Church

“Juke-Box” is a step back from the album format, a return to the building blocks of pop: songs. Riffs, choruses, words and images: those of the video clips, or those that music evokes and uses to seduce the listener.

The aim of this column is precisely to enter into this game of seduction, always crucial and always taken for granted. To uncover its stories and its protagonists, but above all its mechanisms, rules and exceptions. Guided by one simple question: how does a song work?

There are songs that capture the essence of a decade. Perhaps precisely because they run counter to the norms of their era, yet remain extraordinarily faithful to its spirit. "Under The Milky Way" is one of them. Because we were all, in some way, dazzled beneath the Milky Way. New romantics and (post-)goth kids alike, synth obsessives and guitar nostalgics, die-hard Beatles fans and followers of the next generation of indie-pop shooting stars. All of us ensnared by a song that can only be explained as pure magic. Like the kind found in the film "Donnie Darko", which thirteen years later would resurrect it, definitively enshrining it as the soundtrack of an era.

It's 1988, and the Australian Church, having smoothed over the psychedelic textures of their early work, have decided to follow the trail of the Starfish. "Starfish", a name that works, that smells like a turning point. They too want to give it a go, to land the hit; they're indie at heart, but they've got a shot in the chamber that could shatter the charts across half the world. And they're willing to play it, whatever the cost. At worst, some critical ayatollah will cry betrayal. Though they'd soon enough slip back into the margins anyway, even with some remarkable records (see "Magician Among The Spirits").

It's a shot that starts out quiet, though. Cradled by soft guitar arpeggios that feel almost like sidereal crackling. With Steve Kilbey's velvety voice sketching out unreal, dreamlike patterns. A fatalistic, melancholy vocal delivery. A transference, carrying you into another dimension. Oneiric, metaphysical, galactic — call it what you will... If Tom Verlaine once strummed his serenades to the moon ("Marquee Moon"), Church play beneath the Milky Way. And for once, it isn't a synth leading this cosmic journey, but the most "human" of instruments: a guitar, an acoustic one at that.

Under The Milky Way, beneath its hazy glow, on a starry night in the brand-new world. Perhaps out in the wild expanses of the desert, far from the sprawl of Sydney where Kilbey and co. took their first steps. Even though the lyrics mention Memphis and drawn curtains, the song was actually written by Kilbey together with his then-partner, Karin Jansson, in an Amsterdam venue called the Melkweg (which in Dutch means precisely "Milky Way").

Forty-three seconds in, then that forceful entrance of the drums, a punch to the heart. The arpeggio now feels almost more insistent, more compelling, and Kilbey's vocal grows in intensity too. "Wish I knew what you were looking for/ Might have known what you would find". An obsessive wish, repeated twice. Before a rift opens onto this night riddled with stars and melancholy: “And it’s something quite peculiar/ Something shimmering and white/ Leads you here despite your destination/ Under the Milky Way tonight”.

Hypnosis and catalepsy, before the flash of genius. A blistering solo, absurd, unheard of. And gorgeous. It sounds like bagpipes, but it's actually a guitar played with an E-Bow, that electronic device that generates an electromagnetic field capable of making the strings vibrate, emulating the sound of various instruments — violin, cello, flute, clarinet, or, as in this case, bagpipes. Peter Koppes thus rises to become one of the greatest pop interpreters of an instrument he never actually played. The tricks of fate...

The fact remains that solo, epic and thunderous, splits the song in two, driving itself permanently into the listener's mind. Too good to be true. Then Willson-Piper's distorted guitars kick in and Kilbey's thread of a voice returns, whispering those mysterious words. What could that peculiar something be ("Something quite peculiar"), that white shimmer ("Something shimmering and white")? Some have even seen in it an allusion to drugs. What was going on, among the tables of Amsterdam's Milky Way?

We'll probably never know. Not least because Kilbey has always kept it brief: "The song isn't about any particular theme, I mainly wanted to create an atmosphere... Then people's stories gave it meanings it never had". So we like to picture Church under Australia's starry sky, looking back on those days of success, as explosive as they were fleeting. A shame, because the magic has endured. Even among the spirits. An album even inspired by Houdini, eight years later. Too late, though. The hype had already dissolved into the nebulae of the Milky Way.

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08/02/2026