[kj] KJ to play Night Time and Fire Dances live

[jpwhkj at aol.com]

Hi Nick,

Well - you asked!  What follows is as best as I can remember what I felt and thought at the time, without the benefit of knowing what happened next.

It was the Easter holidays 30 years ago that I got seriously into the Joke, when I recorded them (on a cassette player) on Whatever You Didn't Get for my best mate, whose parents didn't have a TV.

When FD came out (shortly after my conversion to the Joke), it sounded to my inexperienced ears like the ultimate Killing Joke album, i.e. ultimate meaning "final destination", rather than "best".  I had no sense at the time that it was more commercial than Revelations.

Me Or You followed in autumn '83.  I didn't buy it straight away, but aforementioned best friend did.  I wasn't keen on it, as it didn't seem to hang together musically.  I didn't think that it sounded commercial.

Next came Eighties, which John Peel described as Killing Joke sounding like the bands that were trying to sound like Killing Joke.  But I loved it, and bought it soon thereafter, along with Me Or You, which I'd come round to.

Then, weirdly, KJ did a session for Kid Jensen (Eighties, New Culture, All Play Rebel, and Blue Feather).  All previous sessions had been for John Peel, so I did have a sense that they were widening their audience, deliberately or otherwise.  I loved the session, and awaited the next single with great anticipation.  Jensen implied that it would be one of the 3 new tracks from the session, and they all sounded good enough.  So it was a surprise to me when the next single was A New Day.  By now it felt like there was another distinctive KJ style coming into being, just as Fire Dances had sounded distinctly different, and Revelations (shrieking guitar) before that, and WTF (dance-dub-metal) before that, and the first album (indescribable) before that, and the EP plus Nuclear Boy, Animal, Malicious Boogie (punk/dub crossover) before that... so I was awaiting an album with the following tracks:

Me Or You
Eighties
All Play Rebel
New Culture
Blue Feather
A New Day

...with a couple more to come.  The chime of Geordie's guitar, and the lyrics, and the graphics of Eighties and A New Day all seemed to provide a vision just as cohesive as the tribal regression of Fire Dances.

But it was not to be, and the months stretched to years, until I saw Killing Joke on the Tube doing Night Time, Love Like Blood, and Kings & Queens.  Hearing them first in a live context, K&Q sounded like a typically brutal stomp of a song, and LLB blew me away with its beauty.  Once I had the single and could listen again, the line "strength and beauty" seemed to me to sum up what Killing Joke were about, and certainly what the song epitomised.  The UK tour was the usual blistering stuff - but when Night Time the album came out, I was disappointed.  The songs sounded tame compared to how they'd sounded live.

Another year and a bit went by, and Adorations was released.  I bought it, and was pretty disappointed.  The lyrics seemed not to mesh well with the music, and the music didn't seem up to much anyway.  A week or two later, I saw them at Reading Festival, where they played most of the as-yet-unreleased Brighter Than A Thousand Suns.  Sanity sounded like it would replace LLB as my favourite KJ track, and Twilight of the Mortal, Chessboards, and Rubicon were all in the brutal tradition of the Joke.  (I was never keen on Love of the Masses.)  I recorded the gig on a ghetto blaster, and listened to it relentlessly until studio versions became available.

The first of which was the single of Sanity.  It didn't have the strength of LLB, but I loved its beauty, and could listen to it again and again and again (to the aggravation of my friends).

The accompanying gigs - as I said earlier today - were absolute stormers, both in terms of the new material but also for blinding versions of Requiem and The Wait (both very fast).  Raven had obviously found his feet with the band, and they were musically very tight.  The album itself was - as with Night Time - a bit of a let down; the studio versions just didn't compare to the live versions.  But maybe that was partly the magic of Killing Joke live...

Almost two years passed, and America came out, followed shortly by OTG.  It really didn't sound good.  The lyrics were tedious and wordy, stripped of the mysterious brevity of early Joke.  The songs were tepid, lacking any musical punch that might have compensated for the lyrics.  I desperately wanted to like them, but just couldn't... Were they chasing commercial success?  I didn't know, but on balance doubted it, because they still didn't sound like any of the bands making money at the time!  Certainly lots of punk bands were sounding more acceptable, though usually without achieving significant chart positions.  All I really knew was the KJ had gone down the pan.

And then came the 1989 gigs, trialling Extremities material... and KJ were back on course.

Jamie



-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Scott <npscott at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: A list about all things Killing Joke (the band!) <gathering at misera.net>
Sent: Sun, 5 May 2013 20:59
Subject: Re: [kj] KJ to play Night Time and Fire Dances live


I would be interesting in knowing what (was too young to have followed KJ from the start and only heard of them from Love Like Blood, when I was barely a teenager) what peoples thoughts on the whole commercial sound of KJ after following them from their beginnings.


The shift is so evident from listening chronologically through the singles collection the shift after "Revelations" era Joke.



>From the first EP to feature Paul Raven "Birds Of A Feather" through the "Fire Dances" era the shift towards that "dandy highway" Adams & The Ants sound, onwards to more commercial new wave/alternative pop rock of  "Me & You", "A New Day" and then the album "Night Time".



Looking at other post punk bands of the same era, notably PiL & Siouxsie & The Banshees they all seem guilty of the shift mid 80s to a more commercial sound.


As this was the fashion of the time was the whole shift in sound to the then loyal KJ following just seen as progression alongside their other peers or not?


Would be interested hearing the views of long standing KJ fans on the sound shift, the Singles Collection really has me thinking more about it how evident it all was.




On 5 May 2013 20:34,  <jpwhkj at aol.com> wrote:

The gigs around the time of Brighter Than A Thousand Suns were absolute stormers.  Twilight of the Mortal was a great opener, played very hard and very fast, and obviously with less synth than the album.  Some of my favourite Joke gigs, in fact.
 
Jamie

 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Scott <npscott at blueyonder.co.uk>
To: A list about all things Killing Joke (the band!) <gathering at misera.net>
Sent: Sun, 5 May 2013 17:22
Subject: Re: [kj] KJ to play Night Time and Fire Dances live


Outside The Gate & Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, so I could have some breathing room down the front of their gig.



On 5 May 2013 17:15, fatpotanga <fatpotanga at gmail.com> wrote:

As per my Southern namesake for the same reasons & yes, I *still* think Obsession would be great live.


I know they won't play certain albums/songs, but I'd love it if they re-worked some of them (eg some Democracy tracks with the loops re-added) & play them how they'd like them to sound now.
If that make sense? I have horrendous hay fever & such itchy eyes I can barely see to type but I know what I meant






On 5 May 2013, at 15:38, jpwhkj at aol.com wrote:


Outside the Gate and Democracy.
 
Because I've never heard anything from either album live.
 
Jamie
 
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Were Wolf <werewolf68 at hotmail.co.uk>
To: The Gathering KJ <gathering at misera.net>
Sent: Sun, 5 May 2013 14:32
Subject: [kj] KJ to play Night Time and Fire Dances live



...Not really! But it would be a great gig!


What 2 Killing Joke albums would you like to see them play live and in their entirety?
 		 	   		  






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