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And so, as I said earlier, 1989 was the year of broken plans for the KLF - their pop domination failed to come to pass, and interesting and important though their ambient and trance experiments were, the general public didn't care about them any more. No 7-year-old was going to play "Pure Trance 2" over and over again in their council house bedroom.

Aside from the film and the soundtrack, that year was littered with unreleased KLF singles. The "Pure Trance" project had produced two wonderful signature tunes - but the plans of releasing ten limited 12"s (especially within ten weeks) had long been abandoned. The sleeves and labels were pressed, but in some cases the songs themselves remained unrecorded.

KLF6T and KLF6R (titled "Love Trance", according to the orange artwork) were announced but unreleased.
KLF7T and KLF7R (titled "Turn Up the Strobe", according to the yellow artwork) were announced but unreleasd.
And KLF8T didn't even seem to have artwork - although rumours exist of a blue-green "Pure Trance 5" sleeve, sometimes titled "E-Train to Trancentral" and sometimes "The White Room". Labels for "E-Train" KLF8T have recently appeared on Ebay.

And that was that ...

... However, in 2003, KLF collector Miles Tighe sold a copy of KLF6T "Pure Trance 3 - Love Trance" on Ebay for £920. Claiming it was one of only around 20 pressed, and possibly a promo, the b-side was the already-mentioned "What Time is Love (Monster Attack Mix)", in pristine quality. The a-side, "Love Trance", was to almost everyone a brand new KLF track, although a highly contentious one. Seven minutes long, and to my ears rather tinny, members of the KLF mailing list argued (and still occasionally argue) over its provenance - since it is probably (although no highly probable) that someone may have recorded a "fake" KLF track, pressed it onto vinyl with the already-bootlegged mix of WTIL, and then glued the labels on and placed in a "Pure Trance 3" sleeve. With records going for nearly a grand, it was probably worth it. However, others have argued that the record does sound - despite its lack of pop nous - like it was recorded on equipment Jimmy would have had at Trancentral in 1989. Plus, at least one member of the mailing list claimed to have bought a copy (for £200) back in 1992, when the record was so unknown it wasn't even a legend. It's possible the KLF just decided that "Love Trance" wasn't good enough, and so abadoned it at some point in 1989, and then forgot themselves that they'd ever recorded it. (However, even if it is genuine, recent Ebay sellers touting "promos", coloured picture discs, and twenty copies at a time of the thing are just trying to make a quick buck - it will be a bootleg; in fact, possibly a bootleg of a bootleg of a fake).

Anywhere, here's the full "Love Trance" track. Decide for yourselves:

http://www.protectlinks.com/98334

"Pure Trance 4" ("Turn Up the Strobe", as Tammy Wynette sang with our boys a few years later) was almost definitely never recorded. However, for the sake that it might just possibly be real here's a track I found on an FTP server titled "Turn Up the Strobe", reported to be by the KLF:

http://www.protectlinks.com/98340

(Please note that the track "Turn Up the Strobe" on the bootleg instrumental album of "The Black Room" by the KLF and Extreme Noise Terror appears to have nothing to do with this track).

KLF8T has a different story to its previous unrelease brethern, but I'll go into that in more detail on my next post.

Finally, we come to the strangest KLF release of all: "Deep Shit". A flexi-disc announced back in 1987 which never saw the light of day, it - or some variant of it - reappeared on a cassette in London in the late 1990s. Two webmasters of the now sadly defunct www.klf.de website came across from Germany and recorded the tape, which actually contained three tracks: "Deep Shit" (called Deep Shit Part III now), "Madrugada Eterna (Club Mix)" (a very clean version not taken from vinyl) and an extended mix of "The Lover's Side" from "The White Room Soundtrack". The release even occasionally appears on KLF discographies as KLF010IR (the "IR" standing for illegal remix?)

"Deep Shit" itself is an odd track, beginning with the intro from "Kylie Said to Jason" (then, presumably, their current single) before splicing it into Drummond ranting "fuck that pop shit, what we want is some deep shit!" It sounds like an out-take from one of his raps from the JAMs days, and just to increase that feeling the whole thing now goes into the full mix of "The Queen and I", the "1987" track which lead to the JAMs' first legal copyright tussle. It seems odd, at the cusp of (they hoped) pop dominance that the KLF would want to look back to their prankstering, political past. Maybe it's not actually the KLF who did it at all. Anywhere, here it is:

http://www.protectlinks.com/98341

On the other hand, the extended mix of "The Lover's Side" sounds very, very like the KLF themselves, and was probably recorded for an unreleased b-side on a "Pure Trance" single. Again, featuring Maxine Harvey's vocals, it is the only track from the original 1989 "White Room" (apart from the cover of "Born Free" and the already-a-single "Kylie Said to Jason") not to be remixed or re-recorded for inclusion on the 1991 "White Room" LP. A brief film snippet of Bill and Jimmy in the studio in 1990, which again can be found on Youtube, features them in the studio reworking it in a stadium house style as "The Sheriff of Mu Mu County", but this track remains unreleased to this day.

Here is the extended mix of "The Lover's Side":

http://www.protectlinks.com/98339

And here is "The Sheriff of Mu Mu County", taken from a 1990 student documentary on the KLF:

http://www.protectlinks.com/98342

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