Very sad to hear that the big man with the big sound Kevin ‘Geordie’ Walker has gone…my condolences to his family, friends and fellow artists. He was certainly an early hero of mine and my small circle of wayward friends. I learned to play guitar to tracks like ‘Frenzy’ on the cheap spanish acoustic I’d begged from my cash-strapped family for Christmas. You can imagine how disappointed my mum must have been that I wasn’t learning Simon and Garfunkel and was opting for this racket.
Attaching heavy gauge strings to a hollow body guitar and bringing it to a playable tension ( downtuned by the standards of the day when everyone played in E ) meant that Killing Joke had a sound that no one was ever going to get near. And that’s an addition to the fact these guys were incredible musicians / artists anyway – Youth’s basslines completed the tonal magic giving Geordie’s fractured riffing a moody, shifting fundamental to sit upon.
Whatever happens now, Killing Joke leave a legacy of sound that is untouched.
Old Man's Mettle 