Bay Shore's Boulton Center for the Performing Arts welcomed legendary Australian rock band, The Church, on April 23. Celebrating three decades of music, and twenty-four albums, the band masterfully evoked the memories of their long-term devoted fans. Vacillating between showcasing their well-known and unbridled virtuosity, and revealing their talents as bona fide raconteurs, lead vocalist Steve Kilbey prefaced each song with its own history - stories punctuated with moments of shrewdly deployed candor, enrobed in witty sarcasm - complete with equally amusing interjections from all members of the band. In doing so, each song became a virtual bookmark in their sonic memoir, and each story quickly engaged listeners, making the obligatory space between the stage and the audience virtually disappear.
"An Intimate Space" provided a return to the uncomplicated and grass-roots methodology of performance - looking not toward the allure of fancy and superfluous stage equipment , or the lucre associated with a twenty-two city tour and all of its inherent merchandising opportunities, but rather the chance to provide the clearly devout fans of The Church with a comfortable place in which to congregate and, more importantly, reminisce.
Throughout the show, Marty Willson-Piper both teased and wooed the adoring crowd with short bursts of soulful, solo guitar riffs, leaving them wide-eyed and hungry for more. Deciding against eschewing perhaps their most eminent effort to a crowd whose knowledge of their material spanned far beyond just the most recognizable, the band contentedly performed "Under the Milky Way," even incorporating the tried and true harmonica solo from Peter Koppes. The audience sang along with numinous zeal, as gossamer, white stars emblazoned themselves onto the curtain backdrop - precisely where Tim Powles worked his rhythmic magic on the drums.
In a startling move, the first of two encores had The Church covering the quintessential hit "Disarm" from The Smashing Pumpkins, who, in 2008, famously performed a cover of "Reptile" during a concert in Sydney.
As the concert drew to a close, Kilbey quietly confessed, "We haven't had a song on commercial radio in twenty years." For a moment, the room was silenced by a piece of information too daunting for an über-fan to contemplate. Willson-Piper finished adjusting his microphone, tilted it toward his mouth, and slyly responded: "Must mean we're doing something right!" With this, the audience exploded into applause, still safe in the knowledge that, without even trying, The Church had somehow laid the groundwork for the next thirty years.
