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‘One time, we achieved levitation’: Killing Joke’s Jaz Coleman on magic, mysticism and mourning

In his first interview since the death of the influential band’s guitarist, Geordie Walker, the singer talks about their friendship, transhumanism and his fears that rogue AI will destroy the world

Playing a semi-acoustic Gibson ES-295 – an instrument once used by Elvis Presley’s guitarist Scotty Moore – but downtuned a tone, with heavier strings and a delay effect, Walker gave the band’s post-punk-industrial-dance hybrid a beautiful intensity which Coleman once compared to “fire in heaven”. So they recruited Walker and bassist Martin Glover (AKA Youth, later a prolific record producer) by the more conventional means of an advert in weekly music paper Melody Maker. However, he is disturbed that almost 60% of the population live in poverty and warns that the UK is headed the same way, blaming “the succession of governments culminating in the current prime minister, whose wealth in contrast to what people are suffering really is obscene.

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