English rockers/punkers Killing Joke are legendary and highly influential. Fact! Over almost four decades of existence they’ve stood tall not only with their ferocious music but perhaps more importantly with their unapologetic social and political comments. They’ve just released their sixteenth album, Pylon, and vocalist/leader/founding member Jaz Coleman was kind enough to share his thoughts about the state of the world, the vitality of his work (some people have that right), the band’s latest album, and the documentary The Death and Resurrection Show.
2015 is not only the year of the release of a new Killing Joke’s album, but also the release of The Death and Resurrection Show, the documentary about Killing Joke. How was the experience of having a documentary made about what’s one of the most important aspects of your life and how did you feel about the final product?
I co-directed with Shaun [Petigrew]. So yeah, it was a big work. I wanted to keep some of the most painful parts of my career, and darkest moments… I wanted to keep them on camera, and have a very different approach to documentaries. So, I was open, I was transparent, you could say, to the approach. Before I did The Death and Resurrection Show, I did a movie called Year of the Devil [Rok ďábla in its original title], a Czech movie that has become very famous here, and there were no actors in this movie. Everything is arranged by chance, there’s no actors and it’s natural. I did The Death and Resurrection Show after this and used the same sort of approach to the documentary.
Doing the documentary you had to look at the past. Do you find them scary, the similarities between then and now, the brutal stagnation in some areas of our world and society? You guys were talking about stuff in the 80s that haven’t really changed 30 years later.
Yeah, that’s right. It’s true. Especially now when you can see that we’ve entered into the new Cold War with Russia. There’s definitely a sort of recurrence of the same feeling, but more so now it’s a different kind of warfare, thirty years on. They refer to it as “full-spectrum dominance”. It’s more what you can’t see. For example, who would have thought that thirty years later that every one of our phone calls is not only being listened to but also recorded to then be put into metadata? Who would have thought that the United Kingdom would become the biggest surveillance state on the planet? I would never think that these things would happen.
And people thought Nixon and the Watergate scandal was bad. There are people now that almost put Nixon as a lamb.
That’s right. If you look at the way… There are so few people that turn up for general elections and participating in democracy. It means, basically, that people don’t really trust or have any confidence in our current system. For example, these new trade… Supposedly, they call it trade agreements like The Trans-Pacific Partnership that are taking away all soverency from every nation state or every single tree. Basically every nation state will be forced to accept genetically modified food, biotech industry, and so forth. For example, under these agreements corporations will be able to sue nation states for loss of earning. Effectively a nation state will be a little more than a protectorate. We’re moving into a time of centralized governments, but the world government that we’re talking about. That’s what they have been trying to, that’s what their goal is, of course. Our society is becoming incredibly fragmented. You go out for an evening with your friends and they’re all looking in their fucking iPhones and iPads, and nobody is really communicating properly with each other or having an interaction of any depth or substance anymore.
“Cattle for slaughter”.
Sure! I think a combination of what’s been sprayed in the air and what’s been put in the food and water… people become fucking zombies.
You’re from England. How do you feel about this situation regarding the Middle East refugees and this 20.000 refugee’s limit for this year that David Cameron and his government want to impose?
It’s ironic that most of these refugees that are coming from Syria into Europe… Libya where we bombed and Syria where we started wars. The reason why they’re not staying in their own countries it is because we destroyed them, essentially. Either with multi-nationals or with wars that we have instigated over there. And when they start coming over here, we start bitching about. [laughs] What you expect me to say? I’m disgusted by it. It’s outrageous. It’s unbelievable. It’s shocking. Look, you have to realize that the majority of the election voted for David Cameron, and they believe in that shit. There you are. What can I say? Even more incredible is spending billions on upgrading the Trident system [UK’s nuclear war system] when we can’t even launch our independent nuclear weapon because basically we can only have the launch codes from Washington. So basically we’re paying billions for our Trident nuclear weapon that we… we can’t even bomb Italy with it [laughs] without asking America first. Effectively we get the bill for something we can’t use properly. I mean, it’s just a fuck scam from hell. Again, the people who benefit from this situation are the military industrial complex… More corporations. That’s really what this is all about. And the whole war… war is just big, big, big business. It’s never going to go away as long as we have a huge military industrial complex. And then we think about the whole power structure in the West, everything is run by central bankers. The politicians don’t do jack shit, they can’t do jack shit… all presidents. The top of the pyramid is the central banks. This is the kind of backdrop to the Pylon record. The uncertainties of the future, the fact that we’re moving towards a totalitarian technocratic dictatorship, basically. People are sleepwalking to it and it is nearly complete. I have to say, bringing these things to people’s attention through Killing Joke… I don’t see any other group doing anything remotely close to what we are doing.
“Our music is about struggle ultimately, and I guess that’s why Killing Joke is so relevant these days. It’s because we’re still relishing struggle of our existence and what we do with our art.”
In one of the most critic times of these last decades of music, with a political voice, seems so fragmented. What do you make of this situation that seems kind of unique, where music is for the most part detached from reality and the things that matter?
It’s just become a pleasure principle. It’s become so eclectic, people have so many choices… there’s no direction with music. There’s no serious experimentation and the quality of music, of course, because everybody downloads music from free and stuff. The quality of recordings of course is going to suffer in the end. That’s why all the big studios are going down. Recording and getting good drum sounds and things like this are things from the past now. It’s sad in many respects to see all these things happen. You know I worked with an orchestra and in different areas of music. I do Arabic music, and sometimes film music, and stuff like that… I had this fucking manager say to me, “There’s no money in classical music. There’s no money in Arabic music.” I just said, “Well, fuck off!” [laughs] I mean, there’s no money in music, unless you go out and do concerts because the internet stolen from all the musicians. But I don’t mind. It’s not going to change my life. I’m still completely committed to doing as many concerts as possible and do what I love. It doesn’t really make a great deal of difference to me. I’m not going to change my lifestyle because suddenly they say, “Music is no longer economically viable, and so you should all stop.” GET FUCKED! That’s where we are in the world with orchestras and classical music. It’s no longer economically viable.
I guess that’s why there are few bands tackling political and social issues. It seems that they are making a tremendous effort to push away that kind of music.
It’s not just in music. In schools they are getting rid of music completely. They just want to concentrate on STEM subjects – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics – and that is because essentially these current establishment, they see the arts as a potential hop of descent. And that’s why you see the children going to school and not having any decent music education, unless they go to an elite school and they got lots of money. Generally speaking, that’s the case, which is sad because essentially what we’re doing is developing only one side of the brain, one side of cerebral hemisphere, which is dangerous and shocking for our emerging society.
What did you want to convey with the title for this new album?
The word Pylon is kind of a reference to the transmission towers. They can be used to convey high frequencies or ultra-low frequencies sounds. Once they spread the air properly enough fucking part course directly injected into our system, we will literally be able to experience intracerebral hearing. We will be able to hear voices, anything they bin to us, with ultra-low frequencies. We would be living, walking human antennas. [laughs]
The Cold War lasted something like five decades. Do you have any predictions when this one will end… or when it will be turned into a third world war?
It’s began. They don’t use nuclear weapons in the new war. It’s full-spectrum dominance. It’s invisible. You can’t see what’s happening.
You said regarding the year 2012, “This year is about getting our collective dreams in order, restoring the biosphere, the idea of well-being as opposed to economic growth, the idea of partnership and co-creation with fellow human beings, moving away from national boundaries and more towards what [Friedrich] Schiller and Beethoven were saying in some of their work.” How do you feel now, three years after?
The world is getting worse, of course. I think the world is polarizing more, people are waking up to the fact that we’re seem to be heading towards that kind of environment where corporations run supreme over everybody. This illegal trade agreements that we talked about earlier and so there’s going to be a big polarization. How this will play out, what’s going to happen remains to be seen but it seems that the West is trying to have full-spectrum dominance over the whole planet. What’s happening is a scramble for resources to be the dominant power so it’s a very unstable time geopolitically. That being said, I do think that many people have woken to the fact that there’s no future for capitalism because everything is gone. We need a new planet to rape. So, if there’s no need for capitalism then there’s no need for banking elite. We’re talking basically a whole restructuring of society and our values. I think that compared to three years ago things have got worse regardless the fact that Mr. Obama has a nice face… it seems that the system is alive and kicking, it seems to me. Forget about politics for a second what we try to do in Killing Joke is to create a little bit of Paradise Now, if you like. The Killing Joke concept is a place I feel at home. I feel a sense of liberty. In a sense, we created our own space of liberty, our own autonomous zone, if you like. It’s our lifestyle. The struggle to be free. Most people give their precious time to be working in an awful job, in an awful place, with awful people. And that’s if they’re lucky to get a job. We’re moving into a time of slavery.
You have by now recorded sixteen full-length albums. Did you find yourself this time around having a completely different experience recording the new album or was it not that far removed from past experiences?
All Killing Joke albums are traumatic and this one was no exception. When we have four alpha males colliding with each other… it’s never a straightforward procedure. And it’s been a difficult year and more difficulties usuallymean better music. Life isn’t always straightforward for Killing Joke. We didn’t sign up for an easy life. Our music is about struggle. Killing Joke is so relevant these days. It’s because we’re still relishing struggle of our existence and what we do with our art.
How do you feel sharing the stage with all these younger bands? I mean, Killing Joke isn’t a band relying on the past.
That’s right. We’re really concentrating on the present tense and future. The past is something that we don’t tend to discuss a great deal… what’s done is done. Look, it’s a great honor be in Killing Joke. It’s incredible and I think it’s the best decision I’ve ever made, to be in a band. [laughs] As Peter Hook [Joy Division, New Order] says, “It’s the best job in the world.” [laughs]