All You Need Is Love (JAMs song)

Song by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

"All You Need Is Love" is a song by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (the JAMs), independently released as their debut single on 9 March 1987. A politically topical song concerning the British media's AIDS furore, the track was initially given a 12" white label release because of its sampling of other records. "All You Need Is Love" epitomised the artistic attitude of the JAMs' subsequent recordings: making use of popular music by taking extensive samples of other artists' work, and juxtaposing these with each other, adding beatbox rhythms and Bill Drummond's Scottish accented raps and narrations. The JAMs' promotional tactics were similarly unconventional, including the use of promotional graffiti, a guerrilla communication method which would be employed regularly by Drummond and Cauty throughout their career.

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). 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 " In the 28 March 1987 edition, NME revealed King Boy D's identity as Bill Drummond. The JAMs re edited the single in such a way that—they hoped—"brought [them] inside the "law" but still got up peoples noses", This new version—named "All You Need Is Love (106bpm)"—was released on 18 May 1987 as JAMS 23T, 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. A simple beatbox rhythm begins, along with samples of John Hurt from a British public information film — entitled Don't Die of Ignorance — about the dangers of AIDS. The samples are taken out of context to create new phrasing: "sexual intercourse — 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 world, and "shag" is a British slang word for 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 rendition by children of "Ring a Ring o' Roses", rhythmic panting, and an original female vocal line concerning infant mortality. Sounds magazine said the deliberate placement of Fox's sexually provocative "Touch Me" alongside "Ring a Ring O'Roses" ("the nursery rhyme about the Plague") "highlights explicitly the depth of contradiction embedded in society's attitude towards death through sex". More succinctly, NME said: "'All You Need ' is by everyone" (so many samples) "and about everything" (and a variety of thematic nuances). 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."

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 Lydon/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." 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". 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". Future KLF collaborator Tony Thorpe recalled hearing "All You Need Is Love" on John Peel's show in the year of its release and being "outraged": "I’m like, Oh my God, some idiot has sampled the Beatles. And it’s all out of time. I was amazed that anybody could be so blatant."

"All You Need Is Love" epitomised the artistic attitude 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" 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 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" logo—a pyramid with a ghetto blaster suspended in front—appeared for the first time on the re released "All You Need Is Love". The "pyramid blaster" references the "All Seeing I" icon—an eye suspended before a pyramid—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 conspiratorial Illuminatus!, and by adopting the subversive attitude of the fictional JAMs they quickly developed their own mythology.