Music: Jeff Hemmings

Killing Joke – This joke is one of the very best…

About to release their 16th studio album, Pylon, the original line up of Jaz Coleman, Geordie, Youth and Big Paul are also embarking on a UK tour that includes the sold-out-within-a-day gig at Brighton’s Concorde 2.
Produced by Tom Dalgety, who recently workedon Royal Blood’s huge debut album, Pylon is quintessential Killing Joke; raw, uncompromising and full of bleak lyricism, trademarks that they have carried throughout their career, right from the get-go in 1978. As the band’s bassist (known even more so as a producer) Youth says: “… heavy and uncompromising, as well as some visionary celebration… lots of black pain emotion. To be honest, we remain genre-blind, so our music always covers a vast spectrum of influences, from disco right through to heavy metal…”
There seems to be no mellowing or softening of this most visceral of bands, described once as purveyors of ‘quasi-metal’. “Death, misery and tears, calculated waves of fear/Drawn up by think tanks, there’s a darkness in the west” goes the start of one of the tracks off the album, ‘I Am The Virus’. And musically, much of Pylon matches the sheer energy, and tribalistic power of many of their most celebrated songs.

According to Coleman, their original manifesto was to “define the exquisite beauty of the atomic age in terms of style, sound and form”. He has also provided an explanation for the band’s name Killing Joke: “The killing joke is like when people watch something like Monty Python on the television and laugh, when really they’re laughing at themselves. It’s like a soldier in the first world war. He’s in the trench, he knows his life is gone and that within the next ten minutes he’s gonna be dead… and then suddenly he realises that someone back in Westminster’s got him sussed – ‘What am I doing this for? I don’t want to kill anyone, I’m just being controlled’”.
Coleman, along with Ferguson and Youth, famously decamped to Iceland in the early 80s, in preparation for the coming apocalypse, which of course, didn’t materialise… But this hasn’t stopped him or them from continuing to offer up savage critiques concerning political and economic corruption, exploitation and hatred. In this age of the musically meek and mild, Killing Joke are a group that actually stands for something. They are more essential than ever before.
Concorde 2, Monday 26 October. SOLD OUT