Memories of Killing Joke (1984 - 1987)

Killing Joke in their mid-80s splendour

(L-R: Geordie Walker / Paul Raven / Jaz Coleman / Paul Ferguson) 

 

A correspondent writes: 

I got the impression from a recent post [1] that you were something of a Killing Joke fan back in the mid-1980s and I was hoping you might expand on this - did you, for example, ever see them live in this period, when, in my view, they were at their very best? 

 

Well, as a matter of fact, I did see them live on at least three occasions; as attested to by the following entries in the Von Hell Diaries (1980-89) ...

   

 

Sunday 1 Jan 1984

Hammersmith Palais: felt a bit like a hippie event with people sitting on the floor. Having said that, there were some fantastic looking individuals amongst the assembled freaks and morons. The support band were the March Violets: who were shit. An inferior Sisters of Mercy (who are also shit, by the way). Is there something in the water in Leeds?

      There was also a young male stripper prior to Killing Joke making their entrance on to the stage. All the punks began to pogo as if on cue (to the latter, not the former). To be honest, the set got a bit dull half-way through; I suspect that all gigs are at their best in the first ten minutes with the initial release of energy. 

      Mostly, the group played old songs and I was a bit miffed that they didn't play any of my favourite tracks from Fire Dances (although they did do a rousing version of 'The Gathering' as an encore). Jaz Coleman [2] is a captivating performer. The rest of the band are essentially just solid musicians (albeit ones who look the part and know how to create a magnificent noise). 

 

 

Sunday 3 February 1985

 

Off with Andy [3] to see Killing Joke at the Hammersmith Palais once again ...

      Lots of punks out and about on the streets of West London - and lots of police to keep 'em in line. Felt like a mug having to queue up for tickets. Met Kirk [4] inside as arranged, though he fucked off to watch the show from the balcony with some video director friend of his. A couple of support bands: Heist and Pale Fountains; neither of whom were much cop. Killing Joke came on to all the usual fanfare - and Gary Glitter's 'Leader of the Gang'. 

      The set was made up of tracks from the new album - Night Time - and the first two albums (nothing from Revelations or Fire Dances). Became separated from Andy and made my way to the front. Got so hot that I seriously thought I was going to spontaneously combust (though probably sweating too much for that). Brilliant night: almost tempted to describe it as a (neo-pagan) religious experience - song, dance, and Dionysian frenzy. Even Andy enjoyed it (I think).   

 

 

Sunday 28 September 1986

 

Back to the Hammersmith Palais for what seems to be becoming an annual event in the company of Killing Joke. Not a bad show, but nowhere near as good as last year. It also felt like a much shorter set; one which opened with 'Twilight of the Mortal' and closed with 'Wardance'.  

      Most - if not all - of the songs were from the first, fifth and (yet to be released) sixth album. The new tracks sounded great - and Jazz looked amusingly grotesque as he blew kisses to his brothers and sisters - but the performance never really took off. And so, I went home feeling a little disappointed.      

 

 

Finally, it might also interest my correspondent (and other readers) to know that I once met Jaz Coleman, at Abbey Road Studios:

 

 

Friday 7 August 1987

 

Lee Ellen [5] rang this morning: she said if I got over to Virgin by 1 o'clock, then she'd take me with her to the studio where Killing Joke were recording and introduce me to Jaz Coleman (having reassured him that I wasn't some lunatic fan). 

      Jaz was much smaller in person than expected and had strangely feminine hands, with long, slim fingers. He also dressed in a disconcertingly conventional manner. Geordie, the good-looking guitarist, was there, but the rest of the band, apparently, had been fired.

      Jaz played tapes of the new material (just the music - no vocals); sounded good (quasi-symphonic). He said the new album would be called Outside the Gate - which is a great title [6] - and that it would bring the Killing Joke project to perfection. After completing it, he planned to emigrate to New Zealand. 

      Mr. Coleman also took great pride in showing me parts of a book he'd been working on for eight years and we talked, very briefly, about D. H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (which he liked) and Yeats's Vision (which he didn't like). 

      Before leaving, Jaz expressed his desire to converse at greater length one day and I very much look forward to that (should such a day ever in fact arrive) [7].   

 

Notes

 

[1] I'm guessing the post referred to was 'Musical Memories' (30 Aug 2023): click here - although I do mention Jaz Coleman and Killing Joke in several other posts on Torpedo the Ark. 

 

[2] Jaz Coleman; lead singer with post-punk British band Killing Joke.

 

[3] Andy Greenfield; friend and, at this time, a Ph.D student at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington.

 

[4] Kirk Field; friend and, at this time, lead singer and lyricist with the band Delicious Poison. 

 

[5] Lee Ellen Newman; friend and, at this time, Deputy Head of Press at Virgin.  

 

[6] In fact, I thought this was such a great title that I later borrowed it for my Ph.D - although the phrase outside the gate can be found in Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence, and is also often used in occult circles.

 

[7] It hasn't so far. 

 

 

Although there were bootleg audio recordings made of all three gigs discussed above and these are now available on YouTube, they are of such poor quality that they don't give a fair representation of just how good a live band Killing Joke were (and to diehard fans still are). Readers are therefore invited to click here to watch a performance recorded live in Munich, at the Alalabamahalle, on 25 March 1985, for broadcast on German TV.     

 

In Times of Sorrow and Fear is When Poets Appear

Ireland's greatest living poet 

and America's greatest ever Speaker

 

I. 

 

Irish poetry has a long and illustrious history. 

 

Whether written in Gaelic, in English, or formed within the complex interplay of these two languages and traditions, no one can deny that the bards of Ireland - both in their medieval and modern incarnations - have produced a body of work that is uniquely rich and worthy of admiration.   

 

Arguably, however, Irish poetry this week scaled new heights and we can now add the name of Bono to a roll call of honour that includes Swift, Wilde, Yeats, and Heaney ...

 

 

II. 

 

I know that his St. Patrick's Day poem for Ukraine has been much mocked and dubbed by some as the worst poem ever written - I even saw it described, shamefully, as a war crime in its own right, inflicting unnecessary suffering upon those who have had the misfortune to hear it. 

 

I find that shocking and I simply don't understand all the personal abuse and ridicule aimed at mega-rich rock superstar Bono, who is attempting to bring a message of peace and love to the world. But, as Taylor Swift once famously said, the haters gonna hate (hate, hate, hate, hate, hate) and it's up to the rest of us to rise above their animosity and shake off all negative vibes.

 

Bono's poem is a profoundly beautiful verse and I will be forever grateful to the first female Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, for sharing it - in her own inimitable manner - during the annual Friends of Ireland Luncheon, held at the White House earlier this week: click here. 

 

I didn't think I'd ever read lines more moving than those written by William McGonagall, recounting the terrible events of December 28th, 1879 (i.e., the Tay Bridge disaster in Dundee). But Bono has surpassed even this glorious verse with lines like these:

 

They struggle for us to be free 

From the psycho in our human family 

Ireland's sorrow and pain 

Is now the Ukraine 

And Saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy.

 

Brilliant. 

 

Now send on the Riverdancers ...

 

 

 

On Magical Names and the Nietzsche-Crowley Connection (A Post for Halloween)

Aleister Crowley aka Frater Perdurabo 

aka the Great Beast 666 

 

 

The practice of adopting a magical name or motto by a newly initiated member of an occult order - including members of the Golden Dawn, probably the best-known of all secret societies - has an amusing quaintness to it. 

 

The names, usually in Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, are intended to express the neophyte's highest ideal towards which they aspire, or perhaps contain some esoteric allusion. Fellow members address them by their new identity so as to create a special bond and to help foster the feeling that they were leaving their old selves behind - even if those old selves were highly accomplished and respected in the everyday world. 

 

W. B. Yeats, for example, one of the foremost figures of twentieth-century poetry and a pillar of the Irish literary establishment, was still obliged to take on a new name when he joined the Golden Dawn by which he would be known; he initially chose the classical adage Festina Lente, though later changed his motto to Demon est Deus inversus. 

 

As for the Hermetic Order's most notorious member, Aleister Crowley - the wickedest man in the world and much despised by Yeats and other members of the Golden Dawn for his libertine lifestyle - he took the name Perdurabo when initiated by MacGregor ('S Rioghail Mo Dhream) Mathers, in November 1898. 

 

It's an interesting choice: and one wonders if Crowley was at all influenced by his reading of Nietzsche, for whom the idea of endurance was central to his Dionysian philosophy: 

 

"To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities - I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not - that one endures." [1]

 

We know that Crowley thought highly of Nietzsche, describing him as a Gnostic Saint, a prophet of the Aeon of Horus, and an avatar of Thoth, the god of wisdom. Crowley even wrote a short essay on Nietzsche (c. 1914-15), in which he attempted to vindicate the latter's work. 

 

So it's possible that Crowley was influenced by Zarathustra's incitement to become hard and learn how to endure like the diamond. I like to think so, at any rate ...

 

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann, (Vintage Books, 1968), section 910, p. 481. 

 

It should be noted, of course, that this fragment by Nietzsche was published after Crowley joined the Golden Dawn; the first English translation of Der Will zur Macht came out in 1910 as part of the Oscar Levy edition. It's probably impossible to know for sure what books Crowley read by Nietzsche - and if he read them in the original German - but it's likely he was familiar with The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Anti-Christ. Readers who are interested in knowing more about the Nietzsche-Crowley (or, if you prefer, Crowley-Nietzsche) connection should visit the Thelemic Union website: click here. 

 

This post is for Christina.  

 

 

Baby/Doll (With Reference to the Work of W. B. Yeats)

 

Admit it, we're so much nicer than 

   the real thing mewling and puking ...

If I were asked by some kind of investigative committee into poetic activity: Are you now or have you ever been a reader of W. B. Yeats? I would have to answer no. 

However, in the interests of full disclosure, I would also have to admit that I did once (unsuccessfully) attempt to read his esoteric study A Vision (1925) and that I am of course familiar with three of his most famous verses: 'The Second Coming' (1920), 'Leda and the Swan' (1924), and 'Sailing to Byzantium' (1928).

But I'm certainly not a Yeats scholar of any kind, nor even a fan of his writing; it's too traditional, too nostalgic, too mystical and too Romantic - in short, too Irish - for my tastes. When I don't find it boring in its lyricism, I find it politically pernicious in it's völkisch nationalism and myth-making.

Having said that, there is at least one other poem by Yeats that fascinates and horrifies in equal measure ...

'The Dolls' (1916) tells the tale of a doll-maker and his wife who has recently given birth following an unplanned pregnancy, for which she is shamefully apologetic in the face of hostility to the newborn child from her husband's handcrafted creations, one of whom "Looks at the cradle and bawls: / 'That is an insult to us.'"

But it is the oldest of all the dolls who kicks up the biggest fuss and screams with indignant rage: 

"'Although
There's not a man can report 
Evil of this place,
The man and woman bring
Hither to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.'" 

This is obviously upsetting to the couple, as one might imagine; and upsetting also to readers of the verse. Creepy, malevolent dolls are bad enough - but creepy, malevolent dolls that bad-mouth innocent living babies, are even worse. WTF is Yeats playing at here?

Well, let me reiterate: I'm no Yeats scholar - but I know a woman who is ...

According to Dr Maria Thanassa, here, as elsewhere in his verse, Yeats is affirming the superiority of art over nature and the fact that he subscribes to a material form of aesthetic idealism in which artificial objects, such as handcrafted dolls, are infinitely preferable in their porcelain perfection to biological entities, such as babies, who cry, vomit, and defecate all day long without restraint and are subject to disease, cot death, and all the other forms of sordid stupidity and defect that characterise mortal existence.      

For the doll-maker, his beautiful figures are the result of hard-work and exquisite design; the child, on the other hand, is the unfortunate consequence of a quick fuck and carelessness on the part of the woman. It takes talent, discipline and dedication to be an artist, whilst anyone can be a human breeder. Thus we should value things born of the mind over things born of the body.

Obviously, in as much as this analysis of Yeats's thinking is correct, I find it problematic to say the least - even as someone fascinated by objects and sympathetic to agalmatophilia, pygmalionism, and all forms of doll fetish.

Were I the doll maker's wife, I'd get my child and get out of there ...     

See: W. B. Yeats, 'The Dolls', in Responsibilities and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1916). Click here to read online at allpoetry.com 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for her kind assistance with this post.

Sailing to Byzantium (Notes on Yeats and the Singularity)

William Butler Yeats by Tricia Danby

deviantart.com

Written in 1926, when Yeats was 61 and starting to feel his age, the poem 'Sailing to Byzantium' was published two years later in a collection entitled The Tower (1928).

Composed of four stanzas, each arranged into eight ten-syllable lines with a traditional rhyming scheme (a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c) of Italian origin much favoured by poets who go in for a mock-heroic effect - not that Yeats didn't take himself and his work very seriously indeed - it describes the metaphorical journey of a man musing on his own mortality and attempting to imagine a vision of eternal life that might provide him with posthumous hope.     

In other words, given the problem of a heart sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal, Yeats looks to art for a solution, speculating that he might be able to escape his paltry body and transfer his soul into some non-natural form - such as that of a mechanical golden bird, that sits in a fake golden tree and sings about the mysteries of time.

This quest for immortality is, for Yeats, at the heart of all spiritual yearning; a yearning that becomes increasingly acute - and increasingly desperate - with age.

What's interesting - to me at least - is not that Yeats openly expresses his contempt for imperfect nature, which, in his mind, is full of ugliness and prone to decay; for that's common among idealists who despise the softness and (sinfulness) of the flesh. It's the fact, rather, that he's equally explicit in his positing of the artificial object as superior to the natural entity in every sense, including, the aesthetico-spiritual.

Ultimately, his is a material idealism of things, including golden birds, not an immaterial idealism of disembodied minds. And his dream is of being gathered into the artifice - not the reality or truth - of eternity. Once his soul has been released from nature, he wants it to be reincarnated in a man-made object.

I thought of Yeats whilst reading an interview with Ray Kurzweil, the American author, computer whizz, and Google's director of engineering. Kurzweil is a public advocate of artificial intelligence and transhumanism who eagerly awaits the singularity - i.e., the moment when mankind fuses with its own technology, finally securing immortality and a new Byzantium; albeit a scientific utopia wherein the knowledge drive is triumphant, rather than poetic fancy.     

If Yeats fantasized about becoming a toy bird, Kurzweil hopes to have his consciousness downloaded onto his laptop and eventually transferred back to his cryogenically preserved and technologically enhanced body, which will be all ready and waiting in its vat of liquid nitrogen at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona.

Both of the visions described here are anathema to me; not only as a Lawrentian, but also as a Wildean. For like the latter, I too hope that if I am to be reincarnated one day it will be as a flower - no soul but perfectly beautiful.

And for that to happen, I need to be buried in the dark soil and allowed to decompose; returned to nature, not released from it; returned to death, which, as Nietzsche says, is a return to the actual, not projected into some virtual future founded upon techno-idealism and dreams of becoming-machine. 


See: W. B. Yeats, 'Sailing to Byzantium', in The Collected Poems, ed. Richard J. Finneran, (Scribner, revised paperback edition, 1996). Click here to read on the Poetry Foundation website.

The Second Coming (Notes on the European Migrant Crisis)

Those politicians and commentators who insist that the European migrant crisis is a moral dilemma are naively mistaken, for there really is no right or wrong solution to this influx of people. And this is precisely why it's known philosophically as a wicked problem. That is to say, a problem which seems obvious to everyone, but for which there is no definitive formulation or answer.

A crisis such as the one unfolding in Europe today, involving millions of people, is, by its very nature, a fast-moving, wild and unpredictable situation, with numerous causes and constantly shifting parameters, thus making it resistant to resolution - no matter how hard Angela Merkel stamps her foot and demands that more must be done by her European partners to tackle the problem and share the burden.

Those who ask themselves when will it all end have also failed to grasp the true nature of what's happening; it won't end - wicked events have no internal stopping mechanism. Likewise, it's a laughable fantasy to believe there's a historical reset button. The fact is, Europe has irrevocably been changed this summer (demographically, socially, and culturally).       

It is - to use another technical term - a real mess. All problems interact with one another in an endless cycle and no one knows what's going on, or what's going to happen next. Those who are supposed to be in charge appear clueless and incapable of acting; or, if they do act, they invariably make things worse. 

And so it seems that Yeats was right and his poetic prophecy is finally coming true:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world ... 

The best lack all conviction, while the worst 

Are full of passionate intensity.

Notes: 

Those interested in reading in full Yeats's magnificent verse, 'The Second Coming' (1920), should click here. 

Those interested in knowing more about wicked problems are advised to read Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, 'Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning', in Developments in Design Methodology, ed. N. Cross, (J. Wiley and Sons, 1984), pp. 135-44. 

This post is dedicated to Dr Maria Thanassa; my favourite Yeats scholar.