Coops Insurance

🔥 IS CHOP-CHOP ONE OF KILLING JOKE'S MOST OVERLOOKED EARLY SINGLES? 🔥

On this date in 1982, KILLING JOKE released CHOP-CHOP as the second and final single from their third album Revelations, on E.G. Records — a seven-inch backed by Good Samaritan, with both tracks drawn from the LP (Jun 14, 1982)

The catalogue number was EGO 7, with the lacquer cut at Strawberry Mastering, and the single did not chart. For a band edging towards wider recognition without yet breaking the singles top 40, its failure to chart underlined how uneven their commercial position still was — and how comprehensively other forces had overtaken the business of promotion.

By the time Chop-Chop arrived in the shops, the band that had made Revelations was already under severe strain and moving into one of the strangest ruptures of its early history. Jaz Coleman — vocalist, keyboard player and the band's most theatrical public presence — had left for Iceland earlier in 1982 without the rest of the band fully understanding what was happening. "We didn't know he left," bassist Martin "Youth" Glover later told Revolver. "We read about it in the NME. We thought, OK, we'll audition different singers, but after a few weeks of rehearsal, Geordie disappeared to Iceland. And then me and Paul said, 'Maybe we should start a new group.'" In Youth's account, he and Ferguson briefly formed Brilliant, a dance-oriented project, but Ferguson then departed for Iceland as well. "The band left me," Youth said. "Later I realized it was not personal, but I was sharing a flat with Jaz and he hadn't told me. I was quite angry. I felt betrayed, and to have the rest of the band follow suit? I felt, Well, what loyalty?"

Accounts of the period have linked the Iceland move to Coleman's fear of nuclear apocalypse, which he later presented as connected to his interests in occult ideas, including the writings of Aleister Crowley. Whatever the precise reasoning, the practical effects were clear enough. The most visible sign of the turmoil had already come with the Top of the Pops performance of Empire Song in March 1982, where Ferguson handled the vocal in Coleman's absence and a stand-in keyboardist was placed at the keyboards. It remains one of the more striking images from that corner of the early 1980s — a band performing on the BBC's primary pop outlet, frontman conspicuously absent.

Revelations itself had been released in April 1982. Recorded at Conny Plank's studio at Wolperath near Cologne, it was the first Killing Joke album made with an outside producer, and Plank's input — stripped back, live-sounding, pushing drums and guitar forward while pulling keyboard density back — gives it a texture unlike the two previous albums. Plank had previously worked with Kraftwerk, Neu!, Devo, DAF, Ultravox and Eurythmics among many others, and his interest in achieving an unglamourised live sound in the studio is audible throughout. The album reached number 12 on the UK Albums Chart, their best performance to that point. Youth, however, was not happy with the result. He later said simply: "It came out a bit dirgy."

Chop-Chop had been tried out in the context of a John Peel session recorded on 11 December 1981, first broadcast on 16 December and repeated on 11 January and 4 March 1982. The session featured The Hum, Empire Song, We Have Joy and Chop-Chop, and introduced all four tracks to a substantial radio audience before the album appeared. A bootleg Peel-session single with We Have Joy on one side and Chop-Chop on the other subsequently circulated, catalogue KJ001. The official E.G. single paired the album version of Chop-Chop with Good Samaritan.

On the album, Chop-Chop opens with Kevin "Geordie" Walker's jagged guitar before Ferguson's drumming drives it forward — the kind of rhythmic ferocity that NME had described in their Revelations coverage as sounding "like pistol shots in darkness." Running at four minutes and twenty seconds, it sits between We Have Joy and The Pandys Are Coming on side one. Lyrically, one possible reading is that the song addresses people who are alive but not conscious of it — a theme reinforced by the image of bodies going by "barely half awake." Coleman's vocal on Revelations was becoming more melodic than on the first two records, a shift that some followers found compromising and others a natural development, and on Chop-Chop that melodic legibility is more pronounced than on the denser tracks around it.

Good Samaritan, the B-side, is the penultimate track on Revelations, running just over three and a half minutes before Dregs closes the album. It is a markedly quieter piece — something close to an actual melody, before the lyric curdles into a sardonic ending of repeated "happy, so happy… la la la la aah" that sits oddly against the album's general abrasiveness. Reaction to the track has always been divided among Killing Joke listeners, and the decision to pair it with Chop-Chop as the single's B-side rather than a non-album track or extended version is one that has not gone unnoticed. Youth's "dirgy" verdict on the album as a whole captures something of the mood that track embodies.

Neither the chart failure of Chop-Chop nor the chaos surrounding its release should obscure how significant this period was in terms of the band's trajectory. Revelations was the last album made by the original line-up of Coleman, Walker, Youth and Ferguson — a configuration that had been in place since 1979 and would not be restored until the 2010 album Absolute Dissent. After the album's release and tour, Coleman and Walker joined up in Iceland, where they worked with musicians from the Icelandic band Þeyr in the project Niceland. Youth remained in England and outside the reorganised line-up, while Ferguson eventually rejoined Coleman and Walker with Paul Raven — previously of Neon Hearts and glam rock band Kitsch — replacing Youth on bass. The non-album single Birds of a Feather followed in October 1982, credited to the new line-up, and Fire Dances arrived as a studio album in 1983. Both pointed toward a Killing Joke that was still forceful in places but increasingly willing to work within recognisable melodic structures. Chop-Chop belongs to the older version of that band, a single from a group that was, almost simultaneously with its release, ceasing to function as the thing that had made it.

What an awesome crop circle, details should be released around 6pm today https://www.cropcircleconnector.com/

Not in the rumours section i may add 🤩