Geordie Walker

Geordie Walker
Walker performing at the 2009 Ilosaarirock festival
Background information
Birth name	Kevin Walker
Born	18 December 1958 (1958-12-18) Chester-le-Street, County Durham, England
Died	26 November 2023 (2023-11-27) (aged 64) Prague, Czech Republic
Genres	Post-punk industrial rock gothic rock new wave synth-pop industrial metal
Occupation(s)	Musician
Instrument(s)	Guitar
Formerly of	Killing Joke Murder, Inc. The Damage Manual

Kevin "Geordie" Walker (18 December 1958 – 26 November 2023) was an English rock musician, best known as the guitarist of post-punk group Killing Joke. His unorthodox style of electric guitar playing was widely acclaimed. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin hailed Walker's guitar sound as "really strong", while peer Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine praised Walker's guitar playing, which he described as "this effortless playing producing a monstrous sound".

Life and career

When he was ten years old, Walker was deeply marked by the guitar sound in the song "Sabre Dance" by Love Sculpture. "I used to go mad when it came on the radio." When he was fourteen, Walker's family moved south from Newcastle to Bletchley in Buckinghamshire, attending Leon School; it was during this era that he acquired his nickname due to his north-eastern "Geordie" accent. He decided to learn to play the guitar: "I used to run home from school at about four, lock myself in the bedroom, turn the amp up full, and thrash it till he [his dad] came in. It was a daily ritual". He learnt that it's melody lines as opposed to solos. The first guitar that helped him to find his way was bought in Northampton at Christmas 1973. When his mother saw a Gibson Les Paul in the shop, she suggested he try it in remembrance of a concert she attended with Jimi Hendrix on the bill. After Walker played about two chords, his mother's verdict was: "We'll take it." He worked at that time, "two real jobs" that allowed him to save money. He then bought another guitar, a Gibson SG Junior.

Walker later moved to London to study architecture and became a founding member of Killing Joke in 1979 when he responded to an advertisement placed by the singer Jaz Coleman. He had never played in a band before. Walker and Coleman were only constant members of the group until Walker's death.

Walker had also been a member of industrial music supergroups Murder, Inc. and The Damage Manual.

In the mid-1990s, Walker lived in Royal Oak, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit with his wife Ginny Kiraly, and his son Atticus. At the time of the recording of Hosannas from the Basements of Hell in 2006, he produced UK girl punk rock act Mary-Jane at Faust Studios in Prague. He later resided in Prague, where he co-operated with Studio Faust Records recording other artists's music.

Influences

Walker cited the band Love Sculpture featuring Dave Edmunds and their sound on their cover version of "Sabre Dance" because "it used the guitar as a musical instrument to convey an atmosphere, it wasn't normal guitar playing which people feel they have to play, certain rhythms, certain solos, certain scales". Walker also named Siouxsie and the Banshees' debut album The Scream as an influence because their original guitarist John McKay "came out with these chord structures that I found very refreshing".

Style

Walker at Hellfest 2022

Walker's tuning of guitar was different; he liked it to be strung a whole tone lower. "It suits the resonance and the volume of the thing, and you can use heavier strings. I’ve got 58s on the bottom. Basically if I play an E-position chord, it’s D." Walker said that "a guitar has a lot of musical capability, but it has the rhythm as well. As one instrument, I think it has the most pleasing sound, the attack, the rhythm". Concerning his guitar playing, Walker explained: "If you hit a chord and press down on the bridge, it bends all six notes at once, that's probably one of the odder aspects of my technique. If you want to get technical - things like augmented fourths and sevenths have a certain unnerving effect, a bit like a tingle up the spine. I go for a lot of those in my chord structures.

Equipment

His guitar of choice was a hollow-bodied 1952 Gibson ES-295 in gold lacquer: an instrument also previously used by Elvis Presley sideman Scotty Moore. It is a semi-acoustic guitar with a trapeze tailpiece. Walker bought it from an old jazzman who played in clubs. He plugged it into two Burman amplifiers, "and the sound was there – a full resonance, and totally bell-like with the sustain on it through 250 watts of amplification in stereo. You can feel the thing vibrating, it's a huge sound. I tune the guitar in D (below bottom E) and my strings are really thick, I use an 062 on the bottom, and because of the way I tune the guitar, the strings still have the same response as a normal guitar would. The amplification makes the bottom end sound unreal. [...] the sound of the guitar is a lot sharper, a lot clearer than other ones I've heard."

He used ADT units made by Bell, one on each amplifier: "It's got from a really tight delay to a single short delay, and a pitch bend on it", and an Electro Harmonix Memory Man Chorus.

Death

Walker died in Prague on 26 November 2023, two days after suffering a stroke.

Further reading

• Hämäläinen, Jyrki "Spider" (2020). Killing Joke: Are You Receiving?. Milton Keynes: New Haven Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-1912587407.

External links

• Media related to Geordie Walker at Wikimedia Commons
• Geordie Walker discography at Discogs
• Geordie Walker at IMDb