The Church Celebrate An Incredible Career With A Singles Retrospective Tour

Formed many lifetimes ago (well, 1980) THE CHURCH has earned a rightfully revered place in Australian rock music history along with a thoroughly deserved place in the ARIA Hall Of Fame. The Church continue to create timeless music that deeply resonates with audiences worldwide. From their early days in Sydney’s underground scene to their global overground success, The Church remain one of the most innovative and enduring bands of their…or any…era.

Everybody knows the etheric majesty of their iconic hit Under The Milky Way (featured everywhere, from the moody cinema masterpiece Donnie Darko, to AFL Grand Finals and car ads) but behind Milky Way lays a deep catalogue of emotive songwriting and genius performances.

The Singles Tour will be the first time ever The Church have played a show in this unique format celebrating their rare guitar brilliance and song writing invention. The tour will see them play twenty of their Classic Singles spanning their career including Under The Milky Way, Reptile, The Unguarded Moment, Tear it All Away, When You Were Mine, Almost With You, Electric Lash, It’s No Reason, Already Yesterday, Columbus, Tantalized, Metropolis, The Hypnogogue, Ripple and many others. With their distinctive sound blending psyche rock, atmospheric melodies, and soul-stirring lyrics, The Church promises a performance that will delight both longtime fans and recent converts. Steve Kilbey talks to Hi Fi Way about this amazing legacy.

Another massive tour celebrating the singles of The Church. Are you looking forward to this one?
Yeah, I am and in America as well. Before this, we’re going to America, doing the same thing in July. So, yeah, two massive tours.

Do you still enjoy the rigors and the grind of touring?
I don’t mind, I like touring in America. I like being on the bus. I really enjoy that. We’ve experimented with lots of ways of touring. Like flying from place to place, which we do in Australia, is a lot more of a pain and a lot more hanging around. The bus is great, you finish the gig, you get on the bus. If you want to sit up and talk and drink beer and smoke weed, watch TV, you can. Like me, most nights I’m so exhausted I get in my bunk, wake up the next morning, and I’m somewhere else. Go out and wander around, have the day to yourself, then in the afternoon, I like touring, I like playing. I don’t like soundchecks. I don’t like waiting around at airports, and I don’t like being on airplanes either. But most of it I really do enjoy, and most of it is still a lot of fun.

I guess particularly since COVID, do you think you enjoy the touring side even more now, having had it taken away for a while?
I think we all, audience and musicians alike, learned something from COVID. We all learned that we sort of need this. A world where you can’t go out and see music, where you can’t go out and play music, is a really terrible world. So yeah, definitely since then, that’s helped all of us appreciate how great this all is.

With a tour like this, so many great songs, that must be a pretty good challenge, trying to present it all in a couple of hours and still have equally as many great songs that don’t make the set list?
We could play for four or five days and never repeat a song. So yeah, boiling it all down to two hours, it’s been done, though. The hard work’s been done. I’ve reduced it, I’ve got the list, and some had to be left off. It’s only a two-hour show. The only question is the encore, what will they be? I don’t know yet. We haven’t figured that out. We’re gonna cut loose a bit in the encore, but yeah, the hard grind has been done, figuring out which songs we’re going to play.

Do you think the encore might include something from The Hypnogogue? Absolutely love that album.
The whole album? No, just part of it, anyway. I think there’s a good chance. Could be something from that. That’d be really good. Glad you like it.

The legacy of these songs, does it still amaze you how they keep building and connecting with audiences year after year?
Yeah, I’m lucky. I think that’s a lot to do with ambiguity. The songs aren’t pinned down in any specific way. I mean, say you’re Billy Bragg and you’ve spent a career singing about how much you hate Margaret Thatcher, suddenly, when she’s dead and gone, half your songs you can no longer play. You know what I mean? The Church has always dealt in ambiguity, so the songs are really from any time or place, in any situation. That enables them to stay relevant.

Absolutely. The audience reaction to these songs, that must be the ultimate compliment, seeing the crowd singing back to you?
Yeah. There was a time when I was a kid, standing outside a guitar shop, looking through the window at an electric guitar and thinking, “Oh boy, that must be amazing.” And I guess that little kid still lives inside of me. I do enjoy, I mean, despite my cynicism and all the stuff that’s happened, I really do enjoy the pleasure it gives people to hear these songs. It’s hard to get over that. I don’t know how, sometimes you see, like, I saw Van Morrison once in Stockholm, Sweden, and he just hated being there. He had his back turned, he was angry at the audience, angry at the gig, angry at the band. I thought, “Gee, it must be tough standing there, singing some songs, and making a million bucks.” So I don’t know. But right now, I feel very blessed to be able to keep doing this, and I’m very appreciative.

I read somewhere that you’ve got five albums scheduled to come out this year, is that right? That’s incredible.
Yeah. I’m still knocking them out, that’s for sure. They’re all really good, too. I haven’t phoned them in, each one of them has something serious to recommend it.

Oh, can’t wait. Do they naturally gravitate toward whether it’s Steve Kilbey solo, The Church, or whatever project you might be working on?
Yeah. Last year, I organised it so The Church went into a studio in Austin, Texas, for about four to six weeks, and we concentrated on The Church the whole time. Everything we wrote was for The Church. Later on, I go down and visit Martin Kennedy in his studio in Tasmania, and we work on that, and that’s what I do. Gareth Koch, the guitarist, said, “Let’s make another album,” so we hired a studio and concentrated on that. Whatever I need to do, I do it at the time and don’t think about the other things. I don’t sit here and do stuff and wonder what I’ll do with it, it’s like everything I’m doing, I’m there doing it, so I know where it’s all going, if that makes sense.

Do ideas just come to you all the time?
Yeah, all the time. I don’t know if you believe in this sort of thing, I felt like I was under psychic attack, like something was trying to get at me, and I saw this woman who heals your other bodies. She said, “Your crown chakra, the top chakra here, is permanently open. You are in communication with the ether all the time.” And I said, “That’s what it feels like.” I feel like that my whole life, I can just have an idea and flesh it out.

I’m extraordinarily good at that, but I’m really bad at other things. I get really angry, I sit down at a café, call the waitress, and they go, “Oh no, you’ve got to order on the app.” And then it’s like, “Create a password,” and suddenly I’m exploding and getting angry. I’m not very good at following instructions, constructing furniture, or many other things. But this one thing, creating, I’m just set up for it to the exclusion of everything else. I’m very lucky like that, but I’m really bad at many other things. I was driving my daughters home last night in Bondi, where I’ve lived forever, and I took the wrong turn. They were like, “What are you doing?” and I said, “Sorry, I was thinking about something else.” So yeah, it’s easy for me to create. Very, very easy.

Is there anything in particular that’s influencing the songwriting?
I think sometimes I’m influenced by books I’m reading, TV shows, or conversations I have. Sometimes I hear a phrase or something that sticks with me, and I store it for later. It’s like how AI works, if you ask AI to write a book about a boy born in the twenty-fifth century on Mars, it pulls from everything it knows, pieces it all together, and spits it out. I think that’s how my mind works too. Every time I write a song, lyrics or music, it’s all swirling around in there, and then it figures out the bits that fit. I’ve always been that way. I’m always collecting, listening to people, watching TV, overhearing conversations, I always pick up fragments of words and phrases. There’s always a part of my mind wondering, “Would that work in a song? Would that be a great song title?” It’s like walking along a beach, picking up shells, collecting things that will come in handy later.

Do you think AI is a bit of a curse for music?
At first, I hated it. Then I got my own AI tool and generated some paintings that looked like everything else out there. And now, I’ve kind of lost interest in it. I’m not really interested in AI. I think it can help set things up, and it might offer some good ideas. But if it’s all AI and no real humanity, I don’t know. I’m already over it. I’m glad there’s less AI-generated stuff flooding the internet now, it was everywhere for a while. Movies, images, everything was AI-generated. I’m over it. I’m tired of it. I’m a big fan of humanity.

You mentioned before that you’re working on a new Church album. Is that something likely to be released this year or early next year?
There’s a bit of conjecture over that. It’s a double album, we recorded twenty new songs. We’re signing with a proper record company, and they don’t want that many songs. I don’t know how I feel about reducing it down. I don’t know when it’s coming out either. But it’s done, it’s ready. I imagine it will be either the end of this year or very early next year.

Is it following a similar vein to The Hypnogogue?
No, no, no. It’s nothing like The Hypnogogue. The album’s called Lacuna, which means a space or a pause. It’s like stopping everything else and writing brand new material. It draws from old Church, mid-period Church, futuristic Church, it’s leaving everything else behind. It stands alone, in its own light, in its own context. I think The Hypnogogue and the novel I wrote about it were enough for that concept. Now, we’re back to normal service, an album of random songs that don’t necessarily connect to each other.

The creative process must be exciting. Seeing the songs take shape with your band must be thrilling?
Yeah, it’s funny. For example, I wrote a song called Winter, which is on the new album. I was sitting in the foyer of the studio while one of the band members was inside doing something else, and I wrote this simple little song. It started with humble beginnings, I didn’t even think I was writing a song. I was just doodling on the guitar and humming. Then, bit by bit, the others joined in, adding more and more overdubs and harmonies. I let Ian play bass because I didn’t know what to play, I just stuck with acoustic guitar. Then, more overdubs go on. It gets mixed, remixed, remixed again, everyone gives feedback, and it gets remixed again. Then it’s mastered. And one day, you sit down, hear the song, and go, “Wow.” It’s like watching a child grow up. At first, they’re rolling around on the floor, and twenty years later, they’re a full-grown adult standing there. It’s exciting watching a song take shape, transform into something bigger.

And the novel, is that finished or still in progress?
The novel was finished, sold out on the American tour. It’s called Eros and The Hypnogogue. I really enjoyed writing it. The main character, Eros, is me, he reacts like I would. He’s living in Antarctica twenty-five or fifty years from now. He gets hooked on a drug and dries up creatively, he can’t write songs anymore. He journeys to Korea, meets Sun Kim Jong, and they put him in The Hypnogogue. He spits out a couple of songs, but in the end, it all goes badly, and he dies. I really enjoyed writing that book. I’m working on another novel right now, something else entirely. I’ve got a graphic novel coming out about Hannibal Barca, the famous Carthaginian general. He still holds the record for killing the most enemy soldiers in one day, more even than in the Great War. At the Battle of Cannae, he slaughtered fifty-seven thousand Roman soldiers in one day. That record still stands.

I’ve always felt connected to Hannibal. The world would have gone in a completely different direction if things had played out differently. Rome and Carthage were two rival powers, Rome crushed Carthage, destroyed it. But if it had gone the other way and Carthage had won, we’d have a completely different world. So I’ve always felt connected to Hannibal. I wrote a graphic novel about his years hiding from the Romans, drifting around the world causing problems, kind of like an ancient Osama bin Laden, popping up all over the place and carrying out attacks on the Romans. That’s in the works and coming out soon.

What’s next for you? You’ve done so many great things, anything left uncharted that you really want to explore?
I’m up for anything. I’d love to write a TV series, I’d love to be a writer for one. I’d love to write a play or a musical. Anything creative. I wouldn’t mind doing some acting, I think I’d make a good villain. Whatever people come up with, if they approach me with a really good idea, I’m in. I’m very open to using this thing I have for as long as I can.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch The Church on the following dates, tickets from Metropolis Touring…