"Let's give the cockroaches a go!": a conversation with Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman
Earlier this month, I interviewed Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke and I came away with more anecdotes than I could fit into my 1,000 word franchise piece. I decided to keep writing...
After talking to Coleman for just over an hour, I got chatting to his publicist and admitted I had way more material than I needed for what I’d been assigned to write, and I wished I had some way to use it. He suggested I could use it for a piece on a blog, and fortunately, I had just the medium I could use - this here (admittedly rather neglected) newsletter. I ran with it, and tried writing something a bit different. Massive thanks to Matthew Reynolds for letting me do this - I am glad these quotes got a home.
Jaz Coleman wants to talk. The opportunity has arisen to speak to the Killing Joke frontman today precisely because he wants to talk, not just to me, but to an intimate audience - night after night, on a spoken word ‘an evening with…’ style tour. There are stories to dig up from the archive of his mind that have stayed in the past, and not been brought forth into the present, for years, decades even. He might as well do before the apocalypse happens, according to the promotional materials anyway.
His publicist tells me that Coleman is a talker as he’s leading me through the cavernous wings of the Columbia Hotel in London, in the wealthy just-west-of-central area of Lancaster Gate. Curiously, it’s just two stops on the Central Line from the area of London, Notting Hill Gate, where Killing Joke was formed 45 years ago. Like the area itself with its pristine white buildings that don’t scream wealth but announce it in a gentler way, the hotel appears untouched by time. It’s old but elegant, all marble and wood that looks a hundred years old. It transpires when I encounter Coleman that this is one of his favourite hotels. He was a regular here in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and his high-profile punk peers were too.
There’s a curious mismatch between the components of Coleman’s outfit – he’s in a hoodie with something over the top that looks like a cloak from a Harry Potter film. He’s the first person I’ve ever interviewed who is wearing sunglasses indoors. During our hour-long conversation he removes them once, maybe halfway through, but they stay in his hands for a matter of minutes before he returns them to his face. In front of him is a saucer full of what looks like coffee that he barely touches, leaving it to turn stone cold. He barely has time to take a sip from it anyway. He has too much to say.
I’m here to ask him about some of the most memorable shows in Killing Joke’s career while he’s in the mood for reminiscing. It’s for a franchise piece – the best gig, the worst gig, the weirdest gig et cetera. To start with, we talk about the spoken word tour, why now is the time for him to unearth all these untold stories. It’s not about nostalgia and it’s not about taking a victory lap, it seems. Looking back means he can talk about Killing Joke in the context of prophecy.
“The things that we’ve talked about in art have kind of manifested later, much in the way that they say life follows art,” he says, speaking slowly, always choosing to sit with silence while he finds the right words instead of using filler phrases. “That certainly happened with Killing Joke’s music in terms of the geopolitical stage we’re in. The first album talks of nuclear war and conscription and when you look at the headlines now, they’re looking at reintroducing conscription across the UK and Europe. These ideas resonate with me, and then you look at lines from ‘I Am The Virus’ on the second album and I think of the pandemic. Then we wrote ‘Empire Song’ on the third album and that happened just before the Falklands and I remember reading a line from the tabloids – ‘Another Empire Backfires’ – and that was the chorus line of the song we’d released. The list goes on. So much of our work has proved to be true, which really accounts for Killing Joke’s global appeal I think in the last 10-15 years.”
If that all sounds apocalyptic, it’s meant to be. It’s hardly out of character for Coleman or his band, and even if you foolishly paid no heed to the message they were trying to convey, the music of their doomier, eerier early albums would conjure the feeling of the sky turning black and falling in at the crux of a nuclear winter anyway. Indeed, the story of Coleman and late Killing Joke guitarist Geordie Walker’s escape to Iceland in 1982 became infamous, with it being heavy believed that they’d packed their bags in order to escape what they perceived to be impending Armageddon. In reality, they went there and set up a bogus label as a cover for a drugs operation, shipping kilogram upon kilogram of hashish into the country and selling it for £25 a gram.
In 2024, the apocalypse is still on his mind. “It’s more serious now than the Cuban Missile Crisis when I was three years of age,” he reasons. “If you're looking at the Doomsday Clock - Albert Einstein, was one of the signatories - we're closer now than any other time in history to total extinction. I say total extinction because a small nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would send us into 25 years of nuclear winter and crop failure. An all-out nuclear war is the end of everything as we know it.”
Coleman is a scholarly sort. It seeps into conversation in unexpected ways, meaning it’s possible to resketch the impression of him in your head as part musician and part philosopher of sorts. “I do think this has happened in prehistory,” he continues on the subject of the apocalypse. “When you read the Mahabharata, which [was written around] 910-1000 BCE, it says, ‘It was an unknown weapon, six cubits by four, shone in all its splendour, wiser than 10,000 suns, the soldiers who themselves in streams but in vain their half lives, their nails fell out from that terrible weapon. Oh death, the destroyer of worlds.’ It goes on. It is clearly like Sodom and Gomorrah in in the biblical epic. It’s nuclear war has happened in the ancient past. I think Oppenheimer knew this. That's the thing,” he adds. “The secret history of the world has been another thing that Killing Joke has been exposed to unlike a lot of other bands. We were exposed to these different mystical schools.”
Listening to Coleman, the idea bursts forth that there might well be more to the world than it presents at face value, that there’s something behind the curtain somewhere, or there’s a reason people talk about events in the context of the Universe wanting a certain thing, pushing certain things into or out of the way to bring about a vital change, or a lesson. He speaks of a show at the Hexagon at Reading where everything went into slow motion, somehow, which sparked his interest in the study of magnetic fields. On more than one occasion, he believes he’s found a safe landing at certain times in his twenties simply by trusting completely and utterly in God, flying somewhere with barely any money in his pocket and yet always, always meeting the right people. “Once you take away the fear of having no money, you don’t really have many fears.”
That much shines through when I ask him, after all his talk of the apocalypse, if he can see any hope at all. “The way I see it, firstly, is that I see most things from an Eastern perspective, which is to say the soul of the child chooses its parents and we choose when we reincarnate and at which period,” he explains. “When I think of this post war bubble, that allowed rock music to exist, this small window of freedom, I think we chose to incarnate at this time, which is the end of a great big cycle. If you consider that our solar system flies through all these rocks every 26,000 years, and we get hit by asteroids and the magnetosphere changes, we're at that time, we're in a time of polycataclysm where there's so many things from solar storms.
“If you look at volcanic activity, and you compare the first 20 years of this century, to the first 20 years of the last century, you will see the volcanic activities is on a massive, massive rise and this cannot be attributed to global warming. Volcanic activity increases as different planetary bodies approach the Earth, the magnetosphere changes, the poles flip. We go through like planetary upheaval, basically. This is the underlying work of Killing Joke - preparing the population for these for these colossal changes.”
So everything is cyclical, then? “I think we’ve reached the stage where the only good thing that can happen is destruction on some level. Let’s give the cockroaches a go! My father used to say to me when I was terrified about the future that in every age, there’ll always be an external threat. I think that is something that we have to live with.”
The other reason Coleman appears so keen to talk is that he’s angry. The first target of his ire is the music industry, which erupts in a conversation about mental health. “It’s Machiavellian, to put it mildly,” he fumes. “When you’re in a band and the money comes, then you see human nature and human greed. You know what? I’ve learned to trust my enemies more than my friends.” He’s also spent considerable time working with musicians across parts of South America, which has involved coming face to face with desperate scenes of poverty. In Argentina, which he was drawn to in order to help in a time where the economy is held up by tent poles, the inflation rate is 220 per cent and three-fifths of the population live below the breadline. He also lived in Mexico, where a fifth of the population is homeless. He’s furious about the amount developed countries pour into weapons of mass destruction and the lasting effects of colonialism – “They left India in a terrible state of poverty with a 13 per cent literacy rate, after raping it. This country owes reparations.” It also appears that Coleman lacks faith in governments and global institutions – “I’m afraid I’m known as a non-violent extremist because I don’t accept the official narratives.”
In his spate of controlled, yet fluid anger, Coleman’s words flow from topic to topic without interruption while he looks vacantly out of the huge bay window in the room through which filters gentle rays of March sunlight. He’s not concentrating on where he is looking because he’s absorbed in his train of thought, and in his sunglasses, it’s not always clear if he’s giving me full eye contact or not. “… The next point I’d like to mention is artificial intelligence in pre-crime, trying to arrest people not for things they’ve done, but for things they might do,” he says at one point, while I’ve still got things to tick off.
I wait till he finishes, and then I ask, “So what was the best gig Killing Joke has ever played?” It feels jarring, silly even, to bring him back to Earth with such a simple question. I have a brief and a script to follow. Most of the time I’m happy to abandon it if necessary, but when I’ve been given instructions, I can’t discard them.
A little later, after I’ve gotten through the mandatory stuff and ask him what the band’s worst gig was, he becomes more revealing. “I think it’s where a member of the band drank so much they were incapable of playing,” he says. “But that brings me back onto the subject of alcoholism.” It’s on this subject that he clearly has even more to express. This, I infer, is a large part of why he wants, needs, even, to talk. After all, we’re speaking just three months after Geordie Walker passed away aged 64 after suffering a stroke – not a cause of death that necessarily screams ‘alcoholic’, but one that might not have occurred, at least not at this point, had he put down the giant bottles of tequila he had a tendency to consume like water.
“When I turned 30, that was when it was suggested that Geordie go to rehab,” he explains. “He died three months ago. It had been stressful for everybody. He drank two bottles of tequila a gig – that’s what he would normally do. It would be my job, along with Dave Simpson, to open the bottle when he went to the toilet, empty half of it and top it up with water. When Geordie became a liability, I just took a sleeping tablet, crushed it and put it in his drink and gave it to him. That’s what I’ve been doing for 30 years.”
During shows, Walker could hold himself together. He found a way to be able to play while heavily intoxicated. Once the stage lights were turned off, however, things took a hairpin turn. “He turned into a fucking demon,” admits Coleman. “He was a demon – it wasn’t really him. That’s why they call it ‘spirit’. A year ago, my doctor said that when it happens with Geordie, it was going to come quick. [He said] ‘I want you to brace yourself. As a stage five alcoholic, you only need one drink – it goes to the liver so quickly and the character change occurs. Geordie in the morning was a charming, wonderful person, because he hadn’t had a drink. After he had his first meal of the day, which was usually around midday, he’d have a drink with that and he wouldn’t stop.” He also cites Walker as the reason he himself stopped drinking, after several “really nasty” fights with him. If he hadn’t done that, he might have been dead by now as well.
Walker’s death was sudden and not sudden at the same time. “We all expected it to happen sooner or later, but I was having daily phone calls with Geordie right up until he died. It was so sudden. We were planning so many things – we got new management, we were after our old managers to give us the accounts and start taking legal action.” Walker wasn’t entirely happy with operating as the original incarnation of the line-up, however, and Coleman had been trying to persuade him not to alter it.
“Sometimes he’d say to the rest of us, ‘I’m too old for this’, but he wasn’t too old,” he adds. “He was just too fucking drunk. “This is what alcohol does. The long term effects of alcohol abuse are when you no longer get pleasure from something which always gave you pleasure.” He pauses. “What’s next?”
By the time I’ve asked my remaining questions, Coleman is in a lighter mood. We end up laughing over his story over an incident made all the more unfortunate by virtue of the lack of thought he put into what underwear he’d picked up off the floor when he left the house. “Someone spotted me in the gig and I ran over and jumped over the orchestra pit and landed on top of this unfortunate person,” he recalls. “Then the crowd was pulling me one way and the row crew of pulling me towards the orchestra. [There was this] great big ripping sound. Then they manhandled me on stage and I found [I was wearing] my wife's pair of underpants and my balls were hanging out and my backside was towards the audience. It was completely shameless. Luckily someone ran out with some Gaffa tape and stuck me together again.”
Then Coleman settles and becomes more philosophical when he comes to the conclusion of the interview, and to where he’s ended up at this point in his storied life. “I'm looking at what remains of my life and the challenges ahead. Because the past is the past. To understand the past, is to understand the present which is also to understand the future,” he explains. “And this kind of relationship comes from the word weird. Because weird comes from the Anglo Saxon word, wyrd and this was [from] the Three Sisters of Destiny who the fates of men on their looms. That’s why [I’m going to] start off doing the spoken word in the present tense, and then move into the past. Both of these determine the future and so on. I'm formulating new challenges for myself. Because without challenges that terrify us, we don't grow. We don't grow into who we really are.”