6 posts tagged “killing joke”
Instead of more long-lost but now-found music, I'm going to follow up the past two posts of pretend Killing Joke with some real Killing Joke. After the gothic beauty and mainstream appeal of 1985's Night Time, Killing Joke went into decline. But in 1990 they came back with a vengeance with Extremities, Dirt, and Various Repressed Emotions, adding Martyn Atkins--the industrial drummer--to the line-up. My first knowledge of the new album was seeing the video for "Money Is Not Our God" at the old 9:30 Club, and it just seethed with energy. Jaz Coleman's snarl at the beginning is practically blood-curdling; try not to notice how much he looks like Eugene Levy:
"Success defined by acquisition STINKS!"
Yesterday I wrote about my continuing search for music by 1919; today I found it! The Killing Joke followers' 1983 mini-LP Machine (which I used to own, but sold on ebay in the 90s) was just posted last week on the Sickness Abounds blog, or as blogger Metalminx writes it, ╬ §ĬÇҜИ ΛБΘЏИЧ ╬. 1919 were known to Killing Joke; Metalminx writes:
KJ and 1919 played quite a few gigs together, so one can only speculate. 1919 also played supporting Danse Society and Playdead, while Southern Death Cult and New Model Army supported 1919. It was just a big happy family.
I've been meaning to post some Danse Society and Play Dead here for some time, but I like both bands' catalogs so much I haven't been able to narrow my selection down to even five tracks, let alone one or two. So in the meantime, here's 1919's "Slave"--
Coming up: more long-lost treasures!
One of the great lost records of my 80s music experience is an album by the Headhunters. It was one of those records that we had at the campus radio station, and I played several cuts from it, but I never found a copy for myself. I have a 12" single by them, "Wipe Out the Funk," but not the album. It was a hard album to search for, too, because any search for Headhunters is flooded with Herbie Hancock results (either the album of that name, or records by the band from that album, who recorded sans Herbie as Headhunters). To compound the problem, I didn't remember the title of the album I wanted. But continued Googling paid off last month: there it was (entitled Industrial Warfare, released in 1983) in an archived entry on one of my favorite sharity blogs, Phoenix Hairpins. So now I have a virtual copy, and it's so great to hear it again. The Headhunters were clearly influenced by Killing Joke, and they even do them one better on a couple of tracks, such as the album opener, "Bright and Bloody"--
The Headhunters only released one LP and three singles, which Phoenix Hairpins has collected here. My search for another Killing Joke-inspired band from the 80s, 1919, continues. Killing Joke are, amazingly, still active, though their last album was kind of a mess. With all the 80s revival bands imitating Gang of Four, The Cure, Duran Duran, and Joy Division, surely the field is ripe for a Killing Joke pretender or three. I'm waiting...
Picking up where I left off yesterday: "Colours" was actually the second single credited to Brilliant, the first was "That's What Good Friends Are For..." on Limelight Music in 1982. After "Colours" came a couple of anthology placements: "Coming Up for the Downstroke" on the high-profile Batcave goth club compilation, Young Limbs and Numb Hymns, and "Screaming Like An Angel" on The Whip, a soundtrack for a movie (imaginary, I believe) based on Lautréamont's Songs of Maldoror and featuring all the usual goth-rock suspects. Then Brilliant was signed to Food Records, releasing some more singles and another compilation track, "Subtle Manoevres" [sic] for the Imminent One sampler LP:
I think that came out in SUMMER NINETEEN EIGHTY-FIVE, if memory serves. I loved this song, especially all the percussive slap bass, the catchy melody, and those bells and blocks popping into the mix. Now it's almost painful to listen to that rudimentary drum beat, but I didn't know any better back then. Things were looking up for Brilliant, but then it all went wrong. WEA had taken over distribution for Food, and Brilliant got a major contract (courtesy of A&R man Bill Drummond) and a huge recording budget, so they... brought in dance-pop schlockmeisters Stock Aitken Waterman to produce! WTF??? At this point Brilliant was the trio of Youth, Jimi Cauty, and June Montana, perhaps trying to capitalize on the Colour Box group format. So what did SAW do to their sound? Check out the "after" version of "Subtle Manoevres," now called "I'll Be Your Lover," from the first and only Brilliant LP, Kiss the Lips of Life:
That was supposed to be better?! They gutted it! And got paid a lot of money for it, too! Needless to say, the album flopped. Drummond himself said, "We spent £300 000 on making an album that was useless. Useless artistically, useless... commercially." But it turned out not to be so useless to him personally; after Brilliant disbanded, Drummond and Cauty got together as the Justified Ancients of Muu Muu, a.k.a. the JAMMS, a.k.a. the Timelords, finally settling in as The KLF. They made some wildly popular records, made a ton of money, and then burned it all. Jimmy Cauty now makes pop-art postage stamps that sell for ridiculous sums. Youth became a top producer himself and occasionally rejoins Killing Joke. June Montana had a brief solo career and then dropped off the face of the earth. Oh, what might have been.
(Then there was the ordeal I had to go through to even get a copy of the album. I was the assistant manager of the Record World at the Georgetown Park mall in Washington in the fall of 1986, when Lips was released in the U.S. on Atlantic. I wanted to get it ASAP, and the fastest way to do that was to order three copies from the warehouse: bulk orders (3 or more) got phoned in on Monday for delivery on Thursday. Anything else was ordered on a paper form via overnight mail and delivered on Thursday of the following week. But oh, at headquarters they just couldn't believe someone ordered Brilliant in bulk, so they called the district supervisor, who called the store manager, wanting to know why the hell we did that. Well, I knew I was going to buy one copy, then it would take nearly two weeks to get another one in, and surely there might be at least one other person who wanted it? (There wasn't, but that's not my point.) They punished me for this transgression by sending us zero copies, and I had to buy it from a different store. That's right, they would rather have me spending the money they paid me at other stores instead of pouring it back into the company. Which is long gone, by the way.)
At the forefront of the 80s gothic funk bands was Brilliant, the band formed by bassist Youth (Martin Glover) after leaving Killing Joke in 1982. (And they weren't the only one, I can think of about two more.) If Wikipedia is to be believed, the band lineup on the 1983 "Colours" 12" is Youth and Guy Pratt on bass, Marcus Myers on lead vocal and guitar, and Andy Anderson and Peter Ogi on drums; no word on who played the keyboards (probably Youth) or who supplied the sexy moans and groans (probably not Youth).
The sleeve design is by Mark Manning, who would later team up with Jimmy Cauty (of the final incarnation of Brilliant) , adopt the nom de musique Zodiac Mindwarp and spearhead the "grebo" fad. (The art itself is not by Manning, but Gustave Doré.) Brilliant became a Uriah Heep-like revolving door for musicians, which didn't stop them from putting out a string of great singles. When their album deal was announced I was overjoyed, because that meant I'd be getting a whole bunch of new Brilliant songs all at once. What a disaster that turned out to be. I can demonstrate exactly what went wrong, but later; right now I'm grooving on what went right.
Bassist Paul Raven died of a heart attack on October 20, way too young (age 46). I remember him best for the throbbing basslines that were the glue of Killing Joke's sound during the mid-to-late 80s, their most successful period commercialwise (as Philip K. Dick would say). Thirteenth Planet records has put up a tribute page. As my own tribute, here are videos of Killing Joke's two biggest Raven-era hits, where you can catch a few glimpses of him at work:
Dave Grohl sat in on drums on Killing Joke's self-titled 2003 album, so that particular hatchet seems to be buried. Paul Raven was back in the fold for that album, too. Finally, how about that Geordie (the guitarist)? Is he the most dapper man in rock or what?
