An extract from Higher Than The Sun looking at The KLF's infamous appearance at the Brit Awards in 1992...
Perhaps sensing all of this, on 12th February 1992, The KLF brought the curtain down on the artier end of indie music’s association with the mainstream in fine style. Rumours had been circulating for some time that the duo were struggling with the pressures and demands of the industry and their unexpected and indeed unprecedented level of success, and that Bill Drummond in particular was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Reports had filtered out that the follow-up album they were working on, tentatively titled The Black Room, combined solidly commercial hooks with hardcore techno and ugly guitar noise . With a likely award for Best British Group in the offing, The KLF were booked to open the 1992 Brit Awards, the annual music industry corporate bash notorious for lavishing more attention on money men and high earning artists – even if they hadn’t released a record in several years – than on any actual developments in the music scene. For two erstwhile punk rockers and art students who had already developed a serious grudge against the industry ‘suits’, the temptation to create havoc was too great to pass up.
Instead of the expected high-concept spectacle, the audience were treated to a flashing blue police light and Drummond – walking with the aid of a crutch – announcing ‘this is television freedom’ before yelling the lyrics to 3 a.m. Eternal at a ferocious speed, accompanied by hardcore punk-metal band Extreme Noise Terror, and closing the performance by firing blanks at the audience from a machine gun while the band’s publicist Scott Piering announced "Ladies and Gentlemen – The KLF have left the music business". The audience had in fact got off lightly – only at the very last minute did Extreme Noise Terror manage to talk him out of catapulting a dead sheep into the middle of the parade of expensive evening wear. The final close-up of Drummond – who would subsequently devote himself exclusively to art and writing (though occasionally with musical elements) – shows a man clearly feeling like a huge burden has been lifted from him; the audience – apart from classical conductor Georg Solti who had laughably walked out in ‘protest’ - simply clap out of politeness with disgusted expressions, although a longshot reveals veteran agit-prop singer-songwriter Billy Bragg applauding with great enthusiasm. Rarely has the distance between art and commerce been so neatly – if accidentally – encapsulated. It would be left to bands more willing to play the game – amongst them Blur, Suede and Pulp, who in time would all have their own hair-raising escapades at The Brits – to pick up the baton a couple of years later.
However, it was precisely the style-over-substance farrago that the Brit Awards had evolved into that gave rise to the most triumphant and unexpected after-effect of the release of this remarkable set of albums. Early in 1992, telecommunications company Mercury – one of the earliest commercial rivals to British Telecom – announced that, in a fairly unusual promotional move for the time, they were to sponsor an annual prize to be awarded to an album that had demonstrated quality and innovation rather than the one that had simply shifted the greatest number of copies. Selected by a panel of judges, and endorsed by the BPI who enthusiastically welcomed it as a credibility-restoring counterpart to The Brits, the nominees for the first ever Mercury Music Prize were announced in July 1992, with the winner to be announced at a large of comparatively modest ceremony in September. Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque and Foxbase Alpha were all included on the list of nominees – Alan McGee had deliberately declined to propose Loveless– alongside The Jesus And Mary Chain’s Honey’s Dead, and Rising Above Bedlam, the widely acclaimed comeback album by Screamadelica guest artist Jah Wobble with his band Invaders Of The Heart.
As promising a line-up as this may have seemed, and as much as the launch publicity had heralded it as an opportunity to celebrate little-known artists in front of a wider audience, the nominees were nonetheless placed up against albums by U2, Simply Red and the million-selling rap group Arrested Development, so it was to the surprise of many when Screamadelica was ultimately declared the winner. That the award was presented to them by former Beatles producer George Martin, who made his own brief comments about how groundbreaking and forward-thinking he considered the album to be, proved that every expensive mid-session studio change, every earlier album that had failed to chime with prevailing trends, and every single bin lid banged together on the long, frustrating journey to what many considered to be Primal Scream’s first ‘real’ album had been more than worth it. No doubt many of those who had chortled at Gillespie’s insistence that the band made music that could take on the likes of U2 were now laughing on the other side of their face.
Higher Than The Sun - the story of Screamadelica, Foxbase Alpha, Bandwagonesque, Loveless and Creation Records' first attempt at taking on the world - is available as a paperback here or as an eBook here.