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Rating: Before the concert, while browsing around the mixer, I had noticed that on the strips of tape used to distinguish the channels, next to "Pet" (Peter Koppes), there was only "AC" (acoustic) and under "Mar" (Marty Willson-Piper), there was "AC" and "EL".
Semi-acoustic set?
The room is 2/3 empty, perhaps 1/4 full, if we squeeze, even 1/5. I count a hundred people. The Church don't deserve this emptiness, we remember them 10 years ago in Milan at the Rolling, full. They come on stage. Marty: "Wo kann ich einen Fahrschein lösen?" with perfect pronunciation. At least he's in the mood to joke. Steve Kilbey has gained weight to the point of being unrecognizable. They start with the two guitarists sitting on stools, oh no, a kind of unplugged. The fourth song is "Milky Way" with the immortal line "wish I knew what you were looking for, but I know what you will find": applause and shouts, we’re in nostalgia, the audience is old but the Church aren't, they continue to make new songs, avoid singles, greatest hits, sometimes lingering too smugly in mainstream psychedelia á la Floyd, yawning.
Where did the lightness of "Starfish" (1988) go, which at times also appeared in "Gold Afternoon Fix" (1990) and "Priest=Aura" (1992), the light and simple riffs?
Hmm, I’m talking about 10 years ago... Marty grins and plays the riff of "Buffalo", the 7th from "Hologram of Baal" (1998). Magnificent, this is good. Then finally Marty picks up an electric guitar, not his usual Rickenbaker, but a Fender Jaguar, probably they don’t sponsor him anymore… They play "Metropolis" from "Gold Afternoon Fix", finally it's them, more than that, the riff spins. They play "Louisiana", from "Hologram of Baal" from 1998. But most of the over two-hour concert is a bore, they don’t take off. There are more moments that say nothing than those that are beautiful.
There are also three encores, requested by the audience. In the first, they play "Hotel Womb" from "Starfish", the good times. The small audience compensates by continuously shouting when they disappear, but between songs, there's a void, embarrassing, filled only by Marty’s jokes asking "do you have some pot?". Someone shouts to play "Almost With You", Kilbey responds imitating (well) the German accent "vi arr not playing zhat one". "Why?". "Becoz it's zou old even for uss".
Understandable, we are talking about twenty years ago. We are at slapstick. Three or four of us ask for "Reptile", at least to save the evening. Nothing. We understand. We understand that we only like the old songs and they don't just want to evoke the past.
Twenty years of career (the first album is from 1981) that close in an unworthy manner, the sadness is maximum, but the blame is theirs, they are at fault for not having stopped.
I search the internet.
Kilbey was born in 1954.
The blame is on time.
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