30 years ago, in March of 1985, Killing Joke released their fifth album, Night Time, an impressive creative leap and commercial success. The band basically jettisoned the tribal drumming and shouted vocals that had made their name in favor of a more accessible sound, though their music retained its anthemic loftiness and inflammatory lyrics. The album spawned the indelible “Eighties,” which somehow still packs a huge punch despite its long-passed expiration date, and the single “Love Like Blood” owed a significant debt to the poppier side of the gothic scene, and sported some mighty radio-friendly production. Their prior album Fire Dances had hinted at the more accessible direction, and Night Time‘s successor, the self-consciously grandiose Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, though quite good, sounds at times like an effort to make an entire album out of “Love Like Blood.”
 

 
Also in March of 1985, KJ appeared on the improbably named German TV program Live aus dem Alabama. The show was named for its shooting location, the Alabama Depot in Munich, a long-time military storage installation that received its conspicuously non-Teutonic name when the USA took the facility over after World War II. The program’s musical performances are listed here. Killing Joke’s performance, unsurprisingly, includes half of Night Time.

00:00 – Night Time
04:55 – Sun Goes Down
09:19 – Tabazan
13:42 – The Wait
17:29 – Love Like Blood
22:01 – Tension
25:16 – Change
28:50 – Pssyche
33:31 – Eighties
36:59 – Wardance