Jaz Coleman
Manchester Stoller Hall
March 20 2024
As the great 2015 book itself claimed, Grief is A Thing With Feathers. Killing Joke totem Jaz Coleman deals with the loss of Geordie and the impending apocalypse in a mesmerising and challenging in conversation with Napalm Death’s Shane Embury.
As life teaches you, chaos always catches up with the best plans. Killing Joke soundtracked this for decades, making them one of the key bands from the post-punk meltdown.
Jaz Coleman had booked out this spoken word tour last year to talk about his future vision and the making of the band’s music, and then a couple of months before it started, fellow Killing Joke member, sonic architect and partner in crime Geordie died.
The shock reverberations are still there to see.
Ostensibly tonight’s talk was going to be a run through of the Jaz world view and a talk about the creation of Killing Joke’s albums and it ended up with the night going in many directions that were a tightrope walk.
There has been much talk of Geordie’s own vision of Killing Joke just before he died and no-one will ever know what he meant and whether we should even know about this kind of internal stuff. The band were always volatile – how could they not be – the initial line up must have been the four most different people ever coalesced into one unit. United by an esoteric vision and a creative crossover, they created a fifth entity – the band itself – out of the four constituent parts.
Jaz talks of this and also fondly of the late Raven, whose bass playing and charisma made him the only person who could have penetrated that initial unit and staked his own space in the story.
Hopefully, the remaining members can find a resolution between them. In chaotic and dangerous times, unity is a luxury, and any differences have to be cast aside for a common cause. Not that anyone is calling for them to carry on musically – the remaining members are all talented enough to exist outside the whole but curating the vision of an important cultural behemoth belongs to all of them.
Killing Joke were a unique band journeying deep into the heart of the art of darkness. They were also one of those bands where each constituent part created a unique whole. Their mesmerising music was full of a dark energy, but you could also dance to it – especially on those early releases. They somehow took these dark visions into the top twenty and had an influential global impact. Covered in face paint with laser beam eyes, Jaz was the shamanic frontman. His very presence seemed to encapsulate the band’s dramatic theatricality and dark high decibel grooves. He talks of this and the band’s intense idiosyncratic journey including the famous levitation at the 1982 gig in Reading, recording in the pyramids in Egypt and the trip to Iceland that initially ended the first lineup.
It’s quite a trip in every sense of the word.
It’s been a tough few months for the singer – the loss of his compadre Geordie and of his own mother’s dementia and end-of-life ritual, and his own near-death experience after getting seriously ill in Mexico a couple of years ago has, of course, impacted on him, and you can sense a vulnerability in his armour. The whole of what was Killing Joke are naturally rattled as well and dealing with the grief has not been easy and created some tricky situations that bounce across the internet.
It’s a tense backdrop, and Jaz explains he’s trying to be honest with what he feels as he sits on the stage with the slides projected behind him. It’s strange to see him sat in a chair and hear his quietly spoken voice, but his message is no less bleak or compelling.
In some ways, the quieter version of Jaz is more unsettling.
The erudite and deeply intelligent singer is very well-read in dusty tomes on the occult, politics, future visions and deep literature.
He knows his stuff.
Sat there in his black cape, he’s like an apocalyptic academic as he intones a vision of the future that is dark but with a light at the end of the tunnel.
Yes, there is an incoming apocalypse, and yes, mankind is deeply stupid and has let the bastards get away with it. The corporations are wrecking the planet and destroying everything in their pursuit of pure greed and using technology, AI and transhumanism and banking to control the masses and create a new underclass.
That much makes sense.
He sees an incoming nuclear war, and yet there is an aftermath where mankind finds a space back in nature again – part of the entwining Mother Earth instead of arrogantly hovering above it. Whether you agree with everything he says or not hardly matters – it’s all provocative and well informed and keeps you mentally alert. It’s challenging and inspiring and from the heart and mind.
He talks of the Rosicrucian – the movement professing esoteric and occult wisdom with emphasis on mysticism and spiritual enlightenment that was formed in the 18th century. He then references Crowley, nature and the mystical side before coming back to secretive cabals and rampant capitalism mixed with media control and deliberate wars that could go nuclear at any moment.
It’s are all in the mix.
Jaz has talked and sung of this stuff for years and now it feels even more imperative. Sometimes it feels like he’s signing off to retreat to his New Zealand nuclear war hideaway but in these end of times, we need his confrontation and ideas more than ever, whether in spoken word, writing, his classical music adventures or even in some form of future rock music…
We have a small favour to ask. Subscribe to Louder Than War and help keep the flame of independent music burning. Click the button below to see the extras you get!
