Under the Milky Way Last Night

A night at The Forum with a good friend and a favourite Australian band.

I went to see The Church this week with friend and fellow World Cup traveller Francis Leach¹. It was one of those life affirming live music nights, where the songs you know are pure euphoria, and the songs you don’t know do that Church thing of swelling into glorious, coursing waves, where the bass and guitars flood your body, and if you close your eyes it feels like you’ve been plugged into some sort of life renewal machine, which is maybe what some people get from those other kinds of churches but what I get from music.

We were at The Forum, and as every Melbourne music lover knows, a gig there is as much about communing with the Romanesque facades and a cerulean blue ceiling as it is about seeing the band. There are stars on the ceiling, actual stars², as if it’s the dining room at Hogwarts, except the decor is Pax Romana 63BC. If you’re near the back at The Forum, under the dress circle and without a view of the stars, you need to shuffle forward quick smart, and you can do this either by pretending to get a drink at the bar, or actually getting a drink at the bar. Once you’re under the the stars, it’s impossible to have a bad night, especially if you’re watching a band whose signature song is ‘Under the Milky Way’. When they played it, I felt like I was about to cry, partly because it’s an important song for me, one that I’ve loved for decades, and partly because Steve Kilbey, the 71 year old who wrote it, was clearly having such a magnificent night himself. It makes me happy to see artists enjoy something that endures and inspires, and for them to know that this thing that came to be when the creative planets aligned all those years ago will live on beyond themselves.

I had a fortunate moment in December when I interviewed Steve Kilbey for the Speakola podcast. The focus of our chat was Kilbey’s superb 2010 acceptance speech — when The Church were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame. The speech was self deprecating and hilarious, and that’s how Kilbey came across in the episode too, and the interesting thing was that he credited the speech for changing some of his attitudes to how he presented himself publicly. Certainly, the angular, brooding, contemplative ‘artist’ personae that Kilbey and bandmates cultivated in the 80s and 90s has now been shed, and Kilbey is a king of stage banter. He’s genuinely hilarious. I actually recorded his intro to ‘The Unguarded Moment’ for my son Jack, 14, who has some strong thoughts on The Forum’s strict over-18 policy, and demands audio bootlegs whenever he is unable to attend. Kilbey told the story of a gig in Warnambool in their ‘cool’ heyday:

We’re driving up the main street of Warrnambool in a black (Ford) LTD. And when we get there, the audience, even though it’s rather large, they hate us, and we hate them, and they hate us, and we hate them.

It’s going in a spiral of horrible feelings towards each other.

And I say to the rest of the band, petulantly, [prissy artist voice] ‘let’s not play that song tonight. Fuck em.’

And the others go, ‘yeah, let’s not do it.’

And we go upstairs. I’m standing there looking in the mirror and I say, ‘Hey Marty, do you think my indigo blue eye shadow looks good or not?’

And suddenly the manager bursts in.

See, we didn’t play the song. This is the crux of the matter. We didn’t play the song. The song that’s coming, by the way. You know the song it’s going to be. We didn’t play the fucking song.

And upstairs the manager goes to me, says, [low, masculine, threatening] ‘Hey mate. I don’t know what they want, but you better go down there and give it to them.’

So, this is all true.

I slunk down the stairs with bass between my legs, and we played the song.

Then we jumped in our LTD, fucking hightailed it. And this is true as well, you won’t believe it. You know that big forest?

The big forest between Warnambool and the Great Ocean Highway?

Crowd: ‘Otways!’

We stop in that forest. Richard Ploog needs a wee wee.

We stop our black LTD in the middle of that forest and it’s dead black except there’s marsupials all around us. You can see their eyes glowing in the darkness. And all of a sudden ...

You’re not going to believe this but it is true.

A UFO came down. [laughter]

Seriously.

And there it was.

And I was watching marsupials. I was watching Ploog have a wee. And the UFO. And what a night that turned out to be.

And after being run out of town.

And you know what? It makes life seem very uneventful (now) …

So here we go, without further ado, if you’d like to sing along, be my guest, alright?

It’s your song, it’s your song.

Steve Kilbey on stage with his 12 string Guild guitar during the 2nd solo set, part of a live 2 set acoustic show, performing 4 Church albums, at the Oxford Art Factory in Sydney on 1 August, 2020. Wikipedia creative commons.

I read on one of The Church fan forums that Kilbey needs his own radio show, and hearing the effortless way stories pour out of him, I’m inclined to agree. There’s a section in the Speakola interview where he describes the first gig he ever attended, a multi band concert in his home town of Canberra, circa 1965, with The Easybeats headlining.

I can’t imagine anybody capturing off the cuff the feel of a first rock gig as well as this:

Yeah that was a great show and look the whole thing I was 11 years old and I walked into that show I didn’t know what to expect. I must have been one of the youngest ones there and not many males either — it was mostly all girls. And I just took it all in like … like a virgin consciousness sitting there.

You know, three hours before I’d been sitting in a classroom doing my nine times table!

Tony: Yeah.

Suddenly I’m sitting in this room full of girls screaming … drumsticks coming into the audience girls fighting over the drumsticks.

The the look of the guitars — like i had never seen electric guitars before, I didn’t know they were so colorful! And there’s so many different shapes and sizes. The drum kits with all the glittery bits and the microphones and and Little Stevie Wright. He was only a few years older than me. He was so skinny! And he was so skinny and a great big mop of hair. He had so much energy. Once again, his energy made Mick Jagger look like fucking Winston Churchill.

And the Easybeats were all dressed in bell bottoms. I’d never seen a guy wearing bell bottoms before. They had black skivvies and black bell bottoms, great big flared bell bottoms. And they all seemed so skinny. And it just blew my mind, the whole thing.

Tony: So was this about 1970?

No, this is 1965! I was 11. I was 11 years old. It was my first ever show I’d ever seen. And how lucky I was to... to luck into that.

Tony: Oh, yeah.

Luck into the Easy Beats headlining over all these other bands that were all big bands in their own right. But there they were at the Albert Hall in Canberra, a pretty decent gig.

Somehow my dad had wangled me a great ticket. And there I was sitting there in my shorts, just going, fuuuuuuuuuuck!

You know, like the sound, the feeling of the bass guitar.

You know, the first time you’ve, you know...

You hear a bass guitar on the stupid little record player I had, it was nothing. But when you’re in the audience and it’s this thing, the sound’s hitting you in the chest.

Tony: Yeah.

It’s outrageous. It’s like fucking outrageous what a bass guitar sounds like the first time you hear it. And as I said, just everything about it, tambourines and, you know, Stevie Wright... doing cartwheels and jumping around and everything seemed so urgent and so important and — love, you know, like all these songs about all these girls that loved him and the ones that didn’t love him and the ones that... You know, ‘Sad, Lonely and Blue’ And I don’t even think ‘Friday On My Mind’ was out then when I saw them. I don’t think they’d written that yet.

They were doing sort of like ‘Woman Come Along to Me’ … [sings it]

My mind was blown.

So, yeah, that will always stay with me, that experience of being that boy, that little boy in amongst all those girls three or four years older than me.

They had such contempt for me.

Just think of all those girls. They’re all like 75 now.

All those girls.

And, of course, there’s a true story.

The drumstick that came, the drummer in the Easy Beat, Snowy Fleet, he’d be playing and then without missing a beat he’d somehow hurl a drumstick into the audience and one landed near me and I jumped under the seat to get it and this girl furiously ripped it out of my hands.

I think she said, ‘I’ll fucking kill you, you little cunt.’

And she ripped it out of my hands and that was it.

And how I would have loved to have gone home with that drumstick.

It would have been like the Holy Grail to me.

So an absolutely unforgettable experience that was.

Hear the full episode

Francis and I found the perfect spot, stage right, although we did have to move because the four drunk guys in front of us yakked loudly through every song. Francis is friends with The Church’s lead guitarist in this current incarnation, Ashley Naylor, who became indie famous with Even, and more mainstream famous as one of Australia’s best guitarists with the Rockwiz Orchestra, Paul Kelly’s touring band and, now, The Church. Naylor was also a parent at our neighbouring primary school, Fairfield Primary, and I’ll never forget going to their school fete, hearing a guitar playing and thinking, holy shit, whatever this is is worth the price of a sausage in bread. Ash went to St Bernards, the same school as Francis Leach. He was a few years below Francis there, and Francis says that one of his greatest achievements as a rock connoisseur (and performer) was spotting Ash Naylor as a waifish, red headed year eight, shredding in the St Bernards music room like nobody has ever shredded. Francis immediately invited him to join The Swarm, and they’d stay together performing until the mid 90s, by which time Francis had his own show on Triple J.

The Church ended the night with Under the Milky Way. Francis and I ended the night with a selfie.

Francis asked me as I took it whether the photo would be as gay as our selfie at Sochi by the Black Sea in 2018, at the end a marathon session of sipping beers and dipping calamari, and I answered that no, it wouldn’t be quite so gay, because our Sochi photo is the gayest thing on the PG internet. I don’t think I’ve posted it before.

Enjoy.

The Forum in the late 1920s. It’s the most beautiful music venue in Melbourne. If you love the history of our old theatres, watch Gus Berger’s ‘The Lost City of Melbourne’ on Netflix. I think it’s also on SBS.

NEW PODCAST EPISODE #60 — Steve Kilbey at The Church's ARIA Hall of Fame induction, 2010

1. Francis and I cohosted a podcast called ‘World Cup Road Trip’ in Russia in 2018. He’s also featured in my book ‘Australia United’ from the 2006 World Cup in Germany.

2. Not actual stars