Brighter Than A Thousand Suns: Geordie Walker 1958 – 2023

We grow with music. We grow old with music. We grow up with music. We grow sideways with music.

A fresh listen to an old song can reveal manifold things that we didn’t hear the first, the 18th or the 88th time we heard it. It is cruel to presume music is static because music requires the listener to close the loop, and we are not static. We are not the person we were when we heard something in 1980 or 1998, and it is only reasonable – in fact it is essential – to include our experience in the act of listening. Of course, an old song is also a mnemonic (it may instantly evoke who we were, where we were, and who we were with when we first heard it), just as important is everything we have heard and experienced since a piece of music came into our lives. The innovation and skill of an artist like the late Geordie Walker, who passed suddenly on November 26 at age 64, has only revealed itself more as we grew up, out and older.

I was certainly impressed by Geordie Walker of Killing Joke when I first heard him in 1979; and even in the context of that simpler and more naïve time, I intuited that Killing Joke was a singular, striking and powerful band. Killing Joke was, simultaneously, the sound of the tread of grim, determined tanks and the cries of the civilians being crushed underneath the machines. I also recall this was my earliest (general) reaction to the band: Circa ‘79/’80, a kind of simple, spare, occasionally twee neo-funk was in the air – think of A Certain Ratio, ESG, Pigbag, Adele Bertei, Bush Tetras and so on – but nobody seemed to be doing it as if they were a rabid punk rock dog with its’ teeth locked into the legs of the Stooges. Killing Joke replaced the, oh, respect and gentility of most of the funk-dusted post punk with something that seemed more akin to the rage and fury of NWOBHM, Oi, or early hardcore. I first saw the band live on New Year’s 1980/81 at a vault-like nightclub on West Broadway called the Rock Lounge. Killing Joke were suitably un-festive and seemed vaguely uncomfortable in a space that seemed distinctively too bank-like and pink for them. Nevertheless, I was deeply whooomped by the almost impossibly handsome, stoic guitarist who threw shards of thick, icy, glacial guitar over rumbling riffs that seemed both primal and funky at the same time.

VIDEO: Killing Joke “Love Like Blood”

Forty-plus years later, my somewhat asinine WNYU-affected desire to relate Killing Joke’s crashing mirrors to, oh, Scritti Politti or APB have been textured and aged with a deep appreciation of what Geordie Walker was really up to: He combined the circular yet irregular hot and blinding sparks of Michael Karoli and Keith Levene with the Huns-on-the-March stompthomp of Ron Asheton, all baked and buttered with the metronomic chunka-whooarr-chunka of Hawkwind. The result of all that was a unified sound that somehow welded the power of Blackmore, Asheton or Dave Brock with a crushed-crystal spray that recalled the needlebag dissonance, fury, threat, and endless harmonic potential of Tony Conrad, Schoenberg, Webern, Catherine Christer Hennix (of whom I shall speak more of later) or Glenn Branca. That’s what time and a widening of my tastes revealed to me (to cite our opening paragraph): Geordie Walker used the guitar the way Conrad used the viola or Hennix used the treated harpsichord, even if the context was different. In fact, in the 23rd year of the 21st century, that’s mostly what I hear when I listen to Geordie Walker: someone who, in this (just) pre-Moore/Renaldo era, invented a vocabulary for loud electric guitar within a rock ensemble that spoke with the same language of dissonance, and grace that the great avant garde adventurers used when they created their Holy Hymns to Satanic Mills.

Between 1979 and 1982 – that is, until and through Killing Joke’s third studio album, Revelations, Killing Joke provided Walker with the perfect thumbtack-studded oily old catcher’s mitt into which to fit his hot rash of a sound. See, Walker wasn’t the only genius in Killing Joke: drummer Paul Ferguson implicitly understood that Killing Joke – this vastly forward-thinking mixture of funk, noise, acid/speed Saint Vitus Dance and sludgey goat sacrifice ritual — needed a THUMPER: someone who played with precision but not finesse, and who could evoke the muddy boots of a whole army in the rumbling of the toms. Like some of my favorite rock drummers of the last 50 years – Slade’s Don Powell, Tommy Ramone, Nick Knox of The Cramps, Martin Atkins (of PiL, Pigface, and sometimes even Killing Joke), and Jola (Adam Ant/the Priscillas) — Ferguson understood that the crash and ride cymbals are to be used very, very, very sparingly, and only when you’ve got a goddamn good reason to use them. (Crash and ride cymbals are the Jimmy Fallon of the drum kit: unsubtle, unnecessary, overbearing, demanding of attention, and totally worth throwing into an industrial size smelter.) Because of Ferguson, Killing Joke rolls and rumbles, conjuring, with almost every bar of music on those first three albums, a very hungry, very determined, very confident army marching across the steppes, knowing that winter is on their side and they have plenty of dry kindling for their fires. There’s real genius in bassist Youth, too: On these first three albums – especially on the first two – his playing is deep, empty, open and so minimal you sometimes wonder if he was off having a smoke during the recording of some of the tracks. One of the very hardest things for any musician to do is to know when not to play, and it’s a quality that separates the real artists from someone who just picks up an instrument in Guitar Center.

VIDEO: Killing Joke “Eighties”

I think the ensemble peaks with 1981’s What’s THIS For…!, wherein Killing Joke seemed to really land on an astonishing, nearly revolutionary mix of Giorgio Moroder, fire-lit tribalism, Stooges/Hawkwind wall-of-sound mesmerism, dissonance, and a tight-jawed, teeth-gritted hoarse adamancy that somehow bridges punk, hardcore, speedmetal, and a Dusseldorf disco. What a goddamn amazing album. I remember thinking that it was what I wished New Order could achieve: keeping feet moving while burning down history.

(And I have to say this, and it’s bloody important: About three-quarters of the Geordie Walker obits I’ve seen so far mention the freaking “Come As You Are”/“Eighties” connection. That really gets under my skin, and here’s why: first, this is far, far from the most interesting thing about this extraordinary musician and his startling band; and, secondly, it’s just wrong. In-effing-accurate. See, that brilliant little arpeggiated earworm that opens “Come As You Are” had its’ origin in a song called “Life Goes On” by The Damned (released in 1982), NOT Killing Joke’s “Eighties,” which came out two years later. True, it’s arguable that Cobain may have first heard the riff from Killing Joke, but there is very little doubt Killing Joke stole the part lock, stock and barrel from the Damned. Personally, I think Cobain likely heard it first on the Damned song, since the way Cobain plays it is far closer in style and spirit to the way Captain Sensible plays it in 1982 then the way dear Geordie recorded it in 1984. Listen if you don’t believe me.)

AUDIO: The Damned “Life Goes On”

Where were we? Ah. I feel that the best tribute I can give to Geordie Walker is to note the very recent passing of another genius of gorgeous noise + endless possibility. Catherine Christer Hennix, the remarkable Swedish musician who created eternal landscapes out of eastern faith and western science, passed on the 19th of November at age 75. Hennix sought to realize in long form composition what Geordie’s guitar playing implied within short-form rock songs: an eternal music of fireflies and comet tails, northern lights and Sputnik blips. We live in a world where the drone of the machine age is a constant: right now, stop doing whatever it is you are doing, LISTEN, and attempt to identify all the drone sounds around you: highway, lightbulb, refrigerator, HVAC mummhumm, halogen and leaf blower…there is always a sound there, yes? Always. However, in the pre-industrial age, when our lives were accompanied “merely” by animal and organic noise and not the eternal buzz of modern convenience and tragedy, drones could be intentionally, joyfully, and practically created for their best purpose: music, worship, ecstasy, rite, relaxation.

Over the last century or so, a handful of musicians have recognized that the modern nuisance of constant machine noise could be wed to the joyous, necessary and ancient ritual of music; and by celebrating, isolating and spotlighting this, we are connecting with the rock’n’roll of eight hundred, eighteen hundred, fifteen thousand and eighty years ago.

This is what Catherine Christer Hennix did, as La Monte Young did, as Cage did, and as Sunn O))), Rhys Chatham, and (the greatest) Roedelius still does. And when I listen to Geordie Walker, when he is disguising infinite sparks in riffs, when he is offering us eternal drones bacon-wrapped in metal shards, I am hearing a fellow traveler to Catherine Christer Hennix. May the god of your choice or no god at all speed and honor their travels.

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Tim Sommer

Tim Sommer is a musician, record producer, former Atlantic Records A&R representative, WNYU DJ, MTV News correspondent, VH1 VJ, and founding member of the band Hugo Largo. He is the author of Only Wanna Be with You: The Inside Story of Hootie & the Blowfish and has written for publications such as Trouser Press, the Observer and The Village Voice. Learn more at Tim Sommer Writing.

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