wotiwrote

This month's Mojo magazine has a short essay on 'Jaz', the frontman of Killing Joke. This brought back memories of a year I spent in Crete during the early 80s. Well, not memories of the whole year, obviously, but of a few weeks when Jaz turned up in the capital Iraklion and stayed in our house.

I think we had met him in a bar in the main square one evening shortly after he had arrived on the island. His name meant nothing to me but I had heard of Killing Joke, however vaguely. Jaz had been in Iceland and seemed to be in flight from his record company or the band - or something. The Mojo article clarifies this a bit but to be honest I wasn't that interested at the time. Now? Not much more so, really.

I spent quite a bit of time with Jaz at first. This involved a lot of drinking. His favourite haunt became a piano bar - back on that main square - where he would play extracts from what he called his 'Icelandic Symphony'. Given that he looked for the most part like he was trying too hard to get the part of the evil vampire in a second-rate horror movie, his music was quite beautiful. Again, the Mojo article puts his classical abilities into context. Apparently, he has recently been commissioned to compose an opera.

His presence in our house, however, became increasingly disturbing as my conversations with him seemed to revolve around black magic and blood and the links between Hitler and the occult. This got boring more than anything. In the end he left - but not before a woman friend arrived and joined him in the house for a while. I can't remember whether I plucked up the nerve to ask him to leave or if he just found us increasingly dull and unresponsive to his mission to convert us to blood worship. I suspect it was the latter. I wonder what I would think of that Icelandic Symphony if I heard it now.