30 years of Starfish: Keeping faith with Aussie band The Church

STEVE Kilbey never made his fortune from revered Aussie band The Church — but he says that diehard fans around the world found something even more precious.

ANYONE who has seen Steve Kilbey singing his own or someone else’s songs in front of a backing band in recent years has been watching a man hard at work.

The front man of revered veteran Australian band The Church has built a side career in such shows. Sometimes he’s singing his own band’s biggest hits for all-star ‘80s nostalgia evenings. Other times he’s a guest artist in tributes to greats from David Bowie to Jeff Buckley to The Cure, or the REM celebration show coming to the Palais Theatre next week.

But as much as he might admire those artists and is proud of his best known songs, he freely admits he’s in it for the money, so that he can continue to finance his many more esoteric side projects as well as the band that’s become his life’s work.

Even after nearly four decades, nothing compares to writing, recording and playing with The Church.

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Steve Kilbey and Peter Koppes from Australian band The Church ahead of the 30th Anniversary tour of their much-loved album, Starfish.

“I am in a weird position,” concedes Kilbey, sitting with the band’s only other remaining founding member, guitarist Peter Koppes, in a Melbourne hotel room.

“The Church is the thing I am famous for and the thing I do best but at the same time it brings me the least money. But because of the kudos, it gets me gigs where I get $3000 just to walk on stage at somebody else’s gig.

“When I walk on to the stage at the Palais in a greatest hits show and sing Unguarded Moment and Under the Milky Way and Almost With You with a house band, then I am at work. I am doing a job and thank you for that. But The Church has gone way beyond a job, it’s like something really special is occurring.”

The Church occupy a strange position in the musical landscape. Despite having a handful of household hits, enduring global success on a massive scale eluded the band, not helped by run-ins with record labels, substance abuse issues (former heroin addict Kilbey freely admits he shot a fortune up his arm) and a bloody-minded determination to do things their own way.

Australian band The Church.

And yet, they have pockets of diehard fans all around the world, for whom they are THAT band, and they are regularly name-checked by other musicians such as Billy Corgan, Brandon Flowers and Billie Joe Armstrong as being formative influences.

They recently returned from London where they were personally invited to perform at a festival curated by Robert Smith, and made time for their own two-day Church festival, which featured band and solo performances and documentary screenings. It’s those fans, plus a few wealthy benefactors, who have enabled The Church to get to 26 albums and counting, and continue to put on intense, mesmerising live shows that Kilbey describes as a “quasi-spiritual experience”.

“We are their favourite band,” says Koppes. “It’s not like we are just a band that they come and see. That’s the thing that is pretty special. And at the same time, they love us and they think we are amazing but they can’t understand why more people don’t know about us.”

The Church’s biggest success came with the 1988 album Starfish, home to their ARIA-winning, much-covered signature song Under the Milky Way. The album, sold more than 600,000 copies in the US and the band will play it in full on a 30th anniversary tour later this year.

Kilbey matter-of-factly says the songs sounds as good now as they did then because “this album is so f---ing good that it’s kind of classic and timeless”.

The Church (from left Peter Koppes, Tim Powles, Steve Kilbey and Ian Haug) will play Starfish in full to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

As revered as the album is now — it came in at No. 40 in a 2010 list of the top 100 Australian albums — the making of Starfish for Kilbey, Koppes and former bandmates guitarist Mary Willson-Piper and drummer Richard Ploog was a strange whirlwind. After being dropped by their Australian label, The Church were unexpectedly signed in the US for big money by music mogul Clive Davis, the man who helped make the careers of artists from Janis Joplin to Billy Joel to Whitney Houston.

Kilbey recalls living in a Los Angeles apartment with swimming pool, consuming copious amounts of mind-altering substances, going to mind-blowing Mexican restaurants and “seeing some nice ladies”. All very sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll — but there was a darker side too. The band’s dreamy, moody psychedelic rock sound and ambiguous lyrics were out of step with the big hair metal bands and shiny, flawless production that dominated the era. Producers Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi butted heads with the headstrong Kilbey and monstered drummer Ploog for what they perceived to be an inability to keep a regular beat.

“It’s very much like when you meet somebody and you spend the rest of your life trying to change them,” says Kilbey now of their brush with the big time. “The record companies and the business were like that. Here’s The Church, a bunch of scruffs from Sydney, playing this beautiful music, and as soon as they got their hands on you they were going ‘you should wear this, you should look like this, get this guy to do your video, get this guy to produce your songs so they are more like this’.

Steve Kilbey says the Church is sounding better than ever. Picture: Prudence Upton

“Why don’t you get a band like that? Why do you sign us up and then try to change us? So Starfish is the result of all of this pushing and pulling — us pulling to the left, them pulling to the right, all of this other stuff going on and somehow, in the middle, the record sort of materialised.”

Despite the anniversary tour and other recent gigs of playing older albums in full, Kilbey and Koppes are adamant that The Church are not a nostalgia band. The pair say that not are they sounding better than ever has thanks to the wisdom and experience of decades of playing together (drummer Tim Powles joined the band in 1994 and former Powderfinger guitarist Ian Haug replaced Willson-Piper in 2013), they are still as obsessed with music was they were when they met in Canberra in the mid-‘70s.

“That’s why the band is called The Church because so long ago I envisaged that thing of it being like a spiritual experience,” says Kilbey.

“We didn’t have it in the early days, we couldn’t achieve it but now we do. But it’s a non-denominational thing — whatever spiritual experience you want to have, you don’t have to take the drugs and drink the booze because we’ve already done that for you. Just go in there and listen to the music.”

AN EVENING WITH THE CHURCH: Anita’s Theatre, Wollongong, November, 23; NEX: The Arena, Newcastle, November 24; QPAC Concert Hall, Brisbane, November 25; State Theatre, Sydney, November 30, Palais Theatre, Melbourne, December 1; Royal Theatre, Canberra, December 2; Thebarton Theatre, Adelaide, December 7; Perth Concert Hall, December 9. frontiertouring.com