KLF — Chill Out. The story behind the first ambient house album of the rave era

“Chill Out was a live album. It took two days to put together. It was done in real time,” said 37-year-old Bill Drummond, one of the electronic punks from The KLF. “There’s no edits on it,” confirms the second KLF punk, 34-year-old Jimmy Cauty. “Quite a few times we’d get near the end and make a mistake and so we’d have to go all the way back to the beginning and set it all up again.

We used two DAT players, a record player, a couple of cassette players and a 12-track, feeding through a mixer and back to a DAT.” Jimmy Cauty practised the skill of juggling his own and other people’s clips from home collections in the lat 80s in one of the first chill-out rooms in the UK club scene. Every week, while Paul Oakenfold played acid house, techno, new beat and mutating hardcore in the main hall, Cauty and Alex Paterson helped the clubbers to come down in a small room, weaving the sounds of passing trains, birdsong, surf noise, and other things that are pleasant for the exhausted body with quiet ballads, stringy ambience, and orchestral classics.