1991 The KLF featuring The Children Of The Revolution: 3 A.M. Eternal

There was always a lot more to The KLF than just the music. Wikipedia's lengthy entry on the band has a separate heading called 'Themes' with four sub-headings 'Illuminatus', 'Promotion', 'Trancentral, eternity, sheep' and 'Ceremonies and journeys'. I can say up-front that I don't intend to go into any of this here, partly because you can read it for yourselves if you want but mainly because....well, because I just never bought into any of it. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty were veterans of the popular music scene by 1991 and knew exactly how to wind it up from within with situationist acts of unpredictable anarchy and mischief that kept the media busy but which by and large passed me by.

The first time I heard this in 1991, I couldn't help but think that I'd heard it before. I had of course - '3am Eternal' was originally a 1988 trance dance piece by band re-worked as song two of their 1991 'stadium house' trilogy,( the other two were 'What Time Is Love' and 'Last Train To Trancentral') but my familiarity stemmed from closer than that. A couple of months in fact - by basing a ramped up version around Ricardo Da Force's raps and the sample of Maxine Harvey's original vocal floating the title over the down time in-between then '3am Eternal' borrows heavily from 'The Power'. And as well as that, I can hear shades of Yazz's 1988 Acid House hit "Stand Up For Your Love Rights" bubbling just under its surface too.

Is that any surprise? Probably not - Drummond and Caughty had already published their book ' The Manual (How to Have a Number One The Easy Way)' and to my mind this was its philosophy made practice and an excuse for me not to trust them - why go to the trouble when you can re-tool your own song with someone else's accessories? Yet that's not to accuse '3am Eternal' of out and out plagiarism; what The KLF bring to this particular party is a self styled 'stadium house' makeover, a pre-Prodigy attack that blended acid house with the catch all appeal of a pop/rock sensibility whose appreciation didn't require a viewpoint on dead sheep or burning a million pounds in cash. '3am Eternal' doesn't require much of a viewpoint at all really; from the machine gun opening its brash dumbness marks it out as the weakest of the trilogy, yet now shorn of the cultural baggage its classic pop sensibilities ("KLF is gonna rock you"!) are allowed to shine through, making sure '3am Eternal' hasn't dated in the same way that their absence on the Snap! or Yazz tracks have.