SPK - Biography
SPK began as a pioneering industrial band from Sydney, Australia that paired gutwrenching noise with brutal images of the horror of modernity in order to shock their audiences into consciousness. The group spoke of becoming a voice for the mentally ill and tried “to express the content of various psychopathological conditions” in sound. Then, suddenly, as if to illustrate Carl Jung’s principle of enantiodromia, SPK transformed into a group that just wanted to dance.
New Zealander Graeme Revell formed the band when he was working in a mental hospital in Sydney former mental patient Neil Hill (a.k.a. Ne/H/iL). Revell soon took the name Operator, or sometimes EMS AKS, after an analog synthesizer. Revell explained the origin of SPK’s name to webzine Then It Must Be True in 2005: “It originally stood for a group of Germans in Heidelberg called Socialist Patients Kollective [Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv]. A psychiatrist at the university's clinic believed that his patients’ mental disorders stemmed from capitalism, and the only cure was a Marxist society. When the university tried to fire Huber, his patients organized the SPK, held protests, occupied the hospital administration offices, and convinced the university to retain him.”
SPK’s early singles “No More,” “Factory,” and “Mekano,” released on the band’s Side Effekts label in 1979, sound closer to punk than any of the band’s later work due to the presence of guitarist Danny Rumour, bassist David Virgin, and ranting vocals.
The music is nonetheless abstract and full of blaring analog synth noise. Throbbing Gristle’s label issued “Mekano” and “Slogun” from SPK’s Australian singles as the Meat Processing Section 7-inch (1980 Industrial), credited to Surgical Penis Klinik.
Dominic Guerin, calling himself Tone Generator, joined SPK in 1980, and Rumour and Virgin left the band. Revell, Guerin, and Revell’s brother Ash (“Mr. Clean”) went to London in 1980, leaving Neil Hill behind in Sydney. In London, Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle suggested guitarist Mike Wilkins, who joined for the recording of SPK’s debut album Information Overload Unit (1981 Side Effekts). Credited to System Planning Korporation, the album is an assaultive and disorienting collage of pure industrial noise and recorded speech. SPK’s live shows made similar use of fire, shocking video imagery, and tribal drumming on metal objects to induce altered states of consciousness.
DOKUMENT ONE, the zine included with the first pressings of Information Overload Unit, presented collages of medical atrocities and news items about psychological instruments of social control. Also included was the invitation “We would like to hear from anyone interested in what we are doing, especially those with interest in, or history of, psychotic disorder. We will reply personally to all correspondence,” followed by Wilkins’s address.
While Revell and Guerin were in London recording Information Overload Unit, Neil Hill and his wife Margaret recorded a single as SoliPsiK (1981 M-Squared). Revell returned to Sydney in 1981, where he, Hill, and drummer Jack Pinker recorded SPK’s second album, the harrowing Leichenschrei (1982 Thermidor), credited to Sozialistisches Patienten Kollektiv. DOKUMENT TWO, included in Leichenschrei, announced that an SPK movie titled L’etat haemophiliaque (Internal Bleeding) would be finished and screened in Australia that year. SPK screened parts of L’etat haemophiliaque on their 1982 US tour, but it is not clear whether the movie was finished or how much of it is identical with the gruesome debraining footage incorporated in the Despair, Two Autopsy Films and Alchemy home videos, released on Twinvision in 1983.
As their transgressive, snuff-style, radically motivated content entered the video market under the SPK name, Revell was completely transforming the group. On the “Metal Dance” 12” (1983 Desire), Revell incorporated SPK’s metal percussion and the vocals of his future wife, Sinan Leong, into a full-fledged 80s disco single, attracting the attention of Elektra Records. Compared to SPK’s next single, “Junk Funk” (1984 Elektra), “Metal Dance” was a dissonant, avant-garde masterpiece; “Junk Funk” wouldn’t have sounded out of place on the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack. SPK’s dance phase culminated in 1985 with the album Machine Age Voodoo (1985 Elektra). Before SPK recorded Machine Age Voodoo, Neil Hill committed suicide in February of 1984 as his wife Margaret died of anorexia.
SPK’s sudden transformation into a pop group understandably alienated some fans and former band members. “We were trying to create a radical new aesthetic and be cultural terrorists,” Guerin said, speaking as Tone Generator in the 2007 video interview Final Statement. “Graeme Revell turned it into a commercial identity. Why he never changed the name, I’ll never know.” Revell resumed making experimental music, if not cultural terrorism, on the next SPK album, the haunting Zamia Lehmanni: Songs of Byzantine Flowers (1986 Side Effekts). Every instrumental sound and sample manipulation on the album is played by Revell alone, with vocal contributions from Sinan, Jan Thornton, and a Russian Orthodox Church choir.
Gold and Poison (1987 Nettwerk), the last SPK studio album, combined some new tracks in the insipid dance-pop style of Machine Age Voodoo with slightly altered versions of songs from Zamia Lehmanni. The final release of Revell’s SPK was the live album Oceania (1988 Side Effekts), recorded on SPK’s 1987 world tour. Revell scored the movies Escape: World Safari III (1988) and Dead Calm (1989), leading to a highly successful career composing music for American movies and television.
Video artist Cathy Vogan digitally reworked SPK’s grisly Despair video for its 2007 DVD release for Twinvision in cooperation with Guerin. Guerin, Vogan, and the mysterious K. Osmosis (who is “in the process of articulating a fresh theoretical foundation for the Kollective SPK”) maintain an official SPK website. According to their website, a new SPK release called Firewall of Failure is forthcoming.
