The dream was never over

It can be hard to imagine - and even accept - iconic band line-ups with apparent interlopers. Think of the unfortunate Adam Lambert, depping for Freddie Mercury in Queen, or Ray Wilson replacing Phil Collins in Genesis, for just the one album. But while not as left-field an appointment as, say, Liam Gallagher joining a reformed Boyzone, Neil Finn’s 2018 replacement of Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac was one I wouldn’t have imagined in a hundred years. 

When they joined the mighty Mac in 1975 Buckingham and then-partner Stevie Nicks heralded the band’s metamorphosis from worthy British blues legends to the all-conquering behemoth that made Rumours, took drugs and did a lot of bed hopping, largely with each other. So when Buckingham was apparently unceremoniously fired in January 2018, following an artistic bust-up, Finn being parachuted in to do Buckingham’s voice and lead guitar parts seemed a little outré. Not that Fleetwood Mac and Finn aren’t suited to each other, or that Finn wasn’t a credible replacement. 

Perhaps it was the notion of Finn, lead singer and main creative force of one significant band, joining an outfit firmly established in the firmament of classic bands, as, essentially, a session player, that felt somewhat odd. Even Finn himself was surprised to be invited to tour with the Mac. “It was just crazy really – although it’s amazing how things become normal,” Finn told The Guardian this week. “[You’re] standing in rehearsal and singing with Stevie [Nicks] and Christine [McVie], with John McVeigh and Mick Fleetwood, one of the greatest rhythm sections of all time. But within a week or two, you’re just making music with people. It was an unfamiliar role for me…being a part of the machine.”

That machine, however, led to an unexpected - and, from my point of view, very welcome - bi-product: it inspired Finn to bring Crowded House out of cold storage. The result is Dreamers Are Waiting, the band’s first album in a decade and 35 years after their eponymous debut introduced Finn’s McCartney-esque knack for sweet melodies, via songs like Don’t Dream It’s Over, Something So Strong and World Where You Live. It’s also, incredibly, 25 years since they said goodbye to 100,000 fans in front of the Sydney Opera House. The Farewell To The World live album resulting from it remains one of my go-to listens to this day, though there’s a residual sadness to it, being the last time Finn’s “best friend”, drummer Paul Hester was in the band. He succumbed to depression in 2005. 

Since 2010’s band release Intriguer, Finn has released two solo albums, Dizzy Heights and Out Of Silence, both of which saw him collaborate increasingly with his sons Liam and Elroy, as well as brother (and fellow former Split Enz member) Tim. Critics will have it that neither Finn’s solo work or post-Millennium releases from Crowded House have lived up to the band’s opening run of albums, but I would staunchly disagree. Because uniform to them all is that remarkable Finn talent for perfect song structure.

Picture: Kerry Brown

Despite the absence of Finn, co-founding bassist Nick Seymour and their longtime producer Mitchell Froom for a decade, Dreamers Are Waiting is infused with a freshness that Finn himself admits came out of his Fleetwood Mac stint. “I was going into this record thinking, ‘I would like to gravitate the band toward songs that would be great to play onstage and where I’m stretching my voice and that are upbeat,’” he said in The Guardian interview. “It made the album a little less melancholy and ballad-oriented, as some of my records have sometimes tended to be.”

It certainly zips along. Like Paul Weller’s recent Fat Pop, Dreamers Are Waiting’s 12 tracks are neat and concise, all coming in under four minutes, framing those Finn melodies and vocal harmonies with absolute perfection. While there isn’t a standout hit of the distinction of Don’t Dream It’s Over or Weather With You, there’s no lack of immediacy, due in part to Froom’s pristine production work which draws out the many layers of the writing and musicianship. It might mean a couple of listens to fully appreciate, but even if, as Finn says, it’s a little different, it’s all the better for it, as you soak in all the classic Crowded House textures while absorbing the new sonic influences that takes it all beyond the Beatley expectation fans might be still want.

An example of this comes late on with Love Isn’t Hard At All, a song that lends itself more to New Order than anything I’ve heard from Crowded House before, with its syncopation of Seymour’s bass, a fibrous guitar riff and layers of synths making it infectiously anthemic without being overstated. This, then, is the hallmark of the album. From start to finish, it soothes in places, lifts in others, but all within a range that manages to encompass plenty of variety. 

This isn’t, however, just a collection of pleasant tunes - there’s something else going on in Finn’s writing. Though written before the word “coronavirus” entered public consciousness, Dreamers Are Waiting finds him reflecting on the importance of family, though some of its songs provide a view on Trump’s America, where Finn moved in 2018 for his sojourn with Fleetwood Mac, setting up home in LA’s swanky Los Feliz neighbourhood. Having a ringside seat shaped Finn’s view of the future, which explains Playing With Fire’s somewhat vituperative lyrics. Likewise, Whatever You Want, which nods back to the 80s vibe of Split Enz and thrusts in the lyric: “This man is a fake/But they will follow him down to the edge of the cliff.” It is something of a departure. “I don’t normally venture into those areas [lyrically], because far better minds than me are able to express it,” Finn told The Guardian. But, he says, the words came out, and he found himself giving subtle commentary on a land divided.

There’s more on the dark, vaudevillian To The Island, which examines the “bigger picture items”, Finn says, shaped by the priorities of his native New Zealand, but framed with a world view of a society strained by the you-know-what. This album is far from maudlin, however, even if the gentle shuffle of Too Good For This World hints at a sense of frustration, while the gorgeous harmony-drenched Start Of Something balances this with an open conversation of hope amid a world in turmoil. Show Me The Way, written by Liam Finn, broods delectably, while Sweet Tooth dips into his father’s quirky sense, delivering a searingly good guitar solo in the process. It is probably the closest Dreamers Are Waiting gets to Crowded House’s more jaunty excursions of old, like Pineapple Head or It’s Only Natural.

Taken as a whole, Crowded House have always managed to deliver engaging rock music without rock excess. That’s not a polite alternative, by the way, to likening them to Coldplay. Dreamers Are Waiting is, without doubt, an eminently soothing record without being somnolent. It is, without doubt, a glorious return for a band which, over the last 35 years, have produced some of the most listenable records in my collection. That’s a semi-vacuous statement, I know,  but I ran out of superlatives when talking about this band a long time ago.

Tales from the other end of the planet: Steve Kilbey's Eleven Women

Music will do strange things to a fellow. In normal times, it’s what turfed me out of bed at Rude O'Clock to queue for a must-have “exclusive” on Record Store Day that would, quite probably, be freely available later in the year. And at a more sensible price, too. It’s the same mild insanity that once sent me on a 12-hour road trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album (for context, I was on holiday in Mammoth Lakes, California, and the nearest Tower Records was in Fresno. To me, a 750-mile round trip seemed a logical use of free time). 

By similar token, I once went to Montreux for the day just to see Prince. The lengthy return train journey, plus two days off work, was totally worth being crammed into the Jazz Festival's Stravinsky Auditorium, wedged against the stage edge with a heaving crowd of 4,000 behind me, just to see Prince deliver three sweaty, cramp-inducing hours of funk, with hardly any hits. It will always be one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

My last marathon music trip was again in California: in May 2019 I found myself in Los Angeles for work and discovered that legendary Aussie wooze merchants The Church were playing up the road. The fact that "up the road” was Santa Cruz, a six-hour, 380-mile yomp up Interstate 5, was somewhat immaterial. What was important was that The Church were playing, in its entirety, Starfish, the record that introduced me to them. With the luscious Under The Milky Way and Reptile, it was an album of the moment, produced as so many were in that period with an emphasis on mood and jangly guitars. It was the band's deserved breakthrough, placing them in the pantheon of global Antipodean rock exports in the 1980s, like INXS, Crowded House and Midnight Oil. Until 2015 I’d somewhat lost touch with The Church, until I was alerted to them playing the poky New Morning club in Paris, where I was living at the time, and in promotion of a new album, Further Deeper. It was, however, something of a disappointment, largely down to frontman Steve Kilbey appearing somewhat worse for wear. Thankfully, the Santa Cruz experience four years later was a wholesale improvement, making the drive up from LA, the overnight stay and the glorious trip back down California's more scenic Highway 101 all worth it. You can read my recollections of that gig here.

Kilbey has, however, been a fascinating character to follow, from afar. An enigmatic frontman, his dabblings in music, poetry, painting and even acting, are not the symptoms of a dilettante character but, simply, manifestations of one of those people who just have an abundance of creativity about them. Thus, his latest solo album, Eleven Women, is the product of a prolific output over the last 30-odd years, being his 12th solo release (in 2014 it was reported that British-born Kilbey had 750 original songs registered with Australia’s copyright agency, the APRA). In fact, Eleven Woman was the fourth new record Kilbey had been involved in last year, like so many others in his profession, applying himself creatively during the lockdown at home in Sydney. Kilbey, however, hadn’t even planned to make a solo album, having expected to spend 2020 touring and recording with The Church.

Picture © Naomi Dryden-Smith

The result is an album that is at turns heartwarming and enjoyably baffling. Loosely, it’s a series of 11 sketches about women, similar in premise, I suppose, to Eleanor Rigby, but with a lens distinctly similar to that which Kilbey applies in his painting. You could - at risk of a convoluted metaphor - look at Eleven Women as pencil sketches with dabs of paint on some, full colour washes on others, and more intricate brushwork elsewhere. There is psychedelia, such as opener Poppy Byron, with its mesh of guitars - some jangly, some Balearic - and 60s-vibe congas. Or Where Gloria Meets Rachel, which purrs along with a beautiful 12-string and mandolin shimmer. Kilbey’s post-punk sensibilities show through on Woman Number 9, which has echoes of Bowie’s Berlin period, although the vocal owes more to Syd Barrett’s whimsy as much as anything else. 

Over the 11 tracks there is a driving curiosity to Eleven Women, as it takes subtle left and right turns, the music and Kilbey’s at-times obscure lyrics combining to maintain constant interest from start to finish.  Some, like Shiba Chiba and Queen Of Spades veer into pure pop, while the moody Lillian In Cerulean Blue takes Kilbey’s bassy vocal into Ian McCulloch territory, a clear contemporary of The Church's breakthrough early alt-rock era. Kilbey’s vocals are, it has to be said, never the surest, but then there are plenty out there (or were out there) who were never exactly pure, either, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Mark E. Smith and even Morrissey. It depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose. On a track like Josephine (no, not a cover of Chris Rea’s AOR staple), a rustic, folky ballad, Kilbey’s singing weaknesses are highlighted, but on the quirky Birdeen, it reaches a similar tone to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett (yeah, yeah - lazy Australian trope, I know), which fits the song with perfection.

It was only after listening to Eleven Women that I discovered it was a classic lockdown production, recorded in just three days. That might suggest an artist in a hurry, but my reading was that Kilbey wanted to create immediacy. Albums can, if the people behind them are so inclined, take an inordinate amount of time to produce: just look at the decades between Peter Gabriel’s output, or the 18 months Bruce Springsteen laboured for to create Born To Run. Eleven Women doesn’t suffer from rapidity at all, even if Kilbey only recorded a couple of takes for each song. Rather than produce something slapdash, he’s created something warm, quirky, at times humorous, always genuine and quite unique.

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.