The first time I became aware that a band named The Church existed was sometime around the autumn of 1990. I was 12 and had a habit of spending a couple hours every afternoon flicking through cable TV channels, mostly watching music videos on Super Channel (we didn’t have MTV). They had this thing called The Mix, where they played a seemingly random selection of videos, in constant random rotation. No host, no VJ, no commentary or explanation of any kind, which made everything kind of mysterious. It was a weird mix of mainstream (Whitney Houston) and more indie-ish stuff (I remember seeing videos by Band of Susans, Stone Roses, Jane’s Addiction and They Might Be Giants…)
One day a Church video came on. I remember registering that the singer had a short beard and thinking that he seemed sort of cool, serious and tired. In subsequent years I was never able to remember what the song was (I’ve since figured out that it must have been “Metropolis”), but for some reason the album title, Gold Afternoon Fix, stuck with me.
Then I didn’t think about The Church for eight years, apart from occasionally wondering what “Gold Afternoon Fix” might mean.
In the late summer of 1998, I saw a copy of Priest = Aura in a second hand shop. I then remembered that video I had watched on Super Channel in my pre-teens and the tired, serious singer with the short beard. The P = A CD cost next to nothing so I picked it up.
In the beginning I had trouble coming to grips with the sound, which I perceived like thin and 80s-like in an unfortunate way, while the songs didn’t seem particularly melodic. At the time, I was primarily into lo-fi, indie-noise-guitar, retro-pop stuff and baroque-pop ultra-melodicism and not so much cinematic soundscapes and chorus- and effects-drenched guitars. When I went to London for three months in the autumn, the Church album wasn’t among the music I took with me.
Then in the beginning of 1999 I spent a couple months working in the ticket office of a Scandinavian ferry operating company. It was terrible, just dreadful… But by then I had started to listen to Priest = Aura in bed before, or while, falling asleep. I got sucked into the atmosphere and the lyrics. Later that year I was in London again and found Heyday (the original Australian pressing) in a Record Exchange store somewhere (not sure if it was the Notting Hill Gate one), and I also picked up the UK version of the debut album – the one with the far superior broken statue cover IMHO – in a goth paraphernalia shop, of all places, in Camden. I still like to feel a bit goth when listening to it.
The next album I got was After Everything Now This in early 2003. By now I was beginning to dig The Church more and more.
In the spring of 2007 I saw them live in Aarhus, Denmark (where I’d lived since late summer 1999). I wish I had bought some of all the stuff, Kilbey poetry books and such, they were selling at the gig, but I was still only a “casual fan”, standing at the back with a beer during the set. But after listening to Starfish shortly after that I figured that I now needed to make an effort to get as much Church related stuff as possible. So I did, and since then, I’ve had sort of a Church obsession.
There’s always something special about the first album you get into by a particular artist, so P=A is probably still my favourite Church album and “Ripple” my favourite song of it. I have a fondness for Gold Afternoon Fix, although it’s apparently often criticized, and songs like “Laughing”, “Disappointment”, “Fading Away” and “Transient” (four really strong ones in a row) are huge favourites of mine. For some reason they remind me of walking along the beach in the small town I grew up in on an overcast day.
I also have a special affinity for the really dark mid-90s stuff – Magician Among the Spirits and Some in particular. It’s one of the best albums ever made for late night listening. Once I fell asleep during it and then suddenly woke up as “After Image” started, and I imagined this was the music that was played when you died and entered some other kind of sphere. There’s definitely something about The Church sound that I associate with lying down. It’s night music to me. I would never put on The Church in broad daylight on a sunny day – well, maybe the very earliest stuff with the jangly sound and faster tempos, but apart from that it’s music that demands darkness, and which you sort of have to “fall down into”, I think. And there is that kind of thread running through it, with “Anasthesia”, “Tranquillity”, alleged opium use, etc. Something to do with reaching a kind of spiritual insight through soporific states. To me, Steve Kilbey is somehow like that figure in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, “The Cowboy”, who turns up out of nowhere, in the middle of the darkness, and wants you to face certain dark, abstract truths.
Lately, I’ve been listening to Back with Two Beasts and I’m amazed of the quality of what is supposedly an album of “jams” or throwaway stuff. (I mean, take “Pearls”… What a song!) Currently looking forward to further reissues from Second Motion and getting hold of some more Kilbey solo stuff (at the time of writing this, I have only heard the Jack Frost records.)
Yeah, well... That's probably about it for now...
