I Saw a film!

and have listened to and loved Killing Joke and the guitar style of Geordie Walker, and the weird, powerful diction and poetry of Jaz Coleman for my whole life since teenager-land. They recently toured with Metallica, and they were less than a mile away, but I couldn’t afford to go. I joked about sharing a ticket with someone, I’d leave after KJ! I knew very little about them as people, their artistic drive, their particular idiosyncrasies, their story, really. I’ve been with them working and struggling and using them for my therapy (recently I hear it said on NPR that musical arts are problem more responsible for getting people through mental distress than actual therapists are) since I was 16 or 17. I dropped the needle on that vinyl probably in 1982 or so (as a rural American it was harder to get these records) and was immediately hooked. Killing Joke is not a band I had to listen to a few times to “get”. What they bring hits like a sledgehammer, but also envelopes you like armor. There’s a kind of powerful safety nestled in the sonics and rhythm. But that’s about me.

Killing Joke are a group of weirdos. How easy that is to say, but dealing with the bonkers spiritualism, the crackers ley line pseudo-science and depth of the cobbled together religious puzzle that these guys have long inhabited cannot be removed from the value of the brilliant art they produce. And just because I find it irrational and possibly downright silly, doesn’t mean they don’t use it to great effect. Is it any worse than any other religious artist paying respects to God? Of course not, it’s actually the same thing, it’s all the same thing. It’s two and a half hours of slamming good rock music mixed with the many faces of Jaz Colman and their various religious outlooks.

Magic minded folks see magic in all places and events, do I need to care while I’m enjoying the latest powerhouse CD called Pylon? I don’t think so. It’s harmless, and Jaz, in recent interviews is a surprisingly pleasant humanist.

They went to the Pyramids of Giza, the world adores those towers of rocks, but truthfully, as Henry David Thoreau so deftly pointed out, they represent the egotism and religious devotion of forced slavery for a few people who should have been tossed in the Nile. On the other hand, they’re the Pyramids of Giza and they’ve taken on a whole 40 centuries later meaning of their own. Killing Joke’s processes of recording didn’t go that well. It’s not easy recording there.

This is running freebie on Prime (usa) and a definitive KJ document for those of you who care!