Trilogy, making anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of cryptic advertisements in New Musical Express (NME) and the mainstream press, as well as unusual performances on Top of the Pops.

In collaboration with Extreme Noise Terror at the BRIT Awards in February 1992, they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party.

[15] Bill Drummond was an established figure within the British music industry, having co-founded Zoo Records,[16] played guitar in the Liverpool band Big in Japan,[17] and worked as manager of Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes.

[27][28] The JAMs' primary instrument was the digital sampler with which they would plagiarise the history of popular music, cutting chunks from existing works and pasting them into new contexts, underpinned by rudimentary beatbox rhythms and overlaid with Drummond's raps, of social commentary, esoteric metaphors and mockery.

Although it was declined by distributors fearful of prosecution, and threatened with lawsuits, copies of the one-sided white label 12" were sent to the music press; it received positive reviews and was made "single of the week" in Sounds.

"[30] The JAMs re-edited and re-released "All You Need Is Love" in May 1987, removing or doctoring the most antagonistic samples; lyrics from the song appeared as promotional graffiti, defacing selected billboards.

[35] They failed to meet ABBA, who they didn't realize already lived in Britain at the time,[36] so they disposed of the copies by burning most of them in a field and throwing the rest overboard on the North Sea ferry trip home.

[25] According to the British music press, the result was "rancid",[45] "pure, unadulterated agony" and "excruciating"[51] and from Sounds "a record so noxious that a top ten place can be its only destiny".

"[25] The 12" records subsequently released in 1988 and 1989 by the KLF were indeed rap free and house-oriented; remixes of some of the JAMs tracks, and new singles, the largely instrumental acid house anthems "What Time Is Love?"

A single from the original album was released: "Kylie Said to Jason", an electropop record featuring references to Todd Terry, Rolf Harris, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo and BBC comedy programme The Good Life.

[62] Songs from The White Room soundtrack were re-recorded with rap and more vocals (by guests labelled "Additional Communicators"), a sample-heavy pop-rock production and crowd noise samples.

"[65] The "stadium house" singles trilogy was characterised by Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger as applying "the possibilities for mass lunacy" to "awe-inspiring, colossal, unprecedented dancefloor bulldozers."

The KLF did to house what Jim Steinman did to rock – they turned it into a thing of tottering grand opera absurdity, pushed the excitement in the music to hysteria, traded content for ever-huger gesture.

[66] After successive name changes and dance records, Drummond and Cauty ultimately became, as the KLF, the biggest-selling singles act in the world for 1991,[13][14] still incorporating the work of other artists but in less gratuitous ways and predominantly without legal problems.

[5] NME's detailed piece on the events at the BRIT Awards and the after-party, which included an interview with Drummond the day after, assured readers that the "tensions and contradictions" would continue to "push and spark" the KLF and that more "musical treasure" would be the result.

[5] On 14 May 1992, the KLF announced their immediate retirement from the music industry and the deletion of their back catalogue: We have been following a wild and wounded, glum and glorious, shit but shining path these past five years.

[14][71]In a comprehensive examination of the KLF's announcement and its context, Select called it "the last grand gesture, the most heroic act of public self destruction in the history of pop.

Even Kenny Gates, who as a director of the KLF's distributors APT stood to lose financially from the move, called it "Conceptually and philosophically... absolutely brilliant".

[100] On 31 December 2020, the release of series of remastered compilations under the collective title Samplecity thru Trancentral was announced on a graffiti and posters hung under a railway bridge on Kingsland Road in Shoreditch, East London.

The 30-minute collection of eight remastered singles Solid State Logik 1 appeared at midnight 1 January 2021, on streaming platforms, while high-definition videos were published for the first time on the band's official YouTube channel, marking the first activity of Cauty and Drummond as the KLF since 1992.

As Drummond and Cauty explained, "The Cartel is, as the name implies, a group of independent distributors across the country who work in conjunction with each other providing a solid network of distribution without stepping on each other's toes.

The kitchen is heated by means of leaving the three functioning gas rings on at full blast until the fumes make us all feel stoned... And pinned just above a working top cluttered with chipped mugs is a letter from a five-year-old fan featuring a crayon drawing of the band.

[132] From the outset of their collaborations, Drummond and Cauty practised the guerrilla communication tactic that they described as "illegal but effective use of graffiti on billboards and public buildings" in which "the original meaning of the advert would be totally subverted".

In December 1987, a Melody Maker reporter was in attendance to see Cauty reverse his car Ford Timelord alongside a billboard and stand on its roof to graffiti a Christmas message from the JAMs.

[37] In February 1991, another Melody Maker journalist watched the KLF deface a billboard advertising The Sunday Times, doctoring the slogan "THE GULF: the coverage, the analysis, the facts" by painting a 'K' over the 'GU'.

[125] In November 1991, the JAMs placed a photograph of graffiti with the slogan "It's Grim Up North" – which had appeared on the junction of London's M25 orbital motorway with the M1 that runs to Northern England[134] – as an advert in the NME.

Vocalist and percussionist Alice Nutter referred to the KLF as "real situationists" categorising them as political musicians alongside the Sex Pistols and Public Enemy.

[149] "What's unique about Drummond and Cauty", the paper said in 1993, "is the way that, under all the slogans and the sampling and the smart hits and the dead sheep and the costumes, they appear not only to care, but to have some idea of how to achieve what they want.

They were witty with the left hand and baffling with the right; they had a sense of timing and event like nobody since Maclaren; they appeared to not give even the merest hint of a fuck; and they made records which were the best shotgun wedding of concept to rhythm this side of Kraftwerk.

[95] Early releases by the JAMs, including the album 1987, were performed using an Apple II computer with a Greengate DS3 sampler peripheral card, and a Roland TR-808 drum machine.