Review: The KLF - Solid State Logik 1

Holy shit. They're here. The KLF are finally available to stream on Spotify and YouTube, and I for one am beside myself with glee.

Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty created quite a stir over their 5 year tenure as The Kopyright Liberation Front in which they took the music industry for a phenomenal amount of cash, rocketed to the top of the charts, pioneered some of the most iconic acid house, rave and ambient tunes of a generation and even managed to snag Tammy Wynette to sing on Justified & Ancient.

Then - without so much as a by-your-leave - they promptly French-exited and deleted their entire back catalogue, declaring they wouldn't record again "until there was world peace." I sincerely hope they're not as good as their word and with the start of 2021 heralding the arrival of Solid State Logik 1, there's one fan right here who can live in hope, especially when their peers of similar ages (The Orb, Orbital, Underworld et al) are still pulling in a crowd and creatively re-peaking in their pensionable states.

Come on boys, you know you want to...

Ironically, Cauty actually formed The Orb with Dr Alex Paterson and (credit to Allmusic for this) the duo recorded A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From the Centre of the Ultraworld in addition to material for an album, but split early in 1990 -- with Paterson taking the name for his future recordings. Cauty then deleted Paterson's contributions, re-recorded large portions, and released the results credited only as Space.

Beginning by taking the piss is absolutely the reason I love these two. They released Doctorin' The Tardis under the moniker The Timelords in 1988; a pretty crappy track by all accounts that went to the number one spot in the charts for a week, and was followed up by the group with a book entitled The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way).

I would wager that changing their name before the next release was a wise move and what effectively rose from the ashes of the aborted recordings as The Orb was Cauty pushing forward an Ambient House concept in 1990, called simply Chill Out. It still serves today as a masterclass in the genre, and as diametrically opposed to what had been (and what was to come) as it could possibly be for The KLF.

....then we have The White Room: 44 minutes of energy, enlightenment, freneticism, chill and a semi-disparate set of tracks that confound at times and frustrate at others; as was the way with these boys.

You have absolute bangers like 3 A.M. Eternal and Last Train To Trancentral which would get any dance floor humming even to this day. You also have one of the finest tracks ever pressed to vinyl in What Time Is Love? Over the course of 3:56 (or 5:17 on the album) we are treated to beats, bass, sampling, rapping, horns, one fo the most iconic synth sequences in history and "I wanna see you sweat" being screamed down the mic. I still get goosebumps at the intro: "Right now, right now, right now.... it's time to.... check out the dance motherfucker!!!!"

There's nothing else here as strong as these 3 tracks, and whilst the remainder of the album flows nicely I can skip over a lot of it, as it kind of passes me by. I honestly struggle to see what the fuss is about as an entire work, but if you zero in on the aforementioned 3 tunes, you can kind of see why it gained such interest in the early 90's.

We then have a near-30(!) year hiatus before Solid State Logik 1 pops up. Just as you would expect from Drummond and Cauty, this offering is somewhat of a mixed bag and is actually a collection of their 'hits' rather than newly released material. It's the number "1" that intrigues me though, as it suggests there is more coming.

We have Doctorin' The Tardis (meh), followed by the 'classic 3', a superb track called It's Grim Up North (which they released as The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu), America: What Time Is Love? (speaks for itself), Justified & Ancient (feat. Tammy Wynette), and the now infamous version of 3 A.M. Eternal.

Again thanks to Allmusic for this as I couldn't rewrite it better:

Voted Best British Group by BPI and the Brit Awards, The KLF were scheduled to perform at a London awards ceremony on February 13, 1992. Cauty and Drummond did show up, but horrified the formal audience with a hardcore thrash version of "3 A.M. Eternal" (performed with the justifiably named Extreme Noise Terror) that also included Drummond spraying the crowd with blanks from an automatic rifle and the post-performance announcement, "The KLF have left the music industry." Topping their already extreme actions, Cauty and Drummond delivered the carcass of a dead sheep -- plus eight gallons of blood -- to the lobby of the hotel after-party. The industry and press reaction was overwhelmingly negative, but Cauty and Drummond had already made their mint.

The group will remain as one of the most influential of the 1990's and cemented their places in Electronic music history with their two main albums.

As for this one, I will rate it highly enough as a piece of their history and sheer shit-housery that has existed for their career and beyond, and wait with bated breath for what's next.

7/10

Badger x