Songfacts®:

• The KLF duo of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty originally recorded this in 1988 and revamped it three years later with DJ and rapper Ricardo Da Force and vocalist Maxine Harvey wailing away. Ricardo Lyte recalled in 1000 UK #1 Hits:
  
  "I met Bill and Jimmy when I was DJing in Ibiza and I was impressed by how funny they were. We got talking and I liked the way they are quite prepared to use different influences. They liked my rapping and asked me to do some stuff on their album."
• The title refers to chucking out time at the Spectrum Acid House club in London.
• This was the first song to reach the Top 40 of the Hot 100 that started with "3." Other songs since that have done so include Alana Davis' 1998 hit, "32 Flavors" and Eminem's 2009 single "3am."
• This song was part of a big scene at the 1992 Brit Awards. The song starts: "This is radio freedom..." and is followed by the sound of machine gun fire. When The KLF performed this at the awards show, they came on stage with a real machine gun full of blanks and started firing at the audience. The shocked audience didn't realize the gun was actually full of blanks and it caused quite a commotion.
  
  At the Brit Awards after show party, The KLF left a dead sheep, announcing they were leaving the music industry forever and deleted their entire back catalogue of music to prove it wasn't just a stunt to sell more records. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Darren - Warrington, England
• The American soul singer PP Arnold sang the hook, but she felt let down by the KLF duo. "I didn't get along with them too well, because when it came to the video, I didn't wanna wear those suits - to me they were a little bit too Kurt Klux Klan," Arnold told Uncut. "So that's why you only see me at the beginning of the video and somewhere at the end. And they only put me in at all because I complained when I turned on Top of the Pops and they had someone else miming to my voice."
  
  Arnold also claims KLF shortchanged her. "I sang the hook on 3 A.M. Eternal," she told The Guardian. "I was paid a session fee, but the deal was that if they used my solo performance I'd get 5%, which I never got because they claimed it wasn't the song's hook. I've got to let it go now, but it's on their conscience."