The Church in 10 Songs
Early years from Of Skins and Heart to Remote Luxury
Welcome back Hi-Fiers,
A few Substackers have written posts in the format of “A Band In 10 Songs”. To break my current trend of writing about albums celebrating 40th Anniversaries, I decided to try doing one. Plus, deep dives can be very time-consuming, so I wanted something fun to fill the gaps. Last time, I did an earworm post, and another I did songs following a war theme.
Now, many of you who follow me know that I keep dropping hints about my favorite band, The Church. But I have been reticent to do a post on them. Not because the story is difficult, though parts of it are, but because the opposite is true. I am too close to this band. I have been obsessed with them for most of my life. I collected everything: albums, singles, B-sides, bootleg cassette tapes traded through the mail before the internet made that kind of devotion redundant. I started fan groups. I joined fan groups. I met the band at various points across the decades.
This is something looser: ten songs, a few thoughts, a few stories. Chronologically, we move from their debut album, Of Skins and Heart (1980), through Remote Luxury (1984). In Australia and the UK, the latter was released as two separate EPs, Persia and Remote Luxury. In the US, they were combined into one album. I have that on vinyl.
This is the period before they made any waves in North America, and many years before their breakthrough hit “Under the Milky Way.” Artistically, I think it was their most fertile period; lyrically, musically, and in terms of sheer chemistry. It is also the period that shaped nearly everything that came after.
And by the way, I do have a full 40th-anniversary post lined up for them this year. But it’s not ready yet. Think of this as the prequel.
To fit some of the themes I have been drawing upon, I have chosen some not-so-likely songs to characterize their early career. What I hope to show is that they are a very lyrical, songwriter’s band, in the vein of Dylan, Nick Drake, Television, and Patti Smith. But dare I say they are also quite Beatlesque and Pink Floyd-esque.
Before We Begin
Two friends, singer, songwriter, and bass player Steve Kilbey, and guitarist Peter Koppes, formed The Church out of the ashes of a Bowie and Bolan-inspired glam and hard rock band called Baby Grand.
During an early gig, backstage, a young British kid walked up to them. He could shred on guitar, he knew it, and he had no interest in being modest about it. His name was Marty Willson-Piper, and he had made his way to Australia from his native Liverpool. What he said to the band, roughly, was this: “I can eat you all for lunch. You need me in the band.”
They liked his swagger. They agreed with him. He was hired on the spot.
Around the same time, the band’s original drummer, Nick Ward, punched out one of the bandmates; accounts vary on the specifics, but the outcome was swift and unambiguous. Nick was gone. He was replaced almost immediately by Richard Ploog, who would go on to play drums on every album in this survey. Ploog’s drumming: tribal, instinctive, occasionally thunderous, became a defining texture of the band’s early sound.
What nobody could have fully anticipated at that point was the guitar interplay between Koppes and Willson-Piper. Critics noticed it. Fans noticed it. Other musicians noticed it. The two traded melody and counter-melody, harmonized chords and feedback, in a way that sometimes sounded like a third, invisible instrument was playing in the room. For a long time, I assumed that quality was something they had developed gradually, over years of touring and recording together. It wasn’t. It was there almost from the beginning.
The Songs
1. Tear It All Away
The manager, Chris Gilbey, somehow convinced legendary rock producer Bob Clearmountain to work with a then-unknown Australian band on their debut album. That alone tells you something about the ambition in the room.
And then there is this song.
When I first heard it, it did not sound like 1960s or 70s psychedelia, though there is an undeniable Syd Barrett-era Floyd quality to it; married to something Byrdsian, jangled and bright. Yet the production does not sound dated or mired in 1980. When I heard it in the 90s, it sounded as current then as it does now. The Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar intro sounds like the Beatles and the Byrds, without sounding like it was recorded in 1962. The lyrics are surreal and mundane in equal measure. The arrangement is immaculate.
This song foreshadowed everything the band was, could be, and would become. Subsequent songs would not always reach this height. Other recordings from this era had muddier productions. Some would sound dated. But on this debut album, on this song, the muse was fully present, and it sounds like nothing else around it.
The ingredients that would eventually produce “Under the Milky Way” are all here, a full eight years earlier.
2. The Unguarded Moment
The entire band has said publicly, repeatedly, and with some exhaustion, that this song became an albatross around their necks for years.
It peaked at #22 on the Australian charts and #19 in New Zealand. I challenge anyone aged 35 or older in Australia to claim they’ve never heard it. It appears on virtually every list of quintessential Australian alternative rock songs ever compiled. In that sense, it did its job almost too well.
The curse of early success is a familiar story. Playing gigs where people are only there for one song. The obnoxious shouts mid-set. The risk of being permanently defined and therefore limited by a single moment. It was their “Creep.” The band reportedly refused to play it live for years, which is either principled or maddening depending on where you were sitting in the venue.
That being said, it is not a bad song. It rocks. It is cynical. It calls out jerks, jocks, and creeps with a catchy efficiency. For 1980, it holds up. But the story of this song is less about the song itself and more about what it cost the band and what it says about how quickly an identity can be imposed on you from the outside.
For the Church’s story, it had to be here.
3. To Be In Your Eyes
Bob Clearmountain returned to produce The Blurred Crusade, and the result was an album that should have catapulted the band to international stardom. The songs are mature and fully realized, standing comfortably alongside the established mainstream rock of the era: Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.
It didn’t happen. But the album endures.
The genius of this particular song is restraint. It is essentially a one or two-chord song: G, or G and D. The Beatles understood this aesthetic. George Harrison certainly did. Think of the immersive, droning quality of “It’s All Too Much.” Less is more. Punk without sounding punk. Folk-punk, maybe. There is also something in here that gives me a strong Neil Young feeling, that particular combination of simplicity and emotional directness that bypasses cleverness entirely.
It is a sad song. Pining for unrequited love, plainly and without decoration. Sometimes that’s exactly what a song needs to be.
4. Field of Mars
A bit of history that matters here: across the first three or four Church albums, only Steve Kilbey received formal songwriting credits. This was a source of real tension and contributed to early fractures within the band. Peter Koppes and Marty Willson-Piper were both singer-songwriters in their own right. Their contributions: musical, structural, and melodic, were significant. The credits didn’t reflect that.
Field of Mars was the first crack in that wall.
Kilbey had the main chord progression and all the lyrics, but the song was unfinished; no bridge, no complete melody, no lead. He took it to Willson-Piper, who rearranged it, added the missing architecture, and elevated it to something neither of them could have arrived at alone. Kilbey’s response to what Marty brought to the table was to ask him to sing it. It was the first time any voice other than Steve Kilbey’s appeared on a Church record.
The music is haunting. The synth is eerie. The drum pattern carries something of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” that deep, deliberate heartbeat quality. There is a Cure-like, Siouxsie-like presence in the atmosphere. Goth-adjacent without being goth. Shoe-gaze before shoe-gaze existed as a term.
For years, I assumed the song was about outer space. I thought the otherworldly, Bowie-and-Floyd quality was purely aesthetic. Much later, I learned that the Field of Mars is a cemetery in Sydney. I also learned that Steve Kilbey’s father died when Steve was relatively young.
Songs rarely get more loaded than that.
5. Fly
For many fans, Seance is the best album of the early Church era. I am not going to argue with that.
My first memory of this song is being somewhere between eight and nine years old, watching MTV, and seeing a black-and-white video: a woman in a hooded cloak, her face invisible, the hood so dark against the lighter fabric that her head almost resembled the face of a fly. It registered somewhere deep in my brain; surreal, haunting, not quite categorizable, and stayed there, even before I knew what I was looking at.
The song opens with a haunting Em chord on 12-string, harmonics layered over it on electric, tribal drumming underneath. It is the Church at its most atmospheric and elemental. The lyrics are among Kilbey’s most deliberately obtuse, surreal, and impenetrable in the best way. In that register, it sits in the same category for me as “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen. Not coincidentally, the two bands toured together and held each other in genuine mutual regard.
Throughout the song, you can feel the spirit of John McGeoch and the Banshees. It is not an imitation. It is a kinship.
6. It Doesn’t Change
The producer for Seance was Nick Launay, who had just come off Midnight Oil’s 10 to 1, an album generating real buzz in the UK and the US. The Church were fans, and were excited to have him on board. So they made the decision not to proceed with Bob Clearmountain for a third time.
By most accounts, the sessions were a disaster. Launay mixed the record without the band’s meaningful input. When they finally heard the results, they hated it, particularly the drums, which sounded, on even the softer songs, like machine guns. Unnatural, clipped, processed.
Except for this track.
Steve Kilbey was, at the time, a devoted listener of Joy Division. He was going through something, possibly grief over his father’s death, possibly a breakup, possibly both, and had been playing “Atmosphere” repeatedly. He wrote this song while listening to it, channeling that same quality of sustained, interior devastation. When it came time to record and mix it, he arranged for Launay to be elsewhere for the day. Locked the studio. Took full control of the production himself.
The result is the most haunting song on Seance, second only to “Fly.” And it sounds nothing like the rest of the album, because it was made by entirely different hands.
7. Constant In Opal
Wham bam! Goth and glam! Now we arrive at the twin EPs: Persia and Remote Luxury, released separately in Australia and the UK, combined into a single album in the US. I have that version on vinyl.
Something shifts here. Eastern themes begin entering the music: scales, melodies, and harmonic textures that carry a geographic imagination. There are nods to The Mission UK and Sisters of Mercy. Marty’s occasional collaborations with All About Eve around this period likely fed some of the gothic Banshees quality. Peter Koppes, always the subtler of the two guitarists, probably contributed the eastern modal sensibility.
The result is a song that sounds like nothing else any other band was releasing in 1984. Both guitars sound less like guitars and more like otherworldly synths, the E-bow wailing throughout, feedback sustained at the edge of melody. It is timeless in the way that genuinely strange things sometimes are.
And then there are the lyrics:
In hearts suspicion flowers
In hands numb with jealousy
Sleepwalking lightning showers
Transform effortlessly
Thinking of all that I left behind
Down in the shaft when my mind was blind
But you couldn’t even find yourself that way
Bowie-esque in their surreal confidence. Images that don’t explain themselves but don’t need to.
8. Into My Hands
This is their songwriter flex, which, given everything we have already covered, is saying something.
Lyrically and musically, it reaches back to the great singer-songwriters of the late 1960s and early 70s. The jangled 12-string arpeggios are unmistakably Church, but the feeling underneath is something warmer and more open, a simple, beautiful love song that doesn’t overthink itself. There is even a touch of Cat Stevens in the timbre of it.
Sometimes the most impressive thing a band known for complexity and density can do is this: strip it back to almost nothing, and make it work anyway.
9. A Month of Sundays
I sang this song, with guitar, to my wife, in front of friends and family, on our wedding night.
I don’t know how to explain what this song is, beyond that. It is like asking someone to articulate why they love “Losing My Religion” by REM. Some things resist analysis because the feeling is the whole point.
What I can tell you is the arrangement: mandolin in a rock song, paired with spacey electric guitars. Acoustic and electric interplay at its most perfectly balanced, which, across a career built on exactly that, is remarkable. And then the lyrics:
Just like the winter your memory thaws
Just like the ocean your memory pours
So many pieces to match or to find
So many doubts to have in one mind
There is one other lyricist I think operates at this level, the combination of wit, compressed imagery, and the perfect unexpected phrase. That is Matt Berninger of The National. The comparison is genuine, not hyperbole.
10. Shadow Cabinet
Finally, the closer. Persia and Remote Luxury are when the band is pushing themselves sonically and musically. With the songwriting matured and all the musical soundscape figured out. They would use these with precision, on their best-selling album Starfish, and go even further experimentally in Priest = Aura.
Speaking of one-liners.
This song is full of them. It is an ethereal, goth-adjacent banger, with a clear wink toward Sisters of Mercy, but what I keep coming back to is the writing. Lines like:
“That Eldritch bitch, must have muddled her spells
Tinges of Persia, hope that it sells....”
And then almost immediately:
“She offered her chaos to me
Proffered herself languidly”
The poetry in those lines is Wilde or Byron territory. It is showing off, and it earns every bit of it.
A perfect place to stop.
Why This Matters
I told you this wasn’t a deep dive and I wasn’t giving a history lesson. That’s still true. But I want to leave you with a few things that are not my opinions, because the band’s influence is documented, on record, in interviews.
Radiohead have said publicly that they studied The Church’s songs to learn songwriting structure. Sometime between 1980 and 1982, The Church played several gigs in Manchester. A young Johnny Marr was in the audience, watching Marty Willson-Piper play a Rickenbacker 12-string electric. That guitar subsequently became Marr’s instrument of choice throughout The Smiths’ career. REM and the Smashing Pumpkins have both spoken about the band with reverence.
They influenced many. They came close to mainstream success more than once, and more than once, circumstances or their own decisions pulled them back from the edge. The two co-founding guitarists and the original drummer have since departed. Steve Kilbey continues to make music, and what he makes is still relevant and still excellent.
The story is not over. And I am not done writing about them.
Further Listening
Listen to my spotify playlist of these songs (including the additional “further listening songs”):
Tracks Not Included:
Of Skins and Heart - “Bel Air” (storytelling is one of Kilbey’s superpowers), “Fighter Pilot Korean War”, click the link to see my post about war songs.
Sing Songs (EP) - The production is poor, and it sounds more like a bootleg/demo, but all the songs are solid. They cover Simon & Garfunkel very early in their career, “I am a Rock”, but all songs are worth a listen. Great songwriting and great music. My favorite on there is “The Night is Very Soft”.
The Blurred Crusade - I highlighted one or two songs, but the entire album rocks:
“Almost With You”
“Just For You” - sound effects of a song knocking at the door, and the writer letting it in, and the sound crescendos
Seance - I’m amongst those who rank this as one of the best albums ever.
“One Day” - balls to the wall rocker, the Afghan Whigs covered it. Does a callback to the song Bel Air as it fades out
“Electric” - ethereal
“Disappear” - if you listen closely, you can hear the arpeggiating and chord progression sound similar to “Here Comes the Sun”. A nod to the Beatles without ripping them off
“It’s No Reason” - their first sort of socially conscious song, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.
“Now I Wonder Why” - a song full of the one-liners I spoke of.
Before You Go...
Missed Last Week? Check out the post on Australian indie legends the Go-Betweens
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“To Be In Your Eyes” is an all-timer. Really happy to see it on this list! A lot of people are about to find one of their new fave songs by the band.
Asteroid No4 did a great cover of it as well:
https://theasteroidno4.bandcamp.com/track/to-be-in-your-eyes
Hey man---thanks for responding. And for sharing the article. Just got through reading/listening in real time to most of the selections! Great article! I know I'm in the minority here, but I wish The Church would have returned, even briefly, maybe for a couple of records --or even just a few songs--to the less abstract, surreal, less overtly psychedelic and moody stuff they hung their hat on in the late 90s and 2000s-2010s. I mean I love their psychedelia, but by devoting themselves so uncompromisingly to that vibe, they shortchanged themselves (and fans) to that earlier songcraft that you highlighted in your piece.