The KLF: The White Room

I've never quite figured out how I managed to miss out on the KLF at the time. (I never got any of their music until ten years after the fact, and even then I arrived at it mostly via Bill Drummond's writing, especially 45.) Maybe it was because I was too preoccupied with Sonic Youth, Galaxie 500 and Neil Young to keep up with what was happening in dance music at the time. Yet I didn't miss out on The Orb… possibly because John Peel played them, but not the KLF.

David Farrow told me stories about The Manual after work in The Pomona, and it sounded great, but it was out of print at the time (and is again now: £180 on Amazon), as were the KLF albums.

Anyway, it was 2000 when I got this. My copy came with an extra CD with various mixes of Justified & Ancient, including the Stand by the JAMS with Tammy Wynette. You should definitely read Drummond's amusing tale of getting Ms Wynette's vocal in 45: it went horribly wrong, and he thought his trip to Tennessee (or wherever) had been wasted. But he was saved by one of the first commercial uses of pitch-shifting software, which was used to bring the vocal back in tune.

As for the music itself, well, maybe I should scrub that first paragraph because it's not surprising that I would have 'missed' this. It doesn't sound to me like an album; it sounds like a compilation of loose ends, with some good bits, but an awful lot of padding and posing. It's the posing and propaganda and self-publicising of KLF that I really love. Normally I hate all of those things, but they raised them to an artform.

At the moment I'm reading Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis (passing note: there's another book that I bought on Amazon marketplace last summer for £0.90, but now it's going for over £50 — what kind of crazy 'market' is this?) , which has many stories of outrageous publicity gags by the likes of Reg Calvert and Andrew Oldham. Evidently Drummond learnt a lot from them and spliced those lessons with Situationism (I haven't got to the Malcolm McLaren chapter yet).

MusicBrainz entry for this album, for Justified & Ancient disc Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Listen to this album in full at Last.fm