OFF: Killing Joke

[gary shindler]

The Jesus Lizard were awesome, so were Scratch Acid. One of the best underrated and influential bands of the 80s. Rock music could use a lot more of someone like David Yow.

Nick Medford <nickmedford at HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 22:41:09 +0000, Jon Jarrett
wrote:


> I went to see the Melvins the night before, and we encountered
>some friends of ours who'd been to the KJ show that night; sounds as if
>they chose the wrong night to go... we had a long and protracted argument
>about who'd been to the better gig (the Melvins did, among other things,
>cover `I Wanna Hold Your Hand', `The Ballad of Dwight Fry' and `I Wanna Be
>Your Dog' with David Yeow (not that I knew who he was till afterwards)
>guesting so we thought, given that they'd also been playing their own
>stuff, that we had a good case) until the opposing side got as far as
>revealing that they thought Gong were an awful band, at which point I
>decided it was safe to discount them as creatures of this modern age of
>short attention spans whose opinions I might disregard. I think they'd be
>horrified to know that someone could be into both Gong and Killing Joke...

That would be me then. And it would probably be at least some members of KJ
themselves. After all original (and sometime current, but not right now) KJ
bassist Martin Glover (aka Youth) went on to become one half of The Orb, who
are well known to be huge Gong fans. I'd be equally sure that KJ have at
least a passing acquaintance with the classic HW material- as an exercise,
dig out yer trusty old copy of KJ's debut album (whaddaya mean ya haven't
got it??) and check out "The Wait", specifically the instrumental part at
the end. I'm not suggesting it's a steal- it's not- but it's very much in a
Hawkwind *style*.

Talking of influences, the "support band" on Friday was Alex Paterson of the
Orb doing a DJ set, which was an eccentric affair, but in amongst the
booming dub and oddball novelty songs he played "Transmission" by Joy
Division (another of my favourite bands)- now I've heard this song a good
few hundred times I should think, but I had never noticed just how utterly
Hawkwind it gets towards the end.

Anyway... David Yow, the guy from the Jesus Lizard? They're a band that
passed me by at the time, but I heard some recently and was cautiously
impressed. Anyone have any thoughts on them?

Nick



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