It’s no secret that Glenn Hughes has a history of heavy drinking. It’s also no secret that he’s prouder than proud of his 30-plus years of sobriety. And to that end, he credits one song in particular for helping him save his career – and indeed his life.
The song in question is America: What Time Is Love? by The KLF, released in 1992 with Hughes as guest vocalist.
On paper, he and The KLF made an unlikely pairing. Hughes had sung and played bass for rock icons Deep Purple and, briefly, Black Sabbath.
The KLF was a two-man electronic music project created by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. With their 1990 release Chill Out, the pair are credited with establishing the sub-genre of ambient house music, but the KLF are probably better remembered by the general public for their outsized antics, which included firing machine guns from the stage at the '92 Brit awards and theatrically burning a million pounds in royalties on the Scottish Island of Jura.
America: What Time Is Love? was a reworking of a track originally released in 1988 as an instrumental titled simply What Time Is Love?
The version featuring Hughes on vocals also sampled the riff to the Motörhead classic Ace of Spades.
For Hughes, this turned out to be a life-changing collaboration.
As he now tells MusicRadar: “I figured to myself, ‘Here’s an opportunity now, after being gone from Deep Purple for quite some time, to change the course of my career.”
But this wasn’t simply a career move. It was a push toward sobriety. “It was an opportune moment for me,” Hughes says. “It led me to think, ‘Let’s go to rehab and see if I really am an alcoholic.
“I laugh because, of course, I was. I figured I’d better get in there before I actually do anything more to myself. And Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, the guys in The KLF, were really supportive. They had a big say in my getting clean and sober.”
Moreover, Drummond and Cauty were big fans of the man known as The Voice of Rock.
He recalls: “They took me into the vocal booth, and said, ‘Be Glenn Hughes!’ It was really quite simple, man. It was very simple for me to sing that melody and sing that lyric. And that song, What Time Is Love, it’s so R&B and Glenn-sounding.”
America: What Time Is Love? was well-received, with Melody Maker hailing it as “brilliantly bonkers”.
The song reached No.4 on the UK chart.
“That song, and that session, and the realisation that was to come was a game-changer for me,” Hughes says. “If I hadn’t have done that song in October or November of 1991, it would have been difficult for me to have another life-changing moment where I thought I needed help.
“The KLF coming to be with that opportunity was important,” he says. “I realised that I was gonna be seen on national TV everywhere and everything, and that it was time for me to come to my senses, and get help.”
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