2K ***k The Millennium (Blast First)
Welcome The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu/The Timelords/The KLF/2K, good guys. Situationist art terrorists, sampling pirates, acid house stormtroopers, ambient house pioneers, the people who filmed themselves burning a million quid and wrote a book about how to have a number one hit single the easy way, if anybody can claim to have been there, done that and devised a scam about it on the way home those people are Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond. But for the last five years they’ve been silent - musically anyway - barring the abrasive jungle version of "The Magnificent Seven" they contributed to the "Help" charity album. Now, having found a worthy target of their irie, they have returned.
As part of their vicious, unrelenting (and some would say unfocussed) campaign against the millennium (other blows against the calendar include the Millennium Crisis Line - calls cost 50p/min - and the National Theatre/graffiti ‘incident’), 2K, as they are now known, have trotted out the nth remake of their ‘acid house anthem’ "What Time Is Love", here stretched on the rack to a stamina-sapping 14 minutes, featuring the preachings of bogus reverends, The National Retired Life Boat Men’s Choral Society in full hymn-singing regalia, the Williams Fairey brass band and the striking Liverpool dockers chanting "***k the millennium/We want it now".
So have Rockman Rock and King Boy D’s legendary pop-satirist talents curdled during their five year lay-off? Well, yes, almost totally. The fact that their last single release was also a remake of "What Time Is Love" ("America: What Time Is Love", and a darn fine version of it at that) only serves to emphasise how spectacularly they’ve lost both the plot and the point of it all. From being the dance band on the Titanic of late 20th Century consumerism they’ve tumbled to being an irritating itch that the even the broadsheets’ culture sections have proved notoriously inefficient in scratching (no pun intended). For the first time ever, they look a bit silly.
I feel duty bound to mention the b-sides, which are Acid Brass’ version of "What Time Is Love" - bet Bill and Jim wish they’d come up with the idea of a brass band playing dance music first! - and a remix of same by London earache merchants Panasonic, neither of which are worth getting out of bed for. And in all honesty I rather wish ‘The Artists Forever Known As The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu’ hadn’t either.