Looking Back At The Crusade

Veteran rockers The Church have been mainstays of the Australian rock scene for so long now that it’s almost impossible to remember a time when they weren’t on the radar, but of course even they were wide-eyed newcomers at one distant point of time. To be precise, that time was at the outset of that most daggy of all musical decades — the 1980s — but fortunately the young Sydney-based quartet didn’t fall into the trap of quickly dated keyboard sounds and production techniques any more than they donned the garishly horrific vividly coloured or pastel fashions that were so in vogue at the time. 

On the verge of conducting a tour which will find them revisiting their 1982 second album The Blurred Crusade in full — as well as last year’s 25th long-player Further Deeper — frontman Steve Kilbey reels back the clock and casts his mind back to when they were writing and creating what would become widely touted as the first of The Church’s many classic albums.

“It’s 34 years old,” he marvels. “It’s aged really well because we were classicists, and we were going for an organic approach. And although at the time I would never had said this, the whole thing with The Church was that we were resisting the zeitgeist of the ‘80s — that whole New Romantic scene and bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, and the kind of things that they were writing songs about and their sounds and their preoccupations. We were reacting against that — and acts like The Thompson Twins and all that — and we were revolting back into a classic style of how we thought rock’n’roll should be: organic with real instruments and having long hair, and all that sort of thing. And getting [US producer] Bob Clearmountain in was the perfect thing to do, because was a sort of classicist himself. Everything is very organic and very real.”

"We were revolting back into a classic style of how we thought rock’n’roll should be: organic with real instruments and having long hair."

Kilbey asserts that despite the success of their 1981 debut Of Skins And Heart — which reached #22 on the Australian album chart, buoyed by hit single The Unguarded Moment — The Blurred Crusade still represented the work of a young band in the midst of trying to find their natural sound.

“I think on that album we find it,” he says. “Our first album is a little heavy-handed, and we had this very unpleasant drummer [Nick Ward] who wasn’t a team player. So Richard Ploog joined, and the band kind of found itself on this album — with Bob Clearmountain’s help and the new line-up and new drummer. To me this is really our first album, the album before that was like a prototype that had a lot of bugs in it — on this album we kinda ironed out everything and turned into The Church for the first time. 

“[Of Skins And Heart did well for a first album] definitely, but it was still unsatisfying to me — I can’t listen to it, just the way I was singing, the way that the guitars were the same through every song. That all left on this album; it’s a lot more gentle with a lot more acoustic guitar, and while my singing’s still not quite all there — it’s still a bit flat and a bit effected — it’s not nearly as bad as on the first album. Basically the songs are just better, and the production was great — although Bob had mixed the first album, actually having him there to record it all was brilliant. He was one of the top guys in the world at the time — it was an amazing coup to get him. I don’t quite know how that happened, someone must have thrown a lot of money at that. But The Blurred Crusade was such a great leap forward for us. I listened to it myself the other day — really I haven’t listened to it all for 30 years — and I sort of marvelled at what a warm, organic sound it’s got considering it’s so old. If you listen to other records from around that time, a lot of them were already falling into that horrible ‘80s hideous trap.”

And it wasn’t just their sound that was being formulated on the fly whilst creating The Blurred Crusade — which ultimately peaked at #10 and birthed another hit single, Almost With You — the nascent incarnation of The Church still toying with the band dynamic which would ultimately serve them so well.

“I’d written a really good bunch of songs — I exercised a lot of control which I later relinquished,” Kilbey reflects. “I wanted things done my way. It’s interesting with Bob Clearmountain, I’ve seen two lists that he’s made; one was a list of the most difficult people to work with and I was like number three, but then on his list of the favourite albums he’s ever made The Blurred Crusade was number three as well. I was very much throwing my weight around and bossing people around to make sure that things were exactly the way I wanted them, and Bob really helped me nail that. 

"If you listen to other records from around that time, a lot of them were already falling into that horrible ‘80s hideous trap.”

“And no expenses were spared — at one stage I decided that I wanted a harpsichord, so a guy came into the studio and built a harpsichord! It took him a day to build it, it took me ten minutes to play it, then it took him another day to pull it down and take it away! Samplers and stuff were hard to come by in those days — they hadn’t really been invented — so if you wanted a harpsichord you could have a really cheap, cheesy one or you could have a real one. So everything we wanted to do we were able to do, and Bob really indulged us. For example, on the song A Fire Burns there’s the sound of me striking a match, but that took us about four hours! We were in all of these different circumstances with me striking a match, and Bob got one right! We spent a lot of time in a very expensive studio — Bob and I were both real perfectionists, and we really laboured over it.”

It seems, looking back, that they didn’t suffer from the dread ‘difficult second album syndrome’ in the slightest? “No, we didn’t,” Kilbey concurs. “The thing was that in the late ‘70s I’d bought the very first domestic four-track you could get, so I was very opinionated and very knowledgeable about what I wanted to do in the studio. You couldn’t say to me, ‘Oh no, you can’t do that,’ because I’d go, ‘Why?’ I knew a bit about it and I sort of knew exactly the type of album I wanted to make, and having Bob there to help me get it was just fantastic. It’s not like that thing where a band has worked for years and years and then they get this bunch of songs together for their first album and then on their second album don’t know what to do, it was really the opposite of that.”

Looking at The Blurred Crusade’s credits, the other band members at the time — Kilbey (bass/vocals) and Ploog then being augmented by guitarists Peter Koppes and Marty Wilson-Piper — had creative input into songs like You Took and An Interlude, which list all four members as songwriters (Wilson-Piper also sharing writing credit with Kilbey on Field Of Mars and B-side The Golden Dawn).

“Yeah, we had some jams and they wrote their own parts which was good — it was setting up how it was going to be on [1985 fourth album] Heyday,” Kilbey offers. “We had some jams at soundcheck, where I’d give them a skeletal idea and they’d flesh it out with bits that they were writing. I don’t care how songs come out as long as they come out. We were a good jamming band, and I thought that was very healthy. The guitarists are great guitarists — they could come up with things as easily as I could — but it took us until Heyday to really start writing everything all together. But what happened there really wielded good results.”

Despite his unabashed happiness with the finished product from a musical perspective, Kilbey is not completely sold on his lyrical contributions to the album. “I don’t think I’d really found my feet as a lyricist there,” he admits. “I think the lyrics are sometimes a bit Fourth Form poetry-ish; it’s all very romantic, lovey dovey hearts and flowers most of it, which disappoints me a bit now. A few songs on the album were written for my girlfriend at the time, and there’s a lot of romantic stuff. I don’t think those lyrics are the best thing ever. At some places like on An Interlude they’re coming unto more like what I would do know, but I think they were a bit ‘over-romantic’ at the time. I’m a bit disappointed by them looking back at it.”

Is it easy for Kilbey now looking over his shoulder to remember his mindset from when he was committing these words to paper all those years ago?

“Yeah it is actually, it’s like I’m right back there,” he ponders. “Exactly how it was, turning up there each day and how I’d write these songs on my four-track and play them to the other guys in the band and stuff like that. I can easily remember it and it all comes back, it’s strange. When I was writing my memoirs [2014’s Something Quite Peculiar] and I was writing about those times I could focus back in on it all really easily, like it was yesterday. Although I can’t always remember what I did last week, I remember all that. 

“It was a really good time in my life; I was free, I’d been in a relationship which had been slightly stifling and I was out of that and I had a girlfriend I thought was the bee’s knees. I used to spend a lot of time at her place, writing songs and just hanging around and smoking dope. And the band was going really well, going from strength to strength — I was a bit of a man about town. It was a really good period, really great days. We were young and successful with a bit of money and travelling around the world — it’s hard to complain.”

Despite Kilbey’s slight misgivings, The Blurred Crusade has gone down in history as one of the great Australian recordings — it came in at #77 in 2010 tome The 100 Best Australian Albums (O’Donnell, Creswell, Mathieson), behind 1988’s Starfish at #33 — but was the album received well at the time?

"On the song 'A Fire Burns' there’s the sound of me striking a match, but that took us about four hours!"

“Can you believe a few magazines didn’t even review it?” the frontman asks incredulously. “There was one mag called RAM magazine and there were some old guard in there who didn’t like The Church and they never reviewed it, and I went to them and said, ‘Why didn’t you review it?’ and the guy said, ‘I was doing you a favour by not printing the review.’ So there were a few naysayers at the time, but it sold really well — it’s our biggest selling album ever in Australia, it went on to sell about 50,000 copies which was amazing for us. It went double Gold, not quite Platinum. But the reviews weren’t all that great — we didn’t start getting uniformly good reviews until Heyday. Although The Blurred Crusade was well received by the fans the critics weren’t necessarily all that kind. 

“One guy wrote something like, ‘The Blurred Crusade should be called The Byrd Crusade’ — he thought we somehow ripped off The Byrds because we suddenly sprung out of nowhere and we had this incredible album and I was upsetting everyone by saying that I was the best songwriter in Australia. I was coming on like a real little prick and suddenly we had this incredible album and some people didn’t like it. Mainly that old guard, people who had been champions of Billy Thorpe and stuff like that — they didn’t like this new bunch of upstarts doing this! Plus it’s all a matter of perspective; in those days, in 1982, it might have seemed to them that we were being retrospective by having these sort of classical Beatles-ish values — that old school drum sound, and not having synthesisers and stuff. People thought we were reactionary and old hat. 

“[But] I just hated the fucking ‘80s. I hated The Thompson Twins and Men Without Hats and all that — I just liked the classic rock’n’roll. I liked The Rolling Stones, I liked Dylan, I liked The Beatles and I liked Bowie and Bolan, and Peter Koppes was really into Hendrix. We just wanted to make real music — real rock’n’roll as we saw it. It’s changed now — at the time we seemed old-fashioned and reactionary against the ‘new modern music’, but now as you say you listen to The Blurred Crusade and it doesn’t sound dated. But you can’t listen to a record by The Thompson Twins — put that on and see if you can get all the way through that.”

Strangely, The Church’s American record label at the time Capitol declined to release the album in the States — this must have been a heartbreaking turn of events for the young musicians. “Yeah, it was, definitely,” Kilbey concedes. “What idiots. They were, like, ‘Can you record some more songs to see if we can get some hits?’ It was really rude. But those guys didn’t know what they were doing — they’d come over here and look at the way we were dressing, and they’d go, ‘The kids in America won’t like you guys dressing like that! Goddammit, the roadies dress better than you!’ Everybody in the word was trying to make us more ‘80s, they thought that we had to be more like whatever was happening on the charts. I remember a guy from EMI pulled me aside, showed me Spandau Ballet’s first record and said, ‘Mate, if you don’t get like this within two months you’re finished!’ And that was in 1980! Where’s he now? Where is that guy?”

"I just hated the fucking ‘80s. I hated The Thompson Twins and Men Without Hats and all that."

Coming back to the present and The Church’s impending Australian tour, while Kilbey admits that he’s looking forward to revisiting these songs from yesteryear, he reckons that The Church’s newest member, Ian Haug — the former Powderfinger guitarist who stepped in following Wilson-Piper’s departure in 2013 — is the one who’s really excited about this jaunt down memory lane. “I think Ian’s looking forward to it more than I am,” he laughs. “He’s like a fan, while I’m more like, ‘Oh God, we’ve got to do The Blurred Crusade, alright.’ There’s no real reason [why we’re doing this album now]. We like the idea of playing albums in their entirety, and this was just the one that everyone in the band thought would be a good idea to play. That’s really it. It wasn’t really my choice, everyone just said it would be a good idea to do The Blurred Crusade and Further/Deeper as a double. It seems to be working out.”

Does revisiting The Blurred Crusade in its entirety present any particular challenges? “Not this album, no,” Kilbey smiles. “It’s really easy. There shouldn’t be any problems. It’s not like when we were doing Untitled #23 [2009] and Priest = Aura [1992], those were really hard albums to figure out and learn how to play. But this album is so easy, I could just about play all of Haugy’s parts myself and that’s saying something!” 

Thirty-five years since The Church first graced our stages there’s no slowing down, and 2015 has represented a particularly busy period for the band.  They’ve just completed another European sojourn — which included a spot on Spain’s prestigious Primavera Sound festival — and then following this Aussie headlining run they play Splendour In The Grass and then jet back to America for a run of shows alongside UK post-punks The Psychedelic Furs. It must be immensely satisfying that The Church’s music is still held in such high regard all over the world? “It is, definitely,” Kilbey offers humbly. “I count my blessings. It’s not a sprint it’s a marathon, and we’ve produced decent music for 35 years and can now reap the rewards of that. You can trust that we’re not going to be selling out any time soon. Back in the day it always seemed like I was banging my head against a brick wall, and everybody thought that I could make a big hit record if I wanted to but that I was just deliberately being stupid, and that was frustrating for me to be dealing with people who thought that because they’d be getting angry with me all the time and not realising that I was doing my best — I just couldn’t turn it on and off like they thought I could. If I could have clicked my fingers and had a hit I would have done that, of course — why wouldn’t I? 

“But their idea of a hit was rubbish anyway. Robyn Hitchcock one said to me about guys from the record company, ‘Once they come to you and tell you that your sound should be a certain way, the sound that they’re talking about is already two years behind the times.’ By the time you spend a year doing it and getting it out you’re already three years behind the eight-ball, and the whole thing’s moved on.”

And excitingly for fans Kilbey is still hard at work crafting songs, only they’re currently for a range of projects aside from his main day job (one of which sounds particularly intriguing). 

“I’m writing and working all the time, but not for The Church right now,” he tells. “I’m just putting out an album I did with Martin Kennedy [Inside We Are The Same], and I’m working on a album with an Irish guitarist. Plus I’m in the midst of writing songs with a big Australian female singer — I’m not sure if we can come out of the closet yet, but I’m writing lyrics for her. That’s in the works too.”