The JAMs, on the other hand, took whole sections of someone else’s record and used them as they were. They took things not for how they sounded, but for what they represented. When they took parts of ABBA and The Beatles it was not because of the quality of the sound, but very specifically because they were records by ABBA and The Beatles.
The bluntness of The JAMs musical thefts can be seen as being an unsophisticated, early attempt at sampling. With the art or craft of sampling still being developed, this argument suggests, it is not surprising that these pioneering records have a naive quality.
Again, this misses the intention behind what they were doing. A more useful model would be to view them as what the Situationists called détournements. The Situationists were a group of thinkers and critics who were active in the Fifties and Sixties, mainly in France.
At the heart of their thinking was the concept of The Spectacle. The Spectacle can be thought of as the overwhelming representation of all that is real.
In the simplest possible terms it can be understood as being mass media, but that simple definition should really be expanded to include our entire culture and our social relations.
The Spectacle is both the end result of, and the justification for, our consumerist society. The Spectacle draws our attentions away from what is real to what is merely a representation.
The Situationists saw in our culture a shift in our focus from being to having, and then from having to appearing to have. This is a process that the users of Facebook will probably grasp immediately. This absorption in the image of things, they felt, was the cause of our modern alienation.
The Situationists were not keen on the spectacle, yet it is the central idea at the heart of their self-referential reality tunnel. The thinking behind Situationist détournements goes like this: every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated.
Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honourable response is to fuck with it.
Détournement, then, involves taking the cultural images that are forced on us and using them for our own ends. It involves changing the text or context of an image in order to subvert its meaning. The Situationists altered cultural images in the pages of their pamphlets, perhaps by taking a newspaper advert for a consumer product and replacing the text with quotes from Sartre about alienation.
These days it is more frequently seen in graffiti, or across the internet on Tumblr blogs and social networks like Facebook, where it is known as ‘culture jamming’. Company logos are a frequent target.
The idea, as the Situationists put it, is to ‘turn the expressions of the capitalist system against itself’. The aim is to break their spell. In this context, consider the first JAMs single ‘All You Need Is Love’.
As its title suggests, this begins with a steal from The Beatles’ song of the same name. The Beatles, of course, are the highest expression of the ‘proper band’ model and generally considered to be the unarguable kings of modern pop music. The highest point of The Beatles, many would argue, was their psychedelic explosion in 1967 and the highest point of this was ‘All You Need Is Love’.
This song was the UK’s contribution to Our World, the first live global television programme. This event was made possible by the recent invention of communication satellites. For the first time in history, people around the world would come together and watch the same thing at the same time. For such a symbolic event The Beatles boiled down the message of the age into a simple melody and the beautifully sung refrain ‘Love, love, love’.
Then, surrounded by flowers and the beautiful people of Swingin’ London, they sent that message, in the form of pop music, around the entire globe.
So when The JAMs started their first record with fifteen seconds of ‘All You Need Is Love’, this was no mere sampling.
The way they ended the sample, by slowing down the final ‘love, love, love’ refrain until it collapsed into nothing, can only be seen as a rejection. This was a statement of intent. It was about claiming – and then dismissing – the height of The Beatles and, by extension, pop music as a whole.
Such were the ambitions and the acts of the two men who had taken on the name The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. That intro was followed by an MC5 sample, the shout of ‘Kick out The JAMs, motherfuckers!’ which Robert Anton Wilson had discussed in Illuminatus!. This was followed by a sampled voice which states ‘Sexual intercourse no known cure’, and introduces the lyrical theme of the track. This is a song about AIDS, a disease which had only become known to the general public a few years earlier and which brought an end to the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s.
The Beatles’ historic expression of the 1967 Summer of Love had been détourned and subverted into an opposite, more contemporarily relevant message. This basic principle, that you have the right to do what you like with whatever culture is thrust at you, is made explicit in their reworking of The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s ‘Take Five’, which The JAMs retitled ‘Don’t Take Five (Take What You Want)’.
The idea would later take on a more political tone in the internet copyright wars of the early twenty-first century. It is the (frequently unspoken) heart of the philosophy behind torrent sites such as the Pirate Bay and related political organisations such as the Pirate Party. It is an argument that is still being digested by our culture.
The finished record was shit, of course. There are very few people who could listen to it today and say, with hand on heart, that as a record it has merit. This is all the more apparent if you play it after listening to The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’, which retains its innate quality to this day.
As Drummond and Cauty’s press agent Mick Houghton told Richard King, ‘[Drummond] came up and played me The JAMs and I thought it was absolute rubbish . . . I just couldn’t take it seriously because it was a racket. It was Bill Drummond pretending to be some kind of Glaswegian dock worker over a load of Abba samples, and I thought it was complete tosh, seriously, I really did and I may or may not have said that to him.’
Faced with the difficulty of promoting such a band, Houghton made it clear to the press exactly who The JAMs were. The pair had adopted pseudonyms – King Boy D for Drummond and Rockman Rock for Cauty – and were trying to hide behind the persona of Scottish dock workers, rapping in the pronounced accent that Drummond used on his solo record.
The revelation of their true identities was a wise move on Houghton’s part, for the press knew of Drummond and Cauty and knew enough to be curious about what they were up to. The press were intrigued by the mystique that The JAMs were beginning to weave around themselves.
Drummond’s first lyric on ‘All You Need Is Love’ was ‘We’re back again’, not a typical opening line for a debut single by a band that had only formed a few months earlier.
The rap continues, ‘They never kicked us out, 20,000 years of “shout, shout, shout”.’ Again, it is not usual for rap artists to announce themselves as a continuation of a 20,000-year history.
The line ‘They never kicked us out’ is a clue here. It is a direct reference to Illuminatus!, and to the Illuminati’s attempts to kick out the Discordian splinter group The Justified Ancients of Mummu.
By 1987, Illuminatus! was not widely read. Even those who had heard of it were unlikely to read it, for by then it had the unacceptable air of a hippy text. Yet without knowledge of this book, The JAMs’ lyrics appeared to be extraordinarily enigmatic, and certainly unlike anything else around.
Even their name was otherworldly – ‘Justified?’ ‘Ancient?’ These were not words used in pop music. Their strange mystique seemed to have an internal logic to it. It wasn’t meaningless or surreal nonsense, but it somehow meant something on its own terms. Even when their name was explained as being taken from Wilson and Shea’s books, as it was in almost every article written about the band, this didn’t reduce the mystery, for very few people went on to read the books.
Discordianism was largely unknown then, as indeed it remains to this day. In this context wherever The JAMs were coming from wherever that was – seemed to be somewhere new. For the music press, this was all good. Journalists are, by necessity, more drawn to something that is good to write about rather than something that is good to listen to.
And there was much about The JAMs that made good copy. Their habit of publicising themselves using graffiti – another nod to the Situationists – or creating crop circles was something else that the press approved of, for the resulting story would automatically be more interesting than an announcement made by a press release.
It did not hurt, of course, that many of their records quickly became unobtainable.
Within a month of the independent release of ‘All You Need Is Love’, three major record labels had taken out injunctions. The court order they obtained required the record not merely to be withdrawn, but that all existing copies be destroyed. In this instance, they were too late. Only five hundred copies had been pressed, and they had all been sold. All this created great publicity for the release of a subsequent version, which had reworked or rerecorded all the samples in order to make them more or less legal.
This legal attention took The JAMs by surprise. ‘We just thought that no one was going to take any notice of [the record],’ Drummond has said. The JAMs’ legal problems came to a head with the release of their album 1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?, which included ABBA on the track ‘The Queen and I’.
‘Included’ is probably not the correct word here, for so liberal were The JAMs with their use of long chunks of ‘Dancing Queen’ that it would be more accurate to call it an ABBA track that featured contributions from The JAMs.
ABBA’s lawyers were having none of it. Shortly after the album was released, Drummond and Cauty were contacted by the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, or MCPS.
‘One of our members, whose work is used substantially on the 1987 album, is not prepared to grant a licence in respect of their work,’ the MCPS wrote.
‘We must therefore insist that in respect of this record you
(i) cease all manufacture and distribution,
(ii) take all possible steps to recover copies of the album which are then to be delivered to MCPS or destroyed under the supervision of the MCPS,
and
(iii) deliver up the master tape, mothers, stampers, and any other parts commensurate with manufacture of the record.’
Drummond and Cauty took legal advice and were informed that it would cost them £20,000 to fight this in court. And that they would lose.
Publicity-wise, of course, this was terrific. Drummond had initially thought that if he met with ABBA and explained his reasons, then they would be able to come to an agreement as artists. It quickly become clear that no meeting would ever be granted.
Nevertheless, Cauty and Drummond headed to Sweden with the NME journalist James Brown in tow. Here they played the offending song outside ABBA’s publishing company and presented a fake gold disc (marked ‘for sales in excess of zero’) to a prostitute who, they argued, looked a bit like one of the women from ABBA.
They then destroyed most of the remaining copies of the album by setting fire to them in a field and were promptly shot at by a farmer for their trouble. On the ferry home they threw the remaining copies into the North Sea and performed an improvised set on the ferry, the only known live JAMs performance, in exchange for a large Toblerone.
This was the start of Drummond and Cauty’s reputations as being masters of the publicity stunt.
It is worth noting the gulf between this reputation and how they actually behaved. The traditional role of media manipulator is a scheming, cynical one, where intricate plans are mapped out in advance and followed to the letter. The archetype of the manipulative producer is perhaps best embodied in the Sex Pistols film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. This presents the story of the Sex Pistols as a grand scheme by their manager, Malcolm McLaren, who is shown manipulating the band like a sinister puppet master for his own financial gain.
In contrast, The JAMs, on adventures such as the Swedish trip and others, are simply winging it. The impetus here was that they had to destroy their stock of the album and they wanted to make that act a thing in itself, something symbolic and interesting. Beyond that, they were scrabbling around for ideas and just trying to make something happen.
Hindsight may fix these events into a narrative that makes them appear symbolic or almost pre-ordained, such as the way the bonfire of their debut album mirrors the later bonfire of their money. But while they are being enacted, they are chaotic. They lack aim and purpose. To quote one of their press releases, ‘The plot has been mislaid’.
Drummond now had a band that had the mystique he looked for in Echo & the Bunnymen or The Teardrop Explodes. But there was still something missing from the picture, and that was the very something that had seduced him into the music industry in the first place. This was the magic of a perfect single, the creation of a single slice of plastic containing a song so universally appealing that it speaks to everyone, outlives its creators and makes the world a better place.
Critical mystique was nothing to be sniffed at, of course, but it was a shame that their records were so shit.
You can see this lingering love of the great pop single in the second JAMs single, ‘Whitney Joins The JAMs’. This begins with the Mission: Impossible theme, with the impossible mission presented by the song being persuading Whitney Houston to join their band. During the early parts of the track Drummond pleads with Houston over a bog-standard dance rhythm (‘Whitney, please! Please, please join The JAMs. You saw our reviews, didn’t you? Please, Whitney, please!’) This builds until Houston’s biggest pop single, ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’, is dropped into the mix. Again, this is no normal sample, but a wholesale stealing of the track. But that is not how it is presented by the logic of the song.
On The JAMs’ terms, this is Whitney Houston deciding to join their band, and Drummond sells this angle by whooping ‘Whitney Houston has joined The JAMs!’ with such excitement that you can’t help but feel delighted for him. It is tempting to see this as a turning point, the moment when the anti-music hip-hop band The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu started to turn towards the pro-music dance band The KLF.
Certainly, you can no longer see the Houston sample as an act of détournement in the style of the 1987 album. Unlike the Beatles or ABBA samples, this is not subverting the meaning of the spectacle. It is about celebrating how brilliant the song they are stealing is. Many critics viewed this lauding of Houston’s single as ironic, but it was nothing of the sort.
It grew out of an attempt to make a credible record that sampled the ‘Theme From Shaft’. They booked a studio for five days and Drummond went to the record shop to buy the Isaac Hayes record.
‘In the window [of the record shop was] a big cut-out of Whitney Houston,’ Drummond has said. ‘I love that track, and I loved Whitney Houston then, and I just said “Wow”, and bought the album . . . We just played that track over and over again, and we just thought, “There’s no point us making records when such fantastic records as this have been made.” And that’s how that track [. . .] grew into a celebration of Whitney Houston.’
