Over a decade in the making, the documentary on Killing Joke, The Death And Resurrection Show, is finally coming to DVD, with pre-orders open now for a summer release.

It was almost 40 years ago that the founding members of Killing Joke coalesced staging a fire ritual that burnt down their London flat; an aptly chaotic birth for a band that would spend the next four decades tearing through conventions both musical and spiritual. The mixture of esoteric beliefs, controversial imagery and genre-defining musical experimentation reaching from industrial rock to classical symphonies, psychedelic trance and 80s power pop has bubbled beneath the popular conscience ever since, inspiring bands like Nirvana, Metallica, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails and Soundgarden along the way.

The stories of rituals and worship at sacred mystical sites, recording sessions in the King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid and band members disappearing to ready for the apocalypse in Iceland have continued to pile up over the years, passed like folk tales between the assembled Gatherers at gigs. Now finally, after a mind blowing 12 year production period, music documentary The Death And Resurrection Show casts fresh light on so many of the stories with an epic two and a half hour barrage of intimate interviews, behind the scenes footage and even family holiday videos, driven by what has to be one of the most ear-pounding soundtracks to ever grace a cinema sound system.

Popping up at festivals and a sell-out special invite screening at BFI Southbank over the last two years, the film is finally coming to DVD, with a deluxe 2-disk edition full of extras currently available for pre-orders through producers ILC Productions and Coffee Films (www.killingjokemovie.com).

Making any kind of sense of such a story is no mean feat and director Shaun Pettigrew fortunately brings an intimate understanding of the band and the music to the table, crafting a densely textured tale that's as much of a feast for the eyes as the ears, and drawing some remarkably honest interviews from band members Jaz Coleman, “Big Paul” Ferguson, Martin “Youth” Glover and Geordie Walker, as well as musicans like Jimmy Page, Dave Grohl, Peter Hook and Alex Paterson, music producer Chris Kimsey, journalists Mat Smith and Neil Perry and much of the team behind the band including managers, astrologists and Jaz Coleman's beloved Mum Gloria, who delivers many of the greatest lines in the film.

“It's been an incredible journey that really started back in the 70's when I was living in a squat next door to the squat half the band were living in.” comments Pettigrew, “Years later I got to know Jaz much more closely when we were both living and working in New Zealand and eventually we got to talking about making a film exploring some of Jaz's experiences and thoughts on things like spirituality and the politics of the Western world around us. Pretty quickly though it felt like you couldn't tell that story without telling a lot of the story of Killing Joke as well.”

The story would take Pettigrew and his incredibly game team across six continents in the years that followed, variously in the footsteps of, and alongside, a band that a lot of people in the music industry have suggested should have a health warning attached. Just as the band have continually stretched conventions so the film reaches well beyond the traditional archive footage and interviews approach, weaving thriller-like threads of searches for mysterious islands, comings of age, spiritual journeys, love and redemption and, naturally, the end of the world: it's a much-used cliché, but you really have never seen or heard anything else quite like it.

The two disc deluxe edition DVD is available for pre-orders now via ILC Productions and Coffee Films for £20 including postage and packing at killingjokemovie.com, and features;

- 150 minute film
- DVD booklet
- Alternate ending
- 35 minute deleted sub-plot
- Uncut “Big Paul” Ferguson interview
- Trailers, photos and artwork

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