‘Darker, nastier and weirder’ 35 years along
Thirty-five years and 25 albums is a heroic run for any band, but Australian underground heroes the Church have actually managed to stay interesting the entire time.
Probably to the Church’s own detriment, admittedly — 1981’s “The Unguarded Moment” and 1988’s “Under the Milky Way” represent this doggedly obscure psych outfit’s only real flirtations with mainstream success, and the band has never shown much interest in staying in one artistic place long enough to cement those footholds into the wider popular consciousness. No, the Church is a cult act and quite happy to leave it that way.
The Star spoke with Steve Kilbey, the band’s frontman and bassist — as well as author of the autobiography Something Quite Peculiar — about the Church’s long, strange trip in advance of its show at the Opera House on Friday. I think it’s the highest compliment I can pay a band that’s been around for 35 years to say I’m still consistently surprised by new Church recordings. It always sounds like you guys are still exploring and finding new ways to do what you do.
Well, good, because we are. That’s why it sounds like that, I guess, because we’re still excited by messing around with electric guitars and drum kits and, you know, making music. Was there a grand design in mind when the Church reconvened to make the album Further/Deeper last year or did you just set aside some time and feel it out?
It’s pretty random. There was no grand design. There’s no nothing, really.
I don’t think anybody in the band could carry off a “grand design.” I think it would go awry if someone said, “We’re gonna do a record like this and we’re gonna play like this and it’s gonna be about this.”
I think immediately you would meet great resistance from whoever didn’t want to do that . . . It’s all pretty much a group effort of fiddling around until we find something we like and then we’re off chasing that idea. We work in blocks. It’s just kind of, like, “Put these three weeks aside and then, damn it, we’ll do something then.” And then when we turn up, we do something. It makes itself happen. The deadlines make the songs happen, I guess. I’m sure there are days when you’d like to be the Rolling Stones and have your own private island or whatever, but I think this is the most respectable way to be in a band — to have a body of work you can look back on proudly and have weird cultists like me in every port of call and know you’ve built something sustainable without ever “selling out.”
Being in a band, you can look at as having a number of boxes to tick.
And as for a sense of general integrity, I guess, we can tick the box that says “Integrity.” We can’t tick the box that says “Private Island,” unfortunately.
And, truth be told, if someone said “You can trade all that for a private island,” I’m not sure that I would say “No.”
But yeah, we do have integrity. We haven’t played the game. Not only didn’t we want to play the game, I don’t think we could have played the game if we’d wanted to.
I don’t think it would have behooved us or done us anything at all to have played that game. I don’t think we’d have gotten the private island. I think we would have lost whatever we did have and we wouldn’t exist. I think we always kind of knew that integrity was our only trump card, really, and hopefully when all of the sort of stupid, ephemeral, rubbishy things had blown over, there would be the guys with integrity, still standing there making music if people were interested.
And people are still interested.
At the moment, people are interested. Our Australian tour, our last European tour and our last American tour in March were mostly sold out every night. So people are kind of rediscovering us. I just feel like “old masters” now, you know?
It sounds strange to say that and the 25-year-old me would jump from the past and slap me ’round the face, but the fact is we are old masters. There’s two ways an old band can go: they can become really safe and really shiny and really professional and not have any brunt, not have anything visceral anymore, (where) it’s all kind of polished and shiny and showbiz-y and Las Vegas.
Or you can be like the Church and you can get darker and nastier and weirder . . . We’re in a really good place at the moment. At the end of this long, long trail — nearing the end that can’t be too far away — we find ourselves in a very sunny, golden kind of end period.
Age has not diminished us. We’re not going ’round on the f---ing nostalgia circuit playing “Under the Milky Way.” We do play “Under the Milky Way.” But mostly people kind of groan when they hear it now, like “Aww, why’d you go and spoil it with that?”