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.

Scientists

Sedition
All Tomorrow's Parties, 2006

"Hello, we're the Scientists," says Kim Salmon before his band launch into the set that would be recorded and released as Sedition. His speaking voice sounds kind of funny, far too polite for a rock star and perhaps even a little eccentric. It sounds totally at odds with the band's songs, which are so loud – so gut-wrenching and visceral – that before seeing him I had always imagined Salmon as some monstrous seven foot juggernaut who headbutted people for a living and had a voice like the bottom-end of a truck engine.

The Scientists formed in Perth as a naff pop-punk group in '78 and released one album before breaking up. A few years later, Salmon relocated to Sydney and formed a new version of the band with a much darker sound. The first single recorded by the new line-up was 'Swampland', now regarded as one of their classics, which had a slowed-down rockabilly rhythm and a nightmarish "rural gothic" atmosphere inspired by bands like The Stooges and The Cramps. "Nobody knows so they never think to visit," Salmon wailed. "In my heart, there's a place called Swampland/ Nine parts water, one part sand..." It set the tone for most of the band's songs through the decade – dark, guttural and very loud.

The second version of the Scientists broke up in the late '80s and Salmon went on to form The Surrealists and play in super-group The Beasts Of Bourbon with Tex Perkins. Two years ago they were asked to reform for a show in London by US band Mudhoney and the resulting gig was released as Sedition. The track-list covers the best of the band's later work, including 'We Had Love', 'Swampland' and several tracks from the Blood Red River EP. During the second-last and loudest song of the night, 'Backwards Man', guitarist Tony Thewlis goes to town on his instrument. As the din dies out, Kim's funny little voice pipes up again. "Six strings in one song!" he yells, laughing. He sounds just as impressed as the audience must have been.

Regurgitator

Regurgitator
Warner, 1994

For the last ten years I have kept a sticker promoting one of Regurgitator's concerts in Newcastle – on the 23rd of July, 1998 – that was given to me by a dear friend. It has a little devilish-looking dude with horns on his head wearing a shirt and tie and offering his arms out to the names of Regurgitator and Tism, which are spelt out up the top in multi-coloured capital letters like the signage of a strip joint. When I decided to write about the band, I couldn't find the damn thing. I went rummaging through boxes of letters from old girlfriends and wads of ticket stubs wrapped in rubber bands without any luck. I couldn't even remember the last time I'd seen it. Eventually, I found it about ten centimetres from where I'd started – under a mess of papers stacked next to my glass of wine and laptop.

For some people the soundtrack to Australia in the 1990s was You Am I, or Silverchair, or Paul Kelly. For me it was Regurgitator. The band formed in 1993 after – according to bassist Ben Ely – he saw future singer Quan Yeomans high as a kite at a hippy party outside the Sunshine Coast in Queensland licking the leaves on trees. Yeomans didn't usually spend his time in outer-space, however. He had been extremely disturbed by the inequalities of global economics during a trip to the World Economic Forum in South America one year earlier and was radically politicised by the experience. Which made it all the stranger when the band signed to a major label before having released anything.

"What the fuck is that piece of shit?" asked the head of Warner Australia after seeing the band's first offering, a bone-crushing stoner song called 'Like It Like That' set to a cheap film clip shot in a shower. To make matters worse, the band had emblazoned the Warner logo on the back of their debut EP as a passive-aggressive taunt. The logo was removed before the record went to print, but it was replaced by a shot of a hamburger on the front – a reference to the mass-production of music and the first blow in what would become a long campaign of mud-slinging against their label, fans and life in general. After sending this column to my editor, I am finally going to peel off that sticker and put it on my laptop.

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.