[kj] 1980 Sounds KJ interview revisited in today's UK Guardian:

[Brendan Quinn]

Tomorrow's World will probably be the title-track of the album

 

Should have been.

 

From: gathering-bounces at misera.net [mailto:gathering-bounces at misera.net] On
Behalf Of Rheinhold Squeegee
Sent: Thursday, 28 March 2013 2:53 a.m.
To: Gathering Gathering
Subject: [kj] 1980 Sounds KJ interview revisited in today's UK Guardian:

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/27/killing-joke-classic-interview
 




Killing Joke: 'We've lost all our friends. We're the only ones we've got
left' - a classic interview from the vaults


To hail Killing Joke's 35th anniversary <http://www.killingjoke.com/>  and
new singles collection, we return again to Rock's Backpages
<http://www.rocksbackpages.com/>  - the world's leading collection of
vintage music journalism - for this interview with the band. It first
appeared in Sounds in August 1980

*	 Killing Joke in 1980
<http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/3/27/1364390
669266/Killing-Joke-in-1980-009.jpg> 

'The people we really play for are the ones who follow us to every gig, good
or bad' . Killing Joke in 1980. Photograph: David Corio/Getty Images

I met Killing Joke <http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/killing-joke>  in one of
the hellhole dressing-rooms at the Music Machine. I introduced myself to
various people who weren't in the band until a swarthy guy overheard me,
sprang up from his seat in the corner, and came to me snarling, "You're from
Sounds? I want to talk to you!"

This was Jaz, singer and keyboard player. He looked as though he would have
started throwing punches if only he'd had a couple of minutes before he was
due on stage to perform for the benefit of the one-parent families of Camden
Town.
I had no idea what he was so steamed up about. I arranged to see them the
next day at the flat Jaz shares with Youth, the bassist, in the Ladbroke
Grove area.
This turned out to be a modest corner of a massive Georgian terraced house.
It has a peculiar shape because of the haphazard conversion probably done
decades ago. Bedrooms, kitchen, and a small sun lounge with balcony were all
bright with natural light, but Jaz ushered me to a central living-room area
which could be rendered gloomy as twilight by closing enough doors and
curtains, which he did.
He waved me to a pile of cushions, gave me a glass of water. Drummer Paul
and guitarist Geordie arrived (bassist Youth never made it) and Jaz said
suddenly "What sign were you born under?" Cancer. "Where do you live?"
Streatham. "Nice little pad, is it? I knew you had to be a home-loving type.
Yeah, a Cancer. Look at that crabby grin."
The others examined me and I tried to stop grinning crabbily. Realising that
I didn't know how a crab does grin only put me at a greater disadvantage.
But as it happens I've got rather inured to that sort of thing recently. A
week previously in a radio interview, Kevin Rowland of Dexy's Midnight
Runners (a group of people I know quite well and like) had come out with the
same sort of probing assault on my home and lifestyle (about which neither
he nor Jaz know a light). And that was just the start.
The similarities between the two rang like a peal of bells, much more
significant than the huge difference in their musical styles.
Shortly Jaz was echoing Kevin again, almost word for word: "We are the only
honest band. You try to find another band that's got true, honest feeling.
Not fashion, girls, things that are going to get them in the Top 10. That's
rubbish, all of it. Our motives are to become as much ourselves as we
possibly can."
There has to be something in this, no coincidence. I feel it's because
British rebels of any stripe, "young soul" or otherwise, find that beating
at the walls of our system/society/culture is like trying to knock holes in
an inflatable - it gives way, bobbles up again behind you and leaves you
floundering. So the only way to retain your integrity (and dignity) is to
create a viable vacuum in which you can float untarnished by impure air.



Reading on mobile? Listen on Spotify
<https://embed.spotify.com/?uri=spotify:user:casparls:playlist:3Bjrp9CU6WEvH
DwoIr4zDQ> 

If I understood them, Killing Joke do this quite consciously. They refer to
"alienation" a lot in their conversation and lyrics. They have reached the
point of accepting it as the modern status quo and using it. Jaz: "We try to
get off on that, try to get as much out of it as we can." Paul: "Four people
with different destinations, but all going up the same flight of stairs."

To achieve their positive isolation, Killing Joke (and Dexys) have to put in
an awful lot of negatives to clarify their position to themselves, often
artificially to my mind. They slot people into categories, such as
"Cancerian" or "old hippie" (or Kevin's favourite, "brown ricers") and
believe that they are the only ones who can transcend such labels - when I
mentioned to Killing Joke that Dexy's were making the same speeches, they
said they didn't like the Brummies' music and doubted that it could come out
of "the way they live" as truly as their own.
They also have to believe they are getting a dirty deal from the press. They
simply couldn't be darlings of the media and retain their self-esteem. This
presents a problem because, as lively and interesting new bands, they tend
to get written about quite favourably. However, a little reading between the
lines to spot the underlying malice or condescension soon sorts that out.
Thus, Dexy's famously are refusing press interviews and Killing Joke, lower
on the career parabola, thought about giving me a hard time before their
basic good nature won through, but then cut up cantankerous with
[photographer] Virginia Turbett (Jaz hiding from the camera and the others
refusing to work for her at all - sure, they're not obliged to, yet if you
read on you may find some interesting comparisons between Killing Joke's
response to a photographer and what they demand of their own audience).



And what Jaz wanted to berate Sounds about was some false impressions we had
apparently conveyed about Youth's involvement with the 4 Be 2s
<http://www.allmusic.com/artist/4-be-2-mn0000572821> . "It's over!" they
insisted and I agreed readily, having no idea why this was reckoned a
controversial issue.

Finally, the rebels of the necessary vacuum will make only the vaguest
commitments about their future conduct, although they imply it will be
radical. Dexy's argue that all promises sound hollow until they are
fulfilled and so will say nothing in detail about their plans.
This avoids pretentiousness all right, but gives people very little to cling
to. Killing Joke said: "When we get the capital, we're going to create our
own environment." They refused to be more specific.



So, like Dexy's, all they are offering with certainty is their music.
Despite the tortured logic of their journey they are a good band and it is
worth getting there. After all, John Peel does say Killing Joke's session
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrV7BtTXq5g>  is the most requested one he's
had on his show.

Reading on mobile? Click here to view video
<http://www.youtube.com/embed/IrV7BtTXq5g?enablejsapi=1&version=3> 

They play a dark, looming, heavy funk/punk which bends the knee to no one
when it comes to raw power. To me their peak to date is Change, the all but
instrumental on their Rough Trade single, which comes at you like a
juggernaut in the night, a kind of crushing dance music.
The complete words are: "You see/You feel/React/You know/You're
waiting/Change!" It gives full rein to Paul's extremely loud and precise
drumming, Geordie's jagged razor-blade guitar and Youth's possibly
incompetent but totally hot bass: a formidable sound.
On stage the tone is set by Jaz, a performer who knows no bounds of polite
restraint. His dark features crease with fury. He points and shakes his
fists. At times he cuts through all the barriers that stand between you and
real emotion in a setting like the Music Machine to set fear shivering up
your spine - possibly just from recognising that anger.
At others he tumbles over into farce, his rage reminding me of the
Incredible Hulk or Windsor Davies. While he's spilling his guts, Youth jogs
beside him with a green sun visor pushing his hair back and making him look
uncannily like Eric Idle.
Careful listening to their tapes and some gap-filling by the band reveal
that their preoccupations are with future holocausts (either nuclear or
natural like Mount St. Helen's) and the tightening screw of oppression
(there's a military or police presence in many of their songs).
They aren't "political" in any dogmatic way but our Prime Minister has
managed to get under their skin - they brought her name up repeatedly and
although she's never mentioned in their songs last summer she inspired the
first Killing Joke composition, Are You Receiving.
It says: "We got nothing at all/This is life in the fall/We keep searching
for the positive/We're using everything."
Tomorrow's World will probably be the title-track of the album they're
recording now for release on their own Malicious Damage label. It would be
appropriate because it's about an example of what the band mean by a
"killing joke". It portrays the "sci-fi lie ... the spangled new age" and
then into this complacency drops the just-for-you image of a call-up letter
on the doorstep: chaos rules, always.
Judging from occasional outbursts in our letters column, there are those
amongst you who will by now be denouncing Killing Joke as "Commies". Save
your sweat. Part of their game-plan for this interview was trying to winkle
out what kind of a Lefty I am, so they could needle me ("Own up, you're a
Trot!" Sorry, don't know how). They're too far into alienation for anything
as friendly as socialism.
In fact, they've been misinterpreted more often as some kind of degenerate
neo-Nazis. Their Island track Turn To Red is fairly evidently about a
nuclear explosion ("The sky is turning red with bodies"), but a reviewer
fingered it as a piece of Lefty-bashing. Resignedly Paul pointed out that
red is still a primary colour after all: "When you get to the traffic light
they don't turn Communist, do they?"
The nearest thing to a Killing Joke manifesto on these matters may be the
creation of the Hammer horror all-purpose gauleiter in Psyche: "Look at the
Controller/ A Nazi with a social degree/ A middle-class hero/ A rapist with
your eyes on me/ You beast for masturbation/ A priest for the nuns you fuck/
You'd wipe out spastics if you had the chance/ But Jesus wouldn't like it,
no!"
They are bitter, all right. Roaring fierce. And if Jaz is the extroverted
mood of the band, he makes no secret of where the feeling come from. "The
thing is he's a wog," cut in Paul as Jaz drew breath for his story. He'd hit
the salient point all right.



Reading on mobile? Click here to view video
<http://www.youtube.com/embed/GBYG1_pbgJ0?enablejsapi=1&version=3> 

Jaz comes from Cheltenham, the son of two teachers, his mother half-Indian.
He watched her being turned down for promotion for 20 years. He caught
enough racist stick himself to want to get away and merge into London,
whence came his strength in anonymous isolation: "I'm a complete mixture. I
have no culture that's my own. I don't relate to anybody and I'm really
proud of that."
Of course London also led him into bands. He got together with Paul in Matt
Stagger, who they left in late '78 to gradually piece Killing Joke together.
When Geordie answered their ad, he was lodging incognito with his girlfriend
in the women's hall of residence at Trent College in Barnet. He was born in
County Durham and moved down via a "cardboard estate" in Milton Keynes where
his father's work as a carpenter had taken him.
"I came to meet them," said Geordie, "and there was this shithole of a flat
with this oily rag of a human [Jaz] rummaging in a dustbin outside. I had an
argument with him immediately and he seemed to like my sarcasm. There was no
money but the personalities appealed."
Then it was actually Geordie who enlisted Youth when the other two had given
up on him. Somehow he liked the way he found the lad lying in bed at three
in the afternoon, deeply inert: "I realised he was the man". Together they
worked up the riff of Are You Receiving and the founding duo were won over.
Since then Killing Joke has survived: abject poverty when their dole was
stopped for refusing to accept work; a raid on Jaz's flat by the
antiterrorist squad when a neighbour reported seeing him with a gun (it was
an air pistol) in the back yard; a session in the cells in Hamburg; a fire
which gutted a previous flat (and gave Geordie an all-time great laugh when
he stumbled out of the smoke and flames to see Jaz haring down the road
stark naked).
They've argued with Island and with Virgin and they've come back to the
complete independence they vow they will maintain for the rest of Killing
Joke's life. Jaz, as a faithful student of the natural sciences, puts it
down to having two fire signs in the band. They were born for conflagrations
of one kind or another and they still take that flat blaze as a symbolic
turning point.
It could equally express the volatile relationship they choose to have with
their audiences. By the end of their set at the Music Machine they were
putting across blatant scorn and contempt to the paying, but subdued,
customers. No apologies. They mean it.
Jaz: "You can always tell what it's going to be like was as soon as you go
on. If it doesn't go 'Bang!' you might as well leave. If they don't react
immediately we don't give a fuck all night."
I asked whether it might not be an idea to put in some effort to change the
response rather than giving up so quickly.
Jaz: "What do you think we are? Entertainment?" (This wasn't a joke.) "Go on
at 10 o'clock and switch on just like the record? We're human beings. We
play as we feel. Tough fuckin' nana. We don't give a fuck about the
bourgeois cunts [equals "posers" - not a Marxist analysis] at the back.
"The people we really play for are the ones who follow us to every gig, good
or bad. That primitive feeling, there's something we've got that they need."
Something fierce, there's something too hot to handle for the majority of
people they've known. It's an exclusive spot, inside that vacuum.
Paul: "We've lost all our friends. We're the only ones we've got left."
Geordie: "Everyone thinks we're cunts, but we're not."
Paul: "It's because we're honest!"
They all laughed amongst themselves at the killing joke.
C Phil Sutcliffe, 1980

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/gathering/attachments/20130328/ef08e0c0/attachment.htm>