Saturday Trousers

This is a bit of a girly take on the music of The Church, in this predominantly male bastion of Church goers. So this is for Mary… and Duncan… I don’t have much with Australian culture, don’t know much about it really, except for one thing. There’s an Australian movie I adore, called Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s a little-known cult-film by Peter Weir about a group of young teenage girls in a chic boarding school going on an outing, a picnic, on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900 in the State of Victoria. A Saturday. Nearby the famous, haunted Hanging Rock. Where some of the girls will disappear, never to return, amongst them the beautiful fair-haired Miranda, a sweet dreamy cloud of blondness. The girls wear long white Victorian frocks in the heat of the sweltering landscape, their white gloves perhaps being the only thing which might connect them to one of the many possible universes of The Church. The sounds of the movie are made up of the clear, soft voices of the young girls, a pan flute, singing the most bewilderingly pristine, archetypical, almost frightening tune, and the mysterious humming of the rock, of nature itself. The setting of the movie feels like a dream world, where “everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and the right place”, Miranda says, while looking up at the huge rock spreading out above her. These words might have been written by Steve Kilbey himself, lines shaping just another one of his poetic little mysteries.

The Australian landscape has something so majestic about it, it makes you so quiet, you just want to look around and listen to what this ancient land has to tell you. Right from the start, when I first began listening to the music of The Church, I felt that the lyrics of Steve Kilbey fitted this landscape so perfectly; it’s as if in all their mysteriousness they were rising up from the depths of this rocky, mystifying, sizzling landscape with its strange century-old formations. The music often has something very serene, calm, self-assured about it, as if it were translating a thousand-year old flow of sounds buried deep down under, in the caves of an arcane, cryptic space or in a container of vast, unfathomable truths that were just lying there waiting for someone to dig them up. Lyrics and sounds, waiting there, all alone, isolated by their sheer beauty and profoundness, with only a secretive, barely noticeable humming sound as a constant keeper and witness of their presence.

I only got to know this music very recently, it was brought to my attention by someone of this group. Of course, just like most everybody else I knew their “Under the Milky Way”, a song I have loved since I first heard it on the radio (and it is still very often played here on Belgian radio stations, but that’s about it). I had no idea that behind it there was indeed a whole milky way, a galactic universe of stellar music beyond my imagination waiting to be acknowledged. And so I started to listen and listen…and listen, discovering new favourites every day (which I probably will for quite some time to come…), lyrics and music that often blew me away at first hearing, lines that are being engraved in my wordy memories of poetry, philosophy, literature.

One of my most cherished ones I found in “Laurel Canyon”, some very simple lines: “Finding my own way – In some cool dimension, – Where it’s always Saturday”, but then I like simple wordings that tell so much or bring a whole world of meanings to my imagination. Saturday being my favourite day of the week, it became a favourite word too. It just feels so terribly relaxed, like the lead singer himself – an aura of seductive, inner poise always surrounding him; and it was my day – since early childhood – of long long sessions of listening to all sorts of music, forgetting about the world around me.

The music and the lyrics especially, of The Church and their leader, have something ancient, primeval and instinctive to them as if they were just unearthed from some olden ground into the fairly new home of pop and rock. A combination which makes indeed for a very cool sort of dimension, which music essentially always is or should be. The Saturday feeling, a relaxed joyfulness, but also the day before Sunday, when everything quietens down again… Sadness is always present too, the feeling that all good things inevitably have to come to an end, that’s Saturday too. The song “Laurel Canyon” exhumes the intricately abundant atmosphere of a world built along some fresh green valley, alive on the deep crevasses of an ancient historical rocky foundation with a sweet, eternal form of liturgy where the birds are singing vespers. The music of The Church seems to be an eternal world of birthed creations, a world never dry or depleted of inspiration, but for ever fertile, simmering with the energy of life and its appetites. The colliding of several worlds, old and new ones is always happening in the albums of The Church. Steve Kilbey’s voice always lending itself to the intuited secret of these worlds, his world, our world, our ancestors’ world. He thought that somehow the mystery of music should be equalled by the mystery of the word.

So that, even in the destituteness and emptiness of a loveless world, a song will for ever linger over its surface, albeit just a quiet sort of impenetrable humming. In Miranda’s world, it is for ever Saturday…

Thank you, St.

Joke Roelandt, May 2020