There are many crazy stories about Jaz Coleman. There was the time he went missing and resurfaced living a nomadic existence in Western Sahara. He has claimed to have seen a UFO – actually seven orange orbs, one bearing the image of a stick man – in central London. Once, he was so annoyed by a Melody Maker review that he stormed into the magazine’s offices and dumped rotting liver and maggots over the reception desk. Today, though, video-calling from Argentina, he is reflective and emotional.
“I’m still in terrible shock,” says the 64-year-old from behind dark sunglasses in the South American daylight. “It’s been an incredibly difficult time for everybody around Killing Joke.” He is talking about the death of Kevin Walker, better known as Geordie. The hugely influential guitarist and band co-founder died in Prague in November, also aged 64, after a stroke.
Playing a semi-acoustic Gibson ES-295 – an instrument once used by Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore – but downtuned a tone, with heavier strings and a delay effect, Walker gave the band’s post-punk-industrial-dance hybrid a beautiful intensity which Coleman once compared to “fire in heaven”. His mesmerising guitar-playing propelled numerous albums into the UK Top 20 and gave them a bona fide hit single with 1985’s Love Like Blood. Their admirers range from a younger industrial generation to Metallica and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. “Geordie was a national treasure,” says Coleman in his first interview since Walker’s death.
But he reveals that concerns about Walker’s health had mounted for some time. “A year ago, a doctor taking care of him said to me, ‘When it comes, it will come really fast. So I want you to brace yourself.’ Of course I didn’t take it to heart, because I thought Geordie was indestructible.”
This month Coleman embarks on a spoken word/Q&A tour, which he knows will now be overshadowed by his bandmate’s death. But there is one question he is not ready to answer: “I’m asking people not to ask about the future of Killing Joke, because I’m still in mourning.”
Walker had been Coleman’s “constant companion, at every single gig and recording” since 1978. Coleman and drummer Big Paul Ferguson had initially tried to complete the lineup by summoning bandmates in a black magic ritual, but the flat they held it in subsequently burned down. So they recruited Walker and bassist Martin Glover (AKA Youth, later a prolific record producer) by the more conventional means of an advert in weekly music paper Melody Maker. “Geordie rang up and said ‘I’ve never been in a band before,’” says Coleman, allowing himself a tiny smile. “‘I’ve only ever played in my mum’s bedroom, but I’m the best guitarist ever.’”
The Cheltenham-born, classically trained Anglo-Asian singer and synth player, and the County Durham-born guitarist who was a Siouxsie and the Banshees fan, rarely agreed on music. But both were well-read and bonded over politics, philosophy and spirituality. “I’d had a considerable occult library since I was seven,” Coleman explains. “Geordie was a master Kabbalist” – a believer in esoteric Jewish mysticism. “We shared an interest in all that side of things.”
Thus, Walker accompanied Coleman on one of his most celebrated adventures. In 1982, Coleman turned up in Iceland, telling reporters he was fleeing the apocalypse, although his subsequent explanations have varied from studying ley lines to setting up a marijuana-running operation. “There’s an element of truth in all of them,” he grins, “but I went to Iceland because I wanted to find a part of me that was missing.”
As he tells it now, during a gig in Reading they’d had the “collective experience of playing in a magnetic field which meant everything slowed down around us”. Keen to further explore such geomagnetic energy, they went to Iceland to conduct ritual experiments in volcanic power centres. “Many crazy things happened,” the singer says. “One person working with us was struck by lightning twice and survived, and one time, from what I could see, we achieved levitation.”
Magically or otherwise, Coleman found his missing part in Iceland, and decided to start a parallel career as a composer (he says he now sells more classical albums than Killing Joke albums). And in more recent years Coleman and Walker had socialised less, after the former gave up drinking.
“Killing Joke has always been like a dysfunctional family,” he explains. “We all love each other deeply, and we’re periodically evil to each other. I had three vicious fights with Geordie. The last time we did so much damage to each other that we both ended up needing stitches. He was making the tea afterwards and went, ‘Do you think we’re drinking too much?’”
Shortly afterwards, in January 2006, Coleman made a vow to stop. “I have a 100% success rate with my system,” he says. “Because the solemn vow is that if you fall off the wagon, you invoke death.”
Coleman still has the empty tequila bottle which Walker drained during his final Killing Joke performance, at the Royal Albert Hall last March. He has filled it with flowers. “He would not stop drinking two bottles a day. He’d start two hours before a gig and as soon as he went to the loo, I’d half empty the bottle and refill it with water.” Coleman sighs, softly. “We’d been doing that for 20 years. I’ve got a vendetta against alcohol because ultimately it cut short the life of my friend.”
After Walker’s death, Coleman had to get out of Prague, where they’d both been living – he also has a farm in New Zealand, and is now drawn to the “creativity and chaos” in Argentina. However, he is disturbed that almost 60% of the population live in poverty and warns that the UK is headed the same way, blaming “the succession of governments culminating in the current prime minister, whose wealth in contrast to what people are suffering really is obscene. In the US, too, 80% of citizens are two paycheques away from homelessness.”
Warning of impending global chaos or disaster has been Coleman’s stock in trade ever since the likes of 1979 debut single Turn to Red or 1980 classic Wardance. But if anything, his vision of the future is now even more dystopian. “The economic bubble is about to burst in ways we’ve never seen in our lifetimes,” he insists, predicting famine, warfare and a widening gulf between an elite and a growing underclass. The tensions between nations is another favourite subject. Having lived near the Ukraine border and worked with orchestras in Russia, he felt war brewing.
“People in Russia were always keen to talk to me about how as a nation they feel encircled,” he says. “But another reason I left Europe is because of the push towards conflicts and the lack of diplomacy everywhere. Like a lot of people, sometimes I simply cannot bear to watch the news. We spend more money on weapons of mass destruction than we do our health systems. We’re 90 seconds away from midnight on the Doomsday Clock, but people don’t seem bothered.”
He fears that we could tumble into nuclear conflict by accident, “because complex defence systems are being run by artificial intelligence and when one AI system misreads another it leads to catastrophic decisions”. He is not the first musician to voice fears about AI, but warns: “It’s the first step to transhumanism, so some people will be able to download an IQ of 600-plus and access life extension programmes, but most of us won’t. So there’ll be two types of humans in the future that will look visibly different to each other.” This seems wild, sci-fi stuff, but he points out that 1982’s Empire Song predicted the Falklands war – it was released two weeks before Argentina invaded – and that his songs contain “prophesies; warnings for humanity”.
Walker’s final recordings with the band appear on the 2022 EP Lord of Chaos, which came after a particularly difficult two years, including a “near-death experience” for Coleman amid a diabetic coma in Mexico in 2021. Life in Killing Joke is certainly never dull, but he says that in one of their final conversations, the guitarist had told him that he didn’t want to continue with the original lineup. “I tried to reason with him,” Coleman says. “Then he died.”
Walker was the second Killing Joke musician to die prematurely. Paul Raven, who replaced Youth for several years before all four founder members reunited in 2008, died aged 46 in 2007. “But I believe in reincarnation and the ancestral spirit,” says Coleman, “which is to say that Raven and Geordie are together. There are times that I can hear them, so when it comes to the future of the group, their will will be taken into consideration.”
• Jaz Coleman’s spoken word tour, Unspeakable, begins at Glasgow Garage on 19 March.
• This article was amended on 19 March 2024 to remove an image that was incorrectly captioned as showing Jaz Coleman.
