Killing Joke: ‘The possibilities are endless’

“Considering that almost this time last year I nearly died and I’ve come back from the dead, everything’s a bonus,” says the 62-year-old, reflecting on his sudden hospitalisation while in Mexico last May. Coleman’s problems had begun with sudden “massive weight loss” followed by a period where he “went beserk”. “They took me to Mexico City Hospital where I went into a coma,” he recalls. “It was a diabetes coma – I didn’t even know I had diabetes.”

Before that he’d had a bout of Covid which, he says, must have brought on an existing condition which was misdiagnosed. Despite losing 40 per cent of his bodyweight, he managed to make it back to the UK where he saw a diabetes specialist. “Since August 5, I’ve managed to heal myself by going to the gym and eating properly and having people with diabetes storming in, and I’ve managed to put most of the weight back on,” he says. “At the hospital they’d said, ‘I think we’ve lost him’, but it was not to be. I came back and here we are.” He says the experience has transformed him “in the sense that for all the terrible things that are going on in the world now, I feel committed to my artform and making the world as beautiful as I can”.

“I feel at peace with myself and I’m glad,” he adds. “When I saw Geordie (Walker, Killing Joke’s guitarist), for example, I said to him, ‘We aren’t Westlife; I really believe in our work’. I had to consider it all. Out of our band has come a global network of wonderful people.”

Next month Killing Joke embark upon a UK tour with an accompanying EP, Lord of Chaos. Having predicted a couple of years ago that the world was destined for major upheaval, Coleman says the conflict in Ukraine “sadly doesn’t surprise” him. “I live in eastern Ukraine, I’ve been a visitor to Russia on a few occasions. Everybody knows the geopolitical problems there and whatever I say really is going to make very little difference,” he says. “I’m old enough to remember when (Soviet Foreign Minister) Eduard Shevardnadze was told by George Baker III there would be no eastward expansion of NATO. The weak spot in Russia, as Bismarck always said, is through Ukraine. But it’s terrible. I hate all war.”

In a recent blog, Coleman wrote about being “in a state of high alert for the most part of (his) 62 years” and of feeling a sense of convergence and destiny. Today he says he has always seen the band and its fans as the meeting point for a new counterculture. “I’m not the only one in Killing Joke who sees it like that,” he says. “Both Geordie and Youth for sure at different times in our career have participated with that. Counterculture is the one thing that has always inspired me, it changes life, we’ve proved that beyond any shadow of a doubt, and the possibilities are endless.

“We were very privileged, Big Paul (Ferguson, Killing Joke’s drummer) and myself. We met when I was 18 and he was 20 and we started our career in one of the buildings of the Tavistock Institute, of all places. One of the books that got bandied around was Between Two Ages by Brzezinski and all the Tavistock people were quoting from this book about the future of the world being a technotronic age where everything from population control to you name it, all the incredible things of the 21st century, they were going to happen, and so of course we had an idea of what was coming. From teenagers we were well informed.”

He recalls meeting Ferguson within two days of moving to Notting Hill in 1978; within months they had formed one of post-punk’s most potent bands.

“Ultimately I am a mystic,” Coleman says. “When I look at the series of immaculately timed coincidences I’m in a state of awe when I consider it all, and if you’d told me back then Killing Joke would go on to affect people’s lives all over the world, I wouldn’t have been surprised at all. It seems completely natural. We knew as the world developed, the importance of our work would be amplified.”

Since the 1990s Coleman has had a parallel career as a classical composer. “I’ve sold more classical records than I have with Killing Joke,” he says.

They have included symphonic adaptations of music by Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. His 2019 album with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, Magna Invocatio, was a gnostic mass inspired by Killing Joke. It was, he says, a “very emotional” project. “There was no money to do it until a week before I went off to Russia to record. I had a dream about being in the Winter Palace and this magnificent orchestra playing, then it all happened.”

Killing Joke play at O2 Academy Leeds on April 8. killingjoke.co.uk