PAUL RAVENPaul Raven, who died on 20 October, 2007, aged 46, was the bass player in the influential post-punk band Killing Joke and several other notable bands.
He joined Killing Joke in 1982 and was with the band during their most commercially successful period.
He went on to to play with, among many, thrash metal band Prong and industrial rockers Zilch, and also worked as a producer.
Paul Vincent Raven was born in Wolverhampton on 16 January, 1961. He began his musical career playing bass for Neon Hearts and Kitsch.
He became Killing Joke’s bassist when Martin "Youth" Glover became exasperated at the band’s lead singer Jaz Coleman – earlier in the year Coleman had insisted the band move to Iceland to escape "the apocalypse".
Raven’s timing was perfect – the band were just about to record Fire Dances (1983), a landmark album that signalled the group’s move away from their early punk and dub material towards a more industrial "darkwave" sound.
In 1985 they scored a surprise hit with Love Like Blood. Raven supplied the memorable bass riff for the gloomy, apocalyptic single which reached number 16.
Towards the end of the decade the band began to incorporate more synthesised sounds into their music and tensions began to rise with Coleman and the record company clashing over his planned solo material, a conflict that would eventually see Raven leave during the recording of 1988's Outside the Gate album.
He rejoined the band for their eighth album, Extremities, Dirt & Various Repressed Emotions (1990), but Coleman’s unpredictability again came between the band, forcing them to split in 1991.
Raven played with the industrial rock supergroup Pigface then joined Prong, playing on two albums before they split in 1996.
Killing Joke reformed yet again in 2003 to record two albums in Prague where Jaz Coleman was now living, Raven once again on bass.
His next project was touring in America and Europe with Chicago metal band Ministry whose political lyrics appealed to his beginnings as a punk fan.
Most recently he had been recording in Geneva with industrial band Treponem Pal and had been working on his own project, Mob Research. He was found dead of a suspected heart attack in a private home in France.
Keep me informed of updates
