Liner Note for American Edit -- "Dr. Who on Holiday"

There's a spectacular mashup of Green Day's American Idiot album that's been making the rounds, purportedly done by Dean Gray called American Edit. Track 5 is called Dr. Who on Holiday and I've read several misinformed pieces about it, so I felt compelled to set the record straight as well as passing along a little trivia ...

Most people will tell you that Dr. Who on Holiday is a mash of GD's Holiday with the Dr. Who soundtrack. This is only sort-of right, and misses a deeper, more interesting truth.

The track is actually a mash of Holiday with the JAMs (better known as the Timelords) Doctorin' the Tardis. Doctorin' the Tardis was done in 1988, early enough in musical time that the concept of sampling was still fairly new. The Timelords sampled the Dr. Who theme, set it to a disco beat, added occasional chanting over the top "Dr. Who, hah, Dr. Who," in keeping with Gary Glitter's Rock & Roll (Part 1 & 2) and more-or-less let it rip.

When listening to Dr. Who on Holiday you can hear Doctorin' the Tardis fully kick in at about 30 seconds. At 1:50 you can hear a sample of The Sweet's Blockbuster, but this too is just a sample pulled in from the Timelords.

At 2:44 you can hear a sample of Gary Glitter's Rock and Roll (Part 2). What's funny is this is essentially a secret handshake because the Timelords went full circle and remade a version of Doctorin' the Tardis with Glitter laying down new material on a song called Gary in the Tardis (it appeared only as a fairly limited distribution single and on a CD called The History of the JAMs a.k.a. The Timelords), but the sample is not from that single, rather it's the original Glitter record from the 70's.

The Timelords themselves are an interesting musical anomaly. Formed by two truly eccentric (if not openly irritating) Brits, Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, they did several attention grabbing stunts, including the burning ₤1,000,000 in pound notes and came under intense legal scrutiny for brazenly ripping off ABBA's Dancing Queen on an early JAMs record (the album was 1987: What the Fuck's Going On? for the track The Queen and I).

They would go on to record under a better-known moniker of The KLF -- a band that somewhat infuriatingly claimed to be obsessed with the Illuminatus books. Through shrewd negotiations, they were able to achieve the nearly impossible and gain control of their musical catalog in the UK. After considerable cult-bordering-on-mainstream success (including a few UK chart hits) they demanded that their UK offerings not only be pulled from production, but also be destroyed. The result being that only non-UK pressings of all the JAMs, Timelords and KLF work is available -- the original UK pressings command top dollar on the private market, although they have been dropping in price as interest in the KLF wanes. Who knows, maybe renewed interest via Dr. Who on Holiday will bolster the prices a bit.

As an aside, KLF fans are nearly unbearable to deal with, matched only in obnoxiousness by truly low forms such as Springsteen fans. They will claim that the JAMs/Timelords/KLF/FALL/K-Foundation invented rap (ignoring things such as James Brown's King Heroin in 1972), ambient (ignoring the entirety of Brian Eno's work of the 70's, most of which had Ambient in the title), trance (ignoring the entire Kraftwerk catalog) and sampling (ignoring John Kongo's revolutionary He's Gonna Step On You Again from 1972(!) and The Residents's brilliant Beyond the Valley of a Day in the Life in the late 70's).