The Alternative Number Ones: The Church’s “Metropolis”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for members only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

Most of the time, the term "space rock" is not a literal thing. It's the name given to a freaked-out, astrally inclined form of psychedelic rock that arose in the early '70s -- the bugged-out style popularized by Hawkwind and early Pink Floyd. Those bands sometimes sang about interstellar adventures, but for them "space rock" was less of a lyrical descriptor, more of a state of mind. In 1988, however, a group of woozy Australians hit the big-time with a rock song that's about space -- or, more specifically, about the kind of blissed-out, romantic alienation that you might feel when you consider the utter insignificance of your own life on a galactic scale.

Stylistically, the Church's "Under The Milky Way" probably doesn't scan as space rock. It's not wild or giddy enough, and it probably won't inspire the kind of chaotic chemical euphoria that I tend to associate with Hawkwind and their aesthetic descendants. "Under The Milky Way" belongs more in the zone of dreamy late-'80s college-rock. It's still psychedelic, but it's also languid and expansive -- opium-den shag-carpet music. But when I encountered "Under The Milky Way" on the radio as a kid, the song still gave me a sense of vast mystery, a feeling of worlds and mental planes beyond mine.

The central lyric of "Under The Milky Way" always bothered me a little for astronomical reasons. If we're in the Milky Way galaxy tonight, as every science textbook assured me that we were, then how could we be under the Milky Way? But the song was too rich and deep and pretty to let me stay in that pedantic mode for too long. With its impossibly lush acoustic guitars and deep-murmur vocals and bagpipe-sounding Synclavier, "Under The Milky Way" felt like its own universe.

This column is not about "Under The Milky Way," but "Under The Milky Way" remains by far the Church's best-known song, and it's the reason that you're reading this column today. "Under The Milky Way" came out a little too early to appear on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, which got its start a few months after the song reached its peak. "Under The Milky Way" was a huge American college radio hit that almost certainly would've gone to #1 if the Modern Rock chart existed at the time. The song also reached #2 on the Mainstream Rock chart and crossed over to the Hot 100, peaking at #24. It was a hit, and at least in America, it's the only hit that the Church ever made. "Metropolis," the lead single from the Church's next album, is a perfectly good song, but it probably went to #1 on the Modern Rock chart because of the momentum that the Church picked up from "Under The Milky Way."

The two bands sound and act nothing like one another, but it feels oddly appropriate to write back-to-back columns on Midnight Oil and the Church. Right around 1990, American college-rock radio was in love with all things Australian -- a late ripple-effect, perhaps, from the near-inexplicable Crocodile Dundee cultural wave of the mid-'80s. Maybe the Australian bands, like the British ones who dominated the Modern Rock chart in its early days, were just exotic enough to seem sophisticated. Or maybe there were just a whole lot of really good Australian bands kicking around at that time.

At least where this column is concerned, the Church and Midnight Oil had career arcs that look almost identical. Both bands had roots in Canberra, but both really started after their principle members relocated to Sydney. Both spent years on the Australian touring circuit, building up audiences while the rest of the world remained mostly ignorant. Both scored random American breakthrough hits in the late '80s, just before the Modern Rock chart came into being, and both went back-to-back in the #1 spot once they released their follow-up albums. That's pretty much where the similarities end, and Midnight Oil became a bigger deal in the US than the Church ever were, but those commonalities still look downright eerie.

The Church don't go back quite as far as Midnight Oil, who got their start in the early '70s. The Church didn't become a band until about 1980, but frontman Steve Kilbey laid the groundwork in the mid-'70s, when he and guitarist Peter Koppes first played together in a glam-rock band called Baby Grande. Kilbey, born in England, moved to Canberra with his family as a kid. Baby Grande recorded a few demos but never released anything, and Kilbey followed that band with a brief stint playing bass in the Canberra post-punk band Tactics. In the late '70s, Kilbey moved to Sydney, where he teamed up with Koppes and drummer Nick Ward, who'd been in a post-Baby Grande band with Koppes, to form the Church. Marty Willson-Piper, a British guitarist who'd just moved to Australia, caught an early Church show and joined the band almost immediately afterward.

The Church caught the attention of the Australian music business pretty early. In their first year as a band, the Church found themselves a manager, a publisher, and a major label. Parlophone released their debut album Of Skins And Heart in 1980, and their early single "The Unguarded Moment" -- great fucking song -- was a pretty big Australian hit. The Church's early music has some of the punchiness of post-punk, and Steve Kilbey's weary baritone sigh has plenty of Bowie in it. Musically, though, the band was already into digging into the intricate guitar-jangle of the Byrds and the mid-period Beatles -- transforming that music into comfort food for the comfortably stoned.

Capitol released Of Skins And Heart in the US, but the album didn't sell anything over here. When the Church turned in their 1982 follow-up The Blurred Crusade, Capitol decided that it wasn't accessible enough, and the band lost their American deal. The next few Church albums didn't come out in the US until years later. In the years that followed, the band always seemed to be on the verge of falling apart; the lineup has turned over a bunch of times throughout the decades. But the Church kept cranking out records, and they eventually got their shot at making a larger impact.

The Church steadily sold in Australia, and they were also pretty popular in Sweden, where Steve Kilbey spent a lot of time. In 1985, when the band released their fourth album Heyday, they signed an American deal with Warner Bros., and the record scraped the lower rungs of the Billboard album chart. For 1988's Starfish, they moved over to Arista and spent a bunch of money recording the LP in Los Angeles, with big-deal session guitarist Waddy Wachtel producing. Wachtel was fully immersed in the big-money California rock world; he'd played with people like Warren Zevon, Stevie Nicks, and Jackson Browne. The Church didn't like spending time in Los Angeles or working with Wachtel, but they still made by far their biggest record with him.

Starfish had "Under The Milky Way," a song that Steve Kilbey wrote withhis then-girlfriend Karin Jansson, from the Swedish band Curious (Yellow). (Kilbey and Jansson's twin daughters, born in 1991, grew up to become the pretty good Stockholm duo Say Lou Lou.) A song as slow and spare as "Under The Milky Way" must've seemed like an unlikely crossover hit, but that's what it became. Starfish went gold, and Arista put out a Church greatest-hits album and American reissues of their previous records. The Church spent the next year touring the world before returning to Sydney and getting to work on their next LP.

People expected big things from Gold Afternoon Fix, the Church's next album, but the record's production was one of those snakebit music-business stories. The Church wanted to record the album with former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, but Arista vetoed their decision and sent them off to work with Waddy Wachtel again instead. They weren't happy about this. The band members were also getting deeper into drugs. (The album's title is supposedly some kind of stock-market term, but I'm guessing that it also has something to do with the heroin habit that Steve Kilbey was just picking up around that time.) Wachtel thought drummer Richard Ploog was messing everything up, and he replaced Ploog with drum machines for much of the LP. You might say that he pulled the Ploog out of the socket. (After the album was done, the Church hired former Patti Smith drummer Jay Dee Daugherty.)

The members of the Church talk about Gold Afternoon Fix as the moment when things just fell apart, when they lost all sense of themselves. Fans tend to write it off as a thin, compromised version of the Church. I'm a neophyte when it comes to this band's vast and intimidating discography, but Gold Afternoon Fix mostly sounds fine to me. From where I'm sitting, "Under The Milky Way" was always the one big anomaly in the Church's discography. The song doesn't sound that different from the rest of the Church's music, but it taps into something deep and mystical. The rest of the time, the Church made perfectly pleasant jangly guitar music that fades nicely into the background. That's mostly what I hear on Starfish, and it's mostly what I hear on Gold Afternoon Fix.

The songs on Gold Afternoon Fix are a little less distinct and immediate, but the album isn't anywhere near bad. It's a nice, warm drizzly-afternoon listen. There are no soaring heights, but nothing grates. First single "Metropolis" is one of the catchier moments, but it doesn't really sound like radio-bait. Instead, it's a gauzy midtempo jam with enough of a melody that I can kind of hum it after hearing it, which is more than I can say for most of the Church's songs. "Metropolis" is less of a catchy pop song, more a song that gestures in the vague direction of catchiness, but I'm never sorry to hear it.

Presumably, "Metropolis" was inspired by the 1927 Fritz Lang film with the robot lady, not the place where Superman lives. Either way, the song stays in the same hazily evocative lyrical lane as most of the Church's music. Steve Kilbey intones all his lyrics with a kind of conversational breathiness. Those lyrics use hallucinatory imagery -- circuses and elephants, a falling trapeze artist, black-and-white dreams, talking about a holocaust and then visiting a zoo. Mostly, "Metropolis" seems to be a straightforward-ish love song: "Back in Metropolis, nothing can ever topple us when I'm standing with you." But I've never seen the Fritz Lang movie, so maybe I'm just not getting the references.

Musically, "Metropolis" sounds a little like the Church's take on power pop. The central hook is a bittersweet guitar riff that's just as important to the main melody as Steve Kilbey's vocal. It's apparently one of the Gold Afternoon Fix tracks that uses a drum machine instead of a real drummer, but I can't really tell. Instead, I'm mostly drawn to the web of reverby guitars -- some acoustic, some electric, all weaving intricately in and out of each other. There's enough echo that everything bleeds into everything else, and it works as a fine example of that era's dreamy rock music. "Metropolis" isn't a classic or anything, and it was firmly out of alt-rock radio rotation by the time I started paying attention, but I don't think the song got airplay just because it came after "Under The Milky Way." It has its own kind of romance working for it.

The Church spent a bunch of money on an overly literal "Metropolis" video, with circus performers and a brief shot of a real dancing elephant. I can see one big problem with the video: Steve Kilbey doesn't look like the Steve Kilbey of the "Under The Milky Way" clip. Instead, he makes a combination of stylistic decisions -- overly-manicured white-guy beard, slightly floofy mullet, dress shirt buttoned all the way up -- that really only work if you're a coke dealer or a member of Color Me Badd. He's a good-looking guy, but you can't make sensitive guitar music while presenting yourself to the world like that.

"Metropolis" might've gone #1 Modern Rock, but it only made it to #11 on the Mainstream Rock chart, and it missed the Hot 100 entirely. On Spotify, the song currently has 3 million streams -- about 4% of what "Under The Milky Way" has. Follow-up single "You're Still So Beautiful" stalled out at #27 on the Modern Rock chart, possibly because its use of the word "fuck" and because of the extremely jarring way that it's bleeped out on the radio edit. Gold Afternoon Fix sold way less than Starfish, and that pretty much killed the Church's commercial momentum in the US.

The Church came back strong with their 1992 album Priest=Aura. It's lusher and spacier than its predecessor, and among the Church's culty fans, it's generally regarded as the masterpiece. The album doesn't hit me on that level, but it's awfully pretty. Priest=Aura doesn't have any hits on the level of "Under The Milky Way" or even "Metropolis," but lead single "Ripple" did reach #3 on the Modern Rock chart. (It's an 8.) Since then, the Church haven't appeared on the Modern Rock chart or, as far as I can tell, on any other Billboard chart.

Still, the Church have remained hugely prolific, cranking out album after album. Some of those records didn't get American releases, and the band's lineup has continued to shift, but they're still at it. These days, the Church is pretty much Steve Kilbey and whoever else he has with him. Drummer Tim Powles joined up in the mid-'90s, and Kilbey's other bandmates have all been around for a decade or less. Still, the Church make a lot of music. They've now got a couple dozen studio albums to their name; their most recent, The Hypnogogue, came out less than a year ago. They still tour pretty regularly, sometimes sharing bills with similarly inclined '80s bands like the Psychedelic Furs. The Church just finished an American theater tour in November. They're still out there under the Milky Way tonight.

GRADE: 7/10

BONUS BEATS: The Church shared a 1990 episode of MTV Unplugged with Sinéad O'Connor, an artist who's already been in this column once and who will soon be back. Here's their drumless rendition of "Metropolis":