Machines Of Loving Grace

Gilt
Mammoth / Mushroom, 1995

Last night I listened to the Jonestown "death tape". It was made during a mass suicide at a separatist commune established in South America by Reverend Jim Jones, the leader of the People's Temple movement, who fled from the US with hundreds of his followers. On November 18, 1978, a politician who had flown down to the commune to investigate allegations of abuse was killed at the airstrip while trying to leave. That night, about 900 members of the commune killed themselves – or were "helped" to a similar fate. Most of them drank from a bucket filled with a mixture of sedatives, cyanide and soft drink. The ones who struggled were forcibly injected with a similarly toxic mix. Many were children.

The tape was made by Jones as his followers lined up and drank the mixture and were led off to die on the grass around the pavilion. The only available copies of it have been edited, though it's not clear whether it was Jones or the FBI who altered it. On it you can hear Jones giving his final sermon and telling the crowd that the fall-out of the politician's murder would be worse than death and urging everyone to speed up the process before the soldiers arrived. In the background you can hear children crying and screaming, and in some parts, noises that let you know they've died. The impact of the tape didn't really hit home until I saw photos of the aftermath. Some of the few publicly accessible images on the internet show hundreds of dead people lying face down and piled on top of one another near a building, and a bucket with dozens of empty pill boxes strewn around it.

The Jonestown tragedy has been referenced in pop music several times, most obviously in the name of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. The first time I heard of it was through a band called Machines Of Loving Grace, who were on the soundtrack to The Crow, and who used a sample of one of Jones's speeches from that day in the last song on the last album they made, Gilt. When I was younger I thought it was a fitting sample for a song about the end of a band. After hearing the tape in full, the idea makes my stomach turn.