HOLY VISION! DID STEVE KILBEY SEE THE CHURCH’S FUTURE? WIND BACK WEDNESDAY KNEELS

Fractured, not yet asunder. The Church line-up of 2006: Peter Koppes, Steve Kilbey, Marty Willson-Piper, Tim Powles.

It’s a proper Church-going season, and lordy aren’t we being spoilt for choice?

Main – and last original – Churchgoer, Steve Kilbey, has just finished a run in one of those tribute shows that make a living for musicians and make going out decisions easy for a lot of music fans, and in May he recreated the Jack Frost album he made with the late Grant McClennan in a small run of shows.

With The Church not long back from The Maldives for a tropical music festival (also there was Missy Higgins, who gets a shout-out/request from Kilbey in the story below, amusingly), the 1988 compilation of Church rarities, favourites and singles, Hindsight, has just been reissued on vinyl, and you can be reasonably certain 1988‘s modern standard, Under The Milky Way, maybe even first hit, The Unguarded Moment (but sadly probably not Constant In Opal), will feature prominently in triple/double J’s hottest 100 Australian songs of all time palaver later this month.

Meanwhile you can buy tickets for the Crowded House shows later this year, where The Church join The Waifs, Angus and Julia Stone, and Mark Seymour with Vika and Linda Bull, on the undercard. And of course, November sees The Church’s own national tour, a career retrospective focusing on their long and rich vein of singles.

What more could you ask for? Wind Back Wednesday has the answer: how about an interview with Mr Kilbey, nigh-on 20 years back, not long after a white-on-the-night acoustic retrospective shows found looking back was a smart and well received thing for his band to do, but a new album was not a bad follow-up either.

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LAST TIME THE CHURCH stepped onto stages here they were dressed all in white, like a middle-aged version of some Jonestown-like cult. The audience response was suitably cult-ish, rapturous in parts, as the band trawled through 25 years of music. Retrovision was the order.

Now normally an acoustic retrospective tour, like a best-of album, can mark a career end or dead end. It's the precursor to entering the rock'n'roll retirement home of Mel and Kochie programs or Countdown revivals. But for The Church what happened next was Uninvited Like The Clouds, a vigorous new album which simultaneously tapped into their past and felt fresh and contemporary. It didn't suck at all. And that surprised some people.

"Uninvited Like The Clouds was an enigma in that it was surprising and not surprising," bassist/singer Steve Kilbey says with a laugh. "It's like 'I'm surprised by this but it sounds a bit like the old stuff as well'. That's not a bad thing to pull off. It's not as good as ' wow, I've never had anything like this before'. But that's pretty hard to do and still maintain some continuity."

However, continuity doesn't mean forgetting a few lessons. For example, you're not likely to see The Church play an outdoor festival any time soon, even if someone like Homebake comes knocking, wanting to have some rock older statesmen-type follow in the footsteps of The Go-Betweens, Hoodoo Gurus etc.

"I think for The Church [festivals] have always been a mixed sort of thing," Kilbey says. "I don't think that we have the ability to win over huge numbers of people who don't know anything about us and aren't willing to. We need some kind of understanding before you see us. For some people, not all people. Some people get it immediately but others, in those kind of [outdoor festival] conditions, we don't rivet the crowd. And daytime is always hard for us: I don't think our trip works in broad daylight."

In the dark they're still managing to attract new and, heaven forbid, younger fans. The recent tours in Australia have seen the play to paunchy fortysomethings and plenty of those who weren't born when the Church played their first gig 27 years ago. Some of these "youngsters" have even been asking for songs from the vaults.

"It's so hard when you been around this long, 26 years, there are all those records, all those songs, and it's so hard to figure out what to play. In the old days this kind of thing would perturb me and I would sit around and analyse it," Kilbey explains. "But nowadays there are people there who for some unknown reason when they hear Unguarded Moment it makes them happy and I just feel churlish at this stage of the game denying them that.

"I think there is continuity though. I can't see why if you liked something we did 20 years ago you wouldn't pretty much like what we're doing now."

Given their longevity it's not surprising that The Church have had at times a direct and maybe even obvious influence on others. Does Kilbey hear that?

"No. No," he says adamantly. "You know, only once. I was driving and a song came on the radio on triple j and I thought this guy has just copped everything from me and my lyrics, the way I write songs.  Then they back announced it and the keyboard player was once a member of [my brother] Russell's band The Crystal Set,. David Moore. And that's the only time I've ever gone 'Jesus!'.

"I didn't mind it, and I would be the only guy who realised that I think, but he had taken every device I've ever used and thrown it all into one song.  But apart from that I never hear it which is strange for someone who is renowned as such an egotist as me."

The memory does give Kilbey an idea though.

"Every now and then somebody has a stab at Under The Milky Way and this is a terribly mercenary thing to say, I wish one of these huge platinum-selling, fucking arena bands would chuck one of my songs on their next platinum album. And then I'd send them my blessings," he chuckles.

"We need John Butler does The Church. We need Missy Higgins does The Church. We need Rick Rubin discovers some old great rocker mouldering in retirement, pulls him out and feels this incredible new album up with Church songs. That's what we need."

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The Church - State Theatre, Sydney, 2018: live review