of an 808 and the sharp musk of a d-beat battlejacket.
Justified, in a word.
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What I’m reading: We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)
What I'm listening to: Sekunden (Swod)
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