The Church - C or D/S&D/CB&TT

Yeah I think Marty's out, period.

That's a shame, although the last album was pretty strong. I'm not sure this is down to the departure of MWP but Kilbey's lyrical style seems to have shifted to a more straightforward rock and roll sort of idiom. Maybe it's the new guy's influence? I mean, it works... but it's different.

A full 1982 show just showed up on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxMXeZgjyxE

Man, that'll be a flashback and a half.

many many thank yous for posting
the sound and video are both quite clear for being so old!

Awesome show! Damn, they were a tight unit, weren't they? And I hadn't known that Marty ever played a Stratocaster! o_O

whoa @ kilbey's post on the making of under the milky way etc, missed that the first time around. fascinating stuff. while i hesitate to tell tales out of school (and those LA guys sound like tools), steve himself was a colossal conceited jerk when i interviewed him a couple years later. but i kinda liked him anyway and still love his music.

I like the additional gothness they throw on the vocals in this set. Also like Vast Halo says, they were really tight! This is what, 2-3 years after they formed?

new album was released last week and ~ shocker ~ it rules

Indeed it does.

I'll take the opposing view - this album is ok but it feels a bit too laid back and doesn't have near the high points of "Further/Deeper". But then I didn't rate "Untitled #23" either. Maybe I just miss the rush of stuff like "Unified Field" and "Block" from "Uninvited Like The Clouds".

o man, i loooooooove untitled #23. total hyperbole potentially but it's hard for me to think off the top of my head of an album that awesome released 18 years after a band's debut. that's one of my favorite eras of their music. i'm hoping they have some involvement with annihilation the way they "soundtracked" shriek

28 years.

28 years! straight = bent. reflexive mistaken underestimates when it comes to kilbey & co even among hopeless fanboys

it's easier to say fans than fanboys

LL is right, there's Steve Kilboys and Marty-Wilson Pipettes who are equally hopeless

I really like the new album. Is it bad to admit I'm happy that it's about 45 minutes long instead of 60+? I love the last two records but I rarely make it to the end of them unless I start halfway through. I miss the narrative lyrics of old, but the new record has sort of playful Jabberwocky kinda thing instead, which works really well with the music. It sounds like they're having fun! The openness of Magician Among the Spirits era stuff but folded down into short pop songs.

Marty-Wilson Pipettes
it me!

xpost I'm with you. I like the brevity on this one.

there's only one song on the album longer than five minutes!

I really love this record!

"before the deluge" could be a robyn hitchcock song

Yeah, that's true. Don't forget Robyn and Steve toured together, maybe it was one they whipped up.

A few more spins and the clear winners for me are "Another Century", "Undersea", "Before The Deluge", "A Face In The Film" and the brilliant closer "Dark Waltz".

The only weak track for me is In Your Fog, the first six tracks are the best run of Church album tracks since Spark -> Hotel Womb on Starfish.

Couple nights ago in Sydney. Rock on!

Great interview with an unfiltered SK on The Hustle podcast
https://thehustle.podbean.com/e/episode-147-steve-kilbey-of-the-church/

thanks for the link! that was a great interview, mainly because it was very long and the interviewer let him talk a lot. no further elaboration on the mysterious exit of marty wilson-piper; he just up and left and they haven't spoken since. loved how he was asked for a great rock'n'roll story and told a ghost story instead.

whoa this thread was started 9/9/01

i have a general question about this band: how were they portrayed in marketing/media in the early years, like 1980-84? were they "new wave" or ?

Early post/alt-rock lumped in with bands like The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, Soft Boys, etc.

they were considered psych revival, no?

Maybe in the same way as Bangles and Dream Syndicate?

compared to psych revival... maybe as much as R.E.M. were compared to jangle pop via The Birds

I first heard them on 120 Minutes - it was something off Heyday and it really caught my ear. I seem to recall them in what trivial pursuit called the “Art Rock” category

oh boy
i have been having some conversations about "art rock"

so far we have:

early alt-rock
psych revival/Byrdsy rock
"art rock"

does this mean "definitely NOT new wave" or ?

So much of that was all lumped together in the overused "college rock" category in the mid-80s American music press. If you were in a band that had at least one Rickenbacker 12-string guitar in it, you were "Byrds/psych revival" regardless if you were R.E.M., Let's Active, Game Theory, The Church, heck even The Smiths.

Anyway, the video for "Tantalized" was one of the first videos on 120 Minutes in 1986 (never heard them on the radio until UTMW). They opened up for Echo & The Bunnymen here (and completely blew them off the stage)

yeah i know that -- and what i am wondering is how they were portrayed before they were lumped into "college rock"
how were they characterized in their own marketing and in the media before that? i still see promos for super old church albums at the record store and afaict, that is a signal that they were widely distributed. just wondering how they were marketed during those early years.

it's possible that their lack of easy categorization contributed to their "college rock" lumping

Them also being an Aussie band must have made the marketing extra tuff on the suits.

Kilbey is always good for some quotes about this early time.

And with producer Bob Clearmountain handling production, the band has a guy who could bring out the nuances in the band’s moody music.

“He was the number one guy in the whole world and somehow someone talked him into working with us,” says Kilbey. “I don’t know why he did. He was an amazing producer. When the album was finished and mastered, [the record label] EMI rang me up and said there was a cassette waiting. I went and picked it up and went back to the market and my friend had a brand new invention called a Sony Walkman. I put it on, and I couldn’t believe our album sounded like that. It sounded like a million dollars. I remember other bands telling me, ‘How did you bastards get it to sound like that?’ It was rich and warm and organic. Clearmountain did a wonderful job.”

But it never came out in America because the higher-ups at Capitol Records thought Americans wouldn’t like it.

“There’s no way I would write a hit they would like,” Kilbey says. “You have to imagine what a guy working at Capitol Records in 1981 was like. There was no R.E.M. There was nothing. There were a few things, but he was already stuck in 1979 anyway. They’re always two years behind. That’s what [singer-guitarist] Robyn Hitchcock said to me. He said, ‘These guys sign you up in 1984 and they’re in 1982 and their idea of what 1982 is 1980 anyway. So by the time the record comes out, they’re five years behind the times.’ These guys were hopeless. They’re like women who see a guy and want to change that guy when they get him. EMI/Capitol looked at the Church and saw what we were — young scruffy indie guys playing psychedelic music. They wanted to turn us into the Thompson Twins. Why would they want that?”

An ill-fated tour with Duran Duran only added insult to injury; Kilbey pulled the group off the Duran Duran tour after only a few dates.

“Their audience hated us,” he says. “It was 1982 and there was no reference to this. There was nobody else out there with long hair playing 12-string guitars trying to invoke psychedelia whatever that is. It was like a One Direction crowd. It was like putting Fleet Foxes on before One Direction. That wouldn’t go down very well. We were supposed to do a whole tour and after 10 gigs, I went, ‘That’s it. I’m not putting myself or my band through this.’ We couldn’t convert [the fans]. There was no conversion going on. Not one girl wetting her pants over [Duran Duran drummer] Roger Taylor would go home and buy the Church’s album. It’s not happening."

good info, thank you!!

Yeah, those quotes really nail it down

pretty gross about the pants-wetting but whatever
times were different, it was 1982

Marty Wilson-Piper touches on it from time to time in his liner notes for the first set of reissues, they're all on his web site:

http://martywillson-piper.com/music/the-church/

It's an interesting question the more you think about it. Seems like before the advent of the Internet there simply wasn't the same framework (in the sense of, like, rebar) available to hang music genres from, they're necessarily going to be really hazy for a "small-time" band like the Church back then. Once you have crossed some volumetric threshold of discussion and documentation, the taxonomies solidify. Even retroactively. I think one effect of the online music community (forums, curated streaming services, the absorption of genre into fans forming their identities) is to reinforce both the desire and reality of questions like "what WAS the Church in 1982?" It's more part of the ongoing experience of fandom than it used to be... or maybe it's just me whose primary interest in genres pre-Internet was as pathways to finding more music that I liked. Still obviously a part of it, but there are actual services... algorithms... (and marketing masquerading as such) that do that for you now. Like, I can't fully appreciate the Church now without knowing what they were back then. This medium seems to kinda drive that desire in a way it didn't for me in, say, the 80s.

It reminds me of people not part of the antiquarian book trade asking what the market value of a very rare book is, when one only appears for sale every 20-30 years. It simply doesn't have a market value the way a book that is bought and sold every week does... you need a certain volume of trading in order to establish value in that way.

that's exactly why i asked the question here -- i guess i could google around and try to figure it out but i thought maybe someone would remember. i don't have time to read through every liner note of MWP (sadly) but it's good to know the info is there.

the church are such a weird band. this discussion helped me to figure out what to say to my students this week, so thanks for that. at least i am not the one who is "confused" -- the whole narrative is confused because ofthe times/methods of communication then vs now

Steve Kilbey is playing a living room show a couple miles from my house tomorrow night. Should be interesting...

Extremely good show last night for this current Starfish 30th anniversary tour they're doing. Absolutely killed Starfish itself, you got a sense of what they wanted the album to actually sound like. (Pretty sure they did a new instrumental break arrangement for "Reptile," plus Steve sang "Spark" to my slight surprise, would have thought Ian would do that.) Also a smart setup because it gets the big US hit out of the way two songs in. Then the remainder of the set was a split between other standards and newer numbers that show where they're at these days; they really have figured out big sweeping epics that work and allows them to do their prog/space rock deep dives without being dull. A real sense of five performers (counting Jeffrey Cain, their newish tour member) working together even with Steve as the pumped-up frontman. Ending the main set on a fantastic version of "Tantalized," then encoring with "Almost With You," "Unguarded Moment" and then taking it back to the present with "Miami" from Further/Deeper was a sharp move.

I'll also add a rather encouraging sign -- plenty of types my/their age in the audience, but I was happily surprised to note a slew of people in their twenties -- or younger! A whole clutch of people went in ahead of me at the door who were under 21, a mix of indie and goth types. (Definitely a low key goth vibe at the show in general -- saw at least one Siouxsie shirt -- plus also a Gang Starr shirt and a Mastodon shirt! One of the more random and interesting mixes on that front at a show I've seen in a bit.)

cool! as much as I dig Starfish, I'd rather hear a set comprised mostly of songs from their last two albums with a handful of old hits

Yeah, right with you -- had a chance to see the regular tour last year but either something came up or I don't know, so I'm a bit bummed about that. But I could walk to this show -- about eight blocks away -- and even with the anniversary hook I wasn't going to say no. Worked out well! It was also 'an evening with,' so no opener, and it was all done by 10:30. I rather appreciated that!

I'm still mad I had tickets to their Starfish/Priest/Untitled tour a few years back but got a new job and couldn't go (seeing the show involved flying to Chicago)

I went and it was great!!!