(From Record Mirror, UK pop music magazine, 23 July 1983)

Jaz Funk

While you're getting a tan in Bognor, Killing Joke's Jaz Coleman might be sunning himself in the Sahara desert.

He likes to get away from it all by going to remote places. Last year he camped out on the boiling plains of Nasca in Peru, with only scorpions and snakes for company.

"It was about 110 degrees and the nearest civilization was four miles away," he says. "I lived off porridge and eggs and slept in a tent. I wasn't afraid of the scorpions and I enjoyed being on my own. I'm not one of those people who likes to spend hours down the pub."

Jaz is keen on astronomy and the clear skies meant he could study the constellations in great detail. He also studied the fantastic drawings of spiders and birds on the plains left by a long lost civilization. All these experiences help in writing Killing Joke's material, like their primal scream of a single, 'Let's All Go (To The Fire Dances)'.

Killing Joke are planning a trip to Easter Island and Jaz is very fond of Iceland.

"I enjoy extremes, so to go from the heat of Nasca to that coldness is stimulating. Pollution is unheard of there and they've never had an army. It's a perfect place. I've just written a symphony which I'm hoping to have performed. I want to try and describe landscape in my music."

Jaz comes from a brilliant family. His brother is the youngest ever Nobel prize winner and works for the NASA space agency.

"Killing Joke are a band who have to play every day to exist," he says. "I'm sure that if our drummer Paul couldn't channel his energies into music then he'd become a mass murderer.

"Our single is about individuals with a common direction. Sometimes I view myself as a composer and other days I'm a musician or an artist.

"I do despise what I hear on the radio. The music insults people - it doesn't inspire them. I don't like all these new Scottish hippies and Fish of Marillion is a prat."

--Robin Smith