Who said revolution was passé? “I was talking to a friend of mine from Dublin about Newgrange earlier today,” announces Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, “and we were discussing the beauty of the place, how watching the light fall a certain way on the rock causes you to re-evaluate your approach to cultural absolutes. Someday, we’ll all progress to a higher form of spiritual enlightenment, and all the bullshit will be forgotten; university top-up fees, Michael Portillo, your Greco-Roman thought processes.”
Just read that last part again. Whatever about over-throwing the state in a blaze of insurrectionary glory, you surely cannot get much more radical than dismissing the intellectual orthodoxies which underpin Western civilisation.
But then, Killing Joke always stuck firmly to a resolutely contrary stance. This was a band that came of age during the Thatcherite eighties, an incendiary blast of apocalyptic discontent from the margins of society.
If rampant capitalism was the prevailing yin throughout the decade taste forgot, then Killing Joke and their like minded band of renegade agitators (bands spawned either directly or indirectly from the Joke ovum would include Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana), were the yang in perpetual conflict with the status quo.
And boy, do they still sound pissed off in 2003. Though Coleman’s foreboding crypt-keeper stage persona (constituent parts; goth make-up, ripped, occultist-u-like black poncho, much Old Testament finger wagging and spooked staring at the audience) is somewhat offset by his amiable between-song banter, the group more than make up for it with a relentless storm of industrial white-noise.
Whilst leaning heavily on the their dependably excellent, eponymously-titled umpteenth album from earlier this year (which featured the ubiquitous Dave Grohl on drums), when the group mine their back catalogue for an old gem (as on the proto-Rapture punk-funk of ‘Change’ and the ‘Come As You Are’-inspiring ‘Eighties’) they demonstrate just what an influence they’ve had on the present generation of rock whippersnappers.
And if, by the end, our eardrums are begging for relief from the unrelenting sonic blitzkrieg, the band might be reasonably entitled to ask - in Aidan Walsh’s inimitable phraseology - “What the hell do you want - jam on it?”