while i was in sweden i had a listen to forget yourself

fuck what a good record!

i never stopped to listen to it at the time

but theres some great stuff on there

i mean obviously we never make bad records

although some we have made i really don’t care for

but they were not bad records

forget yourself is a fizzy electronic-y guitar-pedal kind of album

i had just moved back to sydney

and the ganja here was mind blowing at that time

plus i had finally thrown off the last shackles of heroin

and i was back on form again after a bit of a struggle

it was recorded at tims old studio in glebe

it was crammed with gadgets and equipment and stuff

for some reason we had this engineer nick hard

he didn’t really seem to understand

exactly how we thought we were s’posed to be

so forget yourself is a weird hybrid record

its noisy bright and a bit digital

pretty energetic tho for a bunch of old guys…eh?

i mean we are not going gently into that good night…are we…?

anyway i guess i never really understood what it was at the time

but listening to it for the first time in ten years i was kinda impressed

we put a lot of thought into what we do

and we argue and carry on during the creative process sometimes

i think everyone in the band goes out of his way to make each song special

peter with his apollo approach to guitar

marty with his dionysus approach to guitar

tim was the walloping drums n guy who understood pro-tools

i was the geeza who played bass and sang the songs

we don’t like to write stale hackneyed showbiz stuff

on this album it seemed our horizons suddenly exploded

especially compared to AENT..a very measured record indeed

this record reminds me of some of my paintings

lots of bright colours lots of naive joie de vivre

a sonic recklessness is afoot

after AENT and its tastefulness

FY comes unleashed fucked up squashed chopped up feeding back

a strong sense of some cartoon psychedelic trip

a sense of a rebellious looseness

i have come back to my full powers as a lyricist by now i guess

after some dodgier moments on the gear in the past

in fact at this moment i was on a roll

i wrote june and don’t you fall one night  about 5 minutes apart

despite the fact i was being hassled at the time by someone as i wrote em

it was a hassle-y period

lots of people dropped in

there were always someone hanging around

we went out n took long lunches and dinners

i usually turned up late n went home early

(tho i usually do that)

a lot of good songs from these sessions went on beside yourself

yeah thats a good record you should track down if you like this one

we recorded tons of songs

we went through a very productive streak writing wise

in fact it doesn’t seem possible the church could not write songs ever

we always come up with something

look we just muck around

we just fiddle about until a song starts to form

or we follow weird little strategies of writing

i said to peter one day

give me a chord progression any chord progression

on the spot he came up with the chords for sealine

its called sealine because it reminded us of i am the walrus (geddit?)

song in space sounds like some krautrock group from the seventies

i wrote june and don’t you fall on a bass guitar only

that hardly ever happens

nick hard and tim were doing stuff with the sound

was it meant to be like this ?    i used to wonder

now it doesn’t seem to matter

the record is a glorious accident

its got a couple of beautiful songs

june and maya for 2 at least

its got electro-euphorica e.g. reversal

its got a great slow dissolve ending in summer

which was the aural equivalent to being back in bondi beach

and its got some turbulent strident stuff

and its got some triply poppy stuff

hell you can’t go wrong with forget yourself

if someone else did it it probably woulda been huge

but the church were fated to be ignored for a while

even though we still made great music like this

if we aren’t the best band in this universe we’re not far-off

ie we have delivered interesting accomplished songs and music

for thirty 2 years now and we show no sign of getting soft

still too highly strung for our own good

eccentricity or just plain mad…?

thats the church

we will be back

eventually

 

 

 

 

 

the squalls and the warm calms