Day After Day #170: Under the Milky Way

Day After Day is an ambitious attempt to write about a song every day in 2024 (starting on Jan. 4).

Under the Milky Way (1988)

Every once in a while, a band writes a song that becomes so ubiquitous that it threatens to overwhelm everything else they do. That happened to Australian alt-rockers the Church with their song "Under the Milky Way." It was almost a throwaway song written by singer-bassist Steve Kilbey and the band didn't even like it. Then it blew up.

The band was formed in Sydney in 1980 by Kilbey, Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes on guitar and Nick Ward on drums. Ward played on the band's debut album and then was replaced by Richard Ploog. The band started off playing neo-psychedelic indie rock. The second single off that first album, "The Unguarded Moment," was a hit in Australia and New Zealand, but the band's label, Capitol, refused to release their second album in the U.S. because it felt there was a lack of radio-friendly songs. The band recorded five new songs but the label dropped them anyway. 

After an album and two EPs, the Church signed with Warner Bros. and released Heyday in 1985, which was well-received, although sales in Australia were flagging. The band signed a four-album deal with Arista Records in the U.S. in 1987 and flew to Los Angeles to make the follow up to Heyday. They worked and clashed with producers Waddy Wachtel (known as the long-haired guitarist in Stevie Nicks' and Keith Richards' bands) and Greg Ladanyi. The experience was not fun for the Church, but the resulting album Starfish ended up becoming the band's biggest, hitting the top 50 on the Billboard 200.

And it was mainly because of "Under the Milky Way," a beautiful jangle-rock masterpiece that Kilbey wrote with his partner Karin Jansson, a songwriter and guitarist who was in the punk band Pink Champagne. Kilbey put it on a cassette with a bunch of other songs and gave it to the band's manager, who asked the band to record it.

"Sometimes, when this place gets kind of empty/Sound of their breath fades with the light/I think about the loveless fascination/Under the Milky Way tonight/Lower the curtain down on Memphis/Lower the curtain down, all right/I got no time for private consultation/Under the Milky Way tonight."

Then the chorus sweeps in.

"Wish I knew what you were looking for/Might have known what you would find/And it's something quite peculiar/Something shimmering and white/It leads you here, despite your destination/Under the Milky Way tonight."

The song begins with a 12-string acoustic guitar, while the solo was played with an E-Bow on a guitar that was played through a Synclavier to give it a bagpipe sound. 

"Under the Milky Way" hit #24 on the Billboard Hot 100 and #2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, going to #22 in Australia and #25 in New Zealand; the video got plenty of play on MTV. The song "Reptile" was also a hit on rock radio and Starfish got up to #41 on the Billboard 200 and went gold.

In a 2016 interview with RBMA Radio, Kilbey said the band had no idea the song would become a hit. "...strange enough, 'Under the Milky Way' was the black sheep of that record. The producers didn't like it, the band didn't like it and I didn't really like it, either. We did [it] and then we only discovered it was a hit single when Arista came into the listening party."

After label head Clive Davis heard the song at the listening party, he declared that it was a hit, Kilbey said. "It was half a hit already, and then Arista made it a hit. They fucking pulled out every stop they had to make it a hit. I didn't spot that one coming. No one did."

The song was featured on Miami Vice in early '89 and also in the 2001 movie Donnie Darko, and it has been covered by Sia and Metric.

The Church followed Starfish up with 1990's Gold Afternoon Fix, which did not perform as well as its predecessor. Ploog was struggling with a drug problem and his drums were replaced on most of the album by a drum machine. He was replaced by Jay Dee Daugherty of Patti Smith's band for the tour. The band saw diminishing returns for its next few albums and lineup changes as Koppes left and then returned. Kilbey battled a heroin problem throughout the '90s before getting clean in the early 2000s. Willson-Piper left the band in 2013 and Koppes left again in 2020. The band has remained busy over the years, with 19 albums released in the last 30 years. 

I've never seen the Church live but I'm actually rectifying that tonight when they play the Royale in Boston with the Afghan Whigs.