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Richard Lord

Killing Joke
Killing Joke
E.G.
Killing Joke's fierce, doomy, sometimes perversely funky brand of hard rock-influenced post-punk has won them only a medium-sized following over three decades. But they have shaped the music of a whole host of bands, from metal to industrial to indie to goth.

Their influence has been acknowledged by everyone from Nine Inch Nails to Marilyn Manson to Metallica, who covered their song The Wait in 1987. Nirvana were such fans that Killing Joke considered suing them over the similarities between the former's Come as You Are and the latter's Eighties.
The Wait, and the album on which it appears, Killing Joke's eponymous self-produced debut, was released when the band were barely a year old and still fairly obscure. It showed that everything that later made them so widely revered by other musicians was in place from the start.
The Wait's chugging, throbbing almost-metal is joined by a series of songs with crisp, stripped-down production, based on bouncy off-kilter grooves. Each is borne along on the propulsive bass lines of the musician known as Youth (born Martin Glover) and Geordie Walker's angular, choppy guitar stabs, accented by occasional electronic bleeps and whirrs.
Although famous for their influence on hard rock and industrial groups, Killing Joke are only intermittently metallic. They were heavier on their sophomore effort, 1981's  What's THIS For …!, went a little feeble in the late 1980s, and then roared back on 1990's  Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions. Their full range can be heard on Singles Collection 1979-2012, which goes on sale tomorrow.
On much of Killing Joke, by contrast, the noise is more fuzz than aural assault, but that doesn't mean they pull any punches. The cover art is a stylised depiction of rioting in Northern Ireland (and that's mild by their standards; their 1992 compilation album Laugh? I Nearly Bought One! features on its cover a Benedictine abbot apparently exchanging salutes with Nazis).
Equally confrontational, today as then, is their singer-songwriter Jaz Coleman. An eccentric character with a tendency towards mysticism who once moved to Iceland to avoid the apocalypse, Coleman is a classically trained musician who has conducted orchestras and studied musical cultures around the world.
On Killing Joke, his intense, passionate vocal performance is matched only by his sometimes grating agitprop, but always sincere lyrics, which deal with the Coleman themes of political anger, environmental destruction and pessimism about human nature.
With its insistent, throbbing music, listening to their debut album is like being menaced by a particularly dangerous dog for 35 minutes. It sinks its teeth into you and snarls in your face, confirming why people revere Killing Joke: because they so obviously mean it.


Rewind album: Killing Joke by Killing Joke

Killing Joke

Lifestyle

Arts & Culture

Killing Joke's fierce, doomy, sometimes perversely funky brand of hard rock-influenced post-punk has won them only a medium-sized following over three decades.
