Review:

on 2013-02-27 CharlesMartel Said:

This is a very bleak and oppressive album and one for which I suspect you have to have lived through the times and in the place for it to have any real meaning for you. It is not easy to get into and the fact that over 30 years have passed since it came out have not made any difference to that. It was an album which encapsulated the seething boredom of life on a bleak urban council estate in some Midlands former industrial town.

Looking back, this was an important output for it marked the beginning of heavy metal revival/rethink under new genres. Metallica and the rest simply copied this style and based their careers on it. At the time it came out it was innovative, even shocking. But while successive generations of musical shock artists have somewhat inured us to the shock that this album was upon its release, it remains a classic of a style of music which mirrored the frustrations and tensions of the inner-city youth who came to be known as the forgotten generation.

"Killing Joke" was an album of its time and its place. This was an album which conveyed the hopelessness of life in urban Britain right at the start of Margaret Thatcher's premiership. But it has, unlike many others which held that mantle, survived its time well. It mirrors the bleakness of the surroundings; it reminds you that the good old days were not that good at all  in fact they were mostly pretty shit. Above all it is an album which marks the passage of Old England to the new  and the new was not as potentially appealing as a return to the old values promised to be, if only we could somehow recreate them.

Yet Killing Joke had their roots firmly in the disaffected urban underground underclass that spawned punk, kids who had grown up with no prospects at all. By contrast, the early metal bands of the late sixties and seventies, drew their inspiration from the industrial landscape of the time and the place, and the social consequences thereof. The big difference was this. Working in a heavy industrial factory may not have been fantastic - but you were working.

Above all, this is an album of the present  the present being 1980. Yet, with the rise of a new generation of lost youth, ironically the children of the previous generation, and the awful societal consequences of decisions made back then to consign a proportion of the population to the lumpenproletariat, pen them into sink estates with shitty housing, shitty education, shitty healthcare, little or no job opportunities and a lifestyle ruined by booze and drugs and allowed to continue solely on welfare, this album has once more become relevant. This is now the album for the uneducated teenager spending his time in poorly lit streets drinking cheap white cider by the litre; this is the album for the fifteen year old girl who sees the only way out her hopeless existence is to get knocked up, then the Council will put her and her kid with the equally hopeless existence into her own flat; this is the album for the 28-year old woman with six kids by six different fathers who always has enough money to buy 20 tabs, but never enough to give the kids a decent meal.

The classic track off the album, and the one which defines it in many ways, was "Requiem". A pulsing synthesiser gives way to a dense thudding drum beat and lyrics that present as if struggling to be shouted out. When the guitars and bass finally kick in, a dense, heavy and frankly depressing sound emerges and rumbles along, smashing everything out of its path. The more you listen to it, the more you realise. This is not nice music.

In many ways it is difficult to listen to this album now as the context in which it came out has gone. If you were not there at the time it must be incredibly difficult to find anything to take away from this music. 1980 was a bleak year in the UK. We had just gone through a decade of the worst government ever, and the country had been brought virtually to its knees by incompetent politicians, selfish and greedy corporations and politically corrupted trade unions. What we got was Thatcher, who went on to complete the destruction of Old England. Without that backdrop, it is perhaps hard to comprehend the bleak, post-industrial, urban wasteland theme of the album. The Sex Pistols had sneered no future as far back as 1977. That future had arrived by 1980, and Killing Joke's first album captured its essence perfectly. It is now capturing the essence of 2013 equally well.
Rating: 7/10