'Bill Drammond is a cultural magician, and

ACKNOWLEDGE

I would like to acknowledge that I have been corrected, com­posed, connected, contained, confused, curtailed, continued, confronted, collided, combined, confined, concealed and con­ceived by the following three women, in order of appearance: Julia Drummond, Sunie Fletcher and Sallie Fellowes.

I would also like to acknowledge that if it were not for my collaborators in creation Balfey, Jimmy and Z, I would be some­thing different.

To Cally for the way these things look.

And lastly to Mick for being there for over twenty years.

THRASHED

Friday 13 June 1997

11.34 a.m., Studio One, Worldwide International, Mute Towers, Harrow Road, north-west London. England thrashed Australia in the first Test five days ago. The summer is here and I'm feel­ing crap.

'It sounds shite.' Dull, boring, irrelevant, not of the moment. Definitely not timeless, just old and tired. I'm crouched up on the floor of the studio, and I wish I wasn't here. Jimmy is bent over the mixing desk. His shoulders droop, his body sags; his hair is not grey beyond his years, but way too grey for someone trying to make disco records. I mean, who the fuck do we think we are fooling? How come we ended up here, five years after making our glorious exit? 'Ladies and gentlemen, The KLF have now left the music business.' So why are we doing this? We don't need the cash. We're both already committed to other projects, plans that excite us and take up all our time. We've got the rock 'n' roll legend intact, even if somewhat faded. We have somehow been able to side-step an embarrassing decline into irrelevance and remainder bins.

The history of rock 'n' roll has been littered with pathetic comebacks, in which the heroes of our teenage years are paraded before us to taste and try again. And we see them for what they are, and what they probably always were: puffed-up and pampered egos indulging any will o' the wisp whim that might float by. And we'd feted them as geniuses. In our youth, we saw their posturing and arrogance as something to aspire to. We saw their infantile hedonistic excess as the struggle of heroic freedom fighters against the repressive morals of our parents' generation.

No comeback has ever worked. The motivation behind the comeback has never and will never be the same as when the group or artist first crawled out of their sub-cult. If there were ideals, they have been replaced by mortgage-repayment demands and school fees for the kids. If there was fresh, orig­inal talent, it is now tired and tested, only capable of flicking the nostalgia switch. The Sex Pistols and The Velvet Underground, two cornerstones of rock's many-roomed man­sion, have made that sorry journey around the world's festivals over the last couple of years, and whatever twist they put on it, however well they handled barbed questions at the press con­ference, we knew it was all a bag of shite. Now Echo and the Bunnymen are about to relaunch themselves, in the hope that somebody will buy the legend that they were the Godfathers of Indie. On a personal level I hope so, for their sakes, but it still stinks.

Graham, the assistant engineer, brings in a fresh pot of tea. He tries to give me the red-and-white mug, the one with a cannon and the word 'Gunners' on it. It's a joke. A bad one. Although Graham is a northerner and has no interest in all things Highbury, everybody else that works in this studio (and seemingly the whole Mute empire) is a Gooner. I have to run a gauntlet of posters of Ian Wright, Donkey Adams, David Seaman and the rest. Mute Records? You'd think it would be all eastern-European avant-garde techno talk, and if they have to be into football, why not the Polish first division? You can imag­ine a Mute worker wearing a Czech Republic shirt, but not the dreaded Arsenal away top. I think it's all pathetic, and whatever respect I had for the fiercely independent Mute Records ethos

has evaporated. The fact that I have to keep my White Hart Lane membership well hidden, or the lads here would have it up on the dartboard for practice, may explain my distaste. But this is the light banter . . . the reality is that Jimmy is rolling another rollie, I'm still crouched up in the corner scribbling notes and we are jointly coming to terms with the fact that we've lost it, haven't got a clue, and should be back on our respective farms bringing in the hay. A pair of fortysomethings who are even past our mid-life crises, we are both seriously regretting ever offering to get involved with Jeremy Deller's Acid Brass project.

Last year, when we first met Jeremy up in Liverpool and he explained his idea - acid house anthems from the late '80s played by a brass band - and all his theories about northern working-class amateur-music-making traditions, we were seduced. Sheffield bedroom techno-boys being the same as a colliery brass band makes sense. Open-air raves being the same as a band on a park bandstand on a Sunday afternoon - of course. But maybe it was just our egos being stroked; maybe we were just into the idea of hearing a brass band having a go at our three-note warhorse of a signature tune, 'What Time Is Love' (with or without question mark). After Jimmy and I attended Jeremy Deller's sell-out Acid Brass concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the Williams Fairey Brass band (cur­rent national champions), we were up for the challenge. Sod whatever else we were doing at the time, and how retro the idea was of us two getting back into the studio to do this tune. I think we thought it wasn't going to take up more than a couple of days, and would only involve getting the Williams Fairey Band into the studio, the engineer slinging up a couple of over­head mikes, the band banging down the track and us making sure the right delays and reverbs were used, and the whole thing would sound fabulous.

On 17 May we went into Parr Street Studio in Liverpool with the band. From the word go, we knew it was a disaster. Not only was there a thirty-piece brass band in the studio, but there was also the house engineer, his assistant, a specialist brass band engineer who had been responsible for all the top brass band recordings of our time, the arranger of the track, the conductor of the band, whose job it was to interpret and realise the arranger's arrangement, the band's manager, the bloke from the record company . . . and the FA Cup Final going on in the TV lounge. Jimmy and I tried to keep a low profile, but knew the whole thing was a waste of time, seeing as there was no way the band, however many championships they had won, could play in time. To be fair to them, their type of music isn't about playing in strict machine time; it's about ebb and flow, rise and fall. But if we were going to have any chance of doing anything with the track, other than let it be what it wanted to be, we needed all their parts nailed to a click track.

It didn't happen.

Back down in London Kevin and Graham, the engineers, spent five days sampling all the individual brass parts and flying them back in, moving them about a millisecond back, a niil-limillisecond forward. I mean, this is techno; you don't want any of that natural-feel stuff that musicians go on about. But it doesn't seem to matter how precise Kevin and Graham have got the brass parts; as soon as we put anything else on top, it sounds like a pile of stodge. It sounds like an idea that is screaming at us not to happen. Usually by now Jimmy and I would be going 'sod that, dump the idea, cancel the studio' and be off.

It takes about an hour and a half for me to drive into London from my place. Every morning I stop at the service station and pick one of those club compilation cassettes: Ministry of Sound Vol III, Ibiza Classics, you know the ones. I shove it on the cas­sette player and drive. I hope to hear something that inspires me, makes me feel good, makes me think something's going on out there in disco land. But it all sounds limp, crap, shit and lame. No ideas, no risks, just a bit of shallow packaging and an ad campaign. And they all come on like they are on some sort of a mission, like this well-past-its-sell-by-date handbag techno has got some sort of moral high ground going for it.

Back in the studio, things get worse.

This week Fat of the Land came out. Everybody acknowl­edges that 'Breathe' and 'Firestarter' are the only two modern pop records to come out in the last twelve months. The Chemical Brothers are always mentioned in the same breath as The Prodigy, the current music-business thinking being 'forget Britpop, it's bands like the Prods and the Chemicals that are going to break America'. I bought Fat . . . and the latest Chemicals album on the way in, and right now, as I sip my sev­enth mug of tea of the morning and Jimmy rolls his eleventh rollie, we are listening to The Prodigy and we're thinking, How do they do it? How do they get that sound? That right-between-the-eyes, dry, cut-back but full-bollocks hardest noise in the world, that still sounds like they did it all in the inside of a bis­cuit tin? We know it's time to quit. That fence where the sheep get out needs mending.

We stick on the Chemicals. We are hoping to hear something that we both understand and are capable of ripping off. Track one is 'Block Rocking Beats', and it rocks. These modern groups are all banging away at about 134 bpm - we're still stuck at 120. I mean, we still think it's hip to pretend to be into jungle and threaten to make records at 170 bpm. We had no idea 134 was where it was at. Track two: I don't know what it's called. It sounds like they use a live drummer, you can hear the tom-tom fills go slightly out of time. Very clever. The funky drummer has got even funkier. I love the clattering sound they get. Then we find it, a two-bar drum-fill without too much other noise on top. Graham's already got it sampled; Jimmy loops it. We vari-speed it and bang it down on to our track. It sounds brilliant! But all it does is show up how crap the brass band idea is.

Two Chinese takeaways, seventeen mugs of tea and thirty-two roll-ups later. It is now almost 11.30 p.m., we're both knackered. We've spent all day trying to get this Chemical Brothers drum loop to work in with the Williams Fairey Brass Band. We give up. Outside in the car park, Jimmy and I climb into our respective rusting family saloons, each littered with debris left by young children. Young children who don't give a shit what their dads do, as long as they are at home to play with.