GEORDIE WALKER
Killing Joke guitar king (1958–2023)
RESPONDING to a Melody Maker ad in 1979, guitarist Geordie Walker made an immediate impression on his new bandmates in Killing Joke. “He had a ginger shaggy afro, teddy boy jeans and brothel creepers,” drummer Paul Ferguson recalled to Uncut in 2018. “I didn’t care what he sounded like, he looked amazing. But then he plugged in and started chugging Alex Harvey ris. I worshipped Harvey and that was it.”
Walker would go on to redene the sound of post-punk guitar over 15 albums with Killing Joke, a decades-long tenure in which only he and frontman Jaz Coleman were constants. Playing a down-tuned Gibson, his intense style favoured dissonance and atmosphere over ash solos and conventional scales. Two key inuences were Dave Edmunds’ unorthodox work on Love Sculpture’s “Sabre Dance” and John Mckay’s anged chording in the Banshees. During sessions for 1982’s Revelations, producer Conny Plank likened his sound to a classical orchestra turned up full blast on a radio. Walker called it “the best compliment I’ve ever had”.
Just as Killing Joke deed easy categorisation – incorporating elements of dance, dub, punk and metal – so it was with Walker’s playing. The only consistent factor was his unerring groove, something he also later brought to bear on Killing Joke’s industrial rock spin-os Murder Inc and The Damage Manual. He proved to be enormously inuential in his own right, his admirers ranging from Jimmy Page and Kirk Hammett to LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy and MBV’S Kevin Shields, who hailed Walker’s “monstrous sound”. Nirvana were fans too, though the riy similarities between “Come
As You Are” and Killing Joke’s “Eighties” drew the guitarist’s ire, Walker calling Kurt Cobain “a complete plagiarist”.
“No man was cooler than Geordie, one of the very best and most inuential guitarists ever,” wrote bandmate Youth in tribute. “He was like Lee Van Cleef meets Terry-thomas via Noël Coward.”