One of my favorite bands from the 90's, plus I love the song, Justified & Ancient.

One of my favorite bands from the 90's, plus I love the song, Justified & Ancient.
...which featured Tammy Wynette.

Great song!

The KLF also went under the moniker The Timelords and had a UK #1 hit in 1988 called 'Doctorin' the Tardis' which was a Doctor Who sample based on Gary Glitter's classic 'Rock and Roll Part 2'.  It would also become a Top 40 hit in Canada in 1991.

Vocalist Ricardo Da Force went on to become a part of the excellent 90s trance act N-Trance and provided rap vocals on many of their hits including their lone US Top 40 remix of The Bee Gees 'Stayin' Alive' in 1995 and the Rod Stewart sampled 'Da Ya Think I'm Sexy' in 1997, which was also a Top 20 hit in Canada

One of my favorite bands from the 90's, plus I love the song, Justified & Ancient.


And it all started with the ultimate conspiracy theory novel: The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

The 1975-6s novel was adapted to theatrical production in 1977.  Two of the cast members were Bill Nighy and Jimmy Cauty, and that's how the KLF (the band, that is, not the actual Front) got started.

The parallels between the novel's fictional AnthraxfnordLeprosy Mu (and the bits about the importance of the concentric rings of thefnordPentagon) and the events of and immediately following 9/11fnordare, of course, purely coincidentalfnord.

"showed their hand now and went totalitarian all the way, there would be a revolution. Middle-readers would rise up with right-wingers, and left-libertarerrorn't powerful enough to withstand that kind of massive revolution. But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Consttemporal checksum failedtringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travspoiler deletedeople reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protectransmission garbledhe puppets in the Kremlin have no idea that they and the puppets in the White House are working for the same peCRC-128 errorach group thinks it is competing with the others, while actually each is playing its partransmission garbledthink they're working to bring down the government, but actually they are strengthening its hand. The Black Panthers are also infiltrated. Everything is infiltrated. At present rate, withtemporal signal-to-noise ratio exceededwill have the American people under tighter surveillance than Hitler had the Germans. And the beauty of it is, the majority of the Americans will have been so frightened by tspoiiler warningrrorist incidents that they will beg to be controlled as a masochist begs for the whip."

I mean, that quote is more than 25 years old, and there are better ones, but I can't use them because they'd spoil the enjoyment of the novel for the first-time reader.  It's got to be one of them coincidences.  (Or is it "It's got to be one of them coincidences"?  The way in which you see the universe hangs upon the sylllable upon which you put the accent.)  

I mean, it's all well and good to posit that the many-worlds interpretation of the EPR Paradox is a workable description of reality, but it's quite another thing to suggest that someone might have actually figured how how to manipulate it.  So there's absolutely no way that the author could have slipped in from some place like The Universe Next Door.  

But enough of my ranting.  I finally got the temporoarrdobbsulator working again.  And Here's the passage that spawned the KLF:

Dillinger laughed. "Yes," he said. "I'm the president of Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus Inc. You've seen them— 'If it's not an LBJP it's NOT an L.P.'?

"Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus?" Joe exclaimed. "My God, you put out the best rock in the country! The only rock a man my age can listen to without wincing."

"Thanks," Dillinger said modestly. "Actually, the Illuminati own the companies that put out most of the rock. We started Laughing Buddha Jesus Phallus to counterattack. We were ignoring that front until they got the MC-5 to cut a disc called 'Kick Out The Jams' just to taunt us with old, bitter memories. So we came back with our own releases, and the next thing I knew I was making bales of money from it. We've also fed information, through third parties, to Christian Crusade in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so they could expose some of what the Illuminati are doing in the rock field. You've seen the Christian Crusade publications—Rhythm, Riots and Revolution, and Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles, and so forth?"

"Yes," Joe said absently. "I thought it was nut literature. It's so hard," he added, "to grasp the whole picture."

That's the same John Dillinger who's quoted in Iron Horse Mix of Last Train to Trancentral with "OK, everybody, lie down on the floor and keep calm..." And that's why there's a pyramid behind the ghettoblaster, why "Mu Mu Land" is mentioned in "Justified and Ancient", why the DVD's called "The Sound of Mu(sic)", why Robert Anton Wilson himself is sampled in the first 30 seconds of the 8:50 mix of Siouxie and the Banshees' Kiss Them For Me (Kathak Mix), and why I never listened to the MC5's "Kick Out The JAMs" in quite the same way again.  

I've probably bored all y'all to death, and yet I've barely covered the tip of the iceberg.  There's a lot more out there in terms of obscure KLF/Illuminatus! trivia.  Everything KLF release is an excuse to go hunting for the easter eggs you just know they hid in it.

fnord

The KLF/Timelords and their story always fascinated me.

My faves are "Last Train To Trancentral" and "It's Grim Up North".

I liked The Timelords: Doctorin' the Tardis

and

KLF: Chill Out