Time travel: The Church live in Santa Cruz

© Simon Poulter 2019

Before Amazon, home delivery was a rare event. In fact, I can only remember one occasion in my youth when the doorbell rang and a van driver was standing outside, having wheeled up to the front door a large cardboard box. I was, at the time, living back at home, having returned there from Shropshire after LM, the magazine I joined after leaving school, had gone bust in May 1987. Although I was managing to eek out some freelance work with Smash Hits and Record Mirror, I was officially unemployed. Signing on. So when this large box arrived, I was baffled. Not blessed with a great deal of money, I was hardly going nuts with what was then termed ‘mail order’. Curious, I opened the box and sifting through the polystyrene packing chips I unearthed a whole pile of vinyl records. Carol, the receptionist (whom, I suspect, secretly fancied me) at LM’s publisher had deemed me the lucky recipient of loads of albums that had continued to come into the magazine’s office from record labels, long after the title had folded. For one reason or another, most of this delivery was from Arista Records, and included disco diva Taylor Dayne's unlistenable debut album and an equally iffy release from Aretha Franklin. Also in the pile, however, was a record that, 31 years later, would have me drive for over six hours from Los Angeles to hear it played live in its entirety.

That album was Starfish by The Church, the Australian band once tipped (or is it cursed?) as “the next U2”, and sometimes compared - not unreasonably - with the likes of Echo & The Bunnymen, tropes generated inevitably by a propensity for "ethereal and shimmering"™ guitars drenched in reverb, delays and other effects. Throw in “the 80s” and The Church became part of an Australian invasion (which wasn’t anything like it, but you’ve got to remember this was a time when there were Minogues and various Neighbours on the loose, not to mention Midnight Oil and, if I stretch the antipodean theme a little too far, the Kiwis Crowded House). In customary rock journalism manner, The Church were hard to pin down. Starfish was their fifth album, but not having heard their previous four, it brought me to their sound afresh, and I was particularly drawn to the album's soundscapes, something I'd always liked about progressive rock (I was, then, and still am - suck it up, naysayers - a fan of prog, that genre maligned for the misconception that it's just 20-minute keyboard solos and songs about elves, when in fact Bowie and the latter-stage Beatles were as much prog as anything else). In other words, music that transported you away from the contrite and the conformed, and made you listen a little more, appreciate the instrumentation, wig out even.

Picture: The Church/Facebook

Starfish did just that, and last Friday evening, at the stupendously art deco Rio Theatre in California’s Wigout Central, Santa Cruz, The Church played it in its entirety on the penultimate leg of a US tour to celebrate the album’s 30th anniversary (OK, 31st now). I’ll admit, it was a bit of a punt: the logistics of getting from Anaheim (where I’d been at a work event) to Santa Cruz, a 372-mile drive away, notwithstanding, I'd last seen The Church four years ago at the tiny New Morning, an obscure jazz club in Paris, and had been left somewhat underwhelmed. The evening had been let down by lead singer and bass player Steve Kilbey being decidedly worse for wear. Having succumbed to heroin addiction at the end of the 1990s, it was unclear as to whether he’d relapsed or had simply smoked something before the gig to leave him so unsteady and slurred.

Thankfully there was no such indisposition in Santa Cruz as Kilbey and fellow founder member Peter Koppes (co-architect of that signature guitar jangle), along with longtime drummer Tim Powles, second lead guitarist Ian Haug of Powderfinger, and guitarist/keyboard player Jeffrey Cain of Remy Zero launched into Destination, Starfish’s opening track. The long-held convention in rock is that, when playing live, you must avoid peaking too soon. That would be almost unavoidable in playing Starfish sequentially as the album’s second track is the song that really landed them on the map, especially in the US: Under The Milky Way.

Remembering playing the album for the first time that Tuesday morning (quite why I recall it being a Tuesday, escapes me, but by luck or judgement, Starfish was the first out of the Arista pile), it’s hard not to resort to predictable expression when describing Kilbey’s mellifluous vocal and wonderfully understated vibe. No wonder Under The Milky Way remains their signature and, equally, no wonder it ended up in that other totem of the 1980s, Miami Vice. Michael Mann’s music curation on that show had good form when it came to picking songs with atmosphere, be it In The Air Tonight in the opening episode (Sonny Crocket driving his Dino down Collins - get it? - Avenue), or Peter Gabriel’s Rhythm Of The Heat, so Milky Way and, in a another episode of Series 5, Starfish’s Blood Money, fitted the show's aural aesthetic with polished ease. The thing is, though, that Starfish is such a seminal album, and while Milky Way might be a highlight, the sequence does not diminish, even after the commercial peak of its second track. Produced by legendary Los Angeles session guitarist Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi (who'd worked with Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, Fleetwood Mac and Don Henley, amongst others)], the album as a whole invited a sparser sound than The Church's previous outings, drawing on the sort of ambience that indeed made The Joshua Tree so evocative of the desert U2 were trying to eulogise.

Three decades on, Starfish in its entirety is still a complete delight to indulge. The album's original production treatment was so transportive, and yet live at the Rio, no less evocative, albeit with an edgier nature, powered by the band's live complement, especially the guitar interplay between Koppes and Haug, and the use of 12-string guitar to give a Byrds-like chime to Antenna. Lost and North, South, East And West bore a epic soundscape, while the album’s second hit single, Reptile, punched epically as, arguably, the stronger of the two cuts to have graced the Top 40.

Picture: The Church

Touring a classic album in its entirety is a risky proposition, though one that has gained considerable heritage vogue in recent years, as bands leverage work that casts the nostalgic fan back to where and when they first heard it. I have no particular desire to return to who I was in 1988 when that box turned up on my doorstep, and despite my relative disappointment the last time I saw The Church live, the proposition of listening to Starship being performed from start to finish, was too strong to resist when I discovered that they'd be playing relatively close to where I’d be in California. This time I resolutely wasn’t disappointed. Actually, my respect for the band was only reinforced, especially after the intermission when they dipped into their near-40-year canon of 26 albums to play a further 12 songs including the Bowieish Another Century from their most recent studio recording Man Woman Life Death Infinity, the REM-like Constant In Opal and the deliciously rocking Sealine, before ending with The Unguarded Moment, which dates back to their 1981 debut, Of Skins And Heart, and Miami, the epic, hazy track of beautiful, shimmering guitar work that closes Further/Deeper, the 2014 album that led me to that somewhat off-key gig in Paris.

You may have come to the end of this post and found yourself still none the wiser about The Church. Albums, from Of Skins and Heart through to their most recent Man Woman Life Death Infinity, may have passed you by; even mention of Under The Milky Way might only register as something you might have heard once. But consider this: legend has it that it was a 1982 Church gig in Sheffield that inspired Johnny Marr, Mike Joyce and Andy Rourke to form The Smiths. I guess the angle must be in the jangle. In Santa Cruz, a city which proudly retains its hippy vibe (with the surfers and smell of legal weed to go with it), those frugging wildly in front of the stage at the venerable Rio Theatre demonstrated that, with any band of a certain vintage, there’s an audience to be found who will embrace their own histories and the memories that go with them without prejudice. For me, it was a long drive to travel back 31 years but, heck, it was worth it.