Composition
A single, "Fuck the Millennium" was subsequently released, a studio-based recording falsely promoted as an edited version of the Barbican performance. Comparing the single with the live performance, The Times said that "On CD, things become more orthodox, though no less entertaining, comprising an acid brass version of their classic, What Time Is Love? and a young man shouting rude words."
The unedited studio recording of "Fuck the Millennium" is a 14-minute composition, a protest song based around The KLF's house music track "What Time Is Love?", drawing additionally on musical refrains and concepts from throughout Drummond and Cauty's canon. The track contains three main segued parts: a house section led by the brass band Acid Brass, a choral rendition of the English hymn "Eternal Father, Strong to Save", and a rhythmically hardened remix of "What Time Is Love? (Pure Trance Original)". The lead vocals before and after the hymn consist mainly of angry chants, with hundreds of instances of the word "fuck". Apart from a small number of chord changes during the segues, "Fuck the Millennium" contains no new music. However, the lyrics and brass arrangement are not found elsewhere in Drummond and Cauty's output.
The track is opened by Gimpo screaming "It's 1997: what the fuck is going on?". There follows a brass band version of "What Time Is Love? (Pure Trance Original)", with a house rhythm added, along with samples from The JAMs' 1987 recordings "All You Need Is Love", "Don't Take Five (Take What You Want)", "Whitney Joins The JAMs" and "Burn the Bastards". Drummond leads a crowd of Liverpool Dockers in angry chants: "Fuck the millennium! We want it now!".
Among the voices singing the three verses of the hymn are keyboardist Nick Coler, Drummond and Cauty, multiple recordings of whom are overlain to simulate a congregation. Mark Manning evangelically narrates its lyrics, and between verses, Gimpo screams for "Bill!" (Drummond) and "Jimmy!" (Cauty)—the only instance throughout their music that either of them is referred to without a pseudonym.
A Select journalist enthused about the track in the context of the duo's wider catalogue: "As soon as it starts you immediately remember the excitement that comes from hearing a KLF record for the first time. The original ambient house melody kicks in - and it hasn't dated a day. The chorus is given an extra kick by Acid Brass' massed ranks of horns and trumpets.... It is quite brilliant."
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—Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)
“It is my PRIDE, my damn’d, native, unconquerable Pride, that plunges me into Distraction. You must know that 19-20th of my Composition is Pride. I must either live a Slave, a Servant; to have no Will of my own, no Sentiments of my own which I may freely declare as such;Mor DIE—perplexing alternative!”
—Thomas Chatterton (1752–1770)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)