|
|
 |
The Church.
"Well, our plans were derailed a bit by Liberation Records," Steve Kilbey begins when I ask why The Church are about to hit our town in completely acoustic mode. "They contacted us last year and said 'do you want to do an acoustic album?' and we thought 'why not?' We didn't want an 'unplugged' thing, but we were interested in deconstructing our songs and putting them back together."
That album, 'El Momento Descuidado', was meant to be a quick diversion before the next "proper" Church album, but took on a life of its own. "The album did better than we thought it would, and then Cooking Vinyl wanted to release it in America and England, which surprised us. And then we thought that we hadn't really toured [completely] acoustically and we thought we'd do one more thing before we return to electric again because our next album is waiting in the wings: it's been ready for a year and it's very, very electric. It's the complete anthesis of this."
The thing that really struck me about the album was how well
the songs were served by the acoustic approach, with some -
most notably A New Season, sung by guitarist Marty Wilson-Piper
- revealing a stately beauty missing from the original incarnations.
"Yes, A New Season's a beautiful song," Kilbey enthuses.
"I mean, just because a group writes a song doesn't necessarily
mean they know what to do with it. You can have an idea but
you might not have the savvy to know how to execute it, and
I think that The Church - and me in particular - are just beginning
to learn that less really is more. It really struck me just
how beautiful it was when I heard it produced with that kind
of elegance."
The album has three brand new songs and several of The Hits
- Under The Milky Way, Metropolis, The Unguarded
Moment, Almost With You - and I was curious as to
how the band selected the songs to re-interpret.
"Oh, The Church doesn't have a selection process," Kilbey replies airily. "We just have a kind of argument going 'Why don't we do this, why don't we do that?', until Marty says 'well, I've been playing Tristesse in my acoustic shows' and I say 'well, I've been doing a version of Invisible' - but there was no really great meaningful thinking behind the whole process. I presumed that Liberation wanted those four 'hits' on there, but beyond that they said we could do whatever we liked: new songs, weird songs. But I'm glad those hits are there because we changed them around quite a lot. It's almost like turning a film back into a play and having to get rid of all that superfluous stuff and realising there's a story underneath."
Metropolis gets the biggest makeover; in fact I didn't
even recognise the song at first. I was listening to the album
while I was doing other things and...
"What else were you doing?"
Er, working. Here at dB Magazine.
"Oh. I thought you might have been making love to a lady."
So 'El Momento Descuidado' is The Church's bedroom album?
"It could be!" Kilbey laughs. "But with Metropolis it's
got this complicated little chord run for the chorus and Marty
said 'fuck it, I'm just going to reduce it to F#," he laughs
again. "And in Unguarded Moment we changed an E minor
to an E seventh: in the original version it was a moment to
squeeze even more melodrama out of it, but on this new version
we throw in the seventh to make it little more..."
Quirky?
"Yeah - just to say 'don't take this so seriously.' And that
was great because I found with Unguarded Moment that
I just couldn't stand the fucking song. Also, while we were
making this album in this country & western studio, the guy
played us a version by James Blundell, and it was great, but
he'd taken the melodrama to the nth degree and it sounded like
a desperate plea from a colonial man: [sings waveringly] 'But
their hands, don't make me hang!' And it was so melodramatic
that I thought 'my God, how could I have been responsible for
this song?' So we decided to make it really easy, so it would
just drift by. And that's kind of what we did with all of the
songs."
So surely this record's more for the cuddling in bed afterwards than the deed itself?
"Yeah, I agree. It's for the aftermath, where you get an elbow in the ribs because you've gone to sleep again."
Andrew P Street
 |
The Church play at the Governor Hindmarsh on Wed 14 Dec and 'El Momento Descuidado' is out now through Liberation.
|
|
|
The latest issue
available now!
|
