Bark Psychosis

Teenagers from east London who went from hardcore noise to near silence, recorded in a Stratford church, and made Hex, the record for which the term post-rock was used.

Origin
London, England
Years active
1986-1994, 2004-2005
Genres
post-rock, ambient, art rock
Labels
Cheree, 3rd Stone, Circa, Fire

Noise

Graham Sutton and John Ling met at a school in Walthamstow and started the band in 1986, at fourteen, with a four-track and a drum machine. Sutton took the name from a dream. They began as a Napalm Death covers band; Sutton later said it was a complete sheet of noise, like a hardcore band. Their first logged gig, in 1988, was a support slot to Extreme Noise Terror, opening with Clawhammer.

After leaving school they found the drummer Mark Simnett, about ten years older, who ran a community scheme in the crypt of St John's Church on Stratford Broadway; the band rehearsed in a tiny damp room down there. The Cheree label put out Clawhammer on a flexi disc and then two singles in 1990, sung partly by Sue Page, who lived in the same Leyton squat. A contract dispute took a year to escape, and 3rd Stone bought them out.

The church

Scum (1992), a twenty-one minute single, was improvised over ten days among the pews of St John's on a hired sixteen-track, with advice and mixing from Phill Brown, the engineer of Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden. Sutton had loved Talk Talk since he was fourteen and saw them and AR Kane as his only contemporaries. Melody Maker made Scum single of the week, and Circa, part of Virgin, signed them.

Hex took most of 1993: drums in Bath, overdubs and vocals in the church late at night, beside a traffic island, the keyboards played through a PA and miked from the far end, then more work in Brighton and a mix at RAK. Sutton called it the most intense year of his life. Gish left for lack of money, and a week before the release tour in 1994 Ling quit, telling Sutton it was his record. Simnett left after the Blue EP that spring, and that summer Sutton and Gish played a drum-and-bass set at the Phoenix Festival, the last show under the name for a decade.

Post-rock

Reviewing Hex in Mojo in March 1994, Simon Reynolds used the term post-rock for what the band were doing, and developed it in The Wire that May as rock instruments used for timbre and texture rather than riffs. He had used the phrase before, but the Hex review is what brought it into circulation. The band themselves sound little like the groups later filed under it; Record Collector put it bluntly that they are nothing like Mogwai.

Hex was largely ignored on release and has sold steadily since. FACT named it the best post-rock album of all time in 2016, Fire reissued it from the original tapes in 2017, and Pitchfork gave it a Sunday review in 2024. Sutton made drum and bass as Boymerang, with Talk Talk's Lee Harris, then revived Bark Psychosis alone for Codename: Dustsucker (2004). He became a producer, working with Jarvis Cocker, British Sea Power and These New Puritans. Ling became a psychiatric nurse; Simnett teaches maths.

Members

Records

Songs

Talk Talk, Disco Inferno, AR Kane, Labradford

Where to go next

Official

Reference

Discography and data

Writing and criticism

Interviews

Live performance archives

Sources

  1. Bark Psychosis, Wikipedia
  2. Bark Psychosis: Hex, Graham Sutton interview, The Quietus (2014)
  3. Post-rock, Wikipedia
  4. Graham Sutton (musician), Wikipedia
  5. St John's Church, Stratford, Wikipedia