How Bark Psychosis Made Scum
A post-rock masterpiece recorded in an East London church
A distant guitar reverberates quietly for three and a half minutes.
Shortly before the four-minute mark, acoustic drums appear, and the guitar eventually starts strumming single chords.
The piece nearly seems to fall apart before it even started.
Moody, almost shy vocals come in around five minutes into the tune.
“Don’t tell us that we’re all free/You can’t escape what you can’t see/It’s all around you”, a young man sings dejectedly.
The voice belongs to Graham Sutton, singer and guitarist of the London-based band Bark Psychosis.
In a zine interview from 1994, Sutton remembers that Scum
“came about as a general disaffection with general sentiments from records that were being shoved down my throat. Crap house tracks. I just remember this one track had this chorus like ‘Everybody's free’ and it made me want to fucking puke. I just wanted something completely the opposite of that and turn that sentiment around.”
The music writer Simon Reynolds famously coined the term ‘post-rock’ reviewing Bark Psychosis’ 1994 debut album Hex.
Similar to other nebulous genre descriptors – like ‘deep house’ or ‘indie rock’ – this means very different things to different people. Still, most bands that you’d file under that genre tag, owe something to Bark Psychosis.
While Hex remains the band’s definitive album statement, the group released a groundbreaking longform composition two years before: Scum came out on a one-sided 12-inch single; a moody, meditative 21-minute piece of avant-garde rock music.
The title is a reference to one of their favourite bands, UK grindcore outfit Napalm Death, whose debut album was called Scum.
Bark Psychosis actually started as a Napalm Death cover band. And while their dreamy rock feels very different from grindcore’s short bursts of extreme metal, you can hear the influence in how they treat guitar noise as ambience.
In terms of speed and dynamics though, Scum is the very antithesis of grindcore – a slow-building longform composition, increasing in volume and energy before breaking down and then building up again.
For inspiration, the band was looking towards Miles Davis’ electric period and Talk Talk, especially their albums Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock.
They even asked engineer Phill Brown, who had closely worked with Mark Hollis and Talk Talk on both albums, for recording advice, and hired him to mix the track.
Just like Spirit of Eden, Scum was recorded in a church.
Singer/guitarist Graham Sutton and bassist John Ling knew each other from school in East London. Bonding over their love for noisy bands like Swans, Big Black, Sonic Youth and Psychic TV, they started playing music together. They were still kids at that point.
In 1988, they dropped out of school, which is when Mark Simnett joined. The drummer worked in community projects at St. John’s Church in Stratford, East London, so he had the keys to its rooms.
The band started rehearsing in a crypt underneath the church, an abandoned room with a damp smell from moldy carpets. Sometimes they would play in the main hall too. The vicars didn’t mind.
Experimenting with electronic production and sampling techniques, Sutton and Ling weren’t too keen on being a traditional rock band. When multi-instrumentalist Daniel Gish joined – a synth nerd that loved Kraftwerk and New Order –, he brought even more of those influences to the table.
The early 1990s were a tumultuous time for the young quartet. Most of the band members lived in squats at this point; East London wasn’t gentrified yet.
Having signed their first label deal, they released a few singles of dreamy guitar pop, and then tried to get out of the contract as soon as they realized the record company didn’t understand their vision at all.
Bark Psychosis had no wish to ever repeat themselves or to chase commercial success by following proven templates of success.
The situation was eventually resolved when they were bought out of their contract by another label. They still hadn’t released an album.
Building a temporary studio in St. John’s, they took advantage of the church’s acoustics to make a record that changed the band’s trajectory.
Sutton on Scum’s genesis:
“We had a single to do but we didn't have any tracks that were suitable for a single. We wanted to do something completely new and put ourselves under a certain amount of risk. So basically we hired a load of gear and set up sort of a make-shift string and sticky tape kind of studio under the church where we rehearsed for ages and in the church as well. We had the gear for ten days. We didn't have a track when we started, so we just set ourselves ten days to do a 12-inch and that's what came out.”
While their debut album Hex would heavily involve sampling and editing techniques, Scum was just one long improvised live jam.
"I liked the idea of issuing a single track. No distractions!”, Sutton recounts in an interview with The Quietus. “We only had a couple of reels of tape, so we’d just keep playing, recording ’til the reel ran out, listening and erasing before we had something we liked.”
The band played simultaneously in the same room and recorded themselves mostly without overdubs – like a classic jazz recording.
According to Sutton, the only overdubs were some of the samples that were inserted afterwards, like a group of gospel singers meeting in the back room of the church. The long ambient intro came from the distance mics they had left up from a previous take.
Sutton’s main vocals feel reminiscent of someone quietly humming along while listening to music on headphones in private.
The guitar doesn’t play riffs, but focuses on slowly strummed single chords and loads of feedback noise that turns into piercing drones.
The rhythm section appears loose to the point of carelessness – just a simple, dubby bassline over airy drums with some brushed cymbals.
That screaming no-wave-style saxophone inserts a sudden urgency and dynamic counterpoint to the disaffected vocals.
Those strange field recordings and echoes of traffic noise add more layers of mystery to the music, while also giving it a live feel.
Sutton says he “loved the sound of old Miles Davis records, and (,..) wanted to capture the solidly 3D feeling of sound waves moving through air, creating something holographic, rather than through some processing, which always seemed to lack that true immersiveness.”
It wasn’t just Miles’ electric lineup that experimented with side-long improvisational jams since the late 1960s, abandoning the standard songwriting rulebook. Groundbreaking ‘progressive’ rock bands like Can, Soft Machine or Pink Floyd were working within similar formats.
While Bark Psychosis appear to be part of that lineage, they sound less psychedelic than melancholic – almost like Slint if they hadn’t listened to the Minutemen and Hüsker Dü, but to the Cocteau Twins and My Bloody Valentine instead.
Released with an iconic cover featuring a razorblade against blue background, the Scum 12-inch contained the full 21-minute piece on the A-side, while the empty B-side featured knife etchings. The 2023 reissue includes “Mucs”, a backwards recording of “Scum”, on the flip.
Scum received a lot of press and was awarded “Single of the Week” in the influential magazine Melody Maker. That kind of attention built momentum and prepared the world for Bark Psychosis’ debut album.
While Scum was recorded in ten days, Hex took a year to create.
And though that record is widely seen as one the best experimental rock albums of the 1990s, the band imploded afterwards.
Everyone just went off into different directions, working on other projects and moving into other cities, even countries. Sutton’s dominance and stubbornness during the strenuous album recording process seems to have been a key factor in the unexpressed dissolving of the group.
During the second half of the 1990s, Sutton would mainly produce drum’n’bass tracks under his Boymerang alias.
He’d release a second Bark Psychosis studio album in 2004, Codename: Dustsucker. None of the earlier band members were involved. Though the album was critically well-received, Sutton focused on production work afterwards. The band moniker was put to rest indefinitely.
With just a handful of releases, Bark Psychosis definitely left their marks on the music world – you will hear echoes of their distinctive sound in the works of bands like Tortoise, Mogwai, Sigur Rós, Explosions In The Sky or Godspeed! You Black Emperor, but also in many electronic-leaning projects of the current-day dreampop and shoegaze revival.
Scum still makes my arm hair stand up.
Maybe more bands should record themselves jamming in church halls.
I like "Codename:Dustsucker", love "Hex" but Scum has passed me by so far. Will have a listen.
Yessss! literally this week I found Hex and been burning through it all week, also found the mark Hollis solo album and have been blown away. Universal guidance win for taking me further down the rabbit hole on some albums that will honestly have lifelong impact on me. Great stuff, any other recommendations?