Tlisted below are many loopy tales about Jaz Coleman. There was the time he went lacking and resurfaced residing a nomadic existence in Western Sahara. He has claimed to have seen a UFO – really seven orange orbs, one bearing the picture of a stick man – in central London. As soon as, he was so aggravated by a Melody Maker evaluation that he stormed into the journal’s places of work and dumped rotting liver and maggots over the reception desk. At the moment, although, video-calling from Argentina, he’s reflective and emotional.
“I’m nonetheless in horrible shock,” says the 64-year-old from behind darkish sun shades within the South American daylight. “It’s been an extremely tough time for everyone round Killing Joke.” He’s speaking concerning the dying of Kevin Walker, higher referred to as Geordie. The vastly influential guitarist and band co-founder died in Prague in November, additionally aged 64, after a stroke.
Taking part in a semi-acoustic Gibson ES-295 – an instrument as soon as utilized by Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore – however downtuned a tone, with heavier strings and a delay impact, Walker gave the band’s post-punk-industrial-dance hybrid a wonderful depth which Coleman as soon as in comparison with “hearth in heaven”. His mesmerising guitar-playing propelled quite a few albums into the UK High 20 and gave them a bona fide hit single with 1985’s Love Like Blood. Their admirers vary from a youthful industrial era to Metallica and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Web page. “Geordie was a nationwide treasure,” says Coleman in his first interview since Walker’s dying.
However he reveals that issues about Walker’s well being had mounted for a while. “A yr in the past, a health care provider caring for him stated to me, ‘When it comes, it’s going to come actually quick. So I need you to brace your self.’ After all I didn’t take it to coronary heart, as a result of I believed Geordie was indestructible.”
This month Coleman embarks on a spoken phrase/Q&A tour, which he is aware of will now be overshadowed by his bandmate’s dying. However there’s one query he isn’t able to reply: “I’m asking folks to not ask about the way forward for Killing Joke, as a result of I’m nonetheless in mourning.”
Walker had been Coleman’s “fixed companion, at each single gig and recording” since 1978. Coleman and drummer Massive Paul Ferguson had initially tried to finish the lineup by summoning bandmates in a black magic ritual, however the flat they held it in subsequently burned down. In order that they recruited Walker and bassist Martin Glover (AKA Youth, later a prolific report producer) by the extra typical technique of an advert in weekly music paper Melody Maker. “Geordie rang up and stated ‘I’ve by no means been in a band earlier than,’” says Coleman, permitting himself a tiny smile. “‘I’ve solely ever performed in my mum’s bed room, however I’m the very best guitarist ever.’”
The Cheltenham-born, classically educated Anglo-Asian singer and synth participant, and the County Durham-born guitarist who was a Siouxsie and the Banshees fan, not often agreed on music. However each had been well-read and bonded over politics, philosophy and spirituality. “I’d had a substantial occult library since I used to be seven,” Coleman explains. “Geordie was a grasp Kabbalist” – a believer in esoteric Jewish mysticism. “We shared an curiosity in all that aspect of issues.”
Thus, Walker accompanied Coleman on one in all his most celebrated adventures. In 1982, Coleman turned up in Iceland, telling reporters he was fleeing the apocalypse, though his subsequent explanations have diverse from learning ley strains to organising a marijuana-running operation. “There’s a component of fact in all of them,” he grins, “however I went to Iceland as a result of I needed to seek out part of me that was lacking.”
As he tells it now, throughout a gig in Studying they’d had the “collective expertise of taking part in in a magnetic discipline which meant all the pieces slowed down round us”. Eager to additional discover such geomagnetic vitality, they went to Iceland to conduct ritual experiments in volcanic energy centres. “Many loopy issues occurred,” the singer says. “One individual working with us was struck by lightning twice and survived, and one time, from what I may see, we achieved levitation.”
Magically or in any other case, Coleman discovered his lacking half in Iceland, and determined to begin a parallel profession as a composer (he says he now sells extra classical albums than Killing Joke albums). And in newer years Coleman and Walker had socialised much less, after the previous gave up consuming.
“Killing Joke has at all times been like a dysfunctional household,” he explains. “All of us love one another deeply, and we’re periodically evil to one another. I had three vicious fights with Geordie. The final time we did a lot harm to one another that we each ended up needing stitches. He was making the tea afterwards and went, ‘Do you suppose we’re consuming an excessive amount of?’”
Shortly afterwards, in January 2006, Coleman made a vow to cease. “I’ve a 100% success fee with my system,” he says. “As a result of the solemn vow is that should you fall off the wagon, you invoke dying.”
Coleman nonetheless has the empty tequila bottle which Walker drained throughout his last Killing Joke efficiency, on the Royal Albert Corridor final Might. He has stuffed it with flowers. “He wouldn’t cease consuming two bottles a day. He’d begin two hours earlier than a gig and as quickly as he went to the toilet, I’d half empty the bottle and refill it with water.” Coleman sighs, softly. “We’d been doing that for 20 years. I’ve obtained a vendetta towards alcohol as a result of in the end it lower brief the lifetime of my buddy.”
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After Walker’s dying, Coleman needed to get out of Prague, the place they’d each been residing – he additionally has a farm in New Zealand, and is now drawn to the “creativity and chaos” in Argentina. Nonetheless, he’s disturbed that nearly 60% of the inhabitants dwell in poverty and warns that the UK is headed the identical manner, blaming “the succession of governments culminating within the present prime minister, whose wealth in distinction to what individuals are struggling actually is obscene. Within the US, too, 80% of residents are two paycheques away from homelessness.”
Warning of impending world chaos or catastrophe has been Coleman’s inventory in commerce ever for the reason that likes of 1979 debut single Flip to Purple or 1980 traditional Wardance. But when something, his imaginative and prescient of the long run is now much more dystopian. “The financial bubble is about to burst in methods we’ve by no means seen in our lifetimes,” he insists, predicting famine, warfare and a widening gulf between an elite and a rising underclass. The tensions between nations is one other favorite topic. Having lived close to the Ukraine border and labored with orchestras in Russia, he felt conflict brewing.
“Folks in Russia had been at all times eager to speak to me about how as a nation they really feel encircled,” he says. “However one more reason I left Europe is due to the push in the direction of conflicts and the shortage of diplomacy in all places. Like lots of people, typically I merely can’t bear to observe the information. We spend more cash on weapons of mass destruction than we do our well being techniques. We’re 90 seconds away from midnight on the Doomsday Clock, however folks don’t appear bothered.”
He fears that we may tumble into nuclear battle by chance, “as a result of advanced defence techniques are being run by synthetic intelligence and when one AI system misreads one other it results in catastrophic choices”. He isn’t the primary musician to voice fears about AI, however warns: “It’s step one to transhumanism, so some folks will be capable of obtain an IQ of 600-plus and entry life extension programmes, however most of us gained’t. So there’ll be two kinds of people sooner or later that may look visibly totally different to one another.” This appears wild, sci-fi stuff, however he factors out that 1982’s Empire Tune predicted the Falklands conflict – it was launched two weeks earlier than Argentina invaded – and that his songs comprise “prophesies; warnings for humanity”.
Walker’s last recordings with the band seem on the 2022 EP Lord of Chaos, which got here after a very tough two years, together with a “near-death expertise” for Coleman amid a diabetic coma in Mexico in 2021. Life in Killing Joke is actually by no means boring, however he says that in one in all their last conversations, the guitarist had advised him that he didn’t wish to proceed with the unique lineup. “I attempted to cause with him,” Coleman says. “Then he died.”
Walker was the second Killing Joke musician to die prematurely. Paul Raven, who changed Youth for a number of years earlier than all 4 founder members reunited in 2008, died aged 46 in 2007. “However I imagine in reincarnation and the ancestral spirit,” says Coleman, “which is to say that Raven and Geordie are collectively. There are occasions that I can hear them, so on the subject of the way forward for the group, their will can be considered.”
