### Killing Joke: 2010-10-08

#### 20/10/10 || Khlysty

Okay, before reading anything that I have to say about Killing Joke’s first concert in thirty years in Athens, I suggest that you go at the end of this review and read the setlist. Please, do it, I’ll be here, waiting for you to finish the job. Don’t worry, take your time, there’s no hurry. Pore over it. Savour it. Think how it would be if you were there, seeing the band perform these songs, in a club filled with people like you. Conjure up the proper images and sounds. As I said above, take your time, no hurry at all…

…

Finished? Good. Now I can begin by telling you that this concert is THE BEST FUCKING CONCERT I’VE EVER SEEN IN MY WHOLE FUCKING LIFE! THE BESTEST OF THE BEST!!! Killing Joke, although the members are in their fifties now, is a fucking mind-blowing band, that still makes great and important records and is one of the greatest live acts in the whole fucking world. Man, oh, man, I know that I sound like a fan-boy here, but the truth is that of all the live shows that I’ve ever been to, theirs was the most intense, most lively, most heavy, most soul-wrenching that I’ve been afflicted by.

Their bass-heavy, doom-laden, gnarly sounds translates greatly in a live environment, due the members’ seemingly unending energy and pathos, turning each and every song –from the minimal ode to catastrophe “Tomorrow’s World”, a surprising opener for the concert, to the anthemic “In Exelsis”, to the thrashy charger that’s “Asteroid”, to the quasi-groovy “Pandemonium”- into a condensed fist of sound and anger. Jaz Coleman (with his trademarked “Joker from Hell” facial makeup) is one of the greatest frontmen I’ve ever seen in my life: energetic, smart, full of bite and anger, fully informed about the situation Greece passes through. And for almost two hours, his voice NEVER FUCKING BROKE, EVEN ONCE!

Geordie, using a hollow-body electroacoustic guitar (which is a fucking chore to control, when using a lot of distortion) covered every nook and cranny with his barbed, liquid-sheet-metal, barbed riffs, while Youth added much backbone and dubby space into the songs with his Rickenbaker. As for “Big” Paul Ferguson, I will say just this: if a fifty-years-old drummer can be so aggressive, so precise, so all-over-his-battery as he did during the show, then drummers half his age should just shut up and try to learn from him and put him up there with all the great skinsmen of rock music’s history.

I won’t go on and on about the details of the concert. I will wrap things up by saying that Killing Joke’s show is one of the most intense, angry and mind-blowing that a fan can catch up these days. If you want to have your ears ruptured, your mind overloaded and your body slammed again and again by super-forceful sound, go see them. Like, FUCKING NOW!!!

- Who: Killing Joke
- When: October the 8th, 2010
- Where: Gagarin 205, Athens, Greece

- Setlist
- 01. Tomorrow’s world
- 02. Love like blood
- 03. In exelsis
- 04. Wardance
- 05. Absolute dissent
- 06. Change
- 07. Bloodsport
- 08. European super state
- 09. This world hell
- 10. The fall of because
- 11. Ghosts of Ladbroke Grove
- 12. Madness
- 13. Requiem
- 14. Eighties
- 15. The great cull
- 16. Fresh fever from the skies
- 17. Asteroid
- 18. Depthcharge
- 19. The wait
- 20. Pssyche
- Encore
- 21. Complications
- 22. Pandemonium