Back in the summer, when author/archivist Chris Bryans reached out to me across the Atlantic via email to solicit a testimonial for a book he was putting together on my beloved Killing Joke, I regret to say that my first reaction was empathetic skepticism.
Many ambitious book projects on the subject have been launched — including one by yours truly, some years back — only to be dashed on the rocks of the band’s iron-willed reluctance to let anyone into their inner circle. I was going to warn Chris of this, but thought better of it — not wanting to derail his enthusiastic momentum. Deep into the brow-furrowing travails of the working-from-home dynamic, at the time, I strung together some pertinent anecdotes about my affinity for Killing Joke and shot them off to Chris worryingly close to the deadline. With that, I wished him my best, half-expecting the spectre of futility to lay waste to his endeavor much as it had done all those other projects that never reached fruition.
Months went by when suddenly I started spying signs of the book’s progress. Driven by both my desire to see Chris achieve the heretofore unachievable and by my vain hunger to see my own name in print, I gamely pre-ordered a copy of the stately tome, now officially dubbed — fittingly enough — “A Prophecy Fulfilled” — and yet still wondered if it would still ever actually see the light of day. Once again, given the volatile nature of this particular subject matter, even the best laid plans tethered to Killing Joke — tour dates, albums, spoken-word projects, deluxe box sets, etc — frequently seem to go pointedly awry in a manner that suggests the clandestine intervention of external and — possibly infernal — forces.
To be fair, there is an elite coterie of individuals who *have* pulled it off. Photographer/author Mont Sherar graphic artist Michael Coles and photographer Frank Jenkinson have each put out handsome books rife with striking images of the band and, in Coles’ case, their distinctive iconography, but all three of these gents could be construed, more or less, as inner-circlers, if you will. I would also be remiss not mentioning Shaun Pettigrew, the intrepid filmmaker that attempted to tell Killing Joke’s story in his 2013 opus, “The Death & Resurrection Show.” While said documentary was an unprecedented glimpse — one that took over a decade for Pettigrew to complete, and that allegedly threatened to implode on several occasions — it would not be offsides to suggest that however sumptuous a finished product it was, it did not genuinely give its viewers the full picture.
Chris Bryans, meanwhile, was attempting an oral history — a recounting the band’s myriad hills and valleys through the recollections of figures from both within that secretive cabal and folks from the world outside. Despite being friends with certain folks, I still fall into that latter demographic.
In any case, Christmas came early for me, today, as a big fuckoff box containing Chris Bryan’s magisterial work arrived safely on my coffee table. A bright and colorful artifact to behold, “A Prophecy Fulfilled” is a strikingly rich and heavy text, replete with all sorts of period-specific photography and artwork. No hastily assembled fanboy vanity project (like mine probably would have been), this book is clearly a labor of love by a fellow Killing Joke acolyte with a dutiful adherence to professional presentation. That he saw fit to include my messy tangles of pompously overwritten drivel is testament to his big-hearted, inclusive nature.
I cannot wait to dive into it.
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