'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

WHEELCHAIRS

Monday 30 June 1997

11.37 a.m., Studio One, Worldwide International, Mute Towers, and I'm feeling good like James Brown.

Driving in this morning, banging my palm on the steering wheel in time to whatever crap was coming out of the one speaker that still works on my C reg. Volvo estate, two state­ments were crashing around my head. It was only when I started to get looks from fellow drivers waiting at the lights that I realised the statements were not only in my head, but I was screaming them as loud as I could.

In the studio, Kevin and Graham seem to have got the Chemical Brothers loop, somehow, to sit in the track and make the whole thing rock. Jimmy's got a bass line. At times like these, Jimmy having a bass line is the most important thing in the world. The fact that it is the same bass line we have always used doesn't matter. It is a process of having to go through every conceivable bass line in the world before discovering the only one we have ever used as if we have never used it before. Nick, the keyboard player and programmer, has a new piece of cheap studio hardware called a Sherman. He got it from a tower-block flat in south London. It makes everything sound as tough as The Prodigy - it's obviously the secret of their sound.

This time next month everyone will have a Sherman, and the month after, it will be last month's studio gimmick.

Jimmy is rummaging through his trunk of disks, which con­tains every sample we have ever used. 'It must be here somewhere.' He is looking for a disk that contains the searing synth sound that we used on the original 1988 Pure Trance ver­sion of 'What Time Is Love'. He can't find it. We are not surprised. A bike is sent in search of a copy of the record so we can sample it from there. As the track's playing back at full volume on the speakers and the brass parts are sounding big and shiny and right and true, the two statements come surging back into my brain. Somehow they seem even more right, more meant to be, more handed down by God, and needing to be proclaimed to the nation. But what will Jimmy think? I'm sure the last thing he'll reckon the track needs is a load of shouting from me on it.

'Give it a go,' he says. I do. It takes a few goes before you get down to that bit in you where your primeval howl lies in its lair. Jimmy decides which two we should keep, by which time the bike is back with a copy of 'What Time Is Love (Pure Trance Version)'. Rev rigs up a deck and we stick it on. The fact is, what took us only an afternoon to do nine years ago on some basic home-recording gear sounds more now, relevant, hard and happening than what we have spent the last three weeks working on. But fuck all that, 'cause Jimmy is now randomly jamming the two chosen samples of my primal scream along with the Pure Trance Version still playing on the deck.

'FUCK! FUCK! FUCK THE MILLENNIUM!

WE WANT IT

WE WANT IT

WE WANT IT NOW!

FUCK THE MILLENNIUM! WE WANT IT NOW!

FUCK THE MILLENNIUM! WE WANT IT NOW!

PUCK THE MILLENNIUM! WE WANT IT NOW!

This is rock 'n' roll, this is every Hendrix solo, every Johnny Rotten sneer, every Keith Moon smashed drum kit. At least, that's what me and Jimmy are thinking. Fuck knows what Kevin and Graham are thinking, as they watch us acting like kids messing about with a sampler for the very first time, like small-town punks in a local eight-track studio, thinking their three-chord racket is the future of rock 'n' roll. What this has got to do with brass bands and art concepts, or even hit singles, I haven't a clue, but we're off. More tea (and not in an Arsenal mug). Gimpo turns up, with his new shaved head, sideburns and sticky-out ears look. He tells us sticky-out ears are 'in'. We shove him in the recording booth and tell him to bellow, 'It's 1997, what the fuck's going on?' He does. Then we get him to try 'Fuck the millennium' and 'We want it now'. It sounds good. Finally, we ask him to scream 'Bill!' and 'Jimmy!', like the two of us are lost and he's trying to find us. What we want this for I don't know, but it might help if we ever try to find our way back. Gimpo disappears off up the Harrow Road on his push-bike. Things are moving. More tea, more roll-ups. Graham orders the Chinese takeaway and talks about when he was in the RAF.

When things in the studio start getting a life of their own, they also start to grow as a visual thing in your imagination, so for Jimmy and me, things are getting pretty visual by now. For some reason, we are to be in wheelchairs. My leg in plaster, Jimmy on a drip, both of us being pushed by these two dollybird nurses with white uniforms so tight across their ample busts that you can catch glimpses of their red (or black) push-up bras between the buttons. Almost Benny Hill. A slight concept shift, and Jimmy reckons he wants Hattie Jacques as his nurse, which I suppose means that I get Barbara Windsor. (The fact that Hattie is at least ten years dead is irrelevant.) Now we have our image sorted out, things are becoming clearer.

Z turns up with his bible. He proudly shows us how he has just spent the morning cutting up his genuine snakeskin boots and using the scaly hide to cover the book. He then goes into one about how he has had it with the Old Testament and all that jealous, angry God stuff. He quotes us from the Acts of the Apostles - chapter 19, verse 19 - and insists on writing the words down in my notebook: 'Many of them which also used curious arts brought their books together and burned them before all men, and they counted the price of them and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver.' He thinks it's relevant to me and Jimmy. He may be right. He wants us to use the quote on the track. No way. Jimmy and I have our own ideas. We've got our hymn books. I want 'I Vow to Thee, My Country' and Jimmy wants 'For Those In Peril On the Sea'. Poor Kevin and Graham. They haven't got a clue what's going on by now. They kinda looked up to us as a pair of geezers who'd had a bunch of hits, been there, done that, in the early rave wars. Kevin even told me that hearing the original version of 'What Time Is Love' at an acid-house party at Westworld Studios back in late '88 was a defining moment of his life. And here we are, a couple of farm­ers with cow shit on our wellies, arguing about what hymn we want to sing.

Z gets in the vocal booth, but we are not too sure whether his performance should be in the style of a boxing promoter or a southern evangelist. Of course, the southern evangelist wins out, and the Reverend Bitumen Hoarfrost is born. Then Z is off, back into the night. Jimmy and I are on the settee in the studio kitchen, MTV on but the sound turned down. The coffee table is covered with the remains of our Chinese takeaway, and we're plotting full-page ads in national newspapers. We are getting totally into the institution of The Comeback, draw­ing on the sad, pathetic nature of the whole thing, the desperation of all concerned to exploit whatever they can from the myth, while trying to convince themselves (if nobody else) that the band is still relevant. We want to pick that scab, squeeze that pus, mix it up. We want to play at going ungrace­fully, we want to see the tawdry show with the battered props.

The week that we were Number One as The Timelords, the thing we revelled in more than anything else was the prospect of one day having to tour faded seaside resorts as part of some second-division nostalgia package - Hazel Dean, S'Express and us - like you still get Merseybeaters doing, and all sorts of variants of the original '70s glam bands doing. It was only right and proper that all that had to happen. And once again, we are finding it an interesting subject. No, not interesting. Totally irresistible. Maybe we should do a one-off show as these two old geezers, almost a pastiche of Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse characters, and make out that this record we're doing is a live recording of that event - they're back, but for one show only.

So these are the words we've already got down on the bag the prawn crackers came in ... 'THEY'RE BACK' in bold letters. Underneath in smaller letters: 'from the accountants', followed by some äs-yet undecided description of how ground-breaking we were, followed by the line 'The greatest rave band in the world. Ever!' (Who in these late '90s would want to describe themselves as a rave band? Not even 808 State. The word 'rave' is at that stage where it's no longer used as something to be aligned with, but has yet officially to be deemed naff. Often that's when words are at their most potent.) Then in huge let­ters, 'THE KLF', followed by, 'For one life only'. This done with all the usual graphics we used in the past, same typeface, white out of black, but strapped across the lot will be a white flash with the words 'Cancelled due to severe senility'. Mute Records have been desperate to involve the letters K, L and F in this pro­ject. We have been resisting. They've come up with the idea of stickering the record with 'This is not The KLF'.

We're back to thinking about us in the wheelchairs. These two old, decrepit geezers, dribbling, stinking of ^iss, desper­ately trying to convince the nursing-home nurses that we used to be hip pop stars. Jimmy is scribbling one of his cartoons of the scene. We've got the rhino horns on our heads, the ones we

used to wear under our cowls in the latter KLF period. They now hang in my work room at home. The number of people who are so disappointed to find they are made of some sort of polystyrene, shoved into empty cat-food tins that have then been Gaffa-taped to the innards of building-site hard hats.

Back in the studio, it's hymn-singing time. We drag in as many people as are left in Mute Towers at this late hour, and tell them to sing like men.

O Holy Spirit, who didst brood Upon the waters dark and rude, And bid their angry tumult cease, And give, for wild confusion, peace, O hear us when we cry to thee For those in peril on the sea.

Those are words to drown for. We love it. We do take after take, building the vocal tracks up into a mighty congregation. Jimmy is able to get the octave underneath, Nick does the des­cants and I just about keep in tune. Hymn-singing, music for real men, none of that poofy disco. We can see it now: Hymns Justified and Ancient, a long-playing record by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Somebody has just phoned me and wants to know what Jimmy and I are up to. When I tell him, he says by doing a comeback, even if it is just for twenty-three minutes, don't we think we will disappoint all those people who hold us in such high regard? 'Yeah, that's the whole point,' I tell him. He doesn't believe; I don't know if I believe myself. But none ofthat matters, because we are now born-again hymn-singers. Lifeboatmen. How we are going to make all the disparate ele­ments work in one record we have no idea. We can work that out another day.

Jimmy and I decide to knock it on the head. It's past mid­night. Outside there is a clear sky and a full moon. The two of us set off in different directions. It is only then that 1 remember

that I've forgotten to tell him about the answerphone message I got last night from Stuart Home, about the Rollright Stones coming up for sale. It can wait.