Glims of the happy hunting grounds4/24/2023 ![]() Signing us because we were different and then trying to fit us in with everyone else. The record company also seemed to want to influence us. ![]() We didn’t want to be part of the system that sucked bands in and spat them out. We wanted to explore our more progressive side and were willing to risk the ire or the disappointment of the audience for the sake of realising our musical ambitions. We didn’t want to play the hits anymore –the catchy songs. It was easy to alienate those who were just trying to support us. A band has to be able to not listen to what people say. We couldn’t cater for the desires of the audience any influence on the musical direction or the set list or the style we played would only restrict our creative process. Some fans already held onto a nostalgic ideal of the band but we were trying to leave the past behind and move on. We would have fans calling out for songs we didn’t play. We’d have fans turning up to gigs in paisley shirts, tight black pants and pointy suede boots girls and blokes wearing hoop earrings and sporting fringes, but it felt kind of strange that people might want to look like us. Already Yesterday, 7″ EMI Parlophone A1600 (Australia), October 1985 We were beginning to lose touch with the masses. We had stopped playing ‘The Unguarded Moment’ so we were intriguing to some and frustrating to others. Steve wouldn’t talk to the audience at gigs and the live versions of songs were played extremely aggressively and much faster than on the records. The only thread was that they were unmistakably the church. The manifesto was sketchy the albums could be rock, smooth, gothic, pop, folky. We didn’t really have anything solid for the fans to follow, except ambiguity. A magician is never asked how he does his trick. Journalists either loved us or hated us and we could never really understand why they always needed everything explained. We had many clashes with TV presenters and DJ’s, film crews and cameramen. None of us were very good at playing the game. We were notoriously difficult in interviews and Steve was cagey when it came to defining what the church was actually about. But, there was always some kind of built in anti-success gene playing down our commercial side. But what we did have was intuition, and that has proved to be an essential ingredient in sustaining the band to the present day. Sometimes we were like a blind man edging his way along a cliff. One never really knew where one was with the church. We were always sending out mixed messages. This was very typical of how we did things. Putting a whole lot of effort into something that was only going to confuse the public was the church at its contrary best. However, it was a friend of ours – Tony Forbes – who thought up the cover concept. The photographer was Wendy McDougall, well known for her band shots. In those days user-friendly image editing programs such as Photoshop were not readily available to create a computer generated background. ![]() Somehow we managed to suspend it and position ourselves appropriately for the shot. When we finally hauled it inside we realized that hanging it was also going to be difficult. It was heavy and cumbersome and took some serious maneuvering in order to get it to the location for the photo shoot. I remember we hired the carpet from a posh shop called Nazar carpets in Mosman on Sydney’s North Shore. It was the first time we had had a picture of the band on the album cover and there we were, presenting an image to the world that we had already left behind. We were playing up the recent rise and demise of the new psychedelia’s sartorial elegance sometime after we had already abandoned it ourselves. With our tongues firmly in our cheeks we released Heyday in the European spring of 1985, the four of us in the most decorous shirts the world had ever seen and an authentic expensive Persian carpet as a backdrop. L-R: Peter Koppes, Marty Willson-Piper, Richard Ploog, Steve Kilbey, 1985 (Photo: Wendy McDougall)
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