Tonight’s opening gambit comes from Hitchcock’s Regret frontman Mark Moldre, whose presence on this tour and some recent live appearances completes a very welcome return after a worringly long absence from the live scene. His songs are rich in atmosphere and lyrical detail, not least uwontcmeanymore, the new single produced by Church drummer Tim Powles and the emotive closer, which features the line: ‘Every song is a hymn for all of us who don’t belong’. At this stage, though, the crowd is pitiful, a fact not helped by a stupidly early starting time which saw his set end not much after 8:15, the starting time printed on the tickets.
The Valentinos, meanwhile, begin in such lackadaisical fashion that it’s hard to tell whether their set has actually started, whether they are sound-checking or whether they’ve simply chosen to rehearse on the stage of the Enmore. This five-piece are the perfect mid-level band; they would kill most of the groups playing in Sydney town on any given night, yet none of the songs approach greatness. Tight and slick even in their nonchalance and with vocals reaching a searing falsetto at times, they are quite impressive, their dark, pulsing sound a stylish approximation of what Primal Scream might sound like if they lived in a Darlinghurst sharehouse. However their set suffers from over-familiarity and despite counting tonight’s headliners as one of their key influences, this was never really going to be their ideal crowd.
The Magnetic Strip tour marks an ambitious return to large-scale theatres for The Church after a run of low-key acoustic performances at smaller venues. In terms of pulling punters, its only a partial success, the top tier of the venue deserted, but the dancefloor and lower seats finally filling with a mix of older record-collector types, thirtysomething couples who must have made out to Almost With You as teenagers and some younger fans, who no doubt discovered the group through the inclusion of Under the Milky Way on the Donnie Darko soundtrack.
A couple in front of us get excited every time a new song starts, shrieking “It’s The Unguarded Moment!”. Inevitably it isn’t and their shoulders slump a little until finally, singer Steve Kilbey tells the crowd: “I know what you want, and pretty soon you’re going to get it”. But first, there’s a tribute to “someone who died earlier this year”: a beautiful rendition of Providence which Kilbey wrote with the dearly missed Grant McLennan in their collaboration as Jack Frost. Then, mixed satisfaction for the casual fans: a gorgeous, world-weary version of The Unguarded Moment which sees the male half of the couple fume: “I’m going to be livid if they don’t do ‘Under the Milky Way’ properly”. Other early highlights include Marty taking the vocals for a rollicking ‘She’ll come back for you tomorrow’ and guitar icon Peter Koppes doing likewise for the typically grand, shimmering Never Before.
There’s a moment when the building momentum is derailed as one song splutters to a halt, with the eternal perfectionist Kilbey saying “Stop, stop, stop, this is shit”. Powles starts to tell a story “I saw Neil Finn do that once, when he was in Crowded…”, but is interrupted by a vexed Kilbey: “I don’t want to hear about Neil Finn right now”. Moments later, good humour is restored and Steve quips “That goes to show that things can always go wrong, even when a song only has two chords”. Then there’s the time he forgets some lyrics but covers with a typically wry one-liner: “You can have a ten cent rebate for every line I forget tonight…but only if you’re from South Australia”.
At a Church show, though, things can also go magically right and eventually Steve half-whispers the famous first line of that song: ‘Sometimes this place gets kind of lonely’ and a collective shiver runs up the spine of everyone present. The sublime soon slides into the ridiculous, with an impersonation of Australian Idol competitor Bobby Flynn’s squeaky take on the song thankfully giving way to its dark, slivery magic. These days The Church may be somewhat reluctant about the legacy of their great singles and prefer more exploratory, guitar-driven soundscapes but the enigmatic appeal of Kilbey’s songwriting remains undimmed.
When The Church set the controls for the heart of venus, as in the lengthy jamming in the back half of the set, sometimes they miss and momentarily seem human, or in fact the middle-aged men they are, Kilbey with his grey-flecked beard and the great Wilson-Piper with his portly belly protruding from his unbuttoned shirt, rather than the transcendent and atmospheric band that they can be. By the end of the regular set, though the crowd that has drifted at times, are well and truly won over and threaten to storm the stage, or at least set their collections of Mojo magazines ablaze if an encore does not ensue. Thankfully it does, with Steve telling the crowd “We’re going to play all the songs you hate” as Marty strikes up the distinctive, haunting introduction to Reptile. Far from hating it, we are once again transported to the kind of eerily beautiful places that only this great band know how to find.
