DAY 464.
Killing Joke....................................................Killing Joke   (1980)












This is another one where I've heard of the band but not heard them play, also another one where I wasn't looking that forward to listening to, but was surprisingly surprised.


I really enjoyed this but will only be downloading at the moment, I found this very much tied to it's time lyrically which is in no way being derogatory to the band as I feel they capture the mood quite succinctly.


My favourite tracks would most likely be "Wardance," "Complications," which would be just behind the energetic "Complications" that itself would be just behind the instrumental "Bloodsport" which has to be my track of the day, not normally an instrumental type fella but I absolutely love that track.


So anyways this album wont be going into my collection just yet, but wont rule it out in the future as I also love the cover art.




Bits & Bobs;


Jaz Coleman is a tortured soul. He claims to suffer from constant panic attacks and to get about three hours of sleep every night. Killing Joke music is his outlet, providing relief from his pain.


 
In 2012, the band was slated to tour with The Cult and The Mission, but they begged off in a very public way: announcing on Facebook that they weren't going, and never wanted to in the first place. The post, signed by "Black Jester" (assumed to be Coleman), stated: "The only reason we allowed ourselves to be talked into it was to blow both bands off the stage and to steal their respective audiences."


It continued: "Then there would be a problem with the dressing room and witnessing The Cult charge the fans $200 per head for a Meet & Greet. Lastly, all their songs suck!"



 
The band has an interest in the occult and supports various conspiracy theories. In 1982, Coleman moved to Iceland, claiming the apocalypse was coming and he would be safe there. His bandmates followed, but they all returned to England when they were satisfied that the world was not ending.


 
Killing Joke claims to have little interest in hit songs or commercial success. Coleman says the goal has always been "complete control over our environment."


 
In 2015 Jaz Coleman cited some of Beethoven's symphonies as a musical influence, but said there was no contemporary music he liked. Said Coleman: "Half the motivation for being in a band is making music you can't find anywhere else."


 
Early in the career, the band kept their surnames secret, just going by Jaz, Paul, Geordie and Youth.


 
Jaz is from Cheltenham. His parents were both teachers, and of blended ancestry. He says that he doesn't claim any culture as his own, as he is a mix. "I don't relate to anybody and I'm really proud of that," he said.


 The Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl is such a huge fan of Killing Joke, he did all of the drumming on their self-titled 2003 album free of charge.  (ken what he's beginning to get on meh tits)


Five things you didn't know about Killing Joke A druid, a grand master, an art restorer and an ordained priest: meet post-punk legends, Killing Joke.



After almost four decades, influential post-punk rockers Killing Joke are still as sharp and angry as ever. Fiery new album ‘Pylon’ demonstrates their knack for mixing snarling industrial rock with smart, catchy hooks and frontman Jaz Coleman's biting lyrical observations, showing why they’ve influenced everyone from Metallica and My Bloody Valentine to Foo Fighters and LCD Soundsystem. There are enough bizarre stories about this truly wild band to fill the British Library, but as Coleman explains, ‘the truth of Killing Joke is usually weirder than the fictitious notions.’
Their ‘weirdest gig’ story trumps everyone’s. ‘At the Reading Hexagon on February 1 1981, we played a gig with a fire-eater doing a fire ritual. It was sold out and the place was going crazy. All of a sudden, everything went into slow motion and absolute silence, like everyone in the audience was moving underwater. Then, like a wave, everything just crashed back into reality and the place was pogoing again. It was collective – the whole band experienced it. We’ve talked about it for 30 years, and I’ve written about it in-depth. Basically, we were on a magnetic field and it produced this very strange effect. I’ve studied it with people like Uri Geller and Jimmy Page, who had similar experiences.’

 It was widely reported that members of the band moved to Iceland in the ’80s to escape the ‘impending’ apocalypse.
‘That was the official story. The truth was I wanted to put brakes on Killing Joke and do some other things. I undertook a process that [psychologist] Carl Jung called "individuation", where you lock yourself away and encounter your dark side or unconscious side, so you can really know who you are. The apocalypse thing was the cover story for Geordie [band guitarist Kevin Walker] and myself to keep everybody off our fucking backs!’

 The apocalypse story may have been fake, but surveillance culture made Coleman leave the UK.
‘It’s shocking and unbelievable how far surveillance has come. There’s so little debate in the UK on the ethics of mass surveillance. For there to be bulk metadata, where details and secrets about individuals are recorded, is disgusting. I hate it and I will speak out against it for the rest of my days. I’m a citizen of New Zealand now and proud of it – I love the British sense of humour, I love the people in UK, but I can’t stand the weather and I can’t stand the politics.’

 The band’s interests spread far wider than music...
‘In the band, we have a grand master, an ordained priest, a druid [bassist Martin ‘Youth’ Glover], one of the greatest art restorers in the world, and someone who works with David Rockefeller. And I’m a dowser [someone who uses divining sticks to find water] and a student of Rosicrucian history. It’s an unusual group! The principle of self-education and the punk ethos – having no fear of failure – has helped all of us to pursue anything we want.’


 And their musical interests spread far wider than punk...
‘I went to East Germany, Hungary and Minsk to study orchestration with various masters. I compose and conduct – the United Nations Orchestra are giving me a mandate to form the United Nations Chamber Orchestra, which I’m hoping can do lots of concerts to raise money for various causes. I also have a two-year contract with the St Petersburg State Orchestra. The first time I conducted I only had an hour’s rehearsal, then I was onstage in front of a president. I was fucking terrified!'





 There are thousands of people who are Killing Joke fans, but aren't even aware of it. When Metallica recorded their 1987 EP Garage Days Re-Revisited, fans marveled at that creepy little song midway through, called "The Wait", that distinctive, staccato riff sounding so conducive to heavy metal, that anyone who heard Killing Joke's music circa 1987 would not believe that this was the same band. Industrial rock pioneers such as Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, and KMFDM all based their harsh, jarring sounds on Killing Joke's monumental debut album. The likes of Sisters of Mercy and later on, Type O Negative, would adopt a similarly bleak worldview in their gothic tones. Famed producer Steve Albini would employ the distinctive, stripped-down, muscular sound of the early Killing Joke albums on every single record he worked on. And the grunge messiah himself, Kurt Cobain, for all his Pixies adoration, couldn't help but brilliantly swipe the main guitar riff from the great 1985 single "Eighties", and use it as the basis for a highly successful single of his own, "Come as You Are".


 Emerging from the same post punk era that yielded such crucial bands as Wire, Bauhaus, and The Cure, Killing Joke didn't possess the razor-sharp wit of Colin Newman, the theatrics of Peter Murphy, or the melancholy of Robert Smith; instead, the quartet's music was vicious, feral almost. Guitarist Geordie tore out shards of distorted chords, bassist Youth delivered jarring, angular basslines, Paul Ferguson provided colossal, minimalist beats on drums, and singer Jaz Coleman alternated from an indignant punk wail, to a gravel-throated holler that dared to rival the rasp of Lemmy Kilminster, Coleman's voice famously described by Ferguson as "the sound of the earth vomiting." Throughout the 1980s, the band's sound would evolve from the raw power of their first two albums, to a more slickly-produced, commercially accessible sound that didn't compromise their integrity, and despite veering perilously close to self-parody in 1988, their sound was one all their own, vicious, brutal, and completely inimitable


.Still, to this day, Killing Joke remain rather underrated, loved dearly by fans and fellow musicians, but still unknown to many casual listeners. Despite heaps of classic singles that had a massive impact on punk, metal, industrial, and alternative rock, and not to mention a rather impressive 2003 comeback album (which featured famous Killing Joke fan Dave Grohl on drums), they're a band who deserve much more attention. The 1992 compilation Laugh? I Nearly Bought One! was a decent enough anthology, but was still one that needed some improving, so twelve years later, Caroline Records (by way of EMI in the UK) have taken it upon themselves to put out a new collection, entitled For Beginners, a collection of standout tracks from 1981 to 1988. Unfortunately, as it turns out, For Beginners is hardly the best place for a novice listener to start.


 What instantly hits people more familiar with Killing Joke is what's not on this compilation. Only four tracks from the band's crucial first two 1981 albums, Killing Joke and What's THIS For...! are included, and early classic songs such as "Requiem" and "Wardance", and have been completely ignored, not to mention infamous "Wardance" B-side "Pssyche", and the 1981 single "Follow the Leaders". Not only that, but the band's two most well-known singles from the mid-80s, the great "Love Like Blood" and the aforementioned "Eighties", are nowhere to be found, either.


 That's not to say For Beginners is a complete waste of time. After all, there are so many good Killing Joke songs, that it'd be difficult to put together a mix that would warrant the adjective "terrible". And this CD does have its share of classic moments; there's the phenomenal "The Wait", with Ferguson's tribal drumbeats, and the memorable staccato riffs by Geordie, which pre-dates mid-'80s thrash metal and the American punk of Agnostic Front. "Primitive", also from the first album, is Killing Joke at their minimal best, Youth's bobbing bassline adding a strong, contagious dance element to the muscular arrangement. "Butcher" is considerably more adventurous, the band employing sounds made famous by Joy Division (melodic upper-register basslines and atmospheric guitar solos), but they take the song into an entirely different, murky, pitch-black direction.


 The stuttering "Chapter III", from the Berlin-recorded Revelations album, echoes the band's earlier, hard-edged output, as does 1983's "Fun & Games", but you start to sense the tinny, 80s style production beginning to take over, especially on the latter track. Meanwhile, "Tabazan" and "Night Time", from the breakthrough 1985 album Night Time, have the band putting that commercial production style to good use, as Coleman starts tinkering with synthesizers, to great effect. The only troubling aspect of this compilation is the inclusion of two tracks from the disastrous 1988 release, Outside the Gate, originally intended to be a Jaz Coleman solo album, but released under the Killing Joke moniker instead. Both "My Love of This Land" and "Obsession" have no business being on this collection.


 Of course, labels feel compelled to throw longtime fans a bone or two with compilations like this, and For Beginners has some interesting little nuggets, such as the potent live B-side version of "The Fall of Because" (originally from the "Let's All Go (To the Fire Dances)" single in 1983), and alternate mixes of "We Have Joy" (from Revelations), "Harlequin" (from 1983's Fire Dances), and "Victory" (from 1986's Brighter Than a Thousand Suns). Most interesting is a previously unreleased mix of 1986's "Rubicon", which puts more emphasis on the guitars, marking a great improvement over the original.


 Still, despite being a fun listen, the lack of new material makes this an album for Killing Joke completists only, and even worse, there's no reason whatsoever for new listeners to begin here. For Beginners actually serves as a decent companion disc to the Laugh? I Nearly Bought One! collection, but if a Killing Joke newbie is going to buy two CDs to start off with, they might as well get the classic 1981 one-two punch of Killing Joke and What's THIS For...!, and then go from there. Getting to know the albums by this great band, one by one, will ultimately prove more rewarding in the long run.


 How did you get your name?

 Jaz; 

You can apply the killing joke to everything. Imagine a soldier in the trenches in WW 1. He's just been told to run over and gain, say another 15ft of land and he knows he's going to die, and he suddenly thinks that there's some fat cunt back in Westminster controlling his life, and he feels a bit of a mug. That feeling is the killing joke. You can relate that to yourselves, because that's what's happening to you. In 3 or 4 years something is going to happen The earth will react. You pump the earth full of shit and in the end it's going to throw up, whether it's an atom bomb or an earthquake. You've got to go down to your roots, You've got to know why it's happening. You can't take any religion seriously these days. Your instincts tell you it's all lies. It's all changing, you know what's happening every 2000 years, the last 2000 have been the age of Pisces, now we're moving into Aquarius. I know, because I worked with the church believe it or not. That's my personal interest. I'm not interested in religion, I'm interested in fact.





AAAAARRRGGGHHHH! IT'S THE APOCALYPSE AND WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!


*ahem*



Sorry about that but I couldn't help it after three solid hours of listening to Killing Joke [1980].



The debut album by Notting Hill band Killing Joke is a key album in the rise of thrash, funk and industrial based metal music. Jaz Coleman and his bandmates crossed punk rock with Black Sabbath for a nihilistic, bludgeoning but inspired and exciting noise and of their early albums, this is their best. The songs describe scenes of violence, war, alienation and death. And so would you be if the headlines featured Thatcher, the Cold War and riots.




The original album comprises of eight tracks. The three key songs are the opening grind Requiem, famously covered by Foo Fighters, the anthemic The Wait, famously covered by Metallica and the tribalistic Wardance, famously covered by...umm...wait, it'll come to me.




Requiem opens with air raid siren-like bass from Youth, then a heavy-but-tuneful guitar riff, then a funeral march-tempo drum pound building up to Jaz Coleman's voice, authorital, booming, fearful and repulsed as he shouts "Man watching video, the bomb keeps on ticking. He doesn't know why, he's just cattle for slaughter." with meticulous enunciation and painstaking coherence. Coleman howls in horror "argh!" just before the pummeling chorus of "RE-QUI-EM" and the drums roll back into the verse. It's sludgy, circular but funky and catchy, a terrific opener, but it gets better.




The Wait is the most well-known Killing Joke song, the dissonant noise at the beginning followed by a choppy funk riff and two-thump, forboding drum, Coleman's voice is higher and distinctly London as he decribes the horrors he sees before the chorus, a just-audible holler of realisation and defiance of "THE WAIT!" complete with hissing high-hat like a spit of venom at those about to be nuked.




Wardance begins with a distorted wheezing and coughing, the song bursts into life with a varispeed mix into a crunching, circular riff and time-bomb synth triplet. A staccato riff sets up more distorted voices, this time a disgusted glance at the malevolence and jingoism of the British male, ("This is music to march to, to a war dance") before the entire band chant in unision "A WARDANCE". Coleman recognises that "you got something nasty in your mind, trying to get out, to a war dance" before warning "Look out for a nationalist command". The music shudders to a halt, complete with Wheel Of Fortune-like drum and guitar screech.




The three songs are key in understanding Killing Joke's influence and the direction of the band themselves. Requiem made industrial, a previously hideously misanthropic and pointless sub-genre economically viable for future metal bands taking their cue from it and set up Killing Joke's themes for the next quarter of a century. The Wait gave heavy rock bands a chance to incorporate funk in their music without imitating funk and gave a clue to the stadium-goth anthems Killing Joke would make on post-Youth albums Fire Dances and Night Time. Wardance is the flipside of shoutalong working class OI! music and made use of distortion and tribal rhythms, opening a door for the synthetic metal of future dance producers and percussion-heavy drums for the more primitive (in a good way) sounds of metal.



The rest of the album stands up well, Tomorrow's World is a desolate soundscape complete with eerie and sparse synth drops and pounding drums, the guitar thrashes and after a minute Coleman howls a formless lament of being called up to army service, "carry us, face the music, called up for your country, never, no I won't go". The synth bloops and ragged guitar riff leap out of the dark before the droning finish. Bloodsport is a instrumental funk-metal thrash complete with sweeping percussion and boomerang synth lines to recreate the Coliseum orgy of slaughter from ancient times. The ending, a "wooo!" from Coleman and cheering and whooping from a crowd like a victory celebration with horrible drone that literally dies before setting up The Wait. Complications is a song more in common with the three key tracks above than the previous doom-laden songs, Coleman's voice returns to high-register, London-accented yelp of despair as he describes a weird occult-like descent-into-madness tale. It's the shortest song on the album and probably the most accessible with the coherent lyrics and excellent vocal delivery with the band playing more funk-based hard rock. $0.36 is an experimental dirge (nearly seven minutes) over some snippets of a bloke speaking German and Coleman's indecipherable lyrics, but they're deep in the mix anyway. Primitive has an excellent drum/bass intro, the sweeping synth and chainsaw guitar come in at the right time and Coleman sings about the temptation/righteousness tangle with surprising lyrical insight despite the weird quasi-marching grunts being more disturbing than they should be. Even Goths get the urges.




Killing Joke 1980 was re-issued in 2005 with five bonus tracks, rough mixes of Primitive and Bloodsport and the single mix of Requiem are fine, but the gem is early single Change. Simply the best disco-metal song ever, the lyrics are a wake-up call to Go For It!! before it's too late and react against all the evil around you.




It's empowering stuff. The choppy rhythm, the prowling guitar music and awesome pound of the drums before the chorus are excellent backing for Coleman's army drill sergeant voice shouting "You're waiting!" and sarcastic laughter. And you can dance to it! There's even a dub version for good measure.




If you like Metallica, Soundgarden, Nirvana, Ministry or Sepultura, to name the most obviously influenced, you'll find plenty to - er - "enjoy" on this album, finally complete.




Killing Joke 1980 is the best album made in fear of the Cold War because of its unflinching misanthropy, genuine fear and innovative sound. The ironic thing is the bomb didn't actually drop and if you take a look at the chart positions you'll see it was unreleased in the USA. That's a Killing Joke alright.



Drummer Paul Ferguson and vocalist Jaz Coleman first met when they were both in Zimbabwean vocalist Mataya Clifford’s backing band. They quit to start Killing Joke. * Their debut gig was at Witcombe Lodge in Cheltenham, when they opened for The Ruts and Selecter. That was on August 4, 1979.




The band caused controversy with a poster supposedly showing Pope Pius IX walking down rows of Nazi solders giving the Hitler salute. In actual fact, the figure was German Abbot Schachleiter, who was known as a Nazi sympathiser. * In 2008, the original Killing Joke line-up reunited, following the death of bassist Raven. Coleman said at the time: “Everything came together when we all met at Raven’s funeral. It was funny the unifying effect it had on all of us. It made us realise our mortality and how important Killing Joke is to all of us.”


Metallica covered them. Nirvana ripped them off. Nine Inch Nails remixed them. Inside industrial-metal pioneers Killing Joke.
"Don't go all nostalgic on me," Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman warns Revolver, when we reach him on a rare moment that he's in London. "I don't look back upon 1979 and 1980 and think, Wow, they were the days. They weren't. They fucking sucked, man."


 For the past three and a half decades or so, Killing Joke have been at the vanguard of industrial, post-punk, and metal. Their aggressive-sounding, hard-edged screeds have influenced countless trailblazing, and top-selling, artists including Metallica, Nirvana, and Nine Inch Nails. But despite this, they've struggled through the years to get widespread attention, having come out of London's rough-and-tumble punk scene. "We were pretty violent and vulnerable in the early days," Coleman says in a jovial manner he keeps up throughout the interview, despite the dark stories he tells. "It was quite nasty being in Killing Joke."


 But somehow the band has survived through it all, and with the release of its latest record, MMXII, the original lineup of the group—vocalist-keyboardist Coleman, guitarist Kevin "Geordie" Walker, bassist Martin "Youth" Glover, and drummer Big Paul Ferguson—has created an album that's bleak and compelling, the latest in a long line of career highs. "Most of Killing Joke has been a lesson in, 'First you dream it, then it happens,'" Coleman says. "It's been magical."


 Many of those magical experiences are chronicled in a forthcoming documentary on his band titled The Death and Resurrection Show, which is due for release in 2013. Many are also recounted in the story that follows. When Revolver asks Coleman to recall the weird and wild adventures that got him and his bandmates to this point—including recording in an Egyptian pyramid and gigging with a fire-breathing cannibal—he minces no words. "I can remember exactly what it was like," he says. "It was a different kind of shit, mate."


 Killing Joke came together as teenagers in the late '70s around the London neighborhood of Notting Hill. Today, the area has served as the setting for the eponymous Hugh Grant romcom and is populated by what Coleman derisively refers to as "Hooray Henrys"—the sort of privileged upper-class society types Monty Python mercilessly parodied. Three-bedroom apartments go for anywhere from £1,200 to £2,500 a month (U.S. $1,500 – $3,000), but when Killing Joke formed, Coleman was paying £28 a month for the same space. "This was the most undesirable area to be in, back in '78," the frontman says. "A lot of artists went there because it was kind of bohemian and there were a lot of rehearsal studios. Everyone from Hendrix to some of the Stones to Pink Floyd would all go there to rehearse."


 "We were all squatting," says Youth in a genteel, almost matter-of-fact way. "We used to get picked up by the police three to four times a day, because it was a black area and a frontline for drugs. Me and Jaz lived next to a café where most of the action was. At the time, if you were white, you were there only to get drugs. We were just poor."


 The first members to play together were Coleman and Big Paul in August 1978. Geordie came aboard next, followed by Youth, who'd answered an ad he'd seen in one of the weekly music magazines in the spring of '79. He'd previously played in a few bands, including one with Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten's brother, but his bass skills didn't wow Killing Joke. "Jaz and Paul walked out," Youth recalls of his audition. "They were much more academically trained than me, so they were less than impressed with my musical ability." Luckily, Youth had something more than hot licks: He had feeling. While Coleman and Big Paul were plotting how to tell him he didn't get the gig, the bassist started a "one-note jam" with Geordie that caught the other guys' ears. "That ended up being our first song," Youth says. "Then I kind of just got in."


 With its lineup in place, the band moved quickly to issue its debut, an EP titled Turn to Red, financed by Coleman's then-girlfriend. Its three tracks owe an equal debt to disco, the echoey form of reggae music known as dub, and the throbbing sounds of London's post-punk scene, which was spearheaded by bands like Wire, This Heat, and Johnny Rotten's post-Pistols group Public Image Ltd. One song that made the cut was the jam Youth concocted with Geordie, "Are You Receiving." That track, more than the others, foreshadowed the direction Killing Joke would take in the coming years, because of its crunchy, almost mechanized guitar attack, Coleman's gruff antiestablishment-themed vocal, and a driving tempo that plowed along like a steamroller. It's a sound they would tighten up and make much harder in the coming years.


 At that point, though, their focus was on touring and surviving. Living in and practicing in the gritty setting of Notting Hill influenced them greatly at that point, as it enabled them to meet all sorts of characters. One such rogue was a man who went by the name Dave the Wizard; he had a tattooed face and lived on the top floor of the squat they were staying in. He invited Coleman and their roadie at the time, Alex Paterson (who would go on to form the celebrated techno group The Orb), up to his apartment. "He lived in a pretty primitive state," Coleman recalls. "There were just bones and old pieces of fur strewn about. And he had this big magic circle painted on the floor with a seven-pointed star in it, and just skulls of dead animals." Dave offered to show the pair his "fire ritual" and then proceeded to astound the Killing Joke frontman by blowing what Coleman insists was a 14-foot flame. "I've never seen a flame as long as that," the singer says. "I said, 'You have to come to a gig with us.'" From there, Dave and his fire ritual became a staple of the band's concerts, and he would also go on to influence two of the songs, "S.O. 36" and "Bloodsport," on Killing Joke's self-titled full-length, which the group released in August 1980.


 "We had invited Dave for a Sunday roast dinner with these other people we knew," Coleman says. "The host was serving roasted potatoes and roast pork with applesauce. I don't know how the subject came up, but somehow we got on the subject of cannibalism. And then Dave said one of the best one-liners I've ever heard: 'I've eaten human flesh.'" The host went on to ask about the circumstances under which Dave the Wizard would have eaten a person, and "he finished with the fact that it tastes very much like pork." The singer recalls the food didn't go down very well after that. As for what the Wizard had eaten, Coleman says, "It was an aborted fetus. He hadn't killed anyone. He explained he was completely within the law."


 The band was reminded of the incident months later, while dining in a Berlin beer hall. "All these blue-eyed guys were eating loads of pork and we all got the horrors," Coleman says. "This bled into 'Bloodsport' and especially 'S.O. 36.' That one's about sort of taboo areas."


 The band members continued writing songs for the album upon returning to Notting Hill in a rehearsal studio they shared with two other fast-rising groups, Motörhead and The Clash. "We were definitely influenced by both bands to a degree," Youth says. "The Clash were starting to use dub influences at the same time we were but in a different way, and we always wanted to sound louder than Motörhead."


 One of the songs Killing Joke wrote while in that rehearsal space was a guitar-driven barnburner called "The Wait." "I started seeing keyboards in Killing Joke as atmospheres as opposed to keyboard parts around that time," Coleman says. "That track was really the beginning of getting the sound of Killing Joke." The oblique lyrics, he says, were a bit of reportage from one of the band's tours. The line, "I look at the river, white foam flows down," was something the band had seen. "I don't know how, but detergent had gotten into the whole river where we were and it was just foam. It destroyed everything and there were all these dead fish everywhere," the singer recalls. "It was the most depressing thing we've ever seen." The song was meant to be a summary of the "hopelessness of the human condition" and the fatalism of the Cold War. "It was pretty profound stuff for someone who's just out of his teens," Coleman says.


 Years later, when Metallica were getting back on their feet after the 1986 death of bassist Cliff Burton, they decided to record some cover songs to break in their new bassist, Jason Newsted. When they were rehearsing the song "White Lightning" by a New Wave of British Heavy Metal group called Paralex, they weren't quite getting it right. So guitarist Kirk Hammett started in on "The Wait," which the band knew from one of Burton's mixtapes. The rest of Metallica kicked into it, gave it a bit more of a metal guitar crunch, and decided to record that instead of "White Lightning" for what would become their 1987 release, The $5.98 E.P.: Garage Days Re-Revisited.


 "I thought it was great," Youth says of the Metallica's version. "They captured the spirit of the song.""I'll never forget their cover because I didn't know who the fuck they were," Coleman comments. "I don't really go out of my way to find out what bands are happening, and while the other guys are into metal, I'm not.


 "I'm not sure they got all the lyrics right, but we never printed the lyrics of the first album," the singer adds. "It really makes me laugh when these people think you've been singing one thing all these years and of course you haven't. They've gone and misconstrued the lyrics."


 Inscrutable as its lyrics may be, Killing Joke's self-titled full-length has become a classic. Much more of a rock record than Turn to Red, the group jettisoned much of its dub influences for nasty riffs and Coleman's alternatingly open-throated and gravely vocals. Songs like the bass-heavy "Wardance" and the atmospheric opener "Requiem"—which Foo Fighters would later cover—have since become some of the band's most celebrated numbers. But at the time of the album's release, Youth felt disappointed in it, he says. "'Requiem' had started off as a dub-type track, but we ironed it out and made it more of a rock-esque anthem," he explains. "In a way, I felt like we hadn't represented ourselves properly on the first album because it was more of a direct rock album."


 Having released its first full-length a year after their EP, Killing Joke would continue putting out a record a year through the early part of the '80s. Youth felt more comfortable with their sophomore release, 1981's What's THIS for…!, because they made Big Paul's drums sound bigger and tracks like "Madness" had the dub element he felt was missing on the self-titled album. Unfortunately, he would feel disengaged from the production of 1982's darker, heavier, and more all-around rock-oriented Revelations, after he suffered an acid meltdown.


 "I was taking a lot of LSD at the time," he recalls, adding that he recorded the second album while tripping. "I narrowly managed to drag myself out of a psychedelic soup. I was very lucky to escape being institutionalized. My drug of choice at the time was amphetamines. We were never heavy drinkers. Amphetamines gave us the edge and psychedelics gave us the cosmic side. I just kind of got into it too much and ended up melting down."


 As if the drugs weren't doing enough damage to the group, after the release and tour for Revelations, Coleman moved to Iceland on a whim without telling his bandmates. "I wanted to invoke my holy guardian angel," the singer explains, comparing the experience to what psychologist Carl Jung called "Individuation." "It was like finding your hidden genius. I knew there was a part of me I hadn't found yet and it wasn't just expressed through Killing Joke." Coleman can cite the exact date he had his breakthrough, February 26, 1982, when he concluded that he needed to become a classical composer in addition to playing in Killing Joke. It's a quest he'd embark on in the years to come, and the symphony he wrote while in Iceland would eventually be performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra a decade later. In the '90s, he arranged a number of Rolling Stones songs to be performed by the London Symphony Orchestra for a release called Symphonic Music of the Rolling Stones, which Youth produced, as well as similar albums with the music of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.


 While it was a life-changing trip for Coleman, the other Killing Joke members felt left behind. "We didn't know he left," Youth says. "We read about it in the [British music magazine] N.M.E. We thought, OK, we'll audition different singers, but after a few weeks of rehearsal, Geordie disappeared to Iceland. And then me and Paul said, 'Maybe we should start a new group.'" The band the pair formed was Brilliant, a dance-oriented rock band, but Paul departed for Iceland a week later.


 "The band left me," Youth says. "Later I realized it was not personal, but I was sharing a flat with Jaz and he hadn't told me. I was quite angry. I felt betrayed, and to have the rest of the band follow suit? I felt, Well, what loyalty?" The trio eventually returned from Iceland and invited Youth to tour Germany with them, but he declined, choosing to focus on Brilliant and working with other artists in the studio. From that point up until the present, Youth has produced, engineered, and remixed works for a who's who of pop-culture names: U2, the Cult, the Verve, and Marilyn Manson, among others. In 1993, he formed a new band called the Fireman that writes "edgy and challenging" music with a Liverpudlian bloke named Paul McCartney. He describes that experience as "an absolute privilege," but even so, with these successes in his years away, he still kept an eye on his former band.


 When Youth declined his place in Killing Joke, they hired a like-minded spirit from England's Midlands named Paul Raven as their bassist. In July 1983, they released Fire Dances, which marked somewhat of a departure, musically, as they emphasized the tribal percussive elements of Big Paul's drums, pushing Geordie's guitar back in the mix. After that, though, the group made a departure from playing heavy music seemingly altogether.


 Their fifth album, 1985's Night Time, reflected much more of post-punk and even new-wave sensibility than their earlier albums, which was perfect for the time. The single, "Love Like Blood," with its shimmery guitar and Coleman's almost Robert Smith–like vocal delivery, became their biggest hit, and artists ranging from the Australian synthpop group Icehouse to the metal band Sybreed have covered it. "I was gutted when they did 'Love Like Blood,'" Youth recalls. "I thought it was a great song. I felt like I had really missed out and made a big mistake by not being into the band."


 The most referenced track from Night Time these days, though, is its murky closer, "Eighties," which is basically a summary of all the shitty things about living in the Thatcher-Reagan era. The group had written the song while living in Switzerland, and as soon as Geordie played the main riff, they knew they were onto something. "We premiered it at a private gig in a nuclear fallout shelter in Geneva," Coleman says. "People usually just stand and listen when you play a new song, but the whole place went crazy." Then he deadpans, "Who would have thought that it would go on to be 'Come as You Are' by Nirvana?"


 Indeed, the riff in "Eighties" and the one on the Nevermind cut sound nearly identical. The notes Kurt Cobain played are in mostly the same order and are almost the same pitch, just slowed down. In the past decade, Nirvana's manager at the time, Danny Goldberg, has acknowledged the similarity between the songs. Recalling how they picked "Come as You Are" to be a single, as told in the book Eyewitness Nirvana: The Day-by-Day Chronicle, the manager said, "We couldn't decide between 'Come as You Are' and 'In Bloom.' Kurt was nervous about 'Come as You Are' because it was too similar to a Killing Joke song, but we all thought it was still the better song to go with. And he was right: Killing Joke later did complain about it."


 Actually, Killing Joke did more than just complain; they filed a copyright suit against Nirvana. When Revolver asks Coleman what he thought when he first heard "Come as You Are," he says bluntly, "Guilty. I'll summarize where we stand: Who would you rather be, us or Kurt Cobain?" Sometime after the singer's suicide, though, they dropped the lawsuit. "Money is just not that important," Coleman responds simply when asked why the band decided to let the legal case go the way of the Nirvana frontman. "It has nothing to do with Killing Joke."


 The group continued to release albums throughout the rest of the decade, but none measured up to the success of Night Time. Their follow-up, 1986's Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, seemed to fall in line with the Top 40 synth-pop of the time, albeit through Killing Joke's dark lens. Big Paul left, and Coleman, Geordie, and new members released the disappointing synth-heavy 1988 album, Outside the Gate, and a 66-minute lecture about the occult—a favorite subject of Coleman's—set to Geordie's guitar and percussion, dubbed The Courtauld Talks. But they seemed to find their footing again by the release of 1990's Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions, which found them dabbling in heavier territory again.


 Sometime after that, and after a decade of not speaking to one another, Coleman and Youth reconnected. "After the Iceland thing, he took it pretty hard," the singer says. "But we became friends again, so in the '90s we brought him back after I fell out with Raven." The latter bassist would go on to play with the industrial acts Ministry, Pigface, and Prong, as well as the group Murder, Inc., which also featured Geordie and Big Paul. Killing Joke, meanwhile, began work on a new album with Youth playing bass and co-producing.


 Making 1994's Pandemonium, proved to be its own adventure. Among the places they recorded parts of the album were New Zealand, London, and Cairo, which included a stop to record in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid of Giza. "We bribed our way in," Coleman says. "Egypt is a very corrupt country. We spoke to three Egyptologists and they introduced us to the Minister of Antiquities. We paid him $3,000 U.S. to record for three days."


 Once they were inside the pyramid, not all went smoothly. On the first day, every time the band brought batteries into the King's Chamber, they died within 10 minutes and had to be recharged. Their second day was luckier. "We had a whole team bring in batteries, and that's when the magic really kicked in," Coleman says. "It was hysterical, these three female Egyptologists turned up to the recording dressed like [Egyptians mythological goddesses] Isis and Hathor and all. I kind of recognized it, but Youth didn't and he goes, 'Hey Jaz, who are these three weird birds standing in the back?' I was laughing my head off. Our engineer Sam was falling asleep then he woke up and suddenly ran out screaming. When we left the pyramid, there must have been 500 to 600 tribesmen outside all chanting and playing drums. It was like a Hollywood set." In the end, the group was able to track parts of the songs "Exorcism" and "Millennium."


 The album went on to become one of the group's best sellers, thanks to hitting the crest of interest in industrial music, and they followed it up two years later with Democracy. The band was beginning to reach a critical mass, in terms of interest, and fan and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor even remixed the album's title track. Despite these successes, all was not well within the fold. "There was an imbalance in the band dynamics," Youth says. "Even though I produced Pandemonium and charged them a completely modest fee compared to what I was commanding as a producer, it was still more than the rest of them, which rubbed them the wrong way. Everything in Killing Joke has to be an equal split. You can't underestimate the amount of sibling rivalry in so many years of being in a band together."


 With equality restored, Killing Joke regrouped again in the early 2000s to record a second self-titled album, which they refer to these days by the year it came out. From the rigid industrial metal of "The Death & Resurrection Show" to the screed-like "Asteroid" to the punk-metal steamroller "Seeing Red," it was the most vital album the band recorded in years. "'2003' is almost all of our favorite album," Youth says. "It has elements of dub and metal and it's fairly focused." Part of the album's directness, though, has to do with the drummer who played on it: Dave Grohl.


 Having been in the lurch with drummers, the band decided to lean on some of their famous fans for 2003's Killing Joke. They even tracked four songs with System of a Down's John Dolmayan and had intended to record some with Tool's Danny Carey, but decided in the end that Grohl should do the whole album. The former Nirvana drummer allegedly refused to be paid for his work. Which isn't to say that Killing Joke let him entirely off the hook for the "Come as Your Are" debacle.


 "You'll see where I'm wrestling Dave Grohl to the ground and taking a confession, as it were," Coleman says, referring to a scene in the documentary The Death and Resurrection Show. "But let's be honest. Dave doesn't have publishing on that song anyway."


 "We were all blown away by his contribution," Youth says of Grohl's playing on the 2003 album. "I thought the direction we took was very electronic and quite cyber and techy, brutal, and fierce. It came out great."


 Since then, the band has been on a winning streak, in terms of releasing heavy, industrial-sounding records. In 2006, they put out Hosannas From the Basement of Hell, which received rave reviews from the metal press. But it proved to be a bittersweet entry in the band's catalog as it turned out to be Killing Joke's last with Raven. He would go on to record albums with Ministry and other bands, but on October 20, 2007, he died of a heart attack.


 When pressed for a fond memory of Raven, Coleman doesn't bat an eye. "Of course I have fond memories," he says. "This one night at a bar, this disgusting woman, she goes to Raven and says, 'I want you to fuck me up the ass until I bleed and beat me up.' He said to her, 'Yeah, but I might not stop.'"


 After Raven's death, the four original members of Killing Joke regrouped. In 2008, they commenced on a tour that included playing two nights in several cities, performing the 1980 Killing Joke and What's THIS For…! one night and Democracy and Pandemonium the next. Rather than make it simply a nostalgia trip, they wrote a couple of songs while on the tour. Before long, they were planning on recording again. "We were determined that it had to be a contemporary record," Youth says. "It could be a nod to our legacy, but we had to make a new record."


 In 2010, they released Absolute Dissent, an album that showcases both Coleman's orchestral sensibilities on songs like the title cut, as well as the band's emotionally heavy side on tracks like "The Raven King," which pays tribute to the deceased bassist.


 The reunion experience paid off in full, though, on their most recent offering, MMXII. "The direction we took on that album was quite dark," Youth says. "It has a lot more keyboards but also a bit more of a dense metal sound. The uncompromising antidote to pop and pop rock, à la Nickelback, is becoming more commercially viable, so we were quite influenced by that aspect. The album has a more serious gravitas to its sound because it's the times we live in." And of course, as the record's title suggests, there's the tie-ins with Mayan apocalypses and what Coleman cites as similar prophecies by the Egyptians, Masons, Incans, Hopi, and Maori peoples over the years.


 But so far, the only 2012 catastrophe that has befallen Killing Joke occurred in July when Coleman went on another one of his unannounced sojourns, as he had done when he offed to Iceland so many years ago. At the time, the group was working on a forthcoming collection of dub versions of its songs and planning a tour with the Cult and the Mission U.K., but it had to cancel its plans. Instead the band members took to Facebook and wrote, "We are all concerned about our missing singer's welfare." They also said, "We are doing everything we can to make this tour happen and locate our missing singer." In August, the group announced that he had turned up in the Western Sahara, and, other than the tour, Killing Joke resumed their plans.


 "I just go off," Coleman explains. "I don't use mobile phones or computers. It's difficult to stay in touch. I was close to the border of the Western Sahara, and this hippie comes up to me and says, 'They're all looking for you, man.'" Then he laughs.


 "Oh, we're getting used to that now," Youth jokes. "We are all challenging people to work with. Jaz is a very individually unique character that does crazy things quite frequently. As much as it can be frustrating and embarrassing at times, I'm sure it's the same for what I get up to sometimes. Often in hindsight, it all works out for the best."


 Coleman feels much the same way. When the singer looks back on his career, he has no regrets. After three-and-a-half decades in the rock-and-roll game, he knows the score. "I've got no mercy for young bands today," he concludes. "I couldn't get paid for a gig until 1990. The harder it gets, the harder I feel."




"Wardance"


 This primal track was the first single from Killing Joke's first full-length album. It served as a great introduction to the band. Lead singer Jaz Coleman said in Creem: "That's a great song, an animal song. It's about the nature of man, the subconscious demand for blood. It's about coming to terms with that."

 The tribal drums and dance rhythm on this track provided a fresh sound that got a lot of attention and came to be labeled "post-punk." An early adopter was the influential BBC DJ John Peel, who gave it lots of airplay and raved about the song, saying that he thought it was an established band recording under an assumed name. Peel had Killing Joke on his Peel Sessions show, giving the band considerable exposure.

 Coleman wore war paint on his face around this time to provide a visual counterpart to their sound. When they performed this song, Killing Joke would sometimes have performers on stage doing a fire act. In the early days, a friend of theirs dubbed "The Wizard" would do the act.




"The Wait"



 A track from Killing Joke's debut album, "The Wait" is about the Earth's destruction due to pollution and neglect.Jaz Coleman explained: "That song was written after we played up north in England, and we saw this river that was so polluted. It had detergent floating down in it, and there was dead fish everywhere. I'll never forget it. It was just heartbreaking."


 A key line in this song is, "I look at the river, white foam floats down." The band are big into fishing, so seeing a polluted river affected them. 

DAY 474.
The Teardrop Explodes.......................................................Kilimanjaro   (1980)












If Echo And The Bunnymen were Liverpool's Doors, then Julian Cope's Teardrop Explodes were the scouse Love. They formed in the autumn of 1978,taking their name from a DC comic, but by the time Kilimanjaro was released two years later, their reputation had already been made and to some had passed their peak.


This perception was reinforced by the sacking of original guitarist/co-writer Mick Finkler and their signing to Phonogram a major label, from the local indie Zoo run by Bill Drummond and Teardrop's keyboardist Dave Balfe.


Record Collector described the original cover (above) as "one of the worst record sleeves ever" and the album was later re-sleeved and re-issued with the addition of "Reward"


I thought that wasn't the album cover I had, I must have had the re-issue as mine had "Reward" on it.

The Specials...........................................More Specials   (1980)












 

DAY 475
The Specials...........................................More Specials   (1980)













The runaway success of The Specials debut album and chart topping Too Much Too Young live EP caused a thing for all things Ska,. The Specials label Two Tone had launched the career  of Madness, The (UK Beat) and The Selector , and when the specials played America. in early 1980  their US record company decorated  LA's Whisky A Go-Go  in black and white checks in tribute.

Last edited by arabchanter (28/11/2018 7:52 am)

I don't watch much telly, I normally just stream things unless of course there's futba on, but I heard this advert when I passed my daughters room, and wondered if anyone else who may have looked in on this thread can remember this tune, it's from 1965 and was a great track that was in this book, I always feel when bands let companies use their songs, in my humbles it sort of tarnishes them, anyways can anyone else remember the band and the album?





 

Last edited by arabchanter (28/11/2018 11:13 pm)

DAY 477.
Pretenders.................................................Pretenders   (1980)













Punk claimed to trample gender underfoot, but that didn't stop Chrissie Hynde's contemporaries in Pistols/Clash camps calling her a mouthy yank who would never amount to much. The Ohio native was ideally placed to board the bandwagon, having landed in London and worked for the NME


A cover of The Kinks "Stop Sobbing" produced by Nick Lowe introduced her rich voice' but still didn't prove she could pen anything other than record reviews.


The album did. On tightly wound tales of lust and loathing, choppy riffs met their match in Hynde's honeyed venom.

 

Last edited by arabchanter (29/11/2018 11:38 am)

DAY 478.
Einsturzende Neubauten....................................................Kollaps   (1981)













Formed in 1980, in Berlin, by vocalist Blixa Bargeld and American born percussionist Andrew Chudy, "Einsturzende Neubauten" (German for "Collapsing New Buildings") picked up the gauntlet laid down by fellow sonic terrorists Throbbing Gristle and Faust.


They explored their obsession with destruction using scrap materials and power tools alonside Bargeld's heavilt distorted guitar, their earlier performances were conceived in a service hatch beneath a Berlin Autobahn. Recruiting Stuart "FM" Einheit from Hamburg band Abwarts they set out to record "the most unlistenable album ever"


Sounds like it's gonna be a challenge?

Sorry got wankered yesterday, have got an 80th birthday lunch to go to today, so will try and get a couple done tonight.

A/C, see if there's an album you don't really like, just say that maybe and avoid the background stuff: to save time.

Just a wee suggestion.

arabchanter wrote:

PatReilly wrote:

A/C, see if there's an album you don't really like, just say that maybe and avoid the background stuff: to save time.

Just a wee suggestion.

Have got to work away for a couple of weeks before Xmas, so have decided to have a three week hiatus, if I don't it's going to be murder to catch up, work has been manic of late, out early, home late 7 days a week, so will try to get the backlog done before Xmas if I can get the time. I really wanted this to be done one a day, but work/family has made it impossible at the moment.


Sorry, for the shit service.

A/C
 

 Family and providing for them via work is much more important than doing this every day!

SlatefordArab wrote:

Rubber Soul is probably my favourite Beatles album - for me it's when they sounded and looked their best.

 
New poster here and loving this thread. I'm only up to page 9 so far and some great stuff already. The trivia is immense, thought I had a pretty good music knowledge but the info is impressive to say the least

DAY 468.
Joy Division................................................Closer   (1980)










I found this album to be quite the enigma, I've listened to it several times over the last couple of weeks and have to admit it has grown on me at an alarming rate, and considering my first impression was it was so-so at best, it really has caught me a bit like a "sleekit kick in the ba's."


Kicking off you've got Curtis's monotone vocals which even die-hard Joy Division fans would not call singing, add in the spasmodic/tourrette drumming and a bass player who thinks he's a lead guitarist, then sprinkle in some of the most personal lyrics that seem to plumbs the depth of human emotion that you'll probably ever hear and you'd imagine it was a formula for disaster, but let me tell you my friends this cocktail works, as I've said many times I know nothing about music so I'm unable to decipher why it works, but fuck me it works like a dream on this album.


The first couple of times I listened to this I tended to be a bit to focused on Curtis, but the more I listened I found that his voice blended  perfectly with the almost upbeat melodies of the rest of the band, and which putting them in singular entities I would never have thought would have worked at all together, normally I would have thought  Curtis's vocals and lyrics would have been accompanied by more of a maudlin backing, so yet again shows you what I ken about music.


My favourite tracks change on a daily basis, but today I don't think you can go far wrong with, the mid section of "Passover," "Colony" and "A Means To An End," but like many albums I've liked before, just drop the needle and I'm sure it wont disappoint,and can I just add I think the musicians in Joy Division are very underrated and the haunting vocals of Ian Curtis are the Ying to their Yang in my humbles.



This album will be going into my collection, and if you've listened to it and are maybe no' to sure, give it another couple of spins, who knows you may be like me and find it hard to shake off.




Bits & Bobs;




Already wrote some stuff about Joy Division in post #1663 (if interested)


Closer

Joy Division (Factory, 1980)Peter Saville:


“This cover for the band’s second album was like a work of antiquity, but inside is a vinyl album, so it’s a postmodern juxtaposition of a contemporary work housed in the antique. At first, I didn’t believe the photo was an actual tomb but it’s really in a cemetery in Genoa. When Tony Wilson (Factory co-founder) told me Ian Curtis had died I said, ‘Tony, we have a tomb on the cover.’ There was great deliberation as to whether to continue with it. But the band, Ian included, had chosen the photograph. We did it in good faith and not in any post-tragedy way”




Atrocity Exhibition.



It’s easy to say, in retrospect, that people should have seen it coming. His marriage was falling apart, his epilesy was worsening, and at their most uplifting, his band’s lyrics set new benchmarks for melodrama, paranoia, and depression. “This is the way, step inside,” intones Curtis at the start of the group’s posthumous sophomore release Closer, an album title whose double meaning imparts almost as much menace as the fact that Curtis already sounds like he’s singing from beyond the grave on the sepulchral lead track Atrocity Exhibition.




Isolation.

A slightly atypical track for Joy Division, though a partial predictor of the band’s New Order future, Isolation is perhaps the closest the band ever got to synth pop, but it would be more accurate to see it as the cousin to the all-electronic compositions of Kraftwerk and Suicide.

 That said, the song structure and delivery is all Joy Division and as such makes the song an intriguing twist on a style and a highlight of the excellent Closer album. Stephen Morris’s drumming comes across as more harshly electronic than ever though Peter Hook’s rolling, stabbing bass is purely him. But it’s Bernard Sumner’s translation of his guitar melody style to a cascading, nervous high synth line that’s the compelling element of the song, balanced against one of Ian Curtis’s finest lyrical and singing efforts, a poetic and slightly abstract portrait of the titular subject.


 His sense of connection and reaching after the impossible gets encapsulated perfectly in the (perhaps in retrospect chilling) line “But if you could just see the beauty, these things I could never describe.” Another sharp touch – the fake ending where the band suddenly cuts out, only for the tape to suddenly, noisily feedback a snippet of the performance as a blunt ending.




Passover.


The dirge Passover implies that the band is every bit aware of its morbid power.

 “Left with a mark on the door” is a reference to the Biblical story of Passover, in which God told the Jews to mark their doors with lamb’s blood, so that he might “pass over” them and spare them from the plague.


And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where ye are; and when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and there shall no plague be upon you to destroy you, when I smite the land of Egypt. (Exodus 12:13)


Six string bass used for the first time by Peter Hook in Passover.




Colony

 By the time their second album, Closer, was released only a few months later, Curtis had taken his own life. The clues were on the record, in Colony’s a cry for help, a hint of anaesthesia/ the sound from broken homes, we used to always meet here.

 Courtney Love has claimed she lost her virginity while it was playing. (of course you did, you old "spunk bucket")




A Means To An End.



Then, after such an auspicious start, Closer really clicks into gear. Means to an End is death disco before the fact, buoyed by a surprisingly rousing (and wordless) chorus.




Heart And Soul.



Heart and Soul is a remarkable collision of atmosphere and minimalism, the stuttering drum beat, synth and Peter Hook’s melodic bass lead linked to one of Curtis' most subdued performances. Heart and soul, he sings, as the stark instruments intertwine and twist together. One will burn.




Twenty Four Hours.



Twenty Four Hours briefly tries to pry free from the album’s looming inevitability before The Eternal and Decades draw the music back down and the listener back in to Curtis' world.




The Eternal



The Eternal is the bleakest thing the band ever recorded.


   "The Eternal’ was about a little mongol kid who grow up near Ian. He could never come out of the house: his whole universe was the the house to the garden wall. Many years later Ian moved back to Macclesfield and by chance he saw this kid: Ian had grown up from five to 22, but the kid looked the same. His universe was still the house and the garden.” – Bernard Sumner

Decades



If Decades comes off a relative respite in comparison, the lyrics quickly quash that idea. We knocked on the doors of Hell’s darker chamber, moans Curtis. Pushed to the limit, we dragged ourselves in.

This piece is in D minor and all the verses just alternate between Dm and C. The chorus instead features an unusual chord progression: Dm C Bm Bb, where the Bm ‘intrudes’ into the general Dm tonality.

 The general meaning of the song seems to be the desperate reaction of ‘young men’ who have started to face the reality of life (Hell’s darkest chambers) and have been shocked by it (open, then shut, then slammed in our face). Now they’re weary inside, their hearts lost forever.


 Alternatively, the song could refer to the use of some drug, which is at first seen as the only solution to one’s life problems but later turns into a Hell, at which point there are no solutions left.


 “The sorrows we suffered and never were freed” echoes Freud’s ideas on repressed memories.


 Ian Curtis and Joy Division stand out. Not least because their music portrayed emotions, sorrows and terrors in a way that most popular music never comes within a country mile of and because Ian Curtis held nothing back in revealing his inner feelings, both live and on record. Indeed, he seemed to be singing directly to the listener in a way that seems too personal for a pop record.


 As Robert Smith of the Cure, himself no stranger to seriously soul-searching habits and music, put it: ‘I remember hearing Closer [Joy Division’s second and final album] for the first time and thinking, “I can’t ever imagine making something as powerful as this. I thought I’d have to kill myself to make a convincing record”.’

 To understand why Joy Division sounded the way they did, it is important to look at the time and context that they grew up and lived in.

 The British Empire and class structures were crumbling and unemployment and inflation were sky-high. Britain was in an economic decline with huge public spending cuts, political polarization, and an infinite number of strikes, not to mention the added danger of IRA bombs and hooligan violence, as England had failed to qualify for two consecutive Football World Cups in the seventies. The optimism of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ was well and truly gone.


 This was especially true for the north of England in general, and Manchester in particular – a city that played an important role in the industrial revolution.


 Joy Division guitarist Bernard Sumner remembers a Manchester of factories where ‘nothing that was pretty, nothing’, and growing up in a place where ‘you didn’t have much chance of progressing in the word, really.’


 You could hear the landscapes and soundscapes of seventies Manchester in Joy Division’s music. Indeed, Joy Division’s first album Unknown Pleasures was ‘the album that most perfectly evoked the spirit of 1979’, according to journalist Mick Middles and, friend of Ian’s, Lindsay Reade who was married to Joy Division’s label Factory Records boss Tony Wilson at the time.


 ‘Joy Division sounded like Manchester: cold, sparse and at times, bleak’, as Bernard Sumner said in his autobiography. ‘They sounded like the place they came from, without a doubt’, as a fellow Mancunian, former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, put it.

 But for Joy Division’s lead singer, there were also interior landscapes to contend with. Ian Curtis might have been bipolar. He certainly had a split personality and was affected by severe mood-swings, and when he sang ‘feel it closing in, day in, day out’ on Digital and ‘a dual of personalities, that stretch all true realities’ on Dead Souls it rang true.

 In fact, there seemed to be several Ian Curtis’s:

 The husband and father who took pride in helping disabled people at the employment exchange in Macclesfield, where he worked as an Assistant Disablement Resettlement Officer.



 The lad who partook in all manner of laddish pranks with band and friends, such as fighting, drinking, ‘chasing groupies and pissing in ashtrays and looking at turds in toilets’, as Joy Division bassist Peter Hook remembers.



 The aesthete who had an obsession with death and rock and film stars who had died young. Who read about human suffering in Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Hesse and Ballard, read to his wife Debbie about how ‘there is no mystery so great as misery’ from Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, and talked about poetry and literature with his girlfriend Annik, who he met after a concert in August 1979.


 According to Peter Hook, ‘there were just too many Ian’s to cope with. The perfect friend or partner for Ian would have combined all those things, but if that person exists they were nowhere near our social scene, so he had to be a chameleon … Thinking about it, I bet even Ian didn’t know who the “real” Ian was.’


 A lot of the myth and mystique surrounding Joy Division in general, and Ian Curtis in particular, tends to portray a rather more one-dimensional sense of torment and gloom.


 Perhaps because the band did few interviews, because the cover-art contains little information about the band, or because the pictures and footage that were published and released of them were almost exclusively black-and-white. Including the otherwise excellent film Control, based on Ian’s wife Debbie Curtis’s book, Touching from a distance.


 According to Joy Division’s main photographer, Kevin Cummins, Ian was fun to be with, ‘but has this image of a depressed reclusive gloomy romantic hero because I only released photographs of Ian looking depressed.’


 This is echoed by Ian’s mother, who has emphasized that her son’s life wasn’t tragic and by Peter Hook, who describer Ian as a people pleaser and ‘one of the lads, as far as we were concerned.’



 But however much Ian kept a straight face and could be fun to be with, in retrospect there were many signs that he was not well. He had already tried to commit suicide once. His epilepsy, which he had been diagnosed with in December 1978, was getting worse as fits were becoming stronger and more frequent, both on-stage and off. And the medicine he had to take for the fits had lots of unpleasant side effects.


 Ian’s lyrics had always portrayed images of human cruelty and coldness, pressure, crises, failure and the loss of control. But they were becoming increasingly depressing as his marriage and health deteriorated and he felt the pressure of bearing his soul as a lead-singer of an increasingly popular band.


 He was singing lines such as ‘Existence, well what does it matter[/url]’, ‘[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHfBhuEPf1g]It’s creeping up slowly, that last fatal hour[/url]’, ‘[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfgDnBdvmAk]I’ve lost the will to want more[/url]’, ‘[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_NggH3O90o]Watching the reel as it comes to a close[/url]’, ‘[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnM9X0IgUmg]Look beyond the day at hand, there’s nothing there at all[/url]’, and ‘[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyEO9Yi3ChI]Hangman looks round as he waits, cord stretches tight then it breaks[/url]’, the latter from what was probably the last song the band ever wrote, [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyEO9Yi3ChI]‘In a Lonely Place’.



 Mancunian journalist Paul Morley, who has written extensively on Joy Division, even describes Joy Division’s final album Closer as ‘a series of blatant suicide notes to a number of people in Ian’s immediate vicinity.’


 But did Curtis wish to die a romantic death, along the lines of one of his favorite artists David Bowie’s Rock 'n' Roll Suicide? Was it the medication that made him end his own life, as his wife and several friends believed? Or was it all the soul searching, the illness, and having to make a life-choice between his wife and girlfriend?


 Curtis himself perhaps alluded to one reason when he told Radio Blackburn in 1980 that ‘basically, we want to play and enjoy what we like playing. I think that when we stop doing that, I think, well, that will be time to pack it in. That will be the end.’


 According to his wife, he had only intended to make one album and one single and was unhappy with the music business and the pressure of being in Joy Division. As Curtis wrote in a letter to girlfriend Annik, ‘Joy Division in itself is such a great responsibility not only for my own health and peace of mind but the fact that on me rests the future of others and more beside. Indeed the strain had become too much.’




Whatever the reason, Ian Curtis hanged himself in the early hours of 18 May 1980, only 23 years of age, after having received divorce papers from his wife the previous day. It was the day that Joy Division was to embark on their first tour of America.


 Ian had been drinking coffee and spirits. Iggy Pop’s album The Idiot was on the record player, where he would have heard the song "Tiny Girls" that starts with the line ‘well the day begins, you don't want to live, cause you can't believe in the one you're with.’ And he had seen Werner Herzog’s films Stroszek the previous night, which is about a musician who moves to America, is betrayed by his girlfriend, and ends up killing himself.


 He had left a note on the mantelpiece for his wife that everyone believed was a suicide note. According to neighbour Kevin Wood, it turned out to be a letter to Debbie, saying that when he got back from America he wanted to get back with her and be part of a normal family again.


 Everyone seemed to have a different explanation of what had happened and why. Peter Hook said Ian had seemed happy to be going to America. Ian’s friend and colleague Genesis P-Orridge, on the other hand insisted that ‘he had said that he would rather die than go on that tour.’


 According to Ian’s sister Carole, one of the reasons for this was that her brother could ‘mask his emotions. He never let you know what was really going on. He wouldn’t want to upset you … [But] in my mind I never thought he’d see it past 30 to be honest.’


 Joy Division ended up selling hundreds of thousands of records without advertising, pluggers or marketing budgets, due to the freedom given by their anarchic and idealistic (some would say flippant and financially unsound) record company, Factory Records. Indeed, both the band’s albums received 10 out of 10 reviews from the NME when they were released and Closer reaching number 6 in the UK albums charts.


 At the same time the members of the band held down day jobs for several years while playing gigs, and during the recording of Closer, after they had quit their jobs, they were living on 50 pounds (USD$67) per week. They never made much money from the band while Ian Curtis was alive.


 According to in-house-designer, Peter Saville, who designed Joy Division’s covers and material, ‘Ian’s story is one of the last true stories in pop … in a business-dominated pop culture.’


 John Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten had started it all when Curtis, Hook and Sumner had seen the Sex Pistols at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1977 and decided to form a band. He believes young musicians today ‘have no bollocks. No guts. They’re all young and fed up with their lives. But they don’t sing about it. They don’t do anything to change it.’


 Unlike Joy Division, who obviously ‘meant it’ to a degree that they ended up influencing everyone from George Michael to The Cure and Interpol, as well as forming the basis for another popular and influential independent British band New Order.


 ‘The sound of Joy Division is omnipresent,’ as influential British music magazine the New Musical Express wrote a few years back.

 Dead heroes do not age, do not fade away, do not make bad albums in later years. They allow us to project our fears, hopes and dreams onto them like a musical version of Dorian Gray and let them stare into the abyss for us and describe what they see.

 Ian Curtis once said that ‘you either stay outside the system or go in totally, and try and change it.’ Let it be part of his legacy that he tried and had to give up in the end.


 But as he wrote in a note found by his wife, ‘reality is only a term, based on values and well-worn principles, whereas the dream goes on forever.’






RIP     Ian Curtis.



   














 

shedboy wrote:

what a wonderful review - welcome back.  Bizarrelly I was listening to Closer today in the house.  I love it and have it on vinyl in the loft somewhere.

Thanks shedboy, gonna try and catch up a bit more the day.

You might want to be careful about mentioning vinyl in your loft as Pat mentions his sometimes,

Next thing you know, it will be "has anyone ever seen Pat and shedboy in the same room at the same time?"