Jaz Coleman - Highway from hell, stairway to heaven

- Your previous album, KJ 2003, was a very political album, very much influenced by war in Iraq. "Hosannas from the basements of hell" sounds much more spiritual, like a celebration of life after going through hell and back...

- Absolutely. This is quite a conscious decision, I think everybody knows that the world is absolutely corrupt from the top to the bottom. I started out wanting to go to war zones with this album, but our values in KJ and what I value as an individual is to be with my people, my friends, to value and cherish life. KJ concerts, as you know, are very dear to me, they've become rituals, places where I meet old friends. I wanted to celebrate the ritual that we know as a live KJ concert. And I wanted to lift people's spirits up. Many people I know are very depressed with the world, I know people whose depression is so bad they're suicidal. I wanted to put a smile on people's faces, yet without losing the power. So this record is a celebration for us. And the lyrics are definitely more introspective and inward-looking. I'm not on the soapbox preaching so much. (Laughs)

- So you didn't go to war zones?

- Yes, I did. I went to Uzbekistan to put the strings down, I put some percussions down in Beirut, I wrote the lyrics to "Lightbringer" in the Taipei airport, in Taiwan. I did a few things here and there, I did some vocals in a couple of other places, they weren't so much war zones, but poverty zones. And it just made me appreciate everything that we have, that we've built all these years, this lifestyle, this existence. Killing Joke is a way of living. In fact, I want to take it one stage further. I want to make Killing Joke into an order. I want to make our value system into something tangible, like the villages and the farms. Of course, this is my goal.

- What were your main sources of inspiration lyrically? You talk about the cathartic power of music, for instance, about violent impulse that you exorcise through music.

- Absolutely. Especially in the title track, it's something I have to deal with every day. One of my classical records has sold 2 million copies, I haven't had a single penny for it yet. Sometimes I think about the guy who's keeping this money and, although I'm using legal means to retrieve money, our legal systems do not protect anything but the corporations. In a day, I have to deal with a lot of negative thoughts about people, sometimes I just think: "OK, if you win, I'm just gonna shoot your bollocks off, then I'll go to prison for 3 years". I have to deal with anger like this. And then I forget it all when I play with Killing Joke, it just lifts the burden away. If you ever see me after a KJ concert, which you have, it's the one time in my life I feel a complete sense of peace. It's the most peculiar thing, after all the mayhem and the noise... And I also meet so many old friends. So KJ is, has been and will be my therapy, and I hope for a lot of other people too. I try to be honest about this, you know, "I harbour thoughts of killing you" ("Hosannas..."), it's quite simple. These are really violent thoughts I have. Occasionally, I'm an impulsive person. Music is literally part of my therapy. (Laughs)

- As far as the atmosphere is concerned, Hosannas... reminded me of a cross between "Fire dances", for its hedonistic aspect, and "Extremities...", for its anger...

- It's pretty much the same configuration. When we play predominantly with Paul (Raven) on bass, it gives a different chemistry than Youth. Both have got their virtues. So, I think you're right, although we don't analyse anything before we play it, we just play, once we can get everybody together. (Laughs) There's very little intellectual process going down. When we're all smiling and laughing and we get on a good groove, then everything's good and that's it.

- Talking about Youth, I think he didn't take part in the recording of Hosannas... at all?

- No, because Raven really wanted to be back with KJ and put more time in it than Youth. So it naturally went towards Raven, besides, Youth is a little bit frightened of going on stage. That's because he looks like a geography teacher. (Laughs maniacally) Raven is so much better than Youth on stage and, of course, he helps with all my backing vocals and practical things like that, whereas I dread every time Youth gets near a microphone. (Laughs)

- Do you still consider him a full-time member of KJ?

- Yes, I do. With KJ, I never say never. As long as there's always a configuration of three, I don't mind. I don't really like it if it's just me and Geordie, although predominantly, I guess we're the senior members. (Laughs) There's no hierarchy in KJ, but, in terms of the final say, the senior members obviously have the main vote. It has to be like this, some people have to take this on from year to year and those are the people who suffer the most and go to the top. (Laughs) This month, we're formally making Raven a permanent member of the "Security Council". Hahahahah

- Could you tell me more about the cover? Why did you choose this particular painting and how did you meet Victor Safonkin?

- Victor is a Russian Surrealist. He lives in Prague and exhibits his work permanently there. Raven can talk about the world of art all day and night, but even though I love my Surrealism, I don't really have a great interest in other areas of art. It's a bit like Picasso with music, he never listened to music. (Laughs) So Raven said: "Have a look at this artist" and I saw his work first and I really liked it. The second time I went there, Victor Safonkin was there and he was doing the painting that you see on the front. He was just finishing it and it was strange because, when I met him, we were already halfway through the recording and it was like he had been painting the kind of experiences and weirdness that we felt working in this tiny basement room where we recorded everything. We decided to work using very minimalist equipment, etc. on this record. The experiences between the band members seem to be mirrored by the artwork that I saw Victor Safonkin finishing as we were coming to the end of the recording (note: entitled "Inhuman rearing"). So it was like: "THAT'S IT! THAT'S WHAT I WANT!". And then there was the process of getting it, we went from about 40,000 pounds... down. Hahah That was Victor's first price, but we said: "Oh, we're just a poor band!". And we worked it out and everything was good. His son is a big KJ fan, which is very funny. (Laughs) So he started playing our music to his father and it's one of those wonderful coincidences, when you have a series of immaculately-timed coincidences, this is the hand of God working. You know that I believe very much in that. So that's how it worked and I'm so proud of the artwork. When I show it to my partner, she's completely horrified by it every time, and I know it's the right artwork. Some people find it actually repulsive. But if I think about the kind of artwork that I was looking for before I saw Victor's work, I really liked the cover of Skinny Puppy's "Too dark park", it really described their session. Instead of having one focal point, like on the last album cover, which I don't like at all, I wanted to have real depth and lots of different images that you'll keep looking at for the next 10 to 15 years and be finding something. So it was a hard one to do and it all came together in one day! I was blown away and extremely happy.

- Is Victor also responsible for the rest of the booklet?

- It's amazing! It's the best packaging. I'm personally overseeing it myself and Paul Raven had a lot to do with it. We basically agreed on what we really wanted in it. We looked at a lot of bands and their packaging. Of course, remembering that KJ started out as a vinyl band, when you think about the size of artwork then and you look at a CD booklet, which is 6" x 6" or whatever, I find the content of the packaging disappointing, with a few exceptions. The one thing that's gonna make people definitely buy the album, instead of downloading and cheat us as a band, is by putting things on the packaging that you simply won't get anywhere else. The other point is that we're having at least 3,000 double albums made up with all the artwork as vinyl. I've already ordered 50 copies! (Laughs) We're gonna have a first edition, a second edition and a third edition. We've written quite a lot of tracks that we really like and there will be different configurations of the artwork on the second and third editions. So it's forever changing. The single's a good example: there are two other tracks on it, if we could have fitted them all on the album, I would have put them on, so it's not like they're B-sides, they're tracks that we'll be playing live as well. So I feel like we're giving. For anyone who's remotely interested in KJ, there's a lot of music there. So we'll conclude that magnificent packaging plus different editions has been a point that I wanted to rectify on the last album. On KJ 2003, we were dealing with my very horrible manager, who has since been fired. I'm suing him, so watch this space very carefully. The artwork for it was done while we were away, by the time I came back, I just thought: "Well, it's got the puke-like colours of the Sex Pistols and it's got this kind of picture that looks like one of KJ's minders, Eddie, who used to be in the French Foreign Legion", he's quite a tough guy, and it looked like his face! I just let it go because I just couldn't be bothered arguing at that stage, with all that we went through on that last record. It's amazing we finished it, seeing as we don't even have a contract for it. (Laughs) That, of course, also works to our advantage too!

- I've been reading the lyrics to "Lightbringer" and I was wondering if the song was about the Anunnaki? (note: the Anunnaki are Sumerian gods, but, according to certain theories, they were extraterrestrial creatures who landed on Earth thousands of years ago to bring new scientific knowledge to mankind and even tamper with the human DNA).

- Yes, of course it is. If you go back to the first book of the Bible, Genesis, which of course means the "genes (or DNA) of Isis", there's this famous part in it (chapter 6, verse 8) which says: "There were giants in the Earth in those days and when the sons of God came into the world, great men were born, men of renown". We also have to take into consideration that the "lightbringer" in Christian terminology is Lucifer, but if you look at the mystery traditions, it's completely the opposite. If you look at the image of Adam and Eve and the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the snake is never fully explained. It is of course a character called Father Enki, who basically took pity on Homo Sapiens and gave them autonomy. This is really the occult definition of this entity called "Shaitan", it is not a negative connotation, he's the one who gave us number, proportion, measurement and angle, mathematics, farming, medicine. None of these things, especially mathematics and the binary system, evolved, they appeared overnight. These are the facts. If you look at the Great Pyramid alone, you can see there's 22 blocks and each block weighs 4 Jumbo jets. There are only 2 cranes in the world that can lift this. However bad you might see the world, this entity gave man the choice of good or evil, but in the end, it's still our own choice. And I do believe that the "sons of God" were certainly another race of beings, who didn't necessarily have Homo Sapiens's best interests at heart. Do I believe that man has been genetically modified in the past? Yes, I do. If you look at that line: "The sons of God came in unto the daughters of man" and "great men were born, men of renown", I think this says it all, then you see the bloodline and my continued commitment to this line of thinking, spiritually and in every way, is no secret. I resigned from two major orders in 1991, because I felt that it was more important to have a big heart. The heart chakra, everything is the heart. People look at ideas of Tantra and they just see the sexual side of it, but what they don't realize is that without opening the heart chakra, this cannot work. It is of course the idea of love, the idea that the heart is the key. So in 1991, I resigned from two orders I'd been part of for 20 years and the strange thing is, in recent years, I've kept all my contacts and, after going through many things, I feel like I'm ready to start talking about some of these things. There was a lot of secrecy about the occult movement in the past, and that's because you were normally tortured or burnt to the stake. Hahahah But "occult" just means "hidden", I see no reason for secrecy in this day and age. I think if, as Mahatma Gandhi said, God is truth, God, we must presume, would not want us to accept dogma. I see many people in orthodox, for example, Christian faith who are too frightened to question not only the morality of the writing that they subscribe to, but its authorship. They're too frightened to even do it because of this very powerful fear which is the fires of Hell. For the second part of my life, I want to talk with people about that, if we look at the ancient idea of this, the fire just burnt away impurity, it's an alchemical symbol. You go from lead, and your heart is weighed on the scales of Libra against a feather, which is called Maàt, the goddess of balance and truth. What it means is that everybody, even Saddam Hussein, will have redemption in the end. So why is there any reason to fear? This fear has been used to manipulate people and this is the gift we can give our next generation: Being fearless whilst having a true morality.

- Not needing the fear of retribution to act in a way that's morally right…

- Absolutely! The blood that runs through my veins is of Hindu extraction, Brahmin, and it's hard to shake away that DNA in me. But I would say that I speak for the majority of Killing Joke: I'd say that we essentially subscribe to the idea of incarnation and reincarnation and the laws of Karma.

- What is your relationship to India now? You said you weren't attracted to it…

- If you go back as far as the "Revelations" album, there's "The Pandys are coming", which is very dear to me because I come from a pandit family in India and it's a big shadow on my life, it's a strange thing. I was brought up in a very English environment and this is when I really started to have a big identity crisis in me. My two great heroes in life are Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill, for example, and they were both at war with each other. Churchill put Gandhi in jail during the best part of the war. He said that Mahatma Gandhi was "a half naked fakir" who was forbidden to see the king, when Gandhi was talking about independence. So, you see, I'm at war with myself, even in my DNA. Whereas I also look at Winston Churchill and I think: He was the man to protect England and he had the courage to make hard decisions at the right time. I know of the work of a great magician who did Churchill's astrology when he was a young man and it showed that he was going to come to an ascendancy during the war years. My point being that, at a certain point in my life, being at war with myself, I decided to study not just classical music, but at the same time do oriental studies. I had the chance of studying music in Cairo or New Delhi. And I didn't really want to go to India, I don't identify with this culture, although I come from an Indian family, it's one of those strange things in life. I've never been attracted to it, it reminds me of Youth lighting joss sticks. (Laughs) So I chose Cairo to do my oriental studies and, before this, I also studied in DDR and in Minsk, in Belarus. From the age of six, the Eastern influence in orchestra definitely blew me away, I studied Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and these were just my favourite composers as a child. So the Near East and the Middle East really attracted me, the Far East not so much. These places were where I did my real education and Killing Joke financed that, when I think about it. I went to these places and met these masters and studied with them. And then Prague is a Mecca for all composers, Beethoven wrote his ninth symphony there, Mozart wrote so many works, as well as Haydn. And it has a mystery tradition. You can see why on this record, getting Killing Joke to live as a band in Prague has made it a band effort. It's really about a band playing there what they want to play. And that's the music you hear. (Laughs)

- I hear that, on the previous album, you weren't all in the studio at the same time…

- No, and Geordie hates this album for that. On Hosannas…, he refused to do anything but one guitar. He refused point blank. When you look at a lot of the modern bands, like Trent Reznor's band, I really like some of the music, but what they're doing, and what a lot of people are doing and we did on the last record, is play the guitar four times in order to get this huge density of sound. But ultimately, it's false. This is Geordie's philosophy. I'm trying to tell you because he's not a guy who really likes talking to the press that much, as you know. (Laughs) He said: "I'll do one live take with everything when we play it and that's it". He was absolutely resolute about this. So I thought, OK, fair enough. Then Benny (Calvert) is such a great player, because he also played one take on this album, whereas on the album before, the way that Dave gets this really big sound, and it's a great way of recording, is tracking the drums even, so the drums are all on separate tracks: First you do the kick, then the snare, then you do the tom-tom separately, etc. I had never worked like this before, although it gives superficially really fantastic results. Geordie didn't want this either. (Bursts out laughing) So everybody had loads of fun and during this writing and recording period, we were also playing concerts everywhere as a working band, paying the fuckin rent. A band is more difficult than marriage! (Laughs) It was some sort of return to the roots, when you all live around the corner from each other and you can knock on each other's door or meet at your local bar, then go to Faust studio, that's a great ritual. The story of this is on the album. I hope you enjoy it because it's all true, but it's a surreal experience that was the making of this record. Everybody went fuckin nuts and it was great fun. The "basements of hell", if you ever have the privilege to go there, is this Art Deco building in Prague 6, which is owned by a friend of ours, with a studio with very basic equipment. Downstairs, you have these huge winding tunnels and this big wine cellar, with so many rooms in, I've done art exhibitions down there, it's an amazing space. It was not just for rehearsals, in the end we recorded the whole album down there because one minute you're recording and the next, you have to get ready for a concert… We ended up putting chairs there and people would come. Upstairs by the studio, we have a barbecue and in the end, we invited a few gatherers to come (note: the Gathering being the community of KJ fans). We had really happy summer months, while we were doing the festivals and recording. There was enough time for Geordie to go fishing, etc. And we recorded very cheaply in our basement, which is the approach to old recordings, like the Motown recordings or great old tape recordings. We mixed the record with Mark Lusardi, who did our very first record. All the way through the session, he was going "I know you love my mixing, but I haven't seen you for 26 years!". (Laughs) So it's quite funny, the last time I saw him, I was 19! It was great working with him and we mixed the whole album on huge radio speakers. It's got a really different atmosphere and I have to say it's honest. It's like on the "Garage, inc." EP - I own it because Metallica covers "The wait" on it - basically the idea is to record with inferior equipment. In a way, it's getting back to the roots, unless you absolutely want to spend hundreds of thousand pounds recording, which is the way recordings have gone in the past, because, before you get to the other expenses of a band, you're paying 1,200 pounds a day just for the studio, to which you have to add the accommodation, etc. So you can start getting the idea of what a recording budget's all about. With this place and this recording, we managed to get by all these problems by living in a beautiful European city, living around the corner from each other and doing concerts at the same time that we were recording. And that was good. I think the band that "preys" together stays together... (Laughs) I only had 3 violent occasions with a member of the band on this album, but it's all OK, it's all civilized after we have a cup of tea and stuff. But Prague is a city that can send people crazy, everything is cheaper than everywhere else in the European Union, we really had a nice place to stay, there was a flat above the studio as well, so it was a totally entertaining time. A classic recording. (Bursts out laughing)

- I also wanted to talk about the "Gems of power" recordings, due out sometime this year. Do they expand on the themes developed in "The Courtauld Talks"?

- This is a different approach. Instead of me lecturing, this is about showing people the creative process that you don't need money for and that can take you wherever you want to go. This creative process has worked well for me. So it's basically a hands-on approach to using your dreams the same way the Surrealists used their dreams, like Dali: For instance the techniques of falling asleep awake and then have this affect your artwork or whatever you're creating. There are certain things I demand people get, like a map of the world, and using your dreams with a map of the world. Techniques like these, that liberate. I also talk about "The art of war", which works well for me. It contains 5 basic principles before you set out to do anything. I go through a normal morning with me, I call it "Breakfast at Jaz Coleman's". I talk about how I overcome certain things sometimes and I'm completely frank about it. (Laughs) I also talk about my depression, how I can turn that into something essentially positive. How to overcome certain difficulties in life, even though everything's really expensive and everybody's in a state of economic slavery, how we can go about to attack some of these things, just on a very individual and personal level. That's what "Gems of power" is about.

- You've been doing lectures over the past few years and I wanted to know if it was important for you to express your ideas in a more theoretical or "academic" manner, rather than just through your song lyrics?

- Yes, I think so now. I think people need to know how to survive and get tips from an old man. (Laughs) We have to be more precise about what Killing Joke is, I think we have to define it, it was never just a band for me, ever. Iceland was the beginning of this and now we'll complete it. I really believe this. The book I want to finish, I want it to be as important as Marx was to Socialism, this is to permaculture, free energy, freedom and freedom-loving individuals. I want to write a thesis on how to survive with no money in this world and the best options. The whole of Killing Joke has been towards this one dream, for me. I think the book will be in two parts, some people just want the music, but what I write first is the ideas that made the music, as much as the music itself. What we were reading, what everyone was studying, what we did, who we met, how that changed the way we looked at things, our experiments and their outcomes. It will be our guide not just on how to survive, but to thrive. How to make the best of anything.

- You've been composing several classical pieces, like "Music of the quantum", "The war concerto", etc. over the past few years. Are there plans to record them?

- Sure! Basically, I follow the Walt Disney line of thought, I write ten years ahead of me. So from now on, I can release an album every year for the next ten years in my life. So if I die, I'm gonna leave them all to the Gatherers, to make sure it happens and people can be helped with the finances of this. Because you never can tell, can you? (Laughs softly)

- What were the most important books you ever read?

- There's such a big list, I really don't know where to begin: "Between two ages" by Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was the adviser of President Carter, as far as novels are concerned, I'd say "Spring snow" by Yukio Mishima, it tore me up, as well as Big Paul, and "Love like blood" is the outcome of that, "The magus" by John Fowles. Poetry: when I read "Little gidding" by T. S. Eliot, I can never reach the end, it breaks my heart too much, that's a great poem about everything I love about England and everything that's gone. I think Killing Joke's film is "The last wave" by Peter Weir, none of us could speak after we saw this, obviously "Apocalypse now", "Equus" with Richard Burton, this is absolutely superb. Classical music: Tchaikovsky's sixth, Beethoven's ninth, seventh, fifth and third, I think Rachmaninoff's number 2 piano concerto, second movement, is from God. Tannhäuser and Parsifal by Wagner, but the music, not the opera.

Books again: as a romance, I love "Possession" by A. S. Byatt. An Icelandic novel really influenced me and Geordie: "Christianity at Glacier", Glacier being a holy place in Iceland, where Geordie and I worked. It was written by a Nobel prize nominee from Iceland, Halldor Laxness.

Philosophers: Spinoza...

- Nietzsche?

- I tell you what's interesting about Nietzsche and Wagner and the key to them is Leipzig university. They both dated the same girl, my first wife bought her autobiography, and her depiction of these two guys is very funny, so you laugh, then you understand everything. Nietzsche lived with his mom, she could never get him to have sex. (Laughs) The guy who dreamed up the superman! Hahahah And Wagner was a complete egocentric, who shagged everything. I can't remember her name at the moment (note: Lou Andreas Salomé). I'll try and find the book for you. So no, not Nietzsche, although I like "Zarathustra". Jimmy Page likes Nietzsche very much. I don't, a little bit too homo-erotic for me. Spinoza's great because he believes in pantheism, that man, god and nature are one.

Eliphas Levi, John Dee, Rudolf Steiner, of course, some Crowley, Nema (or Maggie Crosby, as her real name was). Salvador Dali, people who experience different dimensions.

Can, Public Image Ltd, Killing Joke, Joy Division, I put them way ahead of most of them. It was freedom from punk, that was something else that came from it.

- What are your plans for this year? I heard that you would also be working with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra...

- That's right and I'm forever juggling dates because of Killing Joke's commitments. We're waiting for all the dates to come in at the moment. We're doing a world tour, it certainly looks like that at the moment, unless something tragic happens, which I think is probably likely. We're doing a ten-day tour of France, I know that's being organized now, then I believe we'll be doing England and then we're off to the States and to whacked-out places. Then there are some festivals throughout the summer and I know we'll be playing in London in May, we're just talking about that, maybe two nights. Then we're holding the Brixton Academy for the very end of the year, as far as English gigs go. I think we'll be doing 4 to 5 English gigs on this British tour. We'll get everything out on the Website as soon as we know. I know we'll be doing some of the Far East, not just Japan this time, Indonesia and some crazy places. We're also doing South America. We have great travel agents so any of the Gathering who want to can come on these journeys, we always like it when we see old faces.

Interview conducted in Paris, on January 16th, 2006 by Marie Lecocq.

Photos: JP Coillard

Thanks a lot to Tanguy from Wagram for his help and patience and to Jaz for his friendliness.

Official site

Album out on April 3rd.