LET US PRAY FOR THE CHURCH

LET US PRAY FOR THE CHURCH

FEATURES

Steve Peters

by

Steve Kilbey is sitting quietly in a spacious hotel suite overlooking Hollywood Boulevard. The bassist and lead singer for the Church, Australia’s most understated rock band, looks fatigued, his arms drawn close to his sides and his back against the diffused sunlight that drifts through the hotel window. Since writers are so keen on symbolism, I could interpret this as a sign of Kilbey’s preference for the dark, brooding atmosphere that dominates much of the Church’s music. Or maybe he is symbolically turning his back on the glitzy decadence that accompanies success in this ugly city. Far more likely, however, is that he just flopped down into the nearest available chair.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE CHURCH 1980 A.D. TO PRESENT

Over the past eight years, the Church —Kilbey, guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes, and drummer Richard Ploog—have released five superb albums, none of which have made a dent on anything besides the college charts in America. Their records are wistful and melodic, with Kilbey’s plaintive vocals providing the perfect complement to the band’s lush, textural instrumentation.

The Church bridge the best elements of ’60s and ’80s rock; you might hear hints of English psychedelia in the melodies, or perhaps some Byrdsinfluenced 12-string guitar courtesy of Willson-Piper, but their sound is anything but dated. They’ve often been described as psychedelic—not in a derivative way, like the diligent recreations of L.A.’s Paisley Underground bands or the tongue-in-cheek homages of the Dukes Of Stratosphear, but in a relaxing, almost hypnotic sense—an ethereal wash of guitars, bass, drums and vocals that alternately massages and gently assaults the listener’s ears. They’ve also been compared to R.E.M. in the States (much to Kilbey’s dismay), though they were playing the Australian club circuit before

R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck toughed out his first A minor chord, and besides oblique lyrics and certain melodic qualities the only obvious parallel I can draw is Buck and Willson-Piper’s fondness for Rickenbacker guitars.

They aren’t necessarily a gloomy or overly-depressing lot (no Morrissey-styled self-pitying or obsessive death fixations here), yet even their most upbeat numbers seem to be ensconced in a vague Shroud of melancholy—kind of like that gray, cloudy afternoon when some small part of you looks forward to a little rain after a few too many sunny days. JH

Incidentally, their new album, Starfish, is one of the best records you’re likely to hear in 1988.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF INEPT RECORD COMPANIES IN AMERICA, 1980 A.D. TO PRESENT

Unfortunately, in this God-fearing country of ours, the Church have fallfijf prey to a horrible malady that probably first reared its ignorant head when Dacca Records neglected to sign the Beatles in 1962—the dreaded Major Label Corporate Mentality.

Capitol Records released their 1980 Australian debut domestically in 1982 and promptly dropped them. A pair of brilliant albums (The Blurred Crusade and Seance) followed, but since the band was between American label deals at the time, neither record was released here.

Things were looking up again when Warner Bros, signed them and released two Australian EPs as a single album titled Remote Luxury in 1984. The followup album, Heyday, sold a respectable 60,000 copies, but that figure wasn’t respectable enough for the mighty Warner Bros.—they also dropped the band.

“We didn’t sell enough records,” Kilbey explains matter-of-factly, aware that artistic growth usually needs to be coupled with plenty of units shipped to maintain a deal with the majors in this country. “It was obvious that sooner or

later some accountant was gonna say ‘We don’t need this.’ It’s business, isn’t it? The accountants aren’t sitting there going These guys write good lyrics,’ or ‘Listen to this guitar solo.’ It just didn’t make money.”

In the two years between the release of Heyday and Starfish, Kilbey released a terrific solo album of odds and ends he had recorded over the years (released domestically on Enigma as Unearthed) and published a book of his writings in Australia. Meanwhile, the Church were faced with the grim prospect of releasing an album without a deal in America for the third time in their career.

A SAVIOR COMETH

The band’s unlikely messiah turned out to be Arista Records, home of Whitney Houston and destined to go down in history as The Label That Finally Broke The Grateful Dead. “Our manager was sitting in New York one day,” Kilbey recalls, “and Arista rang up and said ‘We want to sign the Church,’ and we said ‘Alright.’ ” While the deal has given the band yet another shot in the States, Kilbey has learned to hedge his optimism. “You know,” he says, “if this album doesn’t do very well, I wouldn’t at all be surprised if we get the royal boot.

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about that sort of stuff, ’cause you just get crazy,” he continues. ‘‘I just feel it’s up to me to make an album and give it to the record company. I know a lot of good musicians who haven’t even made a record, who never got out of playing in their bedroom for one reason or another, so I sort of count my blessings. If I get to make a record and come here and tour and sell 60,000 copies, that’s OK. Anything better is just icing on the cake.”

Mighty modest of. ya, Steve, but it

seems that with the proper promotional push the Church could achieve great success in America. R.E.M. (who might never have gotten past Reckoning had they the Church’s label history) recently proved that there’s definitely a growing market for alternative music in this country.. .

“I know what you mean,” Kilbey says. “I don’t know. I’m kind of a perverseenough individual to sort of enjoy being a best-kept secret. It certainly makes the people who do like you more fanatical. But to me, whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. If people finally discover us with this album, it’ll be nice, but if they don’t, I’m not going to go home and spend the rest of my life going ‘I coulda been a contender.’ There’s a lot of great records that never made it. Just because your music’s subjectively good, or a few critics think it’s good, doesn’t mean that the general, salivating hordes are going to embrace it. What we’re doing is fairly low-key. It’s fairly obscure and subtle, and I’m not really expecting to be that successful with it at all.”

MORE ON STARFISH AND OTHER INTRIGUING SEA ANIMALS Starfish is, in many ways, the Church’s most accessible effort yet. It’s much more straightforward than Heyday, which fea-

tufed decorative horn and string flourishes that didn’t really fit in with the group’s usual style. Since Kilbey tends to be his own harshest critic (“I just want to make the best album I can, which I don’t think we really ever do”), I asked him if he thinks the new record approaches what he would consider a good representation of the band.

“They always say yes, don’t they? ‘It’s our best album, the new album’s the best.’ ” He smiles. “Actually, I think the ratio’s better on this one. I think we’ve got more good tracks than we’ve ever had before. We wanted it to be more like the way we play live. Most of the songs are all guitars, bass and drums laid down at the same time, with hardly any overdubs.

We wanted to get that more live feel, because I thought Heyday was a bit ornamental.”

Starfish is also probably the least psychedelic record the band has released to date, though Kilbey says that wasn’t intentional.

‘‘If people are talking about psychedelia as far as meaning sort of mind-expanding, surrealistic and weird and wonderful, yeah, well I’d like to be that,” he says. “If they mean are we gonna come on with pudding bowl haircuts and sing songs about Strawberry Fields and all

that kind of revivalism, I just don’t want to know bout it. i mean, in the beginning, we did wear paisley shirts (and also on the cover of Heyday, as an in-joke most American fans didn’t get) and afl that sort of stuff. It was sort of saying ‘We stand for these old values.’ Then suddenly this whole thing happened where people were adopting the whole Paisley Underground. It was like, ‘Let’s wear paisley shirts, have pudding bowl haircuts and Roger McGuinn glasses,’ and very few of them ever attempted to wrestle with the whole of what psychedelia was all about.

“The last thing I want to be is looked upon as some kind of pseudo-’60s relic. I would imagine someone who hears this new album for the first time and doesn’t know anything about the Church, I doubt whether the word psychedelic would even come into it at all.”

Does he ever worry that the darker aspects of the Church’s music might turn off potential fans?

‘‘It’s funny,” he offers, “you sort of analyze it to a certain extent—I mean, I think I’m a fairly articulate person, but after a while all I can say is that’s just what I like to do. I was down in this rock shop here the other day, and you look

through one whole section that’s alt groups like Bones and Dust and Suicidal Maniacs and We Kill Our Mothers, and you look at all the songs, it’s all ‘Vomiting In Hell,’ and it’s just so one-dimensional. Then there’s a whole lot of other records like ‘Dancing On The Ceiling’ and ‘We’re Happy’ and ‘Isn’t The World Great?’ I think what I want to get into in the Church is kind of more multi-dimensional than that, so the tune might sound happy and then the lyrics might be more brooding and haunting than that, or have a few conflicting emotions in the whole thing.”

BUT WOULD THEY COVER “STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT”?

‘‘I was just thinking the other day that ‘Milky Way’ (the first single from Starfish) —that song, that whole croon, the lyrics and everything about that song, is a direct reflection of the fact that when I was three or four years old and my parents first moved to Australia, from England, we were very, very poor. I had one record, which was Frank Sinatra’s Only The Lonely, and the whole album was all these songs about love lost, but the lyrics were incredibly surrealistic. If people now were writing lyrics like the lyrics that are on this album, guys like you would be tripping out and saying ‘This is it, this blows so-andso out the window.’ Very weird, strange kind of lyrics, and very clever. I used to sit there and listen to this, and since it was

the only album I had I heard it over and over and over, and it was my first exposure to music. I used to say ‘Why is he saying that? That’s very weird and creepy.’ So as I grew up, I always thought pop music to be this weird, creepy sound, kind of like a loneliness and isolation thing, and I think that, so many years later, it’s come out in this song! ‘Milky Way’ is sort of like my attempt to write a song which, in another time and place, I would have liked to have seen on this Only The Lonely album, That was the real initial thing that got me interested in music and words.

‘‘To me, the sort of art that I enjoy, not just in music but in films, ballet, whatever, is the surrealist kind of things—stuff that’s very open to interpretation, stuff that comes from the subconscious, stuff that’s sort of weird and strange and fascinating... I think there’s room for people like me to be sort of more escapist.”

IN NOMINEE PATRII, ET FILII, ET SPIRITUS SANCTI. . .

So there you have it. Hopefully the Church will sell lots of records and make their new label so proud that they’ll release The Blurred Crusade and Seance on a specially-priced double album and help the band get the recognition they deserve and the MTV generation will dance merrily in the streets to the strains of ‘‘Is This Where You Live” or ‘‘North South East West.” Or maybe they’ll be one of those bands that doesn’t get their just due un-

til a decade after their demise, when they’ve picked up enough cool underground fans over the years to prompt America’s Only Rock ’N’ Roll Magazine to stick ’em on the cover a la the Velvets. Either way, Kilbey honestly doesn’t care.

‘‘To me, it just doesn’t matter,” he says convincingly. ‘‘I want to see the album do well, but I’m just not going to spend a lot of time thinking about CHR crossover charts and all that sort of stuff. It’s just all this artificial sort of packaging and categorizing, putting music under ladders and adding up the. points and all of this sort of stuff. Music’s got nothing to do with that. Music’s this sort of, this thing that makes people feel good. There’s no real logical reason why music makes you feel good, it just does. And that’s what the Church has always tried to do... make music that makes people feel good.”

Amen.