SPK

Auto Da Fe
Mute, 1993

Sydney in 1979 is usually remembered as thriving on the legacy of Radio Birdman, who had ushered in punk rock, nurtured a horde of guitar-heavy imitators and then suddenly broken up. In opposition to the Radios' descendants, however, another underground scene had formed based on experimental and electronic music and led by groups such as Severed Heads and Tactics. The most extreme and mysterious of these bands were SPK, named after a German anti-psychiatry collective and founded by psychiatric nurse Graeme Revell with a patient he had met (deliberately referred to by Revell in interviews as simply "the singer" and by journalists as either Stephen or Neil Hill, with the confusion over his first name possibly stemming from his pseudonym on record sleeves, "Ne/H/iL").

On stage, SPK would bang pieces of metal against the floor, shoot flamethrowers at the audience, project autopsy footage against the wall behind them and, rather infamously, swing an enormous chain over the heads of the crowd – usually missing everyone else but hitting themselves on the back-swing. They were quickly noticed in Europe, where Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten were pursuing similar ideas and laying the foundations for a genre called industrial. After relocating to Britain, Revell became a target for music journalists keen to express outrage over the band's stage antics. After one such question, Revell stood up and took his shirt off. "I'm the only fucking person who ever gets injured. There's 44 stiches in my arm from last night," he told the reporter.

In late 1984, Hill's wife died from illnesses related to anorexia. The singer killed himself the next day. SPK continued as an outlet for Revell and new singer Sinan Leong, who made slightly more accessible music for the rest of the decade. The best collection of the band's early work is Auto Da Fe, originally released in 1983 and reissued by Mute ten years later. In the 1990s Revell began composing music for films and TV shows, including The Crow, Tank Girl and Ghost In The Machine and more recently, Sin City and CSI: Miami. His scores have won awards from the AFI and Venice Film Festival, and in 2005 he was awarded for career achievement at the BMI Awards in Hollywood.