Last Sunday I began to see the news trickle out that Geordie Walker, the guitarist of genre-unto-themselves Killing Joke had tragically died of a stroke in his home of Prague. We now know that he had the stroke two days prior, but he has been the thread of continuity along with lead singer/madman Jaz Coleman, with the band’s rhythm section being more fluid over its 40+ year history.

How I wish I’d first heard the band in 1980, when they were the hardest sound ever happening on the usually ambient and effete E’G Records label. I did recall hearing the band’s sound; singular at the time, being referred to as “Punk Funk” in the music press I managed to see at the time. Like many an American, my first sampling of Killing Joke was down to the airing of the video for “Eighties” on MTV starting in 1984.

Against a sea of Bruce Springsteen, Journey, and hair metal erupting like a musical pimple at the time, one certainly stood up and took notice of “Eighties.” The fiery intensity of Coleman’s lyrics and delivery contrasted mightily with the brutal elegance that Walker brought to his guitar tone. His weapon of choice a hollow-body Gibson that was put to great use in the least likely setting for it. Swooping down through the songs like a pitiless kestrel ready to shred its prey to ribbons.

By the time of their next album, “Brighter Than A Thousand Suns,” I was ready to take the bait. Darkly hued melancholic songs like “Sanity” got plenty of videoplay on MTVs nascent 120 Minutes College-Rock Ghetto, and made me a believer, but when I finally got the CD, I was entranced by the deep cuts which were even better. The band at that point were elegant and propulsive; having their way with the “Big Music” of the mid-80s period. Where they managed to shine the brightest was with the confrontational and questioning point of view that Coleman brought to the songs. If the songs approached grandiosity, they still had bite and meaning.

In 1985, MTV brought British live music series “The Tube” to American eyes and I was treated to the appearance of Killing Joke playing their new single “Kings + Queens” and the impact was visceral for me! The band’s live sound was bleeding edge and incredibly loud, even when television tries its best to restrain and tamp down such antics. Though I rail against Google and YouTube as being enterprises diametrically opposed to the values of Killing Joke itself, I am going off policy to embed the clip here for any who have not seen and heard it. Revel in the ragged power it manifests.

Over the next year or two, I had bought most of the band’s earlier albums on the silver disc. I remember seeing “Outside The Gate” appear in 1988 and I didn’t hesitate to pick it up. The album only had Walker and Coleman on it and the years have revealed that it was intended as a Coleman solo album shoehorned into the Killing Joke brand for commercial reasons. I can recall that it was April of 1989 when the band were going to appear at Visage, the A-list night club that booked the rare concerts I wanted to see in Orlando at the time. I went there with chasinvictoria and a mutual friend and we regarded with raised eyebrows the lit brazier onstage with the band! Those sorts of pyro effects will never happen in a rock club again!

But the staging wasn’t the half of it. While I had been anticipating a tour behind the recently released “Outside The Gate,” what was delivered instead was a set showcasing the new material the band were writing concurrently which would not see tape for another year. When it appeared as “Extremities, Dirt, And Various Repressed Emotions!” We were simply unprepared for the brain-melting intensity of that show, which was so loud I heard about it from chasinvictoria for decades later.

When that album appeared, it was my favorite album of 1990 as I was more than ready for its tightly channeled torrents of righteous ferocity. The heavy synths that the band had investigated by the mid-80s were duly banished for the most part and the power of Walker’s approach was set front and center as the rhythm section were his tireless engine room. In 1989, I’ll admit to having been blind-sided by the bulk of the unknown and scorchingly intense material. If ever there was a time machine to re-attend a concert, this one would be at the front of the queue. After I came to hear and love the recorded album, it still occupies the position of my favorite Killing Joke album in their canon that I’ve heard.

I also bought the follow up in 1994,”Pandemonium.” Which saw original bassist Youth rejoining the group and hybridizing the band’s heavy intense approach with some of the ravetrance factor that Youth had been swimming in and defining around the turn of the decade. It even appeared on the Big Life niche dance label. When the follow up album “Democracy” appeared a scant two years later, my head was in a radically different space as I was getting married and at that point went out of synch with Killing Joke.

After the appearance of “Democracy” [that sounds like an oxymoron, actually] the band seemed to go “off grid” for a number of years. Only appearing again in 2003 with the second eponymous “Killing Joke” album, Notable for the appearance of Dave Grohl on the band’s drum stool. A highly ironic event considering that Killing Joke famously sued Nirvana at the height of their pomp for using the “Eighties” central hook of Walker’s as the basis for “Come As You Are.” The last two decades have seen that album go out of print and start to command high prices in the aftermarket before its reissue last year.

Since that time, the band have been in the studio an additional four times, but there have been ceaseless tours and innumerable live albums as we have now. Given how intrinsic that Geordie Walker was to the entire Killing Joke saga, it’s difficult to imagine the band continuing with a pickup guitarist and moving on with a shrug. But I’ve been terribly wrong about this feeling before with many other bands. The world needs the bitter medicine that Jaz Coleman would bring to any solo work, but whether Killing Joke can be said to exist without the potent guitar of Walker is debatable at best. Our condolences to his family, bandmates, and friends during this time of loss.

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