Killing Joke: Follow The Leaders

"The church is a fucking joke. I'm into what's beyond that. The occult if you like" : les fans auront reconnu Jaz Coleman, fascinant et déroutant leader de Killing Joke, groupe pionnier du Metal industriel tellurique dont l'œuvre, dans une formule fameuse, évoquerait "the sound of the earth vomiting"... Ainsi planté, le décor se fait autoroute pour la présente chronique et, là, excusez du peu, on convoque rien moins que le New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, les tambours du Bronx, la Rugby World Cup de 1998, les attentats du 11 septembre, les collusions du pape Pie XI avec le régime nazi, le vieil Aleister bien sûr, une panspermie trop souvent négligée par les rockers, les pyramides (égyptiennes...), l'apocalypse en Islande avec, forcément, l'insupportable farfadet des Sugarcubes - et puis, bien sûr, la polémique avec Nirvana et une louche sur ces pauvres Mötley Crüe...

Ceux qui seraient tenté, avec une aveugle allégresse toute journalistique, d'enfiler le séduisant cliché d'un Coleman sataniste à la petite semaine risquent d'en être pour leurs frais : si tout semble effectivement pousser à conclure que Coleman, rompu à l'occultisme, fan de divination et de numérologie, adepte de l'incontournable Aleister Crowley, n'est qu'un ado attardé de plus, vaguement diablophile et dévoyeur de jeunes consciences tourmentées, le bonhomme joue en fait très habilement sur plusieurs plans et s'apparente davantage à un Patton, contradictions comprises... Expert en musiques traditionnelles maori, tchèque et arabe - étudiée au conservatoire du Caire, excusez du peu - Coleman officie aussi, entre deux enregistrements métal millénariste au sein de Killing Joke, dans l'Auckland Philarmonic, le New Zealand Symphony Orchestra et l'orchestre symphonique de Prague dont il est compositeur résident... Pas impressionné, il résume en ces termes : "Well, I'm commissioned to write a certain amount of work which I then premiere and perform. So it's really just composing, and I do it about two or three times a year. It's not excessive, but it's different from Killing Joke. [Laughs] I whiz around doing different things with all of them and writing for all of them. I'm working with Les Tambours Du Bronx - they've got 17 drummers and they're all massive Killing Joke fans. I'm working with them and the Czech Philharmonic..." Si on vous dit qu'en plus, le gars a même officiellement ajouté des paroles à l'hymne national néo-zélandais avec la contribution de l'illustre Hinewehi Mohi, lors de la Rugby World Cup 1998 à Twickenham mais là, l'histoire n'intéressera que les fans d'Ovalie...

Bon on vous cachera pas que c'est davantage le côté loufedingue du gars qui nous séduit, ses proverbiales intuitions, mi-prémonitions, mi-prophéties souvent de sensibilité millénariste, sous la bienveillance éclairée de l'enseignement occulte d'Aleister Crowley comme il se doit... Ézéchiel métal, Coleman aurait ainsi, selon les fans hardcore, pressenti et/ou prédit l'attentat de Lockerbie et, bien sûr, les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 dont son titre "America", à la polysémie nostradamienne, est une évidente évocation... Et puis un gars qui cale le tempo de ses compositions, pour l'album Outside The Gate, sur des principes de numérologie antique, bon, ça se pose là en manière de pythie...

Son mysticisme ne l'empêche pas, en passant, d'être un vrai radical des familles, subversif comme un méchant punk... Une fameuse affiche de concert de Killing Joke, reprise sur la compilation Laugh? I Nearly Bought One! représentait le pape Pie XI - en fait l'abbé catholique allemand Albanus Schachleiter au congrès de Nuremberg de 1934 - bénissant gâteusement une infâme haie d'honneur de soldats nazis... Si les croix gammées ont disparu des brassards au profit des symboles du dollar américain et de la livre sterling, la blague n'a pas du tout plu aux instances de censure, on s'en doute... Coleman reste toutefois viscéralement et essentiellement illuminé - en 1994, il fait enregistrer les voix de l'album Pandemonium dans... une pyramide égyptienne : "That was an incredible experience. We bribed our way into the pyramid. We met these three Egyptologists and they knew the Minister Of Culture in Egypt. We went to see him and they told us if you want to get the Kings Chamber or the Great Pyramid to yourself you have to say you are going there for meditation purposes. So we met the minister of culture and bribed him like $3,500US and we had the Great Pyramid to ourselves for four hours each day for three days. It was a fucking incredible experience. The weird thing is that there's nothing to plug into in the Kings Chamber when you go inside the Great Pyramid so we had to take all these massive batteries with us. And every time we would charge them and go up into the Kings Chamber it would absorb nine hours of batteries and we would only have about 15 minutes of electricity to work with, so it's kind of weird. It actually absorbs all the energy from a battery, a fact people with cameras and things like that have noticed. Not that you can take cameras in there because you can't, but we did. We managed to bribe our way into it..."

Naturellement, le tout fut accompagné d'une malédiction en bonne et due forme, poursuit un Jaz tout enjoué : "I have several memories of it, when we got in there we sort of did a ceremony because the place deserves some sort of respect. Our Arabic record engineer, he fell asleep and he had some weird dream of all these eyes coming at him and he ran out screaming his head off and he has never been back since. And then there were the three Egyptologists who all walked in wearing Egyptian head dresses looking like Isis and Hathor, Egyptian goddesses, and Youth goes to me, 'who are those three birds standing at the back there?' (laughs). It was fucking funny. When we left after the first night a friend of mine Abu Setu à he's called Abu Setu because he's got like seven toes on each foot à he'd set up all these drummers and people clapping their hands, so when we came out of the pyramid there must have been 150-200 people there just clapping their hands. The sense of elation? Absolutely! I mean, who ever gets to play inside the Great Pyramid? Killing Joke is the answer (laughs). It was a marvellous experience!"

Motivé, et diversement alimenté, Coleman géra aussi personnellement en 1982 la fin du monde... Informé par une mystérieuse révélation d'origine psychotrope de l'imminence d'un cataclysme mondial destiné à régénérer la race humaine, l'ami Jaz courut se terrer en Islande avec certains de ses potes de Killing Joke, dont Geordie Walker... Inévitablement, nos réfugiés apocalyptiques croisèrent la route de Björk et ses Sugarcubes et, assez rapidement, durent se rendre à l'évidence, en mode dissonance cognitive : la fin du monde prenait du retard donc autant rentrer un peu à la maison avant... Resté en Angleterre pendant toute cette hallucinante période, Youth, le bassiste de Killing Joke, ne décolorait pas et songeait même à recruter un autre chanteur et tapa carrément à la porte d'un certain Iguane... Souvenirs : "We gigged endlessly and were so merciless taking the piss out of each other that by this last tour it was getting quite intense. I was taking vast amounts of LSD wich to be fair, was presenting quite a challenge to the rest of the band. At one point writing Revelations, I pratically forgot how to play ; I looked at my bass and it was just a lump of wood with some metal bits on it. (...) It ended up in Brighton with Jaz just not turning up. We did Top of the Pops the next night with a showroom dummy. The next we knew, he'd left London with pound in his pocket and gone to Iceland, without telling anyone. From knowing him since, I can understand it was all part of his trip, but at the time we all felt really betrayed, so we just thought, Fuck him, let's get another singer ! So we audititioned à Iggy Pop phoned our management ! à but no one could replace Jaz, so we decided to split..."... Pour corser l'ambiance, Youth qui était censé s'occuper du chat de Coleman (si, si...) pendant son trip islandais fit malencontreusement mourir la pauvre bête, s'attirant les foudres de Coleman qui refusa dès lors de travailler avec lui...

Et la fameuse polémique Nirvana qu'on vous annonçait ? Pour les retardataires, la pomme de discorde tient aux troublantes similitudes entre le célèbre "Come As You [Laugh? I Nearly Bought One!] Are" du groupe de Cobain et le titre "Eighties", écrit bien plus tôt par Killing Joke et dont Dave Grohl s'inspira fortement de toute évidence pour composer le hit de Nirvana... Notons que, bien que difficilement sujette à discussion, la bataille fait encore rage et que peu ont noté que le titre "Eighties" de Killing Joke ressemble lui-même fortement au "Life Goes On" de The Damned... En tout cas, Danny Goldberg, le manager de Nirvana, a reconnu lui-même dans un livre sur le groupe que "Kurt was nervous about 'Come As You Are' because it was too similar to a Killing Joke song"... Généreux, Coleman avoue pour sa part n'en avoir rien à battre : "When Kurt blew his bloody head off all we could think about is there is some little kid who is going to grow up without a fucking father, to my bands credit. [...] There's actually a Killing Joke movie [...] The Death And Resurrection Show and I take Dave's confession for stealing the riffs (laughs)... I don't blame Dave so much because he's just a drummer (laughs)... Our publishers are still actually livid about it and of course publishers respond differently, you can't stop them. If they think there's money in something they will do it without the band's permission. They are still talking about going in and getting some money, but I couldn't give a fuck, life's too fucking short for all that bollocks"... La classe, non ?

Allez on termine avec nos affreux de Mötley Crüe, déjà passablement égratignés dans une autre note de ces colonnes, avec qui Killing Joke partagea une tournée en 2005... Là, il faut la totale, de l'exhaustif, du vécu, de Coleman himself qui se marre encore : "(laughs) What was touring with Mötley Crüe like? [...] You know, that tour, I had such a fucking laugh. The management made the first mistake by putting us in a really expensive hotel in Glasgow for a week's rehearsal. I think Geordie's room tab was 12 grand. You should've seen the road manager's face when he had to fork out. (laughs) But the tour itself was great. The army of Killing Joke fans just got bigger every night. At first, you know, I didn't really want our fans to come because I thought it was a rip-off to pay vast sums of money to see us play for half an hour. But Cardiff was amazing. We must've had about 5,000 people in the audience chanting, « Joke! » By the time we got to Wembley, they put us on about two hours on before them. There were no two ways about it... we were definitely nicking a lot of their audience. When we were in Manchester, our manager went and saw Tommy Lee... and they tour a bit differently than Killing Joke, let me tell you: They were all staying at different hotels, they each had their own limousines to the gig, and then they were told by their different tenders and sub-managers when to go to their little tents by the side of the stage. They wouldn't speak to each other; then they'd go onstage, do the show and go back to their little tents. And they were charging 150 quid for people to go back to the tents, meet the band and have them sign posters. (laughs) Fucking hell! We didn't meet them, but their crew was really nice to us. That was a funny adventure. So what happened when our manager went to see Tommy Lee? Tommy goes, «Right - Killing Joke. I love those guys. I've got like six of their albums. What are those guys doing these days?» (laughs) He didn't even know we were on fucking tour with him! »...

Quand on vous disait que ça valait le coup de lire un compte-rendu de première main... Pour un peu, on allait oublier la conclusion de Coleman sur le groupe de Tommy Lee : "their collective IQ barely touches room temperature"... Si avec ça, les fans du Crüe viennent pas squatter les commentaires, on comprend plus...