How Soon is Now?: The Madmen and Mavericks who made Independent Music 1975-2005 (43 page)

O
ver the Christmas holidays of 1986, six months after releasing his solo album,
The Man
, and nine months after leaving the industry, Bill Drummond was out for a walk in the countryside. Looking back on the year drawing to an end, memories of a visit from a larger-than-life character to his Warners office were looming large in his reflections.

‘One day Pete Waterman comes into my office,’ says Drummond. ‘I didn’t know who the fuck he was. He goes, “I’m a producer, have you got any acts for me to produce?” I said, “Well, I’ve got this act they’re on tonight, at the Wag club.” So he came along and said, “Sack the band, we’ll do a track with the singer.” I explained to him, “Well, we can’t sack the band because it’s the guitarist Jimmy Cauty’s band, and he makes it work.” So he said, “OK, we’ll sack the rest, we’ll keep the guitarist and bass player, as long as they understand they’re not going to play on the records.”’

Pete Waterman’s production and songwriting company Stock Aitken Waterman were in the flush of early success. After several false starts they had, in the previous year, achieved their first no. 1 single Dead or Alive’s ‘You Spin Me Round’. Dead or Alive’s singer Pete Burns was a veteran of the Zoo Liverpool scene and had in passing mentioned to Waterman that an ex-colleague was now an A&R at Warners. Waterman was permanently alert to industry openings. SAW’s finances were on a knife edge and Waterman followed any lead that might drum up business.
His vision of SAW as an out-and-out pop production company had taken some unexpected turns; his first songwriting and production project had been the Cyprus Eurovision Song Contest entry in 1984. Waterman, delighted he now had a contact within Warners, wrote down Drummond’s details in his Filofax and demanded a meeting. ‘He walked in, and the first thing he said to me was that he’d made “You Spin Me” with Pete Burns,’ says Drummond, ‘and I just thought, who the fuck is this madman?’

Sufficiently charmed by Waterman’s bravado and fast-talking hustle, Drummond’s interest was aroused and he accepted an invitation to the newly built SAW studios in Borough, which Waterman had christened the Hit Factory, home to, as they would inscribe on the sleeve of their singles, ‘the sound of a bright young Britain’.

‘Pete invited me to meet Mike [Scott] and Matt [Aitken] down at his studio,’ says Drummond. ‘They’ve got the bank manager there. Pete introduced me as a record mogul, and he got the band to come down and it was all just to impress the bank manager – obviously, he was getting his loan. And there’s no real studio there just some samplers, but Jimmy and I learnt just how to go out on a limb, to really go out on a limb with something, through Pete Waterman.’

The band Drummond had taken Waterman to see were Brilliant, a trio of vocalist June Montana, Jimmy Cauty and former Killing Joke bassist Youth, who were managed by former Teardrop Explodes keyboardist and Drummond’s former partner in Zoo, Dave Balfe, who had duly signed the band with Drummond. The arrival of SAW, and their own take on Motown production-line, High Street pop, was an idea too simple yet ambitious for Balfe and Drummond, with their mutual distrust of the orthodoxies of record companies and the multi-album careers of the bands they promoted, to ignore. Brilliant were
taken out of the Warners demo studios and started making their debut album at SAW studios with, in the minds of its partners at least, the UK’s hottest production team. ‘In Pete’s head it was like a Motown ethos,’ says Drummond, ‘or a Jam and Lewis type production style, but for a British audience. I think he thought they were making Jam and Lewis records they were that slick, but they were more of a Woolworth’s version.’

SAW stripped the recording process back to a minimal operation of state-of-the-art sampling, programmed drum machines and vocals. Not only were the conventions of a band playing live in the studio dispensed with, there was nowhere in the Hit Factory for a live band to play.

The production-line method worked perfectly for one-off singles as SAW started a run of chart success that peaked in 1989 with seven no. 1 singles, all of which were distributed by Pinnacle, Rough Trade’s arch-competitor in independent music distribution. Such were the technicalities of the Indie chart, whereby any independently distributed record qualified, SAW releases were no. 1 in both the Indie and Top Forty singles charts. Brilliant were, nominally at least, a band rather than a vocalist working with the production company, and the process of recording their album became, by SAW standards, longer and altogether more convoluted. Cauty and Youth had a background in rock and the group dynamics of albums and tours, where performance and integrity were touchstones of musical creativity. Waterman, in no uncertain terms, had told them from day one that the last thing he cared about was how well a guitarist thought he had played a solo; furthermore, if there were to be any guitar solos on the Brilliant album, they would be played by one of the SAW team. ‘I’d turn up at the studio with my guitar,’ says Cauty, ‘and they’d go, “Well, we did the guitar last night.”’ Rather than storming off with bruised egos Cauty and
Youth were intrigued by SAW’s working methods and settled in at the back of the studio to observe the technological prowess of Stock, Aitken and Waterman at work in the Hit Factory.

‘We’d just sit there, gobsmacked, listening to Pete, ’cause he’d sort of hold court,’ says Cauty. ‘He’d start this little speech at the beginning of the day, and you’d just sit there and listen, and agree with it, because he really knew what he wanted, so you put your trust in him. Me and Youth sat there for a year watching them make these records, figuring out how they did the mixes and stuff. It was brilliant, we learnt a hell of a lot. They were sampling like crazy, everything – drum sounds, bass sounds – and nobody really knew they were doing that, they kept quiet about it all.’

As the Brilliant album started being pieced together, Warners were beginning to lose track of the band’s progress. Having signed them as a priority a few months earlier as a dance/pop/rock crossover act in the style of Prince and the Revolution, the label was in the dark as far as the events in Borough were concerned. ‘We were billed to be the next big thing,’ says Cauty, ‘to have everyone at WEA saying, “You’re gonna be massive, just go along with this. You’re gonna be huge” – and then you’re not. That was interesting as well.’

In the end, frustrated by the lack of progress and with Drummond having left the company, Warners decided to intervene. Balfe’s response was a typically counter-intuitive piece of music-biz theatre. ‘Dave Balfe took Warners to court,’ says Cauty. ‘He had this great idea that we’d take them to court, to try and get out of the record contract, for some bizarre reason that he’d thought of, so, of course, we went to the high court, and we were in court going, “Oh yeah, we hate them,” and they’re sitting there going, “We hate that band,” and then we lost the case, and then we split up, and then that was it, that was the end of that episode.’

Drummond was considering his next move. Having released the quasi-autobiographical
The Man
on Creation, he found himself re-reading books that had influenced him in his youth including
The Illuminatus! Trilogy
, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s work of meandering science-fiction conspiracy theory for which he had designed the set of the Liverpool School of Pun’s production a little over a decade earlier. Rather than setting off a glow of nostalgia for the bohemian days of Mathew Street,
The Illuminatus!
brought Drummond’s thinking right up to date.

‘Re-reading it triggered something off in my head, about doing a hip hop record,’ he says. ‘I was totally bored with aspirations of modern music and how it always seemed to be about looking for integrity or something from the past that makes the bands seem authentic. Oh fuck that. So when hip hop happened – particularly it was the Schoolly D album. There was something about the way he ditched everything, even though they were using old albums, but the hallway, couple of decks, beatbox, somebody on the mic and they could just do it on the street and just do it anywhere.’

Inspired by the stripped-back and practical immediacy of Schoolly D and remembering SAW’s equally functional approach to music making, Drummond made contact with Cauty. ‘Bill just phoned up out of the blue. I wasn’t expecting a call from him,’ says Cauty, ‘and said he’d got this idea for a record, was I interested. We nicked a lot of stuff obviously, from
Illuminatus!
, which sort of helped us.’ Cauty, in the kind of serendipitous moment in which Drummond, with his love of myth and happenstance, placed great stock, had seen the production of
The Illuminatus!
when it had played at the National Theatre.

Drummond’s idea for a record was to combine Schoolly D’s futuristic disregard of the past with the chaotic time-travelling mischief of
The
Illuminatus!
and the beatbox immediacy of
sampling. The band’s name, the JAMs, ‘sampled’ from Shea and Wilson, was an acronym of Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, who feature in the trilogy as the Mummu, spreading counter-factual messages of conspiracy and misinformation known by the ruling illuminati as discordians. For the next five years Drummond and Cauty would act as discordians, running rings around the music industry and media while selling millions of records.

‘A lot of the time, if we couldn’t decide what to do, we’d say to ourselves, “What would The KLF do in a situation like this?”’ says Cauty, ‘so we were always able to stand outside the band – the JAMs, The Timelords, The KLF – and say, “Well, look, there’s The KLF, this is the sort of thing they’d do, what would they do now?” It was almost like we were managing them, and we were able to go, “Well, if you do this, that’ll happen.” So that was very useful. We’d never have been able to have done it on a record company, ’cause everything we did was something that a record company would have said, “But you mustn’t do that.”’

The JAMs agreed a set of criteria: Drummond would be known as King Boy D, a rapper who delivered his rhymes in a Glaswegian accent, and Cauty, who retained a fondness for flowing locks and leather jackets, called himself ‘Rock Man Rock’. The painted JAMs would exist for only one year, during which they would sample their way through their record collections – cutting up the canonical history of music to present the JAMs’ version. The first single, ‘All You Need Is Love’, spliced the Beatles’ original with Sam Fox’s ‘Touch Me I Want Your Body’, and investigated the media’s response to AIDS.

An album,
1987
(
What The Fuck Is Going On?
), came out along with an accompanying JAMs act of self-promotion, a large
white-washed
graffito of ‘1987’ on a tower block. The press, initially intrigued, became supportive of the JAMs interventions and gave the album positive reviews, something that Mick Houghton,
as the JAMs’ press spokesperson found perplexing. ‘There was a period, of about a year I suppose when I didn’t see that much of Bill,’ he says. ‘He came up and played me the JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish … I just couldn’t take it seriously, ’cause it was a racket. It was Bill Drummond pretending to be some kind of Glaswegian dock worker over a load of Abba samples, and I just thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him.’

Drummond and Cauty had pressed up the JAMs releases as white labels with no press release, biographical information or publicity photos. The duo recognised that a few small-scale reviews would, however, generate enough interest to achieve some sales. ‘It was very much on the kind of level of, here’s a box, can you just get them round to the papers,’ says Houghton, ‘and in a way the only thing I could exploit – and I mean I really thought the music was awful – was that Bill had a reputation. Even though there was this nonsense that it was King Boy D, I don’t think I ever denied the fact that it was Bill Drummond and journalists loved him, journalists loved Bill Drummond, so they kind of bought into this thing, much to my surprise.’

Drummond and Cauty had wanted the anonymity of aliases to act as a wall between their past lives and the instant communication of the JAMs. The audacity of the project – the wholesale sampling of the Beatles and Abba along with Drummond’s somewhat theatrical lyrical flow – made instant and entertaining copy and the duo found themselves on the front cover of
Sounds
. ‘At first we decided to pretend that we were just two people from Scotland who nobody even knew about,’ says Cauty,’ ’cause we thought, if anybody knew our history – like I’d just been in this terrible pop band, and Bill being an A&R man – it would just destroy the whole concept of being, you know, two Scottish rappers from the estate.’

Under threat of an injunction from Abba’s management,
1987
(What The Fuck Is Going On?)
was withdrawn from sale and the last remaining copies were destroyed. The JAMs turned the legal action into a small-scale media circus by travelling to Sweden with a journalist and photographer, to try and explain their motives to, if not negotiate with, Abba’s management company. The accompanying feature contained stories of copies being thrown overboard from a ship into the North Sea, and the JAMs’ first and only live performance: taking over the ferry band’s PA as Rock Man Rock and King Boy D freestyled to the amusement of Scandinavian long-haul HGV drivers.

Within less than a year the JAMs had instantly earned
themselves
a reputation for extreme risk-taking and an irreverent approach to music-making and the orthodoxies and legal technicalities of copyright and sampling. The element of risk and disregard for music industry professionalism was highlighted in their media coverage. The duo became synonymous with pranks, a charge that would dog them for the next five years, much to their annoyance and frustration.

‘I’ve got an artist’s ego but what I haven’t got is a front man’s ego,’ says Drummond. ‘I wasn’t twenty-one or twenty-two – what happens when you’re twenty-one or twenty-two [is] you want to be taken seriously. I knew I was fucking serious. Jimmy and I were in our thirties. We weren’t looking up to somebody, trying to be like David Bowie or Jim Morrison. That didn’t exist, so people didn’t know what to make of us.’