Tantalized

Original photo by Lenscreep.

Heyday is often described to be a hypnotic album. Would it be called like that if Tantalized was not on it? Maybe, but not that much. This is the real snakecharmer of a song on this album. It is said to be started by Marty jamming in the studio and that's what it sounds too. Most of the songs of the church have developed from jams but the melody has been refined a lot. The jamming heart of Tantalized is still medium raw here, which makes Tantalized such a different beast in their discography. This is a pure Marty-show and he is doing everything that is possible with his guitar. PK surely has his parts but Marty is the real star here. If Seance-album was mostly Steve's relatively stiff "colour-between-the-Mondrian-lines-sketchbook" then Tantalized is the wild Jackson Pollock colour explosion.

This song always appears to me with the sound and playing first and the lyrics are more just another supporting instrument. There are some key lines, like there always is. "Back from software limbo..." and "All that glittered had me mesmerized" are lines that I remember if I really try. This is also perhaps the first song that kept me intrigued with just the title alone. i have read the description of the word many times but it still escapes me. What is tantalizing actually? Still it's that twin guitar attack is like a locomotive coming straight towards me at high speed and Steve singing is waaay behind in the passenger wagon at the back of the train. This song is more for the body, heart and muscle than it is for the head.

Youth Worshipper

In the past few years the church (now all lower case) has had a few new official histories written about them: No Certainty Attached-biography and Marty's liner notes for the early period 30th anniversary reissues. It's interesting how Youth Worshipper is mentioned in both in almost same way: "...a fairly topical commentary on those who use cosmetics and other means in order to prolong their fading youth..." and "...Steve commenting on plastic surgery...dealt with less abstract subjects...". Both tomes say that the lyrics are easy to understand and that they are a clear statement. I'm sorry but SK sucks big time when he tries to make a simple and easy to understand lyrics. That is a good thing, as the lyrics are still intriguing even though I have read them many times. Despite those other interpretations I still see the character Youth Worshipper as a dirty old man (or could be a puma woman these days) looking for aphrodisiac from young people in seedy environments at the fringe of the movie dream laa-laa land (...steal your scenes) where the dreams turned to nightmares in ruins. How exactly the hooves and horns relate to plastic surgery doesn't open up to me. There is a demonic undertone in the song and the character feels more like a serial killer or a pervert than recovering plastic surgery patient looking to bounce back to big time.

Heyday is often seen as having too much extreme orchestration especially in the end of the album. Night Of Light and then Youth Worshipper after that use all the bells and whistles they wanted. These songs are like companion pieces to each other in my mind with the same kind of arrangements. As Night Of Light was the lighter side this is the darker side. I think that in Youth Worshipper the strings are necessary or even the driving force of the song.This is a song that would be impossible to play live with just the basic guitar/bass/drums-setup. The strings carry the riff behind the chorus in a menacing way. A bit hammy Polanski horror movie extravaganza going on there. Youth Worshipper is not a jangle pop song with added strings and stuff. This is more like chamber jangle pop. The orchestrations are essential to the widescreen touch of the song in Youth Worshipper than any other song in Heyday.

Youth Worshipper is a good Kilbey/Jansson collaboration even though it's mostly forgotten. The duo went on to do another little pop ditty for the next album of the band and it has turned out to be quite popular later on. Still I have listened Youth Worshipper almost as much as that other number, Under The Milky Way, and there isn't much to complain when I blast it from the heavenly 30th Anniversary Edition.

ALREADY YESTERDAY

some things are personal with the church, they sit in the studio writing songs and steve has some words he writes and they record it and send it out into the universe and some where some place far away i heard it, you heard it, and our experience and neural networks process it and make sense of it and our subjective experience is created and then memories are formed and somewhere in the mix with the church something else happens, i don't know exactly what but it's always something to do with the words. 

while i listened to already yesterday over and over, the line, 'avalon over the water' leaped out and wrapped itself around my heart in some kind of embrace, i happened to be reading, 'the mists of avalon' at the time, going through that english flirtation with the idea of avalon and king aurther, i'd read quite a bit especially the lovely books by t. h. white, the once and future king. 

i was working as a social worker in a a place in london called edgware, and i'd finish work by going next door in my black punk suit and tie and order a mineral water. 'the beehive' was a classic bikers bar, it was raided often, sometimes i got hauled in the back of a van with the bikers and taken to the station, over the course of years i got to know every biker in the pub and they all seemed to really like me, despite the fact i never drunk beer or took speed, i just smoked weed and had a mineral water with a slice of lemon.

tank was a massive biker chick with tattoos all over her arms, and her arms were the size of tree trunks. she was fucking huge and very unsexy but she was actually really nice at heart and would always make a space for me at the bar where she sat with her timid public servant husband who was akin to a field mouse, as i guess you would be, married to a woman called tank.

one day i was in there talking to tank and a new barmaid asked me what i wanted to drink, 'a mineral water, lemon no ice,' i said. when i looked up she was there, peroxide hair, penetrating eyes, kinda dark tanned skin and super exquisite smile. i was immediately lost for words, how do you find a way in with girls, i was no casanova, women were and still are a great mystery but here i was caught in this eternal gaze, that one hears in myth and romantic legends. we were both transfixed.
i was stuck for a good line so i asked where she was from and she said, 'avalon' and then the sound of rushing blood to my head and my heart was beating in that ploog rhythm and i said, 'across the water.'

i launched into a massive conversation about 'the church' and that song and i must have struck gold cos we ended up dating and eventually getting married and i came out here to australia and made a home in avalon. my beautiful son was born in avalon and it's always held me in it's spell as it is such a lovely place but i often refer to it as babylon now, since the yuppies moved in and it's become super trendy and chic to be seen hanging around cafes, a new kind of commercialism swept in about five years ago and killed the magic a little, although at night when i stand up on the headland and look at the full moon rising out of the ocean over the water it's quite a magical place despite the yuppies and their black lexus four wheel drives.
anyways, already yesterday holds a significant bit of romance for me, as that look we shared was my son calling his mother and i together, and already yesterday, with it's line, 'avalon across the water' was the gravity that seemed to magnetically attract us all together in that moment i remember with such clarity as if it was already yesterday.
what the hell was steve singing about? 
a moment of freedom i think, freedom from time, freedom from the primal element our brains react with. i don't know, i guess it's a wild stab in the dark but when i listen to the song these days i feel like jumping in my car and driving up the highway somewhere far away, somewhere i have never been before, somewhere where i don't have to look back.

Night Of Light

There is a consensus that Night Of Light is perhaps the one of the weakest tracks in Heyday. It has all kinds of additional elements such as strings, horns and even a choir buried somewhere in the mix.Has the band gone too far and was it all worth it? It has also been revealed that the band made little or no money from Heyday as most of the budget went to the lavish orchestrations. Night Of Light is the black moneyhole where it went and it´s sad that their creators feel that it was not worth it. I still think it was a road worth taken in order to see how far the bands sound can be taken. Most of their contemporaries were dabbling with orchestras and it was about time that they did it too. All those "additional" elements make Heyday what it is and that is why I like Night Of Light so much. It was all worth it at least to me.

Night Of Light is quite simple and driving song with insistent beat and lot of layers caked on top of it. Many of the songs in Heyday make for perfect soundtrack for driving and Night Of Light is perhaps the best for flying in the dark highways. The liftoff to the starry skies just around the corner. The strings coat the catchy chorus in huge amounts of fairydust and then after 3:24 the orchestra builds for a climax and the last minute is spend in a bliss after the most enjoyable climax. Taking the sweet time extending the blissful moment. There could have been more of this kind of symphony and now it feels that the "second part" of the song doesn´t reach it´s conclusion. That leaves me wanting for more. I understand that they didn´t visit this style later on and their art went to another direction. Maybe it was a reactionary move to create atmospheres with fewer elements later on in Starfish. The lavishness of Heyday reached it´s climax somewhere around here and never recovered after that.

Lyrically there is many sad and even dystopian elements in Night Of Light. Small hibernating wintery seaside towns, unwritten books, a doomed relationship perhaps. "I let her go in to the night...". To me it is still a happy song. A song about this moment right here. The night has to be accepted and the darkness must be enjoyed. Under the satellites and all other modern space elements life is good right now if you only make it so. Send my love upstairs, everything is complete. All the verses are the drab everyday life that fades away and then the chorus lifts the spirits higher than heaven. There can´t be revelations all the time.

I have taken hundreds or maybe even thousands of photos of cars and office buildings glowing in the black night that lasts for most of the time between november and march in northern Europe. In my mind they are all homages to Night Of Light. All those blogposts I have made with this subject are called Night Of Light. What else could they possibly be?

Happy Hunting Ground

by fandorin


This little intermezzo from Heyday makes me think of my musical socialization.

Apart from the odd Beatles song and, in earlier childhood some E.L.O. (sic!), rock music didn’t play the first violin in my life. In fact, rock music didn’t play any violins at all. Rock music sat somewhere else, and I wouldn’t discover its magic before age 14. Not that I hated it. I just didn’t care. My heroes were (and are) Bach, Ravel, Dvorák, Beethoven and Sibelius. That was the stuff building inner worlds and galaxies, this is where i found unearthly power and amazing results of sonic thinking. Rock was fun, loved it on the radio, but I won’t have thought about putting a rock record on - except the White Album, Sgt. Pepper and The Best Of The Kinks.

Now most combinations of rock and the classical-romantic heritage I heard about not only sucked big time, but they were probably the most atrocious and ghoulish unholy aberrations of music you could encounter. And E.L.O. were even the best within the limits. It was nothing real. It was phony. I could hear the fake, the lies, the poses. Why should I listen to an ersatz orchestra when a recording of Mahler’s symphonies took me to places the fakers apparently had no idea about. Getting a rock band up with a supersized orchestra wasn’t necessarily a good idea, too. Theatralic guitar-banging. Circus. Novelty. And I hated how little of that huge realm of 1000 years of sonic invention was transferred to the planet of rock. We mostly get a camp and hyper-dramatically idea of operatic, incarnated at its worst but most influential in Frederick Bulsara from Zanzibar, or a fluffy carpet of background strings. Or, with “Y” as in “Yngwie”, we get . Or Sting’s puckered forehead in Thinker Pose, whenever he is on his Elizabethan trips, often resulting in Elizabethan tripe. Why did noone care about Debussy’s radical inventions of beauty, about Ravel’s art of orchestration, about Ligeti’s abilities to explore the universe he created by himself, about Mahler’s roaring depths!?

And that’s where Happy Hunting Ground comes into the picture.

I was totally flabbergasted.

Happy Hunting Ground’s extensive use of dynamic possibilities is blindingly amazing. I have no idea how this piece was developed. In HHG, band and orchestra merge seamlessly. The voices and guitars diving up and down, coming in coming out, the playing with sonic rooms, the two different blocks of sound juxtaposed. The ultra-fine orchestration (yearning guitar, golden Takamine jangle, almost sensual percussion textures, drums n bells - then before your very ears, the whole thing transfers into a kind of archaic dance, increasing and reducing intensity until a giant string rainbow breakthrough feels like the sun rising over Stonehenge....the feelings HHG evokes It’s like an arcadian smile, it’s like something very very old, mysterious. Listen to the pagan cro-magnon background vocals, the growling guitars, like animals purring, the saturated drums...it's so ALIVE!

They are uniting in a musical place rarely visited. Traces and lost images from this wonderland do appear - I can hear them in “Day 5”, “A New Season”...and I always get that feeling of having lost this weird little wonderland somewhere in the past. The spirit of the Happy Hunting Ground also dwells in Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” and “Laughing Stock” (not the worst places to live).

Still, there is nothing like driving through the snowy Alps with Happy Hunting Ground...well...”blaring” from the speakers. And when I listened to it, age 15, the rock n the romantic/impressionistic were united - even if only for 5 minutes.

Already Yesterday

Eliminator (1983) by ZZ Top was the album of the 80´s that was made as a soundtrack for driving and cruising around the streets and highways. If you had to choose one album by The Church for the same purpose it would be Heyday (1985). Already Yesterday is almost a typical song of Heyday and it has many of the themes as the other songs. We are in present time with cars but still the setting moves back and forth in time. Science fiction of our time. We are always on the move searching for a new place after another. Ten Mile Beach, Avalon, Violet Town, Babylon, over the border, everything under the sun is there. It´s only "still in the camera".

When I have gone to car trips and if Myrrh is the start of the trip and Tristesse always cheers me up in the red lights. When Already Yesterday starts then the open highway is ahead and it´s only a matter of keeping the feet on the pedal and enjoy the ride. Disconnected, drifting away. Another morning we´ll be gone.

I also feel that Heyday is a song cycle that follows the day. Like another masterpiece from 1985, Skylarking by XTC. Myrrh is the epic dawn and Tristesse, Already Yesterday and Columbus the busy time from 9-12. Then Happy Hunting Ground has the lunchbreak. Night of Light and Youth Worshipper is of course the end of the day. Already Yesterday is full of optimism of the morning and hope for the future. Everything is still fresh and exciting and the well oiled chromium vehicle glows in the sun as we speed down the highway and "we won´t listen to the voices in the city rain".

MYRRH

A THOUSAND SOUNDS ASCEND

AMPLIFIED THIS JUMP-OFF

INTO THE UNKNOWN

YOUR LYRICS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE

AWAKENING IN A DREAM

THERE I’LL MEET YOU NEXT TIME

LOVE SALVAGES OUR INTENSION

SAME SUN WARMS US BACK

MIRACLES UPON MIRACLE

STILL NOT LEFT UNDONE

Tristesse

It´s easy to see how the heyday of the band is somewhere around here. After Myrrh Tristesse starts with irresistible opening riff and never let´s go after that. These two opening songs are about the best start of any album. This song is just pure enjoyment from start to finish. The mystic feeling of Myrrh coupled with the catchy pop approach of Tristesse draws me straight in to the world of Heyday.

The lyrics of the Church are not usually sexy. They leave the door open for many conclusions but sex is usually not one of them. That must be because The Church is one of the whitest bands on the planet as Steve has admitted. Now From Steve Kilbey Live DVD I learned that Tristesse was about the sad feeling after sex. Let´s see from Wikipedia:

"Sexual intercourse can sometimes lead to a feeling of melancholy called post-coital tristesse (from Latin post-coital, and French tristesse, literally - "sadness"). This is more common in women than in men[citation needed]. Many PCT sufferers may also exhibit strong feelings of anxiety, anywhere from five minutes, to two hours after coitus. Some men also report similar feelings of anxiety and guilt after masturbation. The phenomenon is referred to by the philosopher Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione when he said "For as far as sensual pleasure is concerned, the mind is so caught up in it, as if at peace in a [true] good, that it is quite prevented from thinking of anything else. But after the enjoyment of sensual pleasure is past, the greatest sadness follows. If this does not completely engross, still it thoroughly confuses and dulls the mind."

I just don´t get the whole idea of Tristesse to be honest. There has been a wide array of mixed emotions after duo and solo performances for sure, but sadness has not been one of them. This is no macho bullshit, the sadness issue just doesn´t open up to me. I can vaguely understand the guilt part if religion and other relationships were part of the game. It´s much more understandable that the mind is thinking something else during the performance but when it´s over what´s there to worry after that? To be honest this whole concept feels something like an artsy fartsy french movie director would come up with to make his grainy and shaky black and white movie to have more depth.

If sex is the primary activity in the song then it all becomes so much simpler:

"Let´s have sex anywhere
in deserts under the sun and stars
in a hotel suite in rich man´s town
in a hut in botany bay
I´m just sad that it has to end
I can´t stay much longer
and now I have Tristesse"

That was my own very simplified humour vision about it. I have heard many local bands trying to get a summer hit with that kind of simple formula. One guy even tried it repeatedly! In the end I believe that this title was lifted from the "Book Of Fancy International Words" couple of pages after Tantalized. I don´t mind being educated. The Church offers plenty of stuff to think about.

Myrrh

The previous albums of the Church, Seance and Remote Luxury, were good albums but there was something little missing in them. It was as if the band wasn´t firing on all cylinders. This could be understandable if the bassplayer dictates what guitarplayers should play and doesn´t let them do what comes naturally. That approach lacked spontaneity and improvisation. Both of those qualities are definitely found in Heyday and the band sounds like they are energized and on top of their game.

Shadow Cabinet from Remote Luxury was the first real collaboration of the band and here they continue seamlessly from that point and what that song promised. Myrrh is cut from the same tree as Shadow Cabinet as it evokes that same levitating feeling of flying through the air without much restrictions. I can´t describe that but luckily it´s been done before here. The aerodynamic chromium machine is well oiled and glows in the psychedelic sun on it´s way to undiscovered territories. This is something that nobody else has done before.

From the chiming opening riff and the buildup it´s obvious that this stuff is busting at it´s seams. There is so much directions and ideas that the song can hardly contain them all. It´s as if every part of the song tries to be better and better. The guitarists duel for the attention and try to gest the best out of each other. It´s going forward all the time. By the time the super hypnotic guitar behind the chorus kicks in I´m always sold. This is a song that I seldom grow tired of. "How can you be so invisible?" I always hear that in my mind in the form of "How can we be so invincible?" Is there some teeny weeny thing I could criticize? Hmm, maybe the singing could be mixed a little bit louder? Is that highlighting keyboard really necessary? Naah, that´s nitpicking and I should shut up.

What is the secret ingredient that makes this fly so easily and be so irresistible? I like to think it´s Peter Koppes who is the secret magic ingredient here. Marty can do the other flashy parts but the real magician behind the ethereal architecture and structure has to be Peter. They are both given free reigns and immediately they make the most out of it. In one word: inspired.

Like the music is rich and inventive so are the lyrics. They go from Jericho city to Apache gunmen to cruising down the highway. From big to small, from history to present and beyond. This is the blockbuster of my head. It´s a lot bigger event than SCHWARZENEGGER IS TERMINATOR written with bold font on the biggest billboard you can ever imagine. The Church has had many good moments and they will have numerous more but this is as close as it gets to what they can achieve if I think of mega super Blockbuster for the MIND.

"You would have thought I´d had enough" by now? I´ve had this album for 20 years now. It always surfaces in some form or other. Scratchy vinyl, hissing cassette in the car, CD-r, MP3 from the phone, played on computer or whatever and it still keeps me entertained and thinking. I might think I´m over it but then it pulls me back like a magnet. I´m going all fanboy now but why not? This song should do it if there ever was one.