'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

THEY CALLED ME UP IN TENNESSEE

7 April 1998

A phone is ringing somewhere. Let the answerphone take it. I roll over, switch on the radio to the 6.00 a.m. news headlines on the rescheduled Today programme. Something about the peace process, something about a wonder drug for breast cancer, then:

Legendary country and western singer Tammy Wynette has died, aged 55. She had sold more records than any other female country and western star, and was known as the First Lady of Country. She was less successful in her personal life: married five times, she ...

I switch it off, get dressed, go out to feed the animals and open the chicken run. The damson trees are now in full blossom, but the weather forecast for this Easter weekend is wintry condi­tions. A late frost could wipe the whole crop out.

People can never get enough of dead rock 'n' roll stars. Writers want to write about them, movie-makers make movies about them and record companies want to repackage them. I'm sick of the whole thing; all those dead rock 'n' roll stars should be taken out and shot. Except for the ones who died young and pretty - they should be forced to live until they lose their looks, talent, cool and credibility.

I collect the eggs. A blackcap is singing in the hedge. It's the first I've heard this year. They have a song that confirms all your innocent notions that there is a plan, and the plan is good. Back in the kitchen, I put the porridge on and sit down at the table and write.

Early summer, 1991. Jimmy and I were about to dump the track. We were working in a south London studio, trying to breathe life into a song that had originally been the opening track on our first album, '1987 (What the Fuck's Going On?)'. The singer we had been using sounded uninspired, doing a job, watching the clock. Jimmy turned to me.

'What this song needs, Bill, is Tammy Wynette.' Jimmy is always right. I sang along with the track, mimicking her south­ern twang. It was going to be the best record we had ever made.

I disappeared into the TV room to make phone calls. Somewhere in the world was Tammy Wynette, doing whatever the greatest female country singer the world has ever known does, and somewhere near her would be a telephone. I just had to find the number ofthat phone.

Twenty minutes later I was talking to her backstage in a Tennessee concert hall. She sounded exactly like Tammy Wynette should sound; a classic warm and friendly southern drawl. We played her the track down the phone. She laughed and told us she loved it. When could we get over to record together?

In the twenty minutes between Jimmy Cauty suggesting the idea and me speaking to her down the line backstage in Pennsylvania, I had been talking to Clive Davis, boss of Arista Records, the company that put out The KLF's records in the States, and Davis had been speaking to George Ritchie, Tammy Wynette's latest husband and manager. Davis had convinced Ritchie that although he had never heard of The KLF, we were in fact currently the biggest-selling British act in the world. A deal was struck. Jimmy and I went to a café and rewrote the lyrics to our song, 'Justified and Ancient'. We were proud of them, but doubtful that Tammy Wynette would ever agree to sing them. 'They called me up in Tennessee/They said "Tammy, stand by the Jams" . . .' 'They're justified and they're ancient, and they drive an ice cream van ...'

A week later I was touching down at Nashville, Tennessee, with a DAT of the backing track of 'Justified and Ancient' in my pocket. It was mid-afternoon. George Ritchie met me at the air­port. He was driving a powder-blue Jag. The cassette case to our White Room album was on the rosewood dashboard, and he wanted me to know how excited he and Tammy were about the project. I didn't tell him the project stank. The whole British tradition of 'young' white artists dragging up some has-been legend to perform with is an evil and corrupt exchange; the young artist wanting to tap into the mythical status and credi­bility of the has-been, the has-been wanting some of that 'I'm still contemporary, relevant (and will do anything to get back in the charts)' stuff.

George Ritchie was a time-served Nashville songwriter: snakeskin boots, fresh-pressed jeans, a wet-look perm and just recovering from major heart surgery. I liked him. We pulled up at a pair of huge iron gates. Across them was spelt out, in two-foot-high metalwork, 'First Lady Acres'. The gates opened automatically and we drove up the drive to a low, southern, '60s mansion.

'Bill, is that you, honey? Bill, you come on up here.' Deep white carpets, huge bad taste art and from somewhere upstairs, that voice, calling out directly to me. I was 39, been there done that seen it all, but I was starstruck like I'd never been before in my life, and I'd not even met her yet.

As much as I have loved all sorts of music, from unlistenable avant-garde classical shit through to 'Barbie Girl' by Aqua, country music is the only music I've been totally able to identify with, especially now that I've gone through divorce, heartache,

kids, revenge and Jesus in my own life. Many of my contempo­raries may dig the kitsch value of country. For me, that's just something I try to ignore. There are more country records in my collection than any other kind; it's what I listen to when I'm alone in the house. The day Jim Reeves died was my first great rock 'n' roll death moment. The weep of a pedal steel guitar is the sound of heartstrings being torn. We all need one outlet for the Sad Bastard in us; country music is my avenue.

Tammy Wynette was talking to me, calling me honey, telling me to come on up. I would have declared my undying love for her, agreed to run away together, live a life in cheap motels and all-night bars and . . . Ritchie turned to me.

'Bill, you better go on up and meet her - she's in her boudoir.' I followed the voice up the wide staircase. Tammy had her own beauty parlour. Her fingernails were being manicured by a young man, as a woman teased her hair into some feathered concoction. Her free hand was flicking through the pages of Vogue. Tammy never had the movie star looks of some of her lesser rivals, but she had a tough beauty, a no-messin' allure. No amount of airbrush on record sleeves could conceal it: this face was the epitome ofthat over-used phrase, Southern White Trash. Married at fourteen, divorced at seventeen, three kids by the time she was twenty. (I embroider the myth.) Every fuck-up, heartbreak and overdose chiselled lines of real beauty into her face, which the soft focus tried desperately to hide.

'I'm yours, Tammy. Take me,' was not my opening line, but it would have been if I were honest. Instead, I suffered a blackout. 'I'm not worthy', etc., had the better of me. The next thing I remember is sitting at a white grand piano in a huge front room, big enough for a hoedown; crystal chandeliers, the lot. I tried to steady my hands as I played the chords to 'Justified and Ancient', while Tammy sang along. It wasn't working out - she couldn't find the key, let alone get it in pitch. Ritchie kept us going, encouraging the both of us, telling us it sounded great.

Ritchie had booked a studio for that evening, between seven and ten. Tammy had cancelled my hotel reservation, telling me I was to stay with them and that she was going to cook me grits for breakfast. The two of them gave me a grand tour of the house. It was a museum to her legend: walls covered in gold discs, awards, framed letters from heads of state, massive oil portraits of her children and a Warhol of herself. The place was everything that anybody could want from a Tammj Wynette mansion; from backwoods shack poverty to what mosi of us over here would see as endearing tack on a massive scale. Not quite Imelda Marcos, but you get the picture.

Then Tammy took me out to her back lot, where her tour bus was parked up. This, she told me, was her real home. She onlj ever had a good night's sleep when she could feel the highway speed by four feet below. She spent as much of the year on the road as possible. The idea that Jimmy and I had a commercially successful band and had never played live was beyond her comprehension. The only reason she could think of for making records was to get out there and perform for people, to give love and get it back. The concept that Jimmy and I made records that were not intended to be performed live - worse, would be impossible to perform live - was as ludicrous as play­ing concert halls but not letting anybody in (Tammy's analogy).

'Bill, you're from Scotland? Can you tell me why I have such a large lesbian following there?' I had no answer, but promised to look into it for her.

An off-duty policeman, armed and fully uniformed, had been hired to provide security for our half-mile drive to the studio. Tammy didn't go anywhere without security: it came with the star status. Her legend required it. It also demanded the full make-up and hairdo for a mere recording session. A star must look like a star all the time, even if it was just the recording engineers and me that got to see her. Being the First Lady of Country isn't a part-time job, nor was she in the White House for a mere couple of terms. It was a lifetime commitment.

All studios around the world have basically the same gear. I had been kind of hoping it would be all down-home 1950s Americana, but no. Even the studio engineers looked the same. Apart from the waist-length hair and the cowboy boots. As soon as Tammy tried to sing to the backing track I had brought with me, I knew the whole project was a complete disaster. She could not keep in time with the track for more than four bars before speeding up or slowing down. I began to fill my face from a bowl of boiled sweets that sat on the mixing desk. Being a non-smoker, I resort to stuffing myself at the approach of any emotional crisis.

'How's it sound, Bill?' came the voice from the other side of the glass. How do you tell the voice you have worshipped for the past twenty years, one of the greatest singing voices of the twentieth century, a voice that defines a whole epoch of American culture, that it sounds shit?

'It sounds great, Tammy. We just want to try it a few more times, so your voice can feel the track.' More complete bol­locks. Ritchie knew the score, he knew it wasn't happening. He explained to me that when Tammy was recording her own stuff, the band always laid down the backing track with her singing along; they took their timing from her. Speeding up and slowing down is part of any proper singer's arsenal of emo­tional fireworks. She had never sung to a bunch of machines playing dance music. The whole idea was turning sour. What sort of egocentric, vanity-drenched trip were Jimmy and I on, appropriating one of the world's greatest and purest musical treasures just to reduce it to an ironic aside?

Ritchie had an idea.

'Hey, hon, I'll come in there with you. We'll sing it together.' So Ritchie went into the booth and attempted to conduct her through each line, mouthing the words for her to follow. We did take after take, but things didn't get much better. I felt truly ashamed hearing her voice, the voice of poor white American womanhood, struggling to find some emotional content in our banal, self-referential lyrics. I shoved more boiled sweets into

my face and prayed it was just a bad acid flashback, and noth­ing to do with reality.

Thirty-six hours later I was back in that south London studio with Jimmy, piling up more and more excuses as to why I had failed to get any sort of usable performance out of the First Lady of Country. This was before I played him the tape. When I did, he said:

'We just got this new machine. We can sample up every word she sang separately - stretch them, squeeze them, get them all in time. As for her pitching, the listener will hear that as emo­tional integrity.' As I said earlier, Jimmy is always right.

'It's a Christmas Number One,' he added.

Jimmy was wrong. Freddie Mercury died, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' was re-released and we had to settle for the Number Two slot. A singer dying always messes up the agenda.

I eat my porridge and check the answerphone to hear who rang at the ungodly hour of 6.00 a.m. It was a researcher from the Today programme, who had wanted to know if I'd go on air with a quote. I don't want to speak to anybody, but if I did, this is what I'd say:

'Tammy Wynette may have been the greatest female country and western singer of all time, but she is also the only woman who has ever cooked me grits for breakfast.'

There will be one less Christmas card on my mantelpiece this year. Tonight, I will go to bed and cry.