It’s been silent on the blogging front of late, as you may have noticed.
You may thing that means not much has been happening, but in fact, the opposite has been true. Something had to give, so there wasn’t any time to blog.
I have plenty to write about, but still no time to do the actual writing.
This entry is also being squeezed in before I head off to Brussels in the car for a two night stint of Killing Joke at the Ancienne Belgique.
The band aren’t coming to Amsterdam this time and, well, this time it’s a bit special. With the recent sad death of bassist, Paul Raven, the band have reunited with the original line-up that hasn’t played together since 1982. That means Youth on bass and Paul Ferguson on drums. Apparently, the idea of the reunion was hatched at Raven’s funeral.
Not only that, but they’ll be playing their first two albums tonight in their entirety. Tomorrow, they’ll play the full Pandemonium album, plus the singles recorded for Island in 1979 to 1980. So, it’s not your usual band standard mix of songs through the ages, plus the requisite crowd-pleasers. No, this time, we get the seminal early material through to 1981, plus the band’s favourite album, Pandemonium.
I’d rather not have to spend a night away from home — I miss my children if I’m away from them for more than about four hours — but, like I said, this is a bit special. I also had to ask myself, ‘Which bands would I still make the effort for? If not for the Joke, then for whom?’
I once missed a red-eye flight to Texas, where I would have attended the 2003 Ruby conference. Instead, I stayed on at Slim’s in San Francisco to see the end of Killing Joke’s performance there. That made it a pretty expensive ticket, but in return, it was a hell of a gig.
Besides, there are few people as angry as Jaz Coleman when he’s on stage. Aged 48 now, he still really means it. As I hurtle towards the grave myself, I don’t notice any diminishing of my own levels of bile and gall. In Jaz, I find a kindred spirit and I like the hellish noise his band makes, too; once described by Paul Ferguson as “the sound of the earth vomiting”.
And so I head to the Belgian capital this afternoon for a night of cathartic spleen venting. And then a good night’s sleep, a walk through the old city, a few photos, some good food, coffee, and a second night of purging oneself in the company of like-minded people.
At least, I hope they’ll be like-minded people. They may just be a bunch of dispassionate, complacent zombies, the like of which I’ve suffered before at concerts on the European continent.
But with the US about to elect another misguided fool to continue the flow of billions in military aid to Israel and prolong America’s self-assumed role of policeman to the world, imposing its own peculiar brand of pseudo-democracy in the pursuit of self-enrichment, there’s still a surfeit of things to be angry about in the world.
So, perhaps now, more than ever before, the world needs Killing Joke. I know I do.