Steve Kilbey social media concert is a return to our heyday
In the time of social distance, our writer relives her Church concert-going youth at a virtual gig with her best friends across three towns.
Look at us here, gathered together across three different towns and one closed border, time a flat circle as the past comes rushing in. Thirty-five years compress into nothing and here’s The Church’s Steve Kilbey, again and still, framed inside the screen, performing for us the album of our youth. It’s already yesterday/We’re off the calendar …
In quarantine, time accordions in and around work and home-schooling and the eternal recurrence that made the month of March last for 800 years.
And so three old and dear friends, separated by a pandemic, grab a slice of the present to visit our past. Kilbey and his 12-string acoustic guitar, direct from his Coogee living room in Sydney, deliver us Heyday on Instagram Live and we float unmoored in a shared reverie. I heard the sirens play/Just like an orchestra.
It was in the spring of 1985 that Heyday was released, the fourth album from The Church, the band’s incontestable masterpiece. Remember that baroque album cover, friends? Four psychedelic magicians, mixing and matching in paisley-patterned shirts. Was it Myrrh on the stereo as we turned our gold into cheap wine and incense? Happy Hunting Ground that played while we foraged for loose change on the floor of the car, finding just enough for petrol to bring us all home?
Heyday captured in song our conquests and heartache and ennui; The Church sang our friendship into being. Miracles and labyrinths and camel dust. Blue fox and ermine and carnivals and jewels. Vague and beguiling, we thought of those lyrics as a template for meaning itself.
We know better now, of course. And so, god bless him, does Kilbey. Time’s been kind, unravelled his angst. He’s funny and loose tonight, wearing his quirks like a rumpled second skin. He sings of drum kit moons and software limbo and it’s beautiful and unserious and it means whatever we want it to mean.
We listen to the hazy intensity of Heyday, played from beginning to end, with detours via The Byrds and Bowie and You Are My Sunshine, and we are all there with him in his beachside home, with its statues of Buddha and DIY stage lighting. We hear an anecdote about socially distanced swimming at Coogee — “It’s like f..king Piccadilly Circus” — before hitting some turbulence during Youth Worshipper. “This is your captain speaking,” our wayward pilot intones. “We’re reapproaching the third verse. This one’s gone terribly wrong.”
Marty Willson-Piper, Peter Koppes in October 1982
We are all in this together.
This is the fourth of Kilbey’s Monday night sessions. Like musicians the world over, he’s made a fleet-footed pivot, catering to a self-isolated fan base with virtual concerts. Tonight, that base ranges across continents and time zones. Hi from Mallorca, China, Peru. Hi from a nephew. Hi from Denise, who is gifted a song, an ecstatically jangly rendition of Happy Birthday.
And hi from three friends in three different towns, where time in this moment means nothing, where the past is both present and future, inside a tingling whirlpool of sound.
The flow of time is a man-made construct. Yes, we’re older — are we old? — but listen. You need to hear this. Right now could be our heyday.