Coldcut produced and released “Doctorin’ The House” as by Coldcut, the title of which was a pun on their original “Doctor In The House” available to DJs for some time before. The “Doctorin’ The House” release also featured Yazz and the Plastic Population.
The KLF thought this was a jolly amusing pun, and worked on their “Doctorin’ The Tardis” using Gary Glitter, the Doctor Who theme and The Sweet and released it to world-wide adulation and admiration.
Around the same time (but probably before), Coldcut produced Yazz’ first solo single, “The Only Way Is Up”, again featuring the Plastic Population, and billed to Yazz and them. No mention of Coldcut, except in the production credits. The video to this single (which was a UK number 1) showed a DJ scratching with a KLF record. I assume at the time that it was the back side of “Burn The Bastards/Burn The Beat”, as I don’t think “Doctorin’ The Tardis” had been released then. Try checking the relative release dates of the latter with “Doctorin’ The House”.
I found your comment in searching for something similar and I noticed two things that make it very obvious.
The first is the release dates…
Doctorin’ the House – Feb 88
Doctorin’ the Tardis – May 88
Note identical spelling of “Doctorin’ the” along with the time frame, which if you follow The Manual they clearly state you should tell a producer to make it sound like another song. There’s a second hilarious clue.. In The Manual one of the ways suggested as to how to have a number one hit involved digging through old charts and finding a moderately obscure song that was popular and simply re-recording it in a modern style.. This is exactly what Yazz did with the followup track “The Only Way Is Up” which was a house music version of a soul single by Otis Clay released eight years prior.
It’s clear that all of it is self referential. Cauty and Drummond were outright mocking Yazz’s success and imitating the formula intentionally making the worst artistic decisions possible to prove their point that anyone could pull this off.
It must have been frustrating for Drummond who helped put out such incredible records that a hit record was being created so effortlessly by new technology. For example the only lyrics of “Doctorin’ the House” are:
Doctorin’ the House
So it’s easy to see why Yazz would have been an ideal target.
It’s quite possible they had the idea to write the book before recording the single and only did so as an experiment to prove their written thesis.
I actually went down this rabbit hole after watching the video for “The Only Way Is Up” and wondering who directed it because it’s such an incredibly tasteless video in contrast to such a well written song.
Those are some great observations! We will keep this in mind if we will ever give this entry its (long overdue) rewrite.