Tag Archives: Faith No More

GEORDIE WALKER: THE OTHER VOICE OF KILLING JOKE

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PREMATURE R.I.P. TO THE SOUND THAT DEFINED A DEFINING SOUND

There’s been a defiant inevitability about Killing Joke in the last 15 years or so. They just seemed to keep going and getting better with (middle) age, fired by a different kind of impetus since Paul Raven’s passing pulled them back together and into the studio for a long, late-career golden run that started even earlier with Pandemonium. Seeing the reformed line-up deliver the live and recorded goods so constantly was almost one of rock’s certainties and there was never a sign it wouldn’t happen again. No talk of retirement. You just sort of knew they’d be back…on their terms. When the time was right.

But this isn’t on anyone’s terms, is it? Geordie Walker’s departure at 64, just months after the Royal Albert Hall gigs and the vital-sounding Full Spectrum Dominance single. Hell, it was only last year that we had the Lord of Chaos EP and the Honour the Fire tour. A full album was surely brewing.

Live, it was always Walker who captivated. The whole band did obviously, we’re not ranking players or anything, but the concentrated force of Geordie’s guitar won you over by wearing you down first. Every KJ gig has felt, to me, like slightly hard work at the start before submersing you into a strange state of battered awe by the end, and much of that comes from the hypnotic power of Geordie Walker. He doesn’t move and barely seems to even touch the guitar, yet whatever resonance/dissonance he conjures from those oversized chords and shapes just does something to your brain, shifting you from agitation to submission.

And because there are no solos, the fullness and volume of his noise is permanent. For all the right reasons, it’s no wonder he didn’t get the job with Faith No More when he auditioned back in 1994. Here’s what Mike Bordin said in Small Victories: The True Story of Faith No More:

“We liked how he played, we liked his texture within the music. We liked the fact he was incredibly aggressive with his tone, but wasn’t a soloist. He was cool, talked about jamming with Jimmy Page, smoked a lot of cigarettes…it was probably a bit of a long shot, even to get him to do it. But it was fucking fun.”

Billy Gould said, “He’s a great guitar player, one of the best I’ve ever seen. He would have been amazing, but he is so distinctive. I think he would have rendered us into a Killing Joke cover band.”

Even when talking about the genius of Trey Spruance, who joined Faith No More to record King for a Day…Fool for a Lifetime, Gould couldn’t quite shake Walker’s impact off, saying, “He [Trey] could do whatever he wanted and do it better, but he didn’t have the animal thing that Geordie had. There was a certain violence about Geordie. Trey doesn’t have a violent bone in his body.”

Distinctive is the word. Gould and co made the right call. Killing Joke was home, the only possible place. RIP Geordie Walker.

More Geordie:
The Damage Manual
Full Spectrum Dominance
Gig review from Hammersmith Apollo, 2022


HALLOWEEN NOISE PATTONS

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GREETINGS, schlock pickers. Ready for some deranged voicework this All Hallows’ Eve? Good.

We’ve said it before but if Melvins are Halloween’s house band then super-colluder Mike Patton is surely one of its top MCs. From loverboy whispers and honeyed sweeteners to lullaby daymares, carnival histrionics and pure fucking gibberish, he does it all – and then some. Never more than a beat away from innocence or insanity, it’s this wanton skittery that makes him the rock-vocal equivalent of cinema’s most amoral psychos: the ones who do bad shit just because.

So, we’re digging the grave (yes) of his more rock-heavy oeuvre. If you’re short of time, hit When Good Dogs Do Bad Things first and fill the gaps later. 11 tracks, audio only, no videos except for our short sharp opening shot of… Will Smith?

Too right. Patton is the voice of his I Am Legend post-human nemesis.

FAITH NO MORE: SURPRISE! YOU’RE DEAD!
Could have chosen Zombie Eaters for the title alone, but no. For those of us snagged into FNM’s world by We Care A Lot, The Real Thing was our first exposure to the new guy and it takes just four tracks for him to go voco-loco on our No Faith ears. The start of a new era.

MELVINS: GI JOE
Boneyard beats in a street-smart bed. Non-maniacal menace. All in day’s work for a Melvins/Patton/Ipecac project.

DEAD CROSS: CHURCH OF THE MOTHERFUCKERS
It’d be easy to pick the Bauhaus cover from the Dead Cross debut but Bela Lugosi’s Dead is all over Halloween anyway, so let’s gather for a more visceral midnight mass instead.

FANTOMAS: DER GOLEM
A flawless, monstrous body of classic horror themes skewered and reassembled with grotesque results, The Director’s Cut is one of those albums that’s end-to-end fright-night perfect. It’s why their depraved Omen made our first playlist five years ago because it’s bound for the asylum on a brakeless hell-cart. Anything from this record could make the cut and this year, it’s Der Golem. Slow and Slayer heav-eee with Patton escalating the madness.

TOMAHAWK: WAR SONG
Pace breaker, mood changer, heavy atmos spirited up from the rituals and songs of the Native Americans, Tomahawk style.

PEEPING TOM: SUCKER
Light relief with this voyeuristic hip-pop project, but it still fits. Check the seductive call-and-response voicework, catchy as balls.

DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN: WHEN GOOD DOGS DO BAD THINGS
As if throwing your Salem’s Lot in with Slayer and Melvins wasn’t OTT enough, Patton threw his vocal pyros at this four-track EP back in 2002. Precision mathprogmentalism at its most possessed, Good Dogs is a frenzied attack whose first two minutes leave you savaged. After that, the lull a-bye-bye and slasher false end finale. Mike Patton’s finest six minutes? Maybe. Just load the EP and lose your senses in this one-off detonation of demented genius.

TOMAHAWK: WHEN THE STARS BEGIN TO FALL
Tomahawk goes sneakabout and throws in some theramin? Perfect. Duane Denison’s chords muster the tension, Patton blows and soars.

KAADA PATTTON: INVOCATION
Bacteria Cult is a better-named Kaada Patton record, but Romances gives us Invocation, a genteel creep that’s 60s sound-effect spectral and almost the ghost side of Fantomas – without the bloody metallic body parts.

FAITH NO MORE: MALPRACTICE
A twisted tale of christknowswhat, under-the-knife molestation? Jagged riffage and a symphonic pile-up that’s borderline cacophonous, Malpractice is another of Patton’s most out-there Faith No More moments. APPLAUSE??? Done like a slain beast.

MR BUNGLE: THE HOLY FILAMENT
It’s not their most avant or celebrated album – I guess Disco Volante is – but California packs some of Mr Bungle’s most potent moments and the score-ish Holy Filament is a mellow supernatural sliver of an ending to this year’s playlist. The first half sweats tension, the second half sweeps a falsetto from the afterlife.

Happy listening? We didn’t even mention perhaps THE most fitting Patton track of all, and that’s because it’s an album: Delirium Cordia by Fantomas (who else?). A score of fragments and wide-open spaces means that between the bursts of Patton garble, Lombardo assault, ghostly ambience and white noise, your mind has much room to roam about in – and if you’ve flicked the album’s artwork, those pristine surgery scenes (dislodged eyeball, intestinal wash) make you feel a wee bit queasy. And there’s no escape, because it’s a 75-minute track. You can’t skip anything. Trapped, imprisoned and captured till you hit the 20-minute vinyl run-out groove at the end. Music for voluntary confinement … keep the lights off if you dare.

For a less sombre listen with some mildly retro metal videos, check Hairy Halloween I and II from the last couple of years, or dabble in the gothic splendour of the late Saint Pete of Steele and Type O’s Sabbath slowdown. PUMPKINS OUT, over.