Finding Killing Joke

In the mid 80s, when Metallica released their Garage Days Re-revisited EP, I fell in love with the entire thing but one track in particular stood out: The Wait. That was the first time I heard of Killing Joke. Then in 1988 came Alan Moore’s and Brian Bolland’s brilliant Batman: The Killing Joke. (The band and the comic aren’t necessarily related, but certainly Alan Moore was aware of the band.) And then I moved on.

Every so often, I’d run across a reference to KJ the band when I read interviews with some bands but never investigated. This was pre-Internet, and I wasn’t aware of a place where I would have heard any of the music of KJ. I missed MTV for most of the 80s, too, so I missed their biggest hits. Kind of a perfect storm of my own ignorance and a lack of resources. None of my friends or fellow musicians were into the band. I really wish I’d heard Extremities, Dirt, and Other Repressed Emotions in 1990 when it came out because Ministry’s Psalm 69 was the album I got instead.

Start to finish, one of the heaviest, most aggressive records I’ve ever heard. I would have lived inside this album for years, studied and learned from it.

Flash forward to 2021 and I was cruising YouTube when I decided to go listen to Failure’s Ken Andrews song Sword and Shield. While it played, I perused the comments and found someone mentioned how that song reminded them of Killing Joke. Failure is one of my favorite bands (I tell everyone I know about them) and Andrews’ solo stuff has always appealed to me. So off I went to revisit The Wait.

And then I found Eighties, Love Like Blood, Kings and Queens, The Hum, Empire Song, Wardance, and holy shit how had I missed this band? I found a bunch of mix lists and just let them play, making notes of songs that stood out. That first list had over forty titles.

Listen to “Eighties” and you can’t deny that KJ had a significant influence on Nirvana. Listen to the whole album and you can see why it was their biggest hit.

But then came Extremities… and Money Is Not Our God, The Beautiful Dead, and the atmospheric brilliance of Inside the Termite Mound. I was hooked and listening to everything I could. I read their Wikipedia entry, researched more articles and interviews with Jaz Coleman and the band, found there was a documentary. Dave Grohl played drums on their 2003 self-titled album for free and we got maybe Dave’s best drum work and another industrial masterpiece.

Just put on the headphones and crank this one up. If you’re a fan of any kind of heavy, industrial music this is a treat. So much syncopation that you’ll bounce all the way through it.

By the middle of December I’d listened to every studio album, watched several live concert videos on YouTube, and seen the documentary (The Death and Resurrection Show is on the Roku Channel). Apparently I was making up for 30 years of not supporting the band in six months. I’m absolutely in love with the music in every period. They deserve much wider recognition because once you start listening to them, you can hear how many other bands they’ve influenced.

Geordie’s guitar sounds, the drums (especially Martin Atkins on Extremities…), Jaz’s voice growling, shouting pain and anger then soaring above the wail have connected with me in a way that I haven’t found in music in a long, long time. Maybe the band is old hat to some, but they shouldn’t be written off. They’re important. Politically and socially they comment in words and music on the state of things in ways that other bands don’t. I don’t agree with all their points of view but I understand them. They challenge me and I like that in some of my music.

It’s wonderful to still be finding music that moves me like Killing Joke does and that they are still out there. They toured with TOOL in 2019 before everything and just released a live recording from that trip. Since 1979, the Joke has been a band I should have been listening to, a generator tapping into various sources of power and translating into a language we can understand. All we have to do is pay attention.