All You Need Is Love (The JAMs song)
"All You Need Is Love" is a song by
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu,
independently released as their debut single on
9 March 1987. A politically topical song concerning the UK media's
AIDS furore, the track was initially given a
white label 12" release due to its plagiaristic
sampling of other records.
Bill Drummond and
Jimmy Cauty started working together early in 1987. They assumed alter egos - Kingboy D and Rockman Rock respectively - and adopted the name "The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu" (The JAMs), after the fictional conspiratorial group "The Justified Ancients of Mummu" from
The Illuminatus! Trilogy. "All You Need Is Love" was their debut single.
Initially, the song was released as a limited edition one-sided
white label promotional 12", on
9 March, 1987, by The JAMs' own label
The Sound Of Mu(sic).
[Longmire, Ernie et al. KLF discography Compiled by Ernie Longmire, this has been the authoratative KLF discography on the internet for some 10 years or more and has been the subject of long-term scrutiny and peer review by KLF fans and collectors. It is now maintained by the fan site klf.de. Retrieved 19 June 2006.] This version included a 15-second sample of
The Beatles' "
All You Need Is Love", as well as samples of
MC5's Kick Out the Jams and
Samantha Fox's "
Touch Me (I Want Your Body)". The song had been declined by distributors fearful of prosecution, but copies of the white label were sent to
DJs and the
music press. The identities of Drummond and Cauty were not made known to these recipients (
Drummond was actually something of a music business veteran, and
Cauty a former member of the much-hyped but unsuccessful band
Brilliant).
Underground Magazine speculated on this in March 1987: "The whole affair is mysterious, a telephone number only and a threat that the group will soon be releasing more material... 'No, we've not been in bands before, and yes, I suppose we were originally influenced by
The Beastie Boys to actually get up and do something...' Too true, but these colonials seem a touch wiser, world weary a bit, but not angry...".
[Underground Magazine, March 1987 (link)] In the 28 March 1987 edition,
NME revealed King Boy D's identity as Bill Drummond.
["World Domination Part 458", New Musical Express, 28 March 1987]The JAMs re-edited the single in such a way thatâ€"they hopedâ€""brought [them] inside the "law" but still got up peoples noses",
[Drummond, B., "KLF Info Sheet", October 1987 (link).] removing all but a snatch of The Beatles and replacing or doctoring the MC5 sample. This new versionâ€"named "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)"â€"was released on
18 May 1987
[Musicmatch] as JAMS 23T, and was included on The JAMs debut album
1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?). Indeed, according to Drummond, the recording of
1987 was funded by the sales of "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)".
The original version opens with a 15-second sample of The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love", followed by
Rob Tyner's cry of "Kick out the Jams, motherfuckers!" from the MC5's album
Kick Out the Jams. The central theme of "All You Need Is Love" was the media coverage given to the
AIDS crisis
[Drummond, B., "KLF Info Sheet", October 1987 (link).]. A simple beatbox rhythm begins, along with samples of
John Hurt from a British
public information filmâ€"entitled
Don't Die of Ignoranceâ€"about the dangers of AIDS. The samples misquote the film: "sexual intercourseâ€"no known cure". Bill Drummond performs a heavily-accented
Clydeside rap, beginning "We're back again, they never kicked us out, twenty thousand years of 'shout shout shout'", a reference to the fictional JAMs of
The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Later, he raps: "With this killer virus who needs war? Immanentize the eschaton, I said shag shag shag some more!". "
Immanentize the eschaton" is a reference to the opening line of
Illuminatus!, referring to the end of the material world, and "shag" is a
British slang word meaning
sexual intercourse.
Between verses, the rhythm is punctuated by samples of former
glamour model Samantha Fox ("Touch me, touch me, I want to feel your body"), as well as a sample "Ancients of Mu Mu" (by The JAMs' associate rapper Chike) which recurred throughout the next ten years' work of Drummond and Cauty. Also heard is a children's rendition of "
Ring a Ring O'Roses", rhythmic panting, and an original female vocal line concerning infant mortality.
Drummond has said he was inspired by the
hip-hop and scratch he was hearing regularly on
John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show
, but looking back in 1991 he said "If you listen to it now, it sounds nothing like a hip hop record, you know, it sounds a lot more like British
punk... [a] punk version of a hip hop record, I suppose."
[Transcript of a Bill Drummond interview on "Bomlagadafshipoing" (Norwegian national radio house-music show), September 1991 (link).]The original white label release of "All You Need Is Love" was made "single of the week" in
Sounds magazine, who announced that The JAMs had "produced the first single to capture realistically the musical and social climate of 1987". Calling the result "a seething terror ridden pulp",
Sounds elaborated: "How have [The JAMs] produced a record more powerful than
[John] Lydon/
[Afrika] Bambaataa's 'World Destruction' without laying a finger on a synthesiser or guitar? THEFT! By stealing all the various beats, noises and sounds they've wanted, and building it into their own stunning audio collage, [The JAMs] are making a direct assault on the way records are put together."
["All You Need Is Love" review, Sounds, 14 March 1987.]Underground magazine were also enthusiastic: "This month I'm pleased to say, what's really moving is entirely British. The best groove so far this year is from Scotland and it shows London and New York exactly how it
should be done, a one-sided, one-track 12 inch (it doesn`t need any dub or instrumentals). 'All You Need Is Love' by The Jamms is more than rife with a bit of The Beatles (with a dash of MC5 and Samantha Fox). It seems to be anti-AIDS, but as I know nothing about the band it could easily be a
piss take. Either way this is a superb jam, if you can find it, buy it (it`s so dodgily constructed in legal terms that no distributor info is given)."
[Underground Magazine, April 1987 (link)]In a July 1987 review of
1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?),
Q Magazine recalled that the original release of "All You Need Is Love" "seemed an inspired moment of pure wildness. Here were
Red Clydeside beatbox rappers pointing a finger at society, putting their record together from samples pirated directly from other people's recordings, while at the same time crossing almost all contemporary music tribal boundaries by including everyone from Samantha Fox to The MC5 among their victims." This was contrasted with
1987 which the reviewer felt was a "disappointment" with "too few ideas being spread too thin".
[Cranna, I. 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) review, Q Magazine, July (?) 1987 (link).]The re-release of "All You Need Is Love" rewarded The JAMs with further praise, including
NME "single of the week", in which
Danny Kelly thought that "its maverick requisition of the hip-hop
idiom, its fanatical confrontation of copyright laws overrun by music's new technologies, its central subject matters and its termination with the year's most incisively searching questionâ€"'1987: what the f**k's going on?'â€"combine to make 'All You Need Is Love' a triumph of nowness over mere newness" [censorship preserved].
[Kelly, D., "All You Need Is Love" review, New Musical Express, 23 May 1987.]A retrospective piece in
The Guardian called "All You Need Is Love" a "jagged slice of agit-prop" and "shockingly effective", adding that "[the original] was a club hit (i.e. everybody danced to it though nobody bought it), and after being re-edited to avoid copyright restrictions, it reached number three in the Indie chart".
[Sharkey, A. "Trash Art & Kreation", Guardian Weekend, The Guardian, 21 May 1994 (link)]The artistic attitude of "All You Need Is Love"
epitomised that of The JAMs' subsequent recordings: plagiarising popular music by taking extensive samples of other artists' work, and juxtaposing these with each other, adding
beatbox rhythms and Drummond's
Scottish-accented raps, poems and narrations. The albums
1987 and
Who Killed The JAMs?, and the singles "All You Need Is Love", "
Whitney Joins The JAMs" and "
Down Town" all had small-scale production budgets and little mainstream popularity, yet their novel construction and The JAMs' provocative disregard for copyright gained the duo enduring media attention.
The JAMs' promotional tactics were similarly unconventional, including the use of promotional graffiti, a
guerrilla communication method employed repeatedly by Drummond and Cauty, beginning around the time of their first releases. Some copies of the re-released single were supplied in a picture sleeve which showed The JAMs' "Shag Shag Shag"
graffiti defacing a
billboard (advertising the
Today newspaper) that depicted police chief
James Anderton. Anderton, a self-declared
Christian, had courted controversy when he said "I see increasing evidence of people swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making… We must ask why
homosexuals freely engage in
sodomy and other obnoxious practices, knowing the dangers involved".
[Many a quotation compendium (such as Columbia University) mis-dates Anderton's words to December 1987. In fact his remarks were made in December 1986. See for example The Times (London), 12 December 1986, cited in Gabb, S., "What to do about AIDS", Libertarian Alliance pamphlet, ISBN 1870614305, 1989; or The Guardian, 18 December 1986, cited in Pembrey, G., "History of HIV & AIDS in the UK: 1981-1995", Avert.org. Retrieved 21 June 2006.][For another reference to this quotation and a general overview see: "The 1980s AIDS campaign", Panorama Article on the BBC website (accessed 26 April 2006)] As with much of The JAMs' graffiti, the potency of "Shag Shag Shag" was derived from the context it in which it was placed. Further graffiti followed, "JAMs" and "Shag Shag Shag" slogans defacing billboards and Government-funded AIDS warnings in London.
["The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu", Sounds, 16 May 1987.] The JAMs also made available "Shag Shag Shag" T-shirts which King Boy D told the
NME were "selling like hot cakes".
["Public NME" column, New Musical Express, 9 May 1987 (link). "Selling like hot cakes" is British slang meaning "selling very well indeed".] The JAMs later revisited the word "shag" when they named their early career retrospective compilation album
Shag Times.
Drummond and Cauty's output as The JAMs and later
The KLF extensively referenced
The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and their debut recordings were no exception. The lyrical references in "All You Need Is Love" are complemented by the first of many iconographic and numerical allusions that soon came to characterise the duo's work. Their "pyramid blaster" logoâ€"a pyramid with a
ghetto blaster suspended in frontâ€"appeared for the first time on the re-released "All You Need Is Love". The "pyramid blaster" references the "
All Seeing I" iconâ€"an eye suspended before a pyramidâ€"associated with
The Illuminatus! Trilogy. The catalogue numbers of the single (JAMS 23, JAMS 23S, JAMS 23T) also reference
Illuminatus!, in which the number
23 is a recurring element. The JAMs actively enshrouded themselves with the mythology of the conspiritorial
Illuminatus!, and by adopting the subversive attitude of the fictional JAMs they quickly developed their own mythology.
"All You Need Is Love" was originally released in the UK as a limited edition one-side promotional
12" on
9 March 1987. The UK re-release of
18 May 1987 consisted of a 7" and a 12" that were also limited editions, along with a widely-available 12". The re-release included the tracks "Ivum Naya (Ibo Version)" (a version of "All You Need Is Love" with Chike on lead vocals), and "Rap, Rhyme and Scratch Yourself" (an instrumental version of the song). The 7" A-side was "All You Need Is Love (Me Ru Con Mix)", a traditional
Vietnamese song "Me Ru Con" sung by Duy Khiem, in which The JAMs "[took] remixing as far as we could".
[Sleevenotes, "All You Need Is Love", KLF Communications, JAMS 23S, May 1987.] "Me Ru Con" featured on The JAMs'
1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?). The formats and track listings of "All You Need Is Love" are tabulated below:
Format (and countries) | Track number | | 1 | 2!3 |
|---|
| One-sided 12" white-label promo (UK) (limited edition of 500) | O |
| 7" single (UK) (limited edition of 1000) | M | I |
| 12" single (UK) (limited edition of 5000 in picture sleeve) | A | I | R |
| 12" single (UK) (without picture sleeve) | A | I | R |
|
Key*O - "All You Need Is Love" (original mix) (5:02)
*A - "All You Need Is Love (106 bpm)" (4:56)
*M - "All You Need Is Love (Me Ru Con Mix)" (2:22)
*I - "Ivum Naya (Ibo Version)" (3:39)
*R - "Rap, Rhyme and Scratch Yourself" (4:46)
