Lithium Magazine

By Mike Bax

www.killingjoke.com
www.myspace.com/killingjokeofficial

Cresting on a creative high would be a good way to describe Killing Joke in 2010. Having released a better selection of albums over the past 15 years as compared to their first 15, with their latest Absolute Dissent scoring high with fans; the band seem more vital now than they did thirty years ago.

With a slew of North American dates on the horizon (including Toronto at the Phoenix on December 7th), fans old and new will get a chance to see Killing Joke, performing live with all four original members in the line-up.

Frontman Jaz Coleman took a few minutes last week to discuss astrology, jamming music, and how to top their latest stellar release. Towards the end of our chat he even brought in a little bit of lamentation for days-gone-by, which was utterly amazing to hear. Jaz seems like the type of person who could unveil stories of the early days of punk like a mystical bard, dropping names of musicians long gone like we might talk about repeats of syndicated televisions shows. If the Killing Joke documentary (in progress now) ever sees a proper release, it will be one to watch out for indeed.

Jaz: Hello there. Where are you calling from?

Mike: Toronto, Canada.

Jaz: Ahhh, Toronto. Good, good. Well, I believe we are coming through next month, right?

Mike: Yes, sir. December the 7th. I’m looking forward to it, very much.

Jaz: Great, great. Where are we playing this time? Is it a good venue?

Mike: It’s at the Phoenix, Jaz. It used to be called the Diamond Club. I don’t honestly know if you have ever played there before.

Jaz: Oh, cool. Is it a nice club?

Mike: It’s a good venue. Lots of great bands come through there. It’s a good room to play in.

Jaz: Well, I’m so looking forward to it.

Mike: As am I sir, as am I.

(laughter)

Can you talk a bit about the new album? I can’t really call it a reformation, as Killing Joke never really broke up. But it’s a reformation in so much as Paul is back with the band, yes?

Jaz: As you know, Youth as been working with Geordie and I now for ages. It WAS really a question of getting Paul (Ferguson) to join the family again. It wound up happening around Paul Raven’s funeral, really. We always knew our original line-up would play again. We didn’t really consider that it would happen so soon though. We've been touring together now since 2008. And, of course, we did the recording of the new material. So we’re in good shape… we are already planning a new recording next year. We seem to be on a bit of a creative roll at the moment (laughs). It’s a really exciting time, honestly. And it’s been with the guys that I started Killing Joke with way back when. Very exciting, yes.

Mike: You are going to have your work cut out for you topping Absolute Dissent, Jaz. It’s a kick-ass album. It might even be your best work to date…

Jaz: Yeah, I… we can beat it Mike (laughs)… we can beat it. It will be different again. But we all feel it will be good. It will just be different again. It will be something else that we want to listen to, that’s all. But we are going to go through it, and it will be our 2012 album – bear that in mind.

Mike: I can look back on the Killing Joke discography (I have been buying material from you new since 1985) and there are numerous albums over the years that I outright love. Absolute Dissent sounds like a greatest hits album, but the material is all new.

Jaz: (laughs) That’s interesting. You know what, it’s great that we are promoting the album now, and it’s an album I can still listen to and that I love dearly, and I think I speak for all of us there. In saying that, it IS important to push on. It is significant to note that I think the most vital part of our career, if you look at the recordings in the latter half - if you look at Extremities, Pandemonium, 2003, Hosannas and now Absolute Dissent, you can see that we aren’t pandering on them. Every one of those albums has certain virtues that we are all really proud of. Our albums seem to be actually getting better. So it’s a bit different to most other bands in that respect. Most people that are coming to Killing Joke concerts these days weren’t even born when we did our tenth album.

Mike: Most bands, when they reform or come together with original members who have left the fold for whatever reasons – when they get into the studio they don’t seem to be able to deliver material like this, Jaz. If this was material in any other bands’ hands, we’d be having a different conversation right now.

Jaz: Well you know, any recording that we do there is no planning. We generally just get together and the music tends to write itself. That’s how we tend to approach our sessions. The best way to write music is to forget about music. You need to make your life more colourful. And once you make your life more colourful you’ll find the music just comes right through you, especially if you have the right chemistry of musicians. The music comes through you – there is no cerebral process where you plan it all out, not for us. This is no more better exemplified than this new record because we prepared seven tracks before we went into the studio, but only two of those seven tracks made it onto the record. So ten of the tracks on Dissent were written and recorded at the same time. So you are listening to songs that have been written as well as recorded spontaneously for the majority of that record.

Mike: Hold on a minute… you’re telling me you jammed these songs out in-studio?

Jaz: With everybody there in the studio. Yeah, we jammed them.

Mike: My God… that’s awesome.

Jaz: Spur of the moment, absolutely.

Mike: So what kind of things do you think you draw upon as a musician now as compared to twenty five years ago?

Jaz: Anything that might disturb me is the general answer I have for that. We are somewhat unique as a band in that we have all of these records recorded over all of these years, and we’ve never done a love song. So our subject matter seems to veer towards disturbing elements that we seem to want to exorcise. Frenzy. Dementia. Bits of musical ceremony, yeah? (someone off mic with Jaz says something indiscernable) And trance, absolutely. Yeah.

Mike: How is your new material being received when you are playing it live, Jaz?

Jaz: Fantastic. Everybody knows all the songs already. If I forget the lyrics… I’ve only to look at the mouths of everyone in front of me because they remember them for me… (lots of laughter) They are all singing them back at me.

Mike: How much of the new album is making it onto a current Killing Joke set list?

Jaz: I’d say almost 50/50 at the moment. That seems to be our split right now between old and new.

Mike: There was a delay on this album. I was supposed to see you in May of this year. My concert ticket still says May, actually. What happened? Was the album not done yet?

Jaz: Well, you know, like billionaires as opposed to millionaires, and like Ronald and Nancy Reagan, we don't do anything without consulting an astrologist. Our astrologer told us that if we started any enterprise within the months of April / May of this year, it would be disastrous. And that was when we were going to go on tour and release the new album. So Geordie and I took it upon ourselves to cancel that tour and postpone the release of the album on the basis of this prediction. We rescheduled everything for four or five months down the road when it was deemed to be more fortuitous for us. After doing this, that Icelandic volcano went up and caused all kinds of problems in the UK. We would have been flying then. We would have lost at least 200k if we’d gone ahead with our initial plans. So in the end the wisdom of astrology held true and that’s the reason why we pushed it all back.

Mike: Awesome! I just bought the physical album two days ago. It came out in Canada on the 16th. I’m playing the second disc in my car right now. Aside from it being an impressive collection of bands who all adore Killing Joke and cite you as influences, it seems like it would have been a real legal undertaking to clear the rights to include all of those songs from different labels…

Jaz: Oh, I Dunno. I’ve not even heard it. Don’t ask me a question like that.

(Laughs)

Mike: I mean it’s great. The Metallica cover is on there. They’ve been singing your praises now for 25 years.

Jaz: I can’t comment.

Mike: Fair enough. How about this? I consider Killing Joke the type of band that has circumvented the mainstream for decades, and yet you have musicians all over the world who cite you as influences and for being an awesome band. Can you comment on that?

Jaz: Well, it’s interesting isn’t it? It’s nice. Killing Joke was always Renaissance based. Our early concerts were places where people got together and discussed and debated all sorts of things, both in the audience and in the dressing room. It always has been a kind of open forum for all sorts of ideas. I guess we all believe that every individual… every human being has an innate God-gift that allows you to perhaps inspire other people in different mediums. I guess we made some good decisions in those early days about developing multiple skills simultaneously, and not just focusing in the area of music. This has paid off for all of us. Killing Joke, as I mentioned before, has been my entire University; my entire world education. I’m sure I speak for all of us when I say that. It has great meaning for us… all of us. It’s given us so much. Everybody does it – participates within Killing Joke because of a deep love of Killing Joke and everything that it has provided us, really.

Mike: One of the things I have always liked about Killing Joke is that the band seems to elude getting categorized. The band has changed musical styles on numerous albums over the years. It’s challenging as a listener, but it’s also engaging and entertaining at the same time. You never really know what the next Killing Joke album is going to sound like.

Jaz: And yet we always sound like Killing Joke, don’t we?

Mike: Very true. Your music always does retain a Killing Joke signature.

Jaz: We are a bit of an odd band to photograph, as well. We all look so different. It’s funny. You never know where to find the Killing Joke album in a record store either, do you? Is it in punk? Is it in metal? Is it in pop and rock? I don’t fucking know where to find it…

Mike: I know. Your band is all of these things.

Jaz: It’s always been hard to categorize. In terms of the pigeonholing of styles everywhere, we have managed to elude that just by being who we are. It’s funny really. We stick to our principals of never doing guitar solos. We always try to stick to our musical principals. We never use blues chords for instance. We seem to reject all forms of celebrity rock stardom. We come from a tradition of antiheroes, really.

Mike: I came to Killing Joke as a fan of punk rock back in the early to mid-eighties. That has always been where I’ve found your roots to be. I recently purchased the remastered Brighter Than A Thousand Suns. It’s the album I had the biggest challenge getting behind when it came out as it wasn’t aggressive enough for me. I am quite enjoying that album now - it just took me 24 years to actually understand it.

Jaz: You know, it’s funny; it tends to score as one of our most popular albums. We are under great pressure to play songs from that record live. I think that there are just incredible songs on it. I think that ‘Twilight of the Mortal’ is one of the most fantastic songs ever. And I love ‘Adorations’. There’s some incredible tracks on that record, and we must go out and do a few of them live.

Mike: I really like the last track on the new album ‘Ghost Of Ladbroke Grove’. The (Dub) on the ‘In Excelsis EP’ is pretty damn awesome in that it is even more dubbed out that the original. I’ve heard dub music creeping into Killing Joke numerous times over the years, and I’m glad to see it included here on this excellent track.

Jaz: Well, you know the first wave of punk really started in King’s Road (Chelsea) with the Pistols and McLaren. It was largely a manufactured event. The second wave of punk started in Ladbroke Grove and Portebello Road… and occurred when Bob Marley was introduced by Don Beck to Punk Rock music. And from this point in Ladbroke Grove, groove came into the equation for that second wave of punk, if you like. And of course, for me this is not just an area where Killing Joke started and the second wave of punk started, but it’s a place where there have probably been six generations of my family. And indeed it’s a profound area because it was the first cosmopolitan experiment in the world going back several hundreds of years – that area of different races and different people living together in one community. So it's a very special place and it has great meaning. The second wave of punk was really differentiated by not just the rhythm sections in bands, but the idea of mysticism grew in a lot of artists’ heads back then. If you look at Joy Division and Killing Joke you can see the mystical aspects appearing in the music. That was a really interesting time musically. And of course, the area of Ladbroke Grove is very dear to us. It used to be a place where artists could live very cheaply. You would often see Raven of Joe Strummer down Portobello Road on a Friday, and all sorts of artists who lived in the area. Now it’s been taken over by bankers and people like Ruby Wax and celebrities – the whole character of the place has kind of changed. Almost, but not quite all, you know? And so the song is evoking past ancestors and our tribal roots and our musical roots.

Mike: Can you talk a bit about the rumoured orchestrated Killing Joke project on the horizon for next year, Jaz?

Jaz: Yeah, I’m trying to put that together. I’ve been commissioned to do an orchestrated evolution of punk in three stages. And Killing Joke is going to play a major part in that, obviously. That’s one of the things I have to do at some point in the New Year. I’ve got numerous orchestral projects… but that’s a whole other interview.

Mike: And there is also a documentary in the works called Death and Resurrection. Can you talk a bit about that, as well?

Jaz: That’s right. That’s right, yeah. It’s kind of a documentary slash movie on some of the strange events around Killing Joke, really - the things that have happened around us over the years. It’s black humour, really. We are working on it now and it’s sort of writing itself.

Mike: I am looking forward to seeing Killing Joke live in a few weeks, Jaz. I appreciate your time today.