The Church really is like a traffic accident that all the onlookers remember differently. And Peter’s perspective often varies wildly from mine – so if I’m half-right half the time you can disregard almost three-quarters of this book for a start! A PK-annotated version of this humble book you hold in your hands would surely induce me to laughter and tears and sharp denials and embarrassed admissions …

JUST BEFORE WE left for Europe The Church nipped into Studio 301 for a few days. Capitol Records, our American record label, were looking for more ‘hits’ and they didn’t think The Blurred Crusade had any hits on it.

To tell you the truth, the people who were working in most American record companies wouldn’t have known a hit from a bar of soap even if it’d bitten their arse. I knew in my heart of hearts that we didn’t have any more hits, but I’d written a few interesting new songs that I wanted to record; would they be the hits they were looking for? Fat chance!

The resulting record was Sing-Songs, an EP of mismatched bits and pieces. We had the archetypal Church number ‘A Different Man’, which is such a Church-by-numbers piece of mediocrity I can’t bear to listen to it. We did two versions of ‘A Different Man’ – one with real backing vocals and one with vocoder backing vocals. I don’t know which is worse. We also did a video for this track in a forest on a misty morning, where we all looked wholesome and psychedelic, which is no mean feat. There’s an outtake from The Blurred Crusade, ‘I Am a Rock’ by Paul Simon, which sits on the end of this record verily like the spare prick at a prostitute’s wedding. And then there are the three other songs with a more modern sound – I really thought that ‘The Night Is Very Soft’ was cool and mean and sexy in a way that The Church had never been before.

But hardly anyone else anywhere agreed, and Sing-Songs went quietly into that bad night with barely a whimper. Capitol Records – full of philistines who’d succumbed to the 80s zeitgeist and were falling over themselves to sign up the next Thompson Twins – dropped us cold after doing nothing but releasing our first record with a stupid cover and butchering our single. The Blurred Crusade? Nah, no thanks, too classic, too intelligent, too sensitive, too subtle. Capitol were looking for something with a handclap machine and a quirky sing-along chorus.

Peter and I flew to the US and met them in the famous Capitol Building. They were fuck-knuckles to a man. I’m not surprised they couldn’t find something to like on The Blurred Crusade; it was way too high-brow for them. It was almost a compliment that those guys hated the record. Well, I hated them. What did they know about music? They were just selling black plastic with tunes on it.

So we hit the UK, where we were signed to Carerre and we had some things lined up. Unfortunately one of which was opening for Duran Duran – a band I hated then and still hate now. Yes, hate is a strong word but their new romantic twaddle and their silly videos were anathema to me. Our record company had paid something like thirty thousand fucking pounds to be on their crumby tour playing to eleven-year-old girls in tears. Now maybe I would’ve been happy with that if only we hadn’t hit The Venue first. After an OK warm-up gig opening for a band called The Truth somewhere in suburban London, we’d booked a gig at The Venue, which could hold more than 2000 people. And we sold it out and got rave reviews. Our tour had somehow coincided with a small psychedelic revival in England, and we were seen as godfathers of the whole movement – the audience went bananas when we walked onstage. When I sang the line ‘Who you trying to get in touch with?’ during ‘Almost with You’ the whole place was pointing at me and shouting ‘YOU! YOU!’ I kept thinking there must be something else happening because surely they weren’t all screaming for us!

Backstage people treated us like royalty. I heard one guy repeating to his wife over and over in disbelief: ‘Look, Darlin’, IT’S PETER KOPPES. IT’S PETER KOPPES!’ Something you still might hear me repeat at a gig, much to PK’s bemusement. We later found out that Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd had been at that gig, and he’d said he thought I looked like Syd Barrett. Wow!

Michael Chugg rented us a huge house in Kensington with a spiral staircase and a rooftop view over London. We hit the continent and played a bunch of shows in different cities. We’d been bequeathed Slade’s road crew – now they were a whacky bunch of characters. Slade were a huge British band during the 70s, and although their star had waned a little by 1982 they could still fill arenas. The road crew was made up of Chas on front of house, who had all these little rude sayings like ‘Wrap your lips around Kilbey’s pips! Ooh ooh!’ and ‘For a crunchy lunch try Kilbey’s bunch! Ooh ooh!’ Chas also mixed for Slade, who were one of the most heavyweight loud bands known to mankind, but he maintained that The Church was so fucking loud he couldn’t get the guitarists in the PA. That is to say the two guitar players’ amps were already exceeding the combined volume of the rest of the stuff in the PA. One gig he warned Marty and Peter that if they didn’t turn it down they’d see him down the front drinking a pint of Guinness. Sure enough the boys didn’t turn down and there was Chas in the front row, a big smile on his face and a Guinness in his hand.

Then there was Leggy the guitar tech and general lugger, who was no spring chicken even in those days. He reminded me of one of Robin Hood’s merry men: he was a big man, with long grey hair and a big grey beard. He had as much sex as he could with whomever he could get it with. One night on the tour bus, with a young lady in his bunk, Leggy called out dejectedly to the tour manager, ‘Dennis, she’s got a fucking dick!’

An answer came from the darkness: ‘You’ve paid for it Leggy, you might as well suck it!’

Dennis himself was a shrewd little cocaine-addicted English geezer with a rodent-like tenacity and an outrageously good way of talking himself out of bad situations. When our passports were stolen, Dennis talked us in and out of Sweden and Denmark just by showing the customs guys our album covers! He did a whole tour on white chocolate, milk and cocaine. But where the money came from nobody ever knew or asked, at least for a while – we were at large in Europe with an incredibly bizarre cast of characters; nothing made sense!

Now people saw The Church as this mysterious group but in fact most of our adventures turned into fiascos and our continental tour was no exception. The ferry ride there was not a good omen. Ploogy filled up on baked beans and eggs and chips and hash joints and then decided he loved the taste of the ferry’s lager so he washed all of it down with a few foaming pints. About an hour later the boat began to go up and down and back and forth in the sea. One minute Ploogy was standing there talking to me and then suddenly he turned and explosively vomited over the side of the boat. Only it wasn’t exactly the side – it was over onto the next level down, and he drenched one of the officers in vomit.

Later on, all four of us were in the same cabin. It was totally black inside and three of us were tired and anxious to go to sleep but Richard, now re-energised after his enormous puke, was crawling around on the floor and grabbing each of us, making us scream out or roar. Then Ploog would stop and wait and do it all again. I was absolutely furious with the little bastard. It was terrifyingly silly and I was giggling hysterically and warning the darkness, ‘PLOOG!’

We hit Sweden first and played a gig in Stockholm. I guess we were quite mediocre and maybe they were a bit disappointed in us. It certainly wasn’t like the rapturous response we had in London. Then we went to Gothenburg and our bus broke down. But after the gig I met Karin Jansson, who was the guitar player in an all-female Swedish group called Pink Champagne. The moment I saw her I felt like I was being harnessed to a greater cause. I looked into her eyes and I just knew …

Then fate played a strange hand. Peter and I caught up with Stefan Strom – remember him from my schooldays? Well Stefan was living in Stockholm and so we got him to drive the tour bus, which he subsequently crashed so we had to spend an extra night in Stockholm waiting for something or other. Lucky he wasn’t hurt! That night I met Karin again in some bar and we spent the night together, although there was nothing physical yet.

I was head over heels in love with her from that point on. Jennifer, back in Melbourne, was still my girlfriend, but the conflict of the situation was doing my head in and I became quite oblivious to a lot of the gigs. To top it all off someone nicked our clothes so we had to wear and play in the same clothes for days. Thankfully a groovy English guy in a Stockholm mod shop gave us some white turtleneck shirts to wear.

We hit Denmark and Germany and Holland; the tour was a fucking weird little tour I can tell you that. We had long days off in strange places. In Munich we enjoyed the massages of a groovy old lady as we listened to ambient music. We strolled around the city and did a TV show there with a band called Talk Talk, who were angry at having to go on before us. In Amsterdam Ploog and I went nuts smoking the legal weed and choosing it from menus and eating the space-cakes on offer. We sampled some unbelievably good cocaine one night and, having nothing else to do, Marty and I wrote ‘10,000 Miles’, which would appear on the Remote Luxury EP and album.

In France we ate a huge meal and some elaborate desserts less than half an hour before the gig. Five minutes to go and the band was feeling frumpish and sleepy so Dennis chopped out a big line of cocaine for each member and we ran on stage energised and pumping. But the cocaine wore off after fifteen minutes and slowly we turned into stodgy sludge before the French crowd. A night to forget, that’s for sure.

We didn’t get the same great reaction that we’d had in London until we hit Madrid, where we sold out two nights at a huge club. And the owner was some old aristocratic Spanish guy and was so pleased with us he gave Richard a huge chunk of hash that we almost couldn’t finish … The Spanish crowd went pretty nuts over us; it was rather heartwarming. Everywhere we went in Europe people thought maybe we could really crack it big. Early indications in Spain were good but we never sold as many records as they hoped. But every country abounded with enthusiastic fans waiting around to get something signed and they really helped keep our spirits up during some bleakish times.

Eventually we wound up back in England getting ready to open up for Duran Duran at the Hammersmith Odeon. But again the audience of girlie teenyboppers did not dig us one single little bit. Andy, Duran Duran’s guitarist, came into our dressing room and was very gracious but we rudely gave him a frosty, muted reception. So both bands ignored each other after that. To their credit, Duran Duran live were just like their records – if you like that kind of thing, which I really didn’t at all. They also needed elaborate strategies to escape from theatres because of all the girls chasing them.

Duran Duran’s audience would’ve hated anyone who was on before their idols; they weren’t an audience you could win over with clever lyrics or tricky guitar parts. They couldn’t dig a bunch of Aussie hippies wearing paisley shirts and playing jingle-jangle rock. We were in Perth, Scotland, one night and drove up to the gig and a bunch of screaming girls ran to the car but they stopped in disgust when they saw we weren’t Duran Duran. ‘It’s not THEM!’ sneered one angry twelve-year-old to all the other kiddies who’d rushed the car.

That night Marty broke a string and angrily left the stage and a whole load of the kids cheered delightedly. It was like one down, three to go. We couldn’t operate under such unfavourable conditions so I pulled the plug. It was meant to be a 25-gig tour or something but The Church jumped off after about five or six gigs. It cost our record company dearly but it was the right decision. The whole thing would’ve been a demoralising waste of our time.

Having quit the Duran Duran tour we suddenly had a lot of time to kill before our next gig at The Venue in December. Peter had just had his first daughter, Neige, so he went back to Belgium to spend time with his Belgian in-laws. Marty was originally from London so he disappeared back into the suburbs, which left me and Richard and Dennis living in that opulent flat with the spiral staircase.

One day Karin came over to London and stayed with me for a few days and that was when I really fell for her. I was amazed with everything about her: her accent, her wild ways – she smoked and drank and swore like a trooper! She was a punk-rock girl of 23 wearing cut-off black jean jackets and hennaed vivid red hair. We had some magical days in London together and I was gone hook, line and sinker. The sense of destiny I felt with her was quite overwhelming. She wasn’t that easy to get on with, and she wasn’t bowled over by me or the band, but that just made her seem so much more elusive and attractive.

Meanwhile we went to Scotland and played in a legendary town called Bannockburn. The locals came out in force and The Church and Bannockburn discovered they loved each other. We got a riotous reception. The next day I got a phone call from the mayor of Bannockburn asking if we’d play again that night – he personally guaranteed another sellout, but alas we couldn’t do it.

Back in London we didn’t have much to do. Richard and I went on expeditions to find hash and vegetarian food. Richard loved all things Jamaican and we used to always go into dodgy parts of London (and LA for that matter, too) chasing down Jamaican food. Richard was crazy about it. We’d pop up in some heavy-duty places and Richard would breeze in and everything would always be cool. Richard had a strange affinity with all kinds of people: we’d just walk into these totally Brixton Rasta cafes, both of us in paisley shirts and Levi’s, corduroy jackets and tight black pants and suede boots. But Richard never felt out of his depth and I walked along, fearful, but trusting in his affability to get us through. One night we got tickets to see Neil Young at Wembley. The tickets got us in but there was nowhere to sit so we left and got chased by skinheads howling for our pansy blood. Richard and I hid in the darkness as they ran by searching for us in the shadows of some dismal suburb. Obviously we survived.

Eventually the time came to play our final gig at The Venue. It was sold out again and people went nuts. Jesus the famous hippy attended the gig, which was a good sign for our kinda psychedelic music. Jesus came down the front beaming and banging his tambourine out of time, causing us to lose our rhythm so I had to ask Jesus to put his tambourine away! Talk about feeling like a killjoy. Towards the end of the tour some big shot from Carrere took us out to dinner. I told him I was a vegetarian so he took us to a seafood restaurant. I had chips for every course and didn’t say one word during dinner as everyone munched away on sea creatures – eating crustaceans turns my stomach; they just don’t look edible to me. Anyway within a few years Carrere went belly-up and they didn’t bother to pay us any royalties either. The scoundrels! And at the same time Stunn Records in New Zealand, who’d released our first lot of records, went broke too – again without paying a cent in royalties. Nice work. We’ve had a load of them do it to us: most recently, Thirsty Ear Recordings in America did the same thing again without paying any dough. Yawn.

Back in Australia, Jennifer met me at the airport but things changed a lot between us after I told her about Karin. Our relationship struggled on for a while but it would never be the same.

The Church then played some big shows – we had some big bands opening for us – but the public reaction was lukewarm. We just weren’t always so amazing live I guess. And our star had faded while we’d been overseas trying to crack the big time, just like every other Australian band was doing at the time. Then our manager told us to our great shock that we’d run out of money! So we embarked on another tour around Australia and New Zealand. Dennis came with us, freshly imported to be our tour manager. The fact that he snorted 1200 bucks worth of blow every day should have alerted us but we just naively accepted him as our tour manager. There was an awful lot of cocaine being snorted everywhere in those days by all the guys making money off musicians – they could afford 200 or 300 bucks a gram. Not me, I didn’t think I could afford that … until heroin came along, but that was much later.

On that tour we played just about everywhere there was a gig to be played. The reaction was lukewarm in New Zealand, which made the halcyon days of London seem far behind us. We were on our first little dip and we could feel it. Stuart Coupe came over to my house to do another interview and more or less pronounced us washed up and finished. People still came to our shows but a noticeable shift had occurred.

Still, we had loads of fun and games with Dennis, who could still talk his way out of anything. One night we had two pounds of marijuana in the boot of the car as we were driving through Adelaide after a gig. Ploogy called Dennis our lackey and Dennis warned Ploogy to never call him a lackey again. Immediately Ploogy said, ‘Lackey, lackey, lackey, lackey!’ So Dennis just slammed on the brakes in the middle of a big four-way intersection. He jumped out of the car and tried to get at Ploogy but Ploogy locked the door. So Dennis forced the window down to get in and get the lock up. And they were both screaming and shouting at each other, Ploogy almost mad with fear and giggling like a fiend trapped in the back seat next to me. Suddenly Dennis made a breakthrough and opened the door and got hold of Ploogy, and started dragging him out of the car. But Ploogy was holding onto the door columns for dear life. Dennis had gone absolutely crazy! Then in the middle of all this the South Australian police bowled up.

Dennis said, ‘Evening Officer (in fact, he probably pronounced it ossifer), it’s just the boys letting off a bit of steam after a gig, that’s all.’ The cops took him round the back and looked in the boot but somehow his constant jabber distracted them from noticing the two garbage bags of dope in the boot. He blinded them with his banter, and they let us go scot-free. More such zany times ensued.

There were many amusing conflicts between Ploog and Dennis – Ploog was like some kind of proto-situationist. He liked to push the boundaries and explore the edges of social norms. One day Dennis was checking us in to a rather posh hotel and encountered a bit of difficulty. He was talking on the phone to someone at the management office as well as the staff on the front desk as he tried to sort out whatever was wrong. Meanwhile Ploog had noticed the dry weather and that he could get a pretty decent static electrical shock by rubbing his feet on the hotel carpet, which he amplified by holding one of the hotel’s large metal keys – a perfect conductor. Ploog and I had been busy zapping each other and anybody else all afternoon. We’d hold the key close to anything and this big pink spark all blue around the edges would jump out of the key.

Well Ploog chose his moment while Dennis was on the phone to unleash a mega shock to the back of our manager’s neck. The spark leapt through space disappearing into Dennis’s head. He recoiled and stood there quite … shocked … and then he said quietly into the receiver, ‘Excuse me.’ And then he chased Ploog around and around the hotel through the kitchen and dining room and through the posh drawing room where posh old blokes were reading the papers and drinking port. Finally he cornered him in the cloakroom and gave him such a punch on the arm that Ploog had trouble playing the drums.

Another punch on the arm then ensued the following night after Ploog flicked a towel at him. Dennis patiently hunted him down and WALLOP! Ploog was playing drums with only one arm for a while.

Dennis became a legend among my brother’s band, The Crystal Set: they called him Mr Grit. One day he came over and taught them a lesson. He chopped out a load of cocaine for my brother and his friends. But before they could get up and have it he snorted it all up himself saying, ‘You gotta be quick in this world!’ It’s something me and my brother still refer to as the parable of the slow snorter. A lesson was truly learnt that day.

You know, no one had any idea how much we were earning or where the money was going. I was pretty self-absorbed at the time and trusted in providence that we’d all get looked after. No one ever checked how much of our money went up other people’s noses – you’ve really gotta shake your head in wonder at the greediness and narcissism and naivety that flourishes in the music biz. I was so distracted by all the flattery and bullshit that I didn’t notice I was funding Dennis’s raging cocaine habit. No wonder he never minded chopping out a few lines for the band every now and then! Still he was a likeable rogue and the source of endless amusing anecdotes; they don’t make ’em like that anymore, that’s for sure. The tour managers these days are all clean-living types glued to their computer and drinking Starbucks. More reliable but a lot less fun.

Eventually in 1983 we went into the studio to make our third album, Seance. I’d written all the songs and demoed them at home on my four track. We went into the studio with no real producers but ourselves and I kind of took over too much. The record was like one big demo. In this regard it’s the most Steve Kilbey of all The Church records: I chose the songs and figured out almost everything except the guitar solos themselves, which I left to the players’ discretion.

We’d always hoped that at the end of the project Bob Clearmountain might mix it, and I certainly had his rich organic sound in mind when I made the demos, but an officious little twit at EMI and I started to clash. This guy thought he knew what was best for us. We’d been signed to EMI through our deal with ATV/ Northern Songs, but somehow now we were signed direct to EMI and this officious little twit wanted to take me down a peg or two. He decided we needed some modernisation and got in the mixer du jour, which was Nick Launay. Nick had done Midnight Oil’s 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and had done a cracking job for them. He’d rejuvenated the Oils with all his slabs and stabs and dramatic newfangled sampling triggering stuff. Kudos to him. But he fucked up a lot of Seance and it wasn’t supposed to sound like it does. It’s like he did the opposite of what I’d always imagined it would be.

For some reason I was the only one allowed to visit him and comment on the mixes. I went in there one rainy Sydney day – it was dark and overcast and I remember it so well. After chatting up the girls in the art department on the ground floor I went up to the mixing suite on the seventh floor. And there’s Nick Launay, all of about nineteen, and the officious little EMI twit himself. And they played me some mixes and I was horrified. The fat bass was now wiry and grinding, losing all of its bottom end and its entire boom boom quality. The guitars were de-emphasised somehow and some parts were missing altogether. It never occurred to me in 1983 that someone would mix our record and actually leave off things I’d recorded to be on there but Nick just did what he liked.

I told them I didn’t like it. Nick just stood there with his hundred boxes of outboard gadgetry, uninterested in my reaction. ‘This is what I do,’ he said, and actually that was true. He was heralding the dawn of the mixer who put you through his process to give you a sound that had his stamp. And good luck to them. But he ruined the mix on Seance – as epitomised by the unbelievably stupid sound of Richard’s drums on ‘Electric Lash’. Machine guns would blush at the rapid-fire electro miasma of Richard’s rolls, but Nick was backed up and sanctioned by EMI’s ninny.

The others in the band blamed me for the awful fucking sound of Seance and reckoned I should’ve done something but I don’t know what. I ended up being the apologist to them for the mess Nick Launay made of the album by mistakenly pinning the record to that laughable era of stupid sounds as opposed to the classic sounds of The Blurred Crusade, which exist outside the zeitgeist. Never again did I want a mixer of the day foisted upon us.

I’d intended to put the song ‘10,000 Miles’ on Seance but our EMI nong rang me up and we had a screaming match when he said he didn’t want it on Seance because it wasn’t good enough. I said, ‘Since when do you decide which tracks go on Church records?’ And he spat back, ‘If you argue with me I will lock this record up and it will never come out. And that fucking song will still not be on it!’

A lot of people used to say that Seance was their favourite album, which makes me happy, but it could’ve been so much more if I’d relaxed control a little and if someone other than Nick Launay had mixed it. Or even if I’d been allowed to mix it with the band and John Bee. But it never escaped a certain stiffness, and never attained the warmth I wanted it to have. It’s harder to create a masterpiece than you think – I sure found that out!

The record came out to some mediocre reviews. We did a half-arsed arty video with Richard Lowenstein, who’d done good work for others but it didn’t really work out with us. He seemed oblivious to any advice. A bit like Nick. This is what he did and he was doing it. The song we chose for our first single was not an obvious one, and the video was obscure so it hardly ever got played.

As all this was happening I got a message from Karin asking me to come and visit her for summer in Sweden. It was my first real invitation from her so I booked the tickets and one day in June I flew off to Stockholm. It would be the start of an endless stream of songs that are still flowing on into this world.