It’s armageddon time again. Following last year’s 25th anniversary celebrations, Killing Joke are about to unleash their latest album on a world ravaged by war, fire, floods, earthquakes and bracing itself for impending eco-crisis. ‘Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell’ is arguably the most Killing Joke-sounding record since the early 1980s, and it’s also a dramatic reassertion of the group’s ongoing mission to face down the apocalypse... with a smile.
“Killing Joke must be the only group of people where I’ve had to start a physical fight because I’m laughing so much at what’s going down.” Jaz Coleman, KJ singer, classical composer and black-clad clown of the apocalypse, is sitting in the lounge of London’s Columbia Hotel, smoking Marlboros and downing bottles of Guinness. He’s in fine fettle, regaling Terrorizer with opinions and reminiscences ranging from the hilarious to the downright outrageous. “We’ve got the blackest sense of humour in the world,” he continues. “When things go really bad, it’s the way you laugh at it. I still think laughter is the best cure, however disastrous everything is. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! When I think about it, Killing Joke started out for us as two words that represented a sense of no control over your destiny. Then it changed to the laughter that overcomes all fear, those two seconds you have before you take your final breath and you die, the crystallisation and realisation of everything.”
Killing Joke have been laughing in the face of death since 1978, when Coleman and drummer ‘Big’ Paul Ferguson left the Matt Stagger Band to form their own group. Recruiting the singular talents of bass player Youth and guitarist Geordie Walker, the resulting four piece made a noise which was inspired by, but by no means bound to, the DIY punk explosion of the late 1970s.
“At this time, everybody was in a band, you didn’t have to be a musician, everybody had their own record company,” Coleman remembers, fondly. “You could do a recording on Friday and it’d be in the shops on Monday, ha ha ha! It was a tremendous time. There was less competitiveness between bands and there was more a fraternal feeling at that time, which has almost gone. Now the whole pop star idea, sadly, has come back into vogue.
“I think it’s possible that you can be a gifted, talented classical musician or rock musician, whatever, and still be a normal person. Playing this game of ‘I want to be a rock star’ and you get your big house... this was never part of my vision or my dream, I never wanted this. For me, freedom, travel, this was the emphasis. Individual freedom. In fact, while I think about it Killing Joke has never done a love song. In all the albums that we’ve done, there’s only one song that we write and that’s about freedom on it’s various levels and letting the spirit go.”
This emphasis on freedom not only informed the band’s philosophy from day one, but also its musical output. Despite their punk roots, Killing Joke offered something more demanding than reheated Ramones riffs and stylish rebellion; Youth’s fat, dub-influenced bass lines, Big Paul’s furious tribal battery, Geordie’s trebly, wire-wool guitar and Coleman’s psychotic, sardonic vocals meshed into a lethally effective whole, as illustrated by EMI’s recent reissues of the band’s first four albums ‘Killing Joke’, ‘What’s THIS For...?’, ‘Revelations’ and ‘Ha’. Their early sound shared some elements with similarly bottom-end obsessed contemporaries Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, but the Notting Hill-based reprobates arguably outdid both in terms of teeth-grinding intensity. Where PiL gave the impression of being more John Lydon’s (excellent) pet project than a fully fledged band and Joy Division were fundamentally mired in Ian Curtis’s doleful gothicism, Killing Joke were unfashionable, brutal and charged with occult energies, possibly due to Jaz and Youth’s fascination with the magickal teachings of Aleister Crowley. As vicious and unforgiving as their music gets, Killing Joke’s aim is to transcend the mundane and break through to a higher state of consciousness. They are, as Jaz puts it, “about revelry!”
“We used to co-headline with Joy Division all those years ago - they used to call us ‘Southern Stomp’ and Joy Division ‘Northern Gloom’ - and everybody would just go physically crazy for Killing Joke and just stand there for Joy Division! I find Killing Joke very uplifting music. It lifts my spirit, it lifts my heart, it still makes me smile, and I get to lose a few pounds as well in the process, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Like many of their punk and new wave contemporaries, Killing Joke were heavily influenced by Jamaican dub reggae. Characterised by earthshaking bass frequencies, disorienting sound FX and the hardcore apocalyptic/elitist philosophy of Rastafarianism, it’s easy to see the appeal dub held for young, disaffected teens in the late 1970s. Many bands, including the previously mentioned PiL and Joy Division as well as The Clash, The Ruts and The Slits made their love of dub clear through homage or imitation, but Killing Joke created their own hyper-aggressive variation, adding abrasive guitars and amplifying the dread factor a thousandfold.
“When we started, we used to have support bands and they were so bad that we used to turn ‘em off and turn our own reggae music up! Then we stopped the support band thing altogether and just DJed and put heavy dub reggae on. The way we viewed a concert was like, ‘We’re hiring this fucking hall and we’re going to have a good time in it!’ You’ll see members of Killing Joke walking around in the audience before a gig, saying hello to people. No bands would dream of doing that! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It isn’t unusual for Killing Joke to take the road less travelled, and latest album ‘Hosannas...’ is a case in point. The casual observer might have expected the band to follow up the success of 2003’s Dave Grohl-assisted ‘Killing Joke’ with another big-budget, high-definition juggernaut. Then again, the casual observer probably knows very little about how this band works. Holing up in a Prague basement owned by a mysterious ‘Dr Faust’, Jaz and his comrades eventually emerged with a rough document of a particular point in the lives of the band, the ragged, lo-fi splendour of which makes it much more of a ‘return to form’ than the previous effort, which while excellent, sounded more like an effective post-millennial update of the band’s sound than yer actual classic KJ.
“The whole thing was recorded in a fucking cheap basement with inferior equipment,” states Jaz proudly. “A studio in London’s going to cost you £1, 200 a day before you get to the engineer. If you put that and accommodation costs and everything together, you can see you’re running up one fuck of a bill, right? We decide that’s not the way we make music any more, so we used like a really tiny studio, a few more tracks than an eight track, that’s how we started, and record in this little wine cellar underneath. Then we started encouraging people to come down to rehearsals. Rehearsals for Killing Joke, there’s always 30 or 40 people sitting around on the sofas, having a good time, and I enjoy that too. For some reason the band always plays better when there’s people there. I wouldn’t like to analyse why, but anyway... ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
The themes explored on ‘Hosannas...’ may prove surprising to those expecting a knotted mass of conspiracy theories and global politics. One song, ‘Majestic’ deals with the shadowy machinations of the world power elite, but elsewhere Jaz looks at the smaller picture, focusing on his own life and those of his bandmates and associates. On the title track, Jaz considers the role Killing Joke plays in his life, and the role he plays in Killing Joke. “I harbour thoughts of killing you/Pour petrol on you and then on me/But then I walk down the stairs/And Killing Joke waits for me there.” It’s apt that ‘Hosannas...’ follows last year’s 25th anniversary celebrations so closely, as it’s an album that concerns itself not just with the band but also the fans and friends - ‘Gatherers’ - that surround them. Jaz maintains that Killing Joke is made up of more than just four musicians.
“The idea is literally liberate my spirit, get out of my body, and share this experience with everybody,” he claims. “I love this life and I love the people outside of the band. The people that love Killing Joke have made Killing Joke what it is more than the band itself. They’ve kept us going, and have inspired us to keep going when we’ve gone through dark times because of that loving support. I mean, I’m amazed to see how young our audience is now. We’re certainly old enough to be their fathers. Our drummer, Benny (Calvert), he’s half the age of all of us! He calls me ‘Papa Jaz’, he calls Geordie ‘Uncle Geordie’ and Raven ‘Uncle Paul’! He’s the same age as my oldest daughter!”
Typically labelled a ‘dark’ band, Killing Joke’s career is in fact littered with uplifting anthems of defiance. Songs like ‘Wardance’, ‘We Have Joy’, ‘Love Like Blood’, ‘Eighties’, ‘Money Is Not Our God’, ‘This Savage Freedom’ and ‘Loose Cannon’ are far from despondent. They’re rallying cries, even if the cry is to dance wildly into the abyss. The celebratory aspect of Killing Joke - another thing that separates them from most of their dour post-punk peers - endures to this day, as Jaz points out.
“We all still get fucking caned and shitfaced together when we go out on celebrations,” he confirms. “I’d hate to live a life of sobriety and drinking mineral water, you know. Life’s for living! We like feasts in Killing Joke. We like eating together, drinking together. I think this must be one of the few bands where everybody’s got a good basic knowledge of just about everything. What’s going on politically in different parts of the world, poetry, classical music, insects, everything. Everybody’s got strong opinions about so many different things, and for me it’s such a joy being with such a well-read, intelligent band of thugs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Dividing his time between his island home off the coast of New Zealand and the city of Prague (where he scores classical music for orchestra) Jaz is a man reluctant to stand still. One of his upcoming projects is a spoken word collaboration with Paul Raven entitled ‘Gems Of Power’, an extension of Coleman’s career as a lecturer.
“I’ve lectured on music, on thinking, on techniques of giving yourself personal freedom if you’ve got no money. How to go anywhere in the world and live like a millionaire on fresh air. This is what I’m doing with ‘Gems Of Power’. The world is changing, we know it’s going to shift, how do we respond to it? So it’s simply that. It’s something you can play at home and think about. You don’t need any money for it, you need to get a map of the world and stick it on the toilet wall, that’s all I ask people to do.”
As an individual constantly struggling with very real problems of his own, Coleman is more than qualified to dispense wisdom.
“I go through this ‘Breakfast with Jaz Coleman’,” he smiles. “I can hardly sleep, I have this sleeping disorder, and when I do sleep it’s for two hours and then I wake up with massive panic attacks. So I go through a normal morning for me, sharing my Hell with everybody else and how I get out of it and how I get out of my depression. I suffer terrible depression. One in ten people suffer depression, I’m not alone. When you look at the world it’s hard to keep that spirit up sometimes. And the price of everything! My God, in London you have to have a hundred quid to step outside! That’ll buy you a couple of pints, a sandwich and your travel! It’s unbelievable. Then on top of that people are paying their rent! I don’t know how you lot do it!”
As several songs on the new album indicate, Jaz keeps his spirits up by keeping busy and concentrating on the things that matter and make his life worthwhile. After over 25 years, Killing Joke still acts both as community and catharsis for the charismatic musician.
“Spending time with the people you really love, eating and drinking well, these are the things that warm my heart. Sharing the music with everybody while we’re on two legs and we’re not dead. These things mean a lot to me and I rejoice in them on this record. Although I wrote a lot of the album in warzones, the result I got was completely different. I look now at Killing Joke’s music as the new folk music, because we never had folk music. The songs of our forefathers? I don’t know what a fucking English song is! We made our own with Killing Joke. In this way, I think we’ve contributed to modern culture. Although it’s always difficult we’re just going to keep doing it, I want the standards to be higher and the next album I want to be better again, and more honest again. I don’t know what it will sound like but it’ll sure sound like Killing Joke.
“It’s a good life. Don’t forget that. With all the depressions and all the shit that’s going on in the world, we’re not dead yet, and we can have a few laughs still. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Do you want a cigarette?”
“Killing Joke must be the only group of people where I’ve had to start a physical fight because I’m laughing so much at what’s going down.” Jaz Coleman, KJ singer, classical composer and black-clad clown of the apocalypse, is sitting in the lounge of London’s Columbia Hotel, smoking Marlboros and downing bottles of Guinness. He’s in fine fettle, regaling Terrorizer with opinions and reminiscences ranging from the hilarious to the downright outrageous. “We’ve got the blackest sense of humour in the world,” he continues. “When things go really bad, it’s the way you laugh at it. I still think laughter is the best cure, however disastrous everything is. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! When I think about it, Killing Joke started out for us as two words that represented a sense of no control over your destiny. Then it changed to the laughter that overcomes all fear, those two seconds you have before you take your final breath and you die, the crystallisation and realisation of everything.”
Killing Joke have been laughing in the face of death since 1978, when Coleman and drummer ‘Big’ Paul Ferguson left the Matt Stagger Band to form their own group. Recruiting the singular talents of bass player Youth and guitarist Geordie Walker, the resulting four piece made a noise which was inspired by, but by no means bound to, the DIY punk explosion of the late 1970s.
“At this time, everybody was in a band, you didn’t have to be a musician, everybody had their own record company,” Coleman remembers, fondly. “You could do a recording on Friday and it’d be in the shops on Monday, ha ha ha! It was a tremendous time. There was less competitiveness between bands and there was more a fraternal feeling at that time, which has almost gone. Now the whole pop star idea, sadly, has come back into vogue.
“I think it’s possible that you can be a gifted, talented classical musician or rock musician, whatever, and still be a normal person. Playing this game of ‘I want to be a rock star’ and you get your big house... this was never part of my vision or my dream, I never wanted this. For me, freedom, travel, this was the emphasis. Individual freedom. In fact, while I think about it Killing Joke has never done a love song. In all the albums that we’ve done, there’s only one song that we write and that’s about freedom on it’s various levels and letting the spirit go.”
This emphasis on freedom not only informed the band’s philosophy from day one, but also its musical output. Despite their punk roots, Killing Joke offered something more demanding than reheated Ramones riffs and stylish rebellion; Youth’s fat, dub-influenced bass lines, Big Paul’s furious tribal battery, Geordie’s trebly, wire-wool guitar and Coleman’s psychotic, sardonic vocals meshed into a lethally effective whole, as illustrated by EMI’s recent reissues of the band’s first four albums ‘Killing Joke’, ‘What’s THIS For...?’, ‘Revelations’ and ‘Ha’. Their early sound shared some elements with similarly bottom-end obsessed contemporaries Public Image Ltd and Joy Division, but the Notting Hill-based reprobates arguably outdid both in terms of teeth-grinding intensity. Where PiL gave the impression of being more John Lydon’s (excellent) pet project than a fully fledged band and Joy Division were fundamentally mired in Ian Curtis’s doleful gothicism, Killing Joke were unfashionable, brutal and charged with occult energies, possibly due to Jaz and Youth’s fascination with the magickal teachings of Aleister Crowley. As vicious and unforgiving as their music gets, Killing Joke’s aim is to transcend the mundane and break through to a higher state of consciousness. They are, as Jaz puts it, “about revelry!”
“We used to co-headline with Joy Division all those years ago - they used to call us ‘Southern Stomp’ and Joy Division ‘Northern Gloom’ - and everybody would just go physically crazy for Killing Joke and just stand there for Joy Division! I find Killing Joke very uplifting music. It lifts my spirit, it lifts my heart, it still makes me smile, and I get to lose a few pounds as well in the process, right? Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Like many of their punk and new wave contemporaries, Killing Joke were heavily influenced by Jamaican dub reggae. Characterised by earthshaking bass frequencies, disorienting sound FX and the hardcore apocalyptic/elitist philosophy of Rastafarianism, it’s easy to see the appeal dub held for young, disaffected teens in the late 1970s. Many bands, including the previously mentioned PiL and Joy Division as well as The Clash, The Ruts and The Slits made their love of dub clear through homage or imitation, but Killing Joke created their own hyper-aggressive variation, adding abrasive guitars and amplifying the dread factor a thousandfold.
“When we started, we used to have support bands and they were so bad that we used to turn ‘em off and turn our own reggae music up! Then we stopped the support band thing altogether and just DJed and put heavy dub reggae on. The way we viewed a concert was like, ‘We’re hiring this fucking hall and we’re going to have a good time in it!’ You’ll see members of Killing Joke walking around in the audience before a gig, saying hello to people. No bands would dream of doing that! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It isn’t unusual for Killing Joke to take the road less travelled, and latest album ‘Hosannas...’ is a case in point. The casual observer might have expected the band to follow up the success of 2003’s Dave Grohl-assisted ‘Killing Joke’ with another big-budget, high-definition juggernaut. Then again, the casual observer probably knows very little about how this band works. Holing up in a Prague basement owned by a mysterious ‘Dr Faust’, Jaz and his comrades eventually emerged with a rough document of a particular point in the lives of the band, the ragged, lo-fi splendour of which makes it much more of a ‘return to form’ than the previous effort, which while excellent, sounded more like an effective post-millennial update of the band’s sound than yer actual classic KJ.
“The whole thing was recorded in a fucking cheap basement with inferior equipment,” states Jaz proudly. “A studio in London’s going to cost you £1, 200 a day before you get to the engineer. If you put that and accommodation costs and everything together, you can see you’re running up one fuck of a bill, right? We decide that’s not the way we make music any more, so we used like a really tiny studio, a few more tracks than an eight track, that’s how we started, and record in this little wine cellar underneath. Then we started encouraging people to come down to rehearsals. Rehearsals for Killing Joke, there’s always 30 or 40 people sitting around on the sofas, having a good time, and I enjoy that too. For some reason the band always plays better when there’s people there. I wouldn’t like to analyse why, but anyway... ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
The themes explored on ‘Hosannas...’ may prove surprising to those expecting a knotted mass of conspiracy theories and global politics. One song, ‘Majestic’ deals with the shadowy machinations of the world power elite, but elsewhere Jaz looks at the smaller picture, focusing on his own life and those of his bandmates and associates. On the title track, Jaz considers the role Killing Joke plays in his life, and the role he plays in Killing Joke. “I harbour thoughts of killing you/Pour petrol on you and then on me/But then I walk down the stairs/And Killing Joke waits for me there.” It’s apt that ‘Hosannas...’ follows last year’s 25th anniversary celebrations so closely, as it’s an album that concerns itself not just with the band but also the fans and friends - ‘Gatherers’ - that surround them. Jaz maintains that Killing Joke is made up of more than just four musicians.
“The idea is literally liberate my spirit, get out of my body, and share this experience with everybody,” he claims. “I love this life and I love the people outside of the band. The people that love Killing Joke have made Killing Joke what it is more than the band itself. They’ve kept us going, and have inspired us to keep going when we’ve gone through dark times because of that loving support. I mean, I’m amazed to see how young our audience is now. We’re certainly old enough to be their fathers. Our drummer, Benny (Calvert), he’s half the age of all of us! He calls me ‘Papa Jaz’, he calls Geordie ‘Uncle Geordie’ and Raven ‘Uncle Paul’! He’s the same age as my oldest daughter!”
Typically labelled a ‘dark’ band, Killing Joke’s career is in fact littered with uplifting anthems of defiance. Songs like ‘Wardance’, ‘We Have Joy’, ‘Love Like Blood’, ‘Eighties’, ‘Money Is Not Our God’, ‘This Savage Freedom’ and ‘Loose Cannon’ are far from despondent. They’re rallying cries, even if the cry is to dance wildly into the abyss. The celebratory aspect of Killing Joke - another thing that separates them from most of their dour post-punk peers - endures to this day, as Jaz points out.
“We all still get fucking caned and shitfaced together when we go out on celebrations,” he confirms. “I’d hate to live a life of sobriety and drinking mineral water, you know. Life’s for living! We like feasts in Killing Joke. We like eating together, drinking together. I think this must be one of the few bands where everybody’s got a good basic knowledge of just about everything. What’s going on politically in different parts of the world, poetry, classical music, insects, everything. Everybody’s got strong opinions about so many different things, and for me it’s such a joy being with such a well-read, intelligent band of thugs. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Dividing his time between his island home off the coast of New Zealand and the city of Prague (where he scores classical music for orchestra) Jaz is a man reluctant to stand still. One of his upcoming projects is a spoken word collaboration with Paul Raven entitled ‘Gems Of Power’, an extension of Coleman’s career as a lecturer.
“I’ve lectured on music, on thinking, on techniques of giving yourself personal freedom if you’ve got no money. How to go anywhere in the world and live like a millionaire on fresh air. This is what I’m doing with ‘Gems Of Power’. The world is changing, we know it’s going to shift, how do we respond to it? So it’s simply that. It’s something you can play at home and think about. You don’t need any money for it, you need to get a map of the world and stick it on the toilet wall, that’s all I ask people to do.”
As an individual constantly struggling with very real problems of his own, Coleman is more than qualified to dispense wisdom.
“I go through this ‘Breakfast with Jaz Coleman’,” he smiles. “I can hardly sleep, I have this sleeping disorder, and when I do sleep it’s for two hours and then I wake up with massive panic attacks. So I go through a normal morning for me, sharing my Hell with everybody else and how I get out of it and how I get out of my depression. I suffer terrible depression. One in ten people suffer depression, I’m not alone. When you look at the world it’s hard to keep that spirit up sometimes. And the price of everything! My God, in London you have to have a hundred quid to step outside! That’ll buy you a couple of pints, a sandwich and your travel! It’s unbelievable. Then on top of that people are paying their rent! I don’t know how you lot do it!”
As several songs on the new album indicate, Jaz keeps his spirits up by keeping busy and concentrating on the things that matter and make his life worthwhile. After over 25 years, Killing Joke still acts both as community and catharsis for the charismatic musician.
“Spending time with the people you really love, eating and drinking well, these are the things that warm my heart. Sharing the music with everybody while we’re on two legs and we’re not dead. These things mean a lot to me and I rejoice in them on this record. Although I wrote a lot of the album in warzones, the result I got was completely different. I look now at Killing Joke’s music as the new folk music, because we never had folk music. The songs of our forefathers? I don’t know what a fucking English song is! We made our own with Killing Joke. In this way, I think we’ve contributed to modern culture. Although it’s always difficult we’re just going to keep doing it, I want the standards to be higher and the next album I want to be better again, and more honest again. I don’t know what it will sound like but it’ll sure sound like Killing Joke.
“It’s a good life. Don’t forget that. With all the depressions and all the shit that’s going on in the world, we’re not dead yet, and we can have a few laughs still. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Do you want a cigarette?”
