More and more rock writing is ensnared by its own dogmas. Burdened by its overpowering (and rank anyway) principles, its terms by reference have had their potency whittled away through age and misuse. There are barely even seems to be the strength left for a decent writhe of agony in the death throes.

What is crucial – and missing – is any injection of reality into the proceedings. The rock biz as a whole has become a cosy safe-house through which the participants can pass, sheltered from the wider worldly goings on outside.

With a music 'scene' cluttered with the nappy rash irritation of the new treacle pop and, at the other pole, vulgar (although highly laughable) forays into behemoth-sized fantasy – the prose that should trigger reaction is too crippled to respond and too blinkered to enjoy the gift of overall vision.

In consequence, anything that does assert a dark shadow of a menacing and violent reality cannot be handled. For a band stepping outside the insular motions of the rock machine, the spears really begin to fly.

Spending time on tour with Killing Joke just heightens (soars!) my awareness of these horrors. There is an excitement about them and their music which slithers out of the grasp of definition in the old rockspeak terms. 'Fire Dances' is a spleen cracker of an event and/but not necessarily a 'great album'.

The 'new' Killing Joke (they call it that as well) is so gleaming with purpose and intent that all their previous records assume the inglorious significance of a slimy damp patch on the wall of some Ladbroke Grove squat.

I'm not interested in why Youth left or why they've 'mellowed out' (ha!) – Jaz: "We project better, it feels better on stage. Killing Joke is more articulate now, we can just go and enjoy ourselves. We aspire to be in control of our immediate personal environment and we've defined this with more clarity."

'Fire Dances', like all the best stimulants, is not an end in itself but a vehicle to sharpen your awareness and function as a fever-pitched backdrop to enhance whatever experience you want.

Killing Joke are well beyond analysing or defining. One can feel and react with them or against them but there are no half measures. You can't tie Killing Joke up in knots of rhetoric. Any argument swings like a great pendulum from point to counterpoint and always comes to rest in insoluble contradictions – that's the killing joke and that phrase is where all roads of rationality lead.

Jaz: "The foundation of what we do is determined by the nature of our personalities."

Watching Killing Joke live is like seeing a coagulation, the experience of each merging/bleeding into the collective statement. Witnessing their set in Glasgow it struck me suddenly that Geordie was the Albert Spear to Jaz's Hitler – those ringing guitar lines an epic classicism of a setting for the singer's oration. A wildly impressive, towering vision of power and presence. But the oration is short of being dictatorial... unless, of course, you want to be led...

Jaz: "The majority of people in this world are animals , they just follow. You get the mindless majority at every gig you do but there are others who actually get a good inspiration from what we do. There's always an element of that just go through the traditional gig aspects. I've no objection to that, it can help the night go on, there's something pleasing about a bit of tradition. But there are those who get more than that, who actually listen to the content of the music and become emotionally involved in it.

"It's important for me that a lot of people get together and they don't know why. The band don't have a manifesto to attract them but they gather and feel comfortable there. It's that no reason, I really like that element in people, it's a primal thing and I like that under the name Killing Joke. There's the level of intensity in the music – by doing this you don't define so you don't restrict any potential ideas you may get from it."

When Jaz says 'primal' he's talking about a state of innocence (an innocence that is nothing like the dripping goo goo pop conception of made-up innocence) – a point where emotions are felt without the numbing need to justify and explain them. The band seek to draw on this, fan the blazes of the past yet infuse them with a contemporary resonance:

"We enjoy merging the dim and distant past with the present to influence the future. If we choose a starting point it doesn't matter if that starting point ever really existed. The point is, we choose it as a beginning to influence our future. If we take an ideas from a certain mythology we don't really care if it existed or not as long as we can use certain parts to stimulate our imagination and influence our direction.

"I say now that things are very simple. We live in a period of time when the will-power is more important than the intellect. I find that one can achieve a lot more by being naive, using will-power and just going for it, than by sitting and rationalising everything. I'm talking of things on a bigger scale, another world where not everybody will fit in, where things will be measured in terms of will-power, it is that which determines survival.

"People don't like that, I don't always like that but Killing Joke have a lot to do with that and I see it as significant, relevant and inevitable, ultimately. I just feel that there are changes ahead, big changes and people and being foolish if they don't take into consideration something that is more than a possibility and consider themselves in relation to that possibility. They're being very stupid and unrealistic. I would like people to adept to a new world. a different one."

Digging up the old hack devices, it's usually about now that Jaz gets cited as, at worst a loony, at best an idle romancer – but to tumble into that viewpoint is too easy, too common and so bottleless, it must be wrong (which needn't mean that Jaz is 'right' but ... ).

The strength that pours out of Killing Joke's music stems from belief and that frightening potential of its lethal apartness from the empty hysteria of run-of-the-DJ pop.

"A more savage world which I see as inevitable."

Increasingly the development of anything on this planet is restricted by all kinds of decaying ideological dogmas (which snaps us back to, the opening paragraphs – maybe the state of rock prose isn't that far off the rails, just a parallel to the greater state of imminent collapse... !) A change, whether Jaz's or a different one, is going to happen. Ready or otherwise.

"With Killing Joke you get a glimpse of that world. It doesn't matter what your opinion is, that is the way it is. A don't see there's any way of this not happening regardless of what action, what people call 'positive' action, you take. We are going towards inevitable and colossal upheaval. Not just nature regurgitating but super nature. Radiation in the atmosphere. We're talking ultimately of mutations and, in the long, long run, the body adapting to changes in the atmosphere.

"This world is the world we deal with in our music. This is where the future lies. There are not many people in the music scene who even consider this world.

"Iceland was simply aspirations that failed but just the fact that I went over there and tried something ... I wish to do that now collectively. Do it for ourselves and anybody who feels that they would like to participate. Not necessarily for the same reasons but there can be a common feeling, an instinctive sense of direction. It's not something that needs discussing. I don't discuss it with the other members of the band, we just get on with it. feel it, a common sense of direction, you just look around and see it.

"To make music that kindles the primal spirit within you, that kindles the will-power so that you can deal with what is going on – this is how I see Killing Joke. If people didn't like it we would still be doing it anyway. What does it matter if the majority like something, does that mean it's good? I think the majority is a load of crap. It's the minority that influence the majority.

"I would say that we're going to be quite big by next year. The accessibility will have become more inherent in the music and will actually be taking effect. There are no bands that are anywhere near our calibre. I don't think much of those 'positive punk' people because they lack the commitment and they haven't got the edge in the intensity of the sound. There is a big gap which we fill. I see that as becoming more relevant, the intensity in the sound becoming more and more popular, more and more in demand as time wears on."

To utterly sum up Killing Joke isn't within my capabilities, or theirs, and it is certainly beyond the perimeter of rock writing style. The finest that one can aspire to is a pulling back of the curtain to garner a brief glimpse of a few of the aspects that surround them.

The very nature of the group determines that this is the case. To rationalise their being is the absolute mistake, to think you're pinned them down completely means you've lost them totally. That's the killing joke.

And it continues...