It’s not about anything. Like all my songs, it’s a portal into your own mind where I give you a guided meditation. It’s a blank, abstract canvas for people to lose themselves in.

KARIN AND HER friends met me at Arlanda airport in Stockholm and we drove straight to her father’s house at Graddo (which translates to Cream Island), a spot outside Stockholm on the archipelago. The house was full of young Swedish types including Karin’s three younger brothers: Anders was handsome, quiet and distant; Marten was the friendliest and the kindest; And Olle was the youngest and naughtiest. Plus there were a couple of members of Karin’s all-girl punk band and their partners.

They were all lefty, intellectual feminist types – even the guys! I was totally out of my depth. I didn’t know anything about the IRA or the Black September movement. I thought the punk days were over and hedonism ruled, but not there in Sweden. I immediately began to behave like a bit of a turkey and probably pissed them all off much more than I meant to, although they maintained a polite Swedish detente at all times. Everyone was impossibly good looking and polite and so fucking Swedish. They spoke Swedish all the time too, which I hadn’t really considered. I thought they were gonna speak English with a groovy accent!

Of course being a jumped-up little rock star in Australia meant that now everything was all about me. I couldn’t just relax and take it all in. It seemed every time we sat around that big long table in her father’s kitchen they were all talking or laughing about stuff I had no idea about. Discussing Swedish musicians and actors and writers. No, I’d never heard of August Strindberg or heard any records by Ebba Gron. Sydney suddenly felt a long way away.

Being the sensitive kind of ninny that I was, that whole trip was beginning to blow my mind. I’d left Sydney in the middle of a gloomy, rainy, dark winter and popped up where the sun shone until eleven o’clock at night. And then at three in the morning this bright grey twilight mist would start up and it was impossible to sleep or even know when you should be sleeping. I felt like I was in a parallel universe; everything seemed just a little strange: wooden butter knives, showers with hardly any water pressure, hard bread, caviar and pickled herring, coffee with buttermilk, and the list went on and on.

Karin and I would go for walks around her father’s place. The weather and the scenery was beautiful, it overwhelmed me and I behaved childishly trying to get more of Karin’s attention. I mean we were having a nice time but she wasn’t bowled over by me, which some stupid arrogant thing in my brain was demanding. I mean for fuck’s sake, she invited me on her summer holidays – that meant she liked me. But I needed more reassurance. So instead of enjoying all of that as much as I could I was being needy and sulky. My narcissism knew no bounds. In a foreign land, stripped of the roadies and the groupies and all the flatterers, I felt strangely naked and exposed.

Karin’s father Jan came home one day and he and I got along really well. He loved to speak English and had a whole bunch of slightly naughty jokes, which were pretty funny as he sometimes grasped for the English word needed to deliver the punchline. His second wife Gunnel spoke perfect English and Jan would always stop right at the end to ask her the English word for something. Jan always included me in everything and was a very kind and gracious host. We went out fishing on his boat and got on famously. He was a very likeable guy and didn’t put any trips on me because I was with his daughter. Gunnel was a really intelligent woman and would discuss literature and stuff with me too, even though I must’ve seemed a bit of a philistine to her at the time.

Karin herself remained elusive. We were together, but I felt lonely nonetheless. One day we left the country and went into Stockholm where Karin lived in the most amazing share-flat I had ever seen. It was a grand old apartment in a leafy part of Stockholm, with huge windows and high ceilings and a bunch of hip young Swedes. Karin and I went shopping in the Swedish supermarket, which had such a different vibe from the Aussie Woolworths and Coles! Everything in Sweden was muted, luxurious and futuristic. The people seemed homogeneous and sensible, and ever so slightly aloof – like the elves in Lord of the Rings or something. We went to the famous Red Room and sat at a huge table quaffing beers that I calculated to be worth 30 bucks each. Everyone was rabbiting on in Swedish and I just sat there looking stupid. At one point this was confirmed when one of Karin’s band mates said, ‘You look pretty stupid sitting there not knowing what’s going on!’ Yeah, she sure was right about that.

The more I tried to impress Karin the less impressed she was. One day I played her a cassette of two romantic songs I’d written for her. She didn’t say a word. After they were over she jumped up and said, ‘Now I’ll play you something I like!’ And she put on some awful Swedish punk song. No doubt this was good for me, taking off some of my arrogant edges, but it was still hard to take at the time.

We went out to the country to celebrate Midsummers Eve, which is a really big thing on the Scandinavian calendar. At trestle tables under the trees outdoors sat loads of her relations eating and drinking and becoming more rowdy as the evening progressed. After a while Karin and I walked down that long track to the lake where we swam naked in the cold brown water and sat on the mossy rocks talking. I’d never known anything like that feeling before: the magic of the Swedish summer, the beautiful forests that surrounded us, the unfamiliar stars in the northern sky. Sydney really seemed a long way off, and so complicated and dirty.

In the days we wandered through the villages and visited the kiosks where I topped up on French fries and Swedish licorice lollies.

I felt I was being drawn to Karin because of some higher purpose. I knew she felt it too but she just wouldn’t put my mind at rest and tell me she loved me and wanted to be mine. Well I mean she probably did say those things but for some reason it was never enough. Maybe it was because we were surrounded by her ex-boyfriends and guys she’d had a fling with somewhere sometime – it was all doing my head in.

One day we went to a restaurant called Bistro Boheme and in the men’s room there was some graffiti in Swedish about her: ‘I love Karin in Pink Champagne,’ it read. And underneath someone else had written: ‘Who hasn’t?’ Embarrassingly enough I had to ask Karin to translate it. What a total dork I must’ve seemed.

One day we caught the ferry to Gotland, a small island off the Swedish coast. We stayed with Ann, the singer of Pink Champagne, and her husband Micke. Ann and Marty were also destined to one day have a daughter, Signe, who’s a year older than the daughters that Karin and I would eventually have. But then Ann was married to Micke, a journalist at some big Swedish newspaper and they had a great little house where we could spend our days driving about the island and playing mini-golf. This really was the life. The weather in Sweden during a good summer is surely the most wonderful thing ever. The biggest place on Gotland is Visby, which is like a full-on medieval city complete with its own wall and everything; I walked through the old streets and felt like I was in a dream with the blue sky and the dark water of the surrounding sea and the clatter and chatter of this quaint town almost untouched by time.

We spent the evenings outside eating and drinking and I worked on my latest ‘thing’, which the Swedish call snus. Snus is this tobacco that you stick in your mouth against your gums. You can get it in packets or just loose, which is kind of messy. The loose kind often leads to this characteristic boot-slap thingy that you see all the time in Sweden as the guys knock it off their fingers on their boot-heels. You’re not supposed to swallow it, although I did a few times and it makes you feel verily nauseous. So there I was sitting at the table with my lip bulging, full of snus, looking like a right idiot, I’m sure!

Some of the Swedish words sure are funny to an Englishman. There were signs up all over Stockholm in all the shop windows bearing the legend ‘SLUT SPURTS’. Wow I thought that was raunchy! The reader won’t be very surprised to know that the Swedish meaning was rather mundane compared to the English. It meant something like ‘End of Sale Rush’. Karin’s father was a great source of info about Sweden: ‘In summer we Swedes hunt and make love,’ he said. ‘In winter we don’t hunt much,’ he added.

All the Swedes could speak perfect English except the oldest ones. And yet almost all of them apologise for their bad English when they really don’t need to. The Swedes like to point out the words they’ve added to the English language like the two words in the title of this chapter. And all Swedes will tell you about their word largom, which means ‘just right!’ and does that job so well for them. I’d never before encountered such national pride in a word – although when one gets used to it, it is incredibly pithy!

Karin’s accent was quite Swedish – more than say that of her mother, who spoke English in a crystal-clear upper-class English accent that contained more interesting vocabulary than most Aussies could shake a synonym at. (And she wouldn’t have ended a sentence on a preposition!) But I liked to listen to Karin’s accent. She made English interesting for me again. One morning she said, ‘Today, I think I will upset my hair.’ It was very endearing, although she didn’t necessarily like me thinking that.

As the holiday went on Karin and I became closer and closer. Waiting for trains in the country on a sunny day or taking our long evening walks down to the lake we talked and laughed and became friends. Something bigger than ourselves seemed to be pushing us together. It was as though it was fated to be. Karin resisted that more than me at first; she was only 23. I imagined she could’ve had a whole load of groovy Swedish rock stars and actors for her boyfriends and sometimes I felt inexplicably inadequate. I would’ve done anything to please her.

It was an ideal summer, like a scene from a film – everyone deserves at least one summer like that in their life. We sat in Kungstradgarden in the middle of Stockholm and ate cheese and tomato baguettes and drank coffee and beer. The Swedes seem to have an affinity for alcohol and they all drank copiously, even from an Australian perspective. I was amazed and in awe of how much booze they could put away and how many strong cigarettes they could smoke. Pot and hash were available but generally frowned upon; Karin smoked a bit of weed but she could take it or leave it.

Sweden was a funny country when it came to intoxicating substances. You could only buy booze from these Systembolaget places run by the government. You couldn’t go in to the shop, pick out what you wanted and take it to the counter. Some lackey would have to go out the back to fetch it for you. Usually the place was packed so you’d have to take a ticket and wait your turn. The system was failing spectacularly if it was trying to keep alcohol out of people’s hands: everyone bought up more than they needed in case they ran out over the weekend. And then they’d be back at the bottleshop first thing Monday!

But most people weren’t that thrilled about pot. When I first went there they had an ad campaign against the dangers of hasch. My my, the damage done by a month of hash smoking is devastating, did you know? Hollow cheeks, acne, greasy hair, missing teeth, bags under the eyes. Looked like those Swedish youth had been in a death camp smoking ice for ten years! But the campaign worked.

One night I went to a party in Malmo, Sweden’s third-biggest city. The kids there were so fucking wasted on vodka they were fighting and vomiting all over the place. I lit up a joint and suddenly people started fleeing the party like rats off a sinking ship! ‘What are you doing man?’ screamed the host of that drunken melee. Someone even jumped out a window to get away from the horror of my joint! I was bemused and contemptuous of their desire to toe the government line while getting as pissed as newts on vodka. Oh the irony!

Though I have a passion for pot I’ve never been a big drinker – sometimes I’ll drink onstage a little to loosen things up but I never want to get drunk. I just can’t hold my liquor. I’m a one-beer drunk and I’ve never been really drunk in my whole life. The scene bores me. But in Sweden I guess I pretended to be vaguely interested in it because everyone seemed to be drinking all the time. Skol!

Eventually our last few days rolled around and Karin and I agreed she’d come and visit me in Australia in the not-too-distant future. Just before I left I rang up Marty in Australia and told him I’d had a bad dream that Seance had dropped out of the charts. He told me that it had. It was gonna be a struggle to regain our momentum.

After I returned to Sydney I began to brood about Karin. At least it was good for my writing, and I started my routine of going to the swimming pool every morning. I’d walk up to Victoria Road and take the bus into the city. Then I’d walk through the streets and the Domain to the Boy Charlton pool, where I’d do twenty laps come rain, hail or shiny shine, all the while thinking about Karin and Sweden and music. Afterwards I’d go home and try to teach myself Swedish from a book. Eventually she came out to Australia in 1984 and we were a couple for about the next ten years and ending up writing quite a few songs together including, of course, ‘Under the Milky Way’.

1984 was a year of marking time for The Church and for me. Seance hadn’t done very well anywhere in the world and the pundits were suggesting our time had come to an end. I started to believe them. Our gigs in Australia weren’t leading anywhere. Instead of advancing the cause and conquering and building and all that, we were merely paying bills and earning a wage. We toured more, doing all the same places, often to fewer and fewer people. The country towns totally didn’t dig us and never will, it seems. We were just too ‘city’ for them I guess. It was certainly demoralising to ‘burn’ promoters and publicans when we didn’t pull a big enough crowd. One night I saw a guy crying as he handed over our fee to the tour manager: ‘That’s it I’m out of business now,’ he sobbed. It made me feel so fucking bad! I urged the tour manager to give him some of the money back but he refused. A few years later in San Francisco I urged a tour manager to give back some dough to a complaining venue owner after we’d done mediocre business that night – the tour manager gave him back half the dosh and everyone involved was furious with my stupid interfering because now our tour was struggling itself. Me and my big mouth!

Our success and the subsequent lack thereof had played games with my mind. Occasionally I took a stab at replicating an 80s sound in my home studio: hence you have ‘Constant in Opal’, which is a good song, and ‘Maybe These Boys’, which is a bad song – you know the one the smart-arses mention when they’re casting around to find my Achilles heel, my true nadir of songwriting. You can’t go much lower than that little two-chord horror to understand what letting the 80s in did to my head. But a few people heard the demo of ‘Maybe These Boys’ and I got talked into doing it. And so the first and only real stinker of a Church track got onto an EP called Remote Luxury that came out in early 1984.

Later that year we would release another EP called Persia that contained ‘Constant in Opal’ as well as a few other cool tracks like ‘Shadow Cabinet’, which was kind of a taste of things to come on Heyday, being composed by the band and not just me. It was the first time the band had written a piece of music that was earmarked to be sung over by me. I was very happy with both the music and the lyrics. The band was moving forward, becoming a sleeker machine: I thought Persia was a great little record.

Unfortunately our decision to do two separate EPs was a mistake. Why do EPs? They’re neither here nor there, don’t you agree? But now I’m only talking from that stupid commercial perspective. I’d been forced to contain the duality of seeing things from two perspectives simultaneously: that is from my private songwriter’s perspective and from a commercial record company’s perspective, whose job it was to sell my bloody songs so I could get paid – even if only partially! And looking back I see we did three EPs when we should’ve been trying to make the golden album that Heyday would almost prove to be. Almost but no sugar lamp as one review said …

Meanwhile some bizarre things began to happen for The Church. Out of the blue Warner Bros. Records in the US signed us up and decided to release Remote Luxury and Persia as an LP called Remote Luxury towards the end of 1984.

For a while some nineteen-year-old kid in America had been calling me up and telling me how great Seance was and generally being an inquisitive fan-boy type. He was supposedly part of a management group run by a millionaire who wanted to acquire hip groups. From the kid’s perspective there were few hipper groups in the world than The Church: we were totally obscure, our records were almost impossible to find in the US, and we were mysterious and all that malarkey.

The kid’s name was Marc Geiger. He’s now a big agent in LA. And he did actually have a millionaire friend who wanted his own fucking rock’n’roll band to manage. He already had a load of other things but he wanted a goddamn band, and a good goddamn band too. One that was gonna go places and impress people.

And so we split amicably with Michael Chugg and signed up with the millionaire and the young guy. For a while we managed ourselves in Australia and were amazed by how much money was actually floating around, then Marty and I flew over to the US to meet our new management.

We arrived at night, got picked up in a limo and ate dinner with our new guys. There was John the millionaire and Marc the kid and also Ken the BMW dealer. We went home in the limo and it was dark and foggy. I went into a guesthouse and flopped down into a deep, deep sleep. When I awoke the next day nothing could’ve prepared me for the sight that greeted my weary jet-lagged eyes. John’s house was on the side of a hill, very high up overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Below sprawled his gardens complete with a swimming pool surrounded by topless girls. It was a perfect blue morning, warm but not hot. On a set of drawers someone had thoughtfully left an ounce of Humboldt County purple heads and I got busy smoking at once. It sent me off into a dreamy delicious haze. There were other refreshments as well; I’d sure fallen on my feet!

John was a very nice guy. He was affable, generous and easy to like. Where all his money came from, no one ever said, although there were many rumours circulating that it was South American drug money being laundered somehow. I never really knew and I didn’t think it appropriate to ask. Once I went into a shoe shop with John and he liked a pair of shoes so he bought twenty pairs of the same shoe in all these different colours. He bought Marty a load of equipment too: a Vox amp and a rare Rickenbacker guitar and a drum machine too. John asked me what I wanted but I wouldn’t or couldn’t name anything that I wanted him to buy me. I know that if I’d said a Porsche or something he would’ve gotten it for me, but I was too proud – or silly – to ask.

As wonderful a guy as John was he didn’t have a single fucking clue how to manage a rock band. But he wanted to try it out. Hey it couldn’t be that hard, could it? Warner Bros. wanted us to lose him almost as soon as the arrangement started. We had a disastrous visit there one afternoon: John and I were both as high as kites after snorting cocaine and smoking that primo Californian weed. I was so out of it I was unable to talk or say anything! We must’ve made some impression as we sauntered down those platinum- and gold-lined corridors. Two nitwits, yet complete opposites, out of our depth and both floundering.

On the other hand the kind of guys you met in record companies those days weren’t up to much scratch. They seemed so phoney and insincere, like caricatures, always blabbing on with all the industry jargon; it was the exact opposite of why I got into music and I instinctively knew that to get involved in all this management stuff would destroy my creativity. This talk of shifting units and penetrating secondary markets was anathema to me. It was useless me going into record companies in those days; I only ever succeeded in pissing everybody off.

Life in Malibu was grand. There were always loads of pretty girls at John’s and plenty of refreshments too. We went to the best restaurants every night. One night we went to a place doing nouvelle cuisine, which I’d never had before. The dishes came out looking awfully sparse – just a carrot, a few sticks of asparagus and a thin sauce. Marty and I complained about it, not understanding what it was supposed to be. Marty was complaining about the dress code too; everybody seemed very dressed up. ‘It’s a wonder they let us two blokes in at all!’ he said, indicating our holey jeans and scruffy jackets.

‘They wouldn’t have,’ said John, ‘except that I own this restaurant.’

We spent two weeks with John. He was indeed a gracious host. But Warner Bros. wouldn’t come around to him. He wasn’t really a manager anyway, he was more like a guy collecting a menagerie and he needed a band. Eventually Karin and I went back and stayed with him for a month prior to the band’s US tour, which was coming up in November and December. Again John was a faultless and generous host, but things turned a little strange when a vacancy turned up in the American all-girl band The Go-Gos, who’d lost their bass player.

In 1984 The Go-Gos were one of the biggest bands around, and although Karin wasn’t a bass player she could certainly play the bass – and she had rock star looks and a few records and tours with Pink Champagne behind her. So we put in an application and she got a reply and a time for an audition. At this point John got really interested. He started daydreaming about managing one of The Go-Gos and started to believe that this unexpected windfall would wind up in his lap. He imagined all the leverage this would give him and all the status, but Karin didn’t get the gig. John was mightily disappointed and we saw his petulant side for a while … although the dinners and drink and drugs still flowed whenever we wanted ’em.

Then came our first US tour, which was quite an eye-opener in many ways. The rest of the band turned up and we started rehearsing: we were going all over the US and it was gonna be amazing!