The Church and Afghan Whigs

with special guest Ed Harcourt

Doors 7 p.m. | Show 8:00 p.m. | 18+

Information | Tickets

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The Church

Few bands enter their fifth decade of making music with all the fierce creative energy of their early years. Few bands are like The Church. The Australian psych-guitar masters are deep into recording the band’s 25th studio album over 40 years after their formation.

The 2021 epic line-up is bassist, vocalist, and founder Steve Kilbey; with longtime collaborator timEbandit Powles drummer and producer across 17 albums since '94; guitarist Ian Haug who joined the band in 2013 and Jeffrey Cain, touring multi-instrumentalist who is now a full-time member of The Church since the departure of Peter Koppes in early 2020. The band have also recently recruited one of Australia's finest and most respected guitarists Ashley Naylor (Even, The Grapes). Ashley and Steve have collaborated on many different projects over the years and now was the perfect time to bring Ashley into the band.

Kilbey says: "A band is like a family and over 40 years it is only natural that families will change. It's too big a body of work not to keep exploring it."

That body of work stretches back in a continuous line to classic early albums Of Skins and Heart and The Blurred Crusade, which revealed a distinctive soundscape of sharp pop hooks and towering guitars complementing Kilbey's lyrics and vocal tones. The more intricate arrangements of Heyday gave way to the wide-open atmosphere of Starfish, the 1988 album which broke into the mainstream and gave them the international hit 'Under the Milky Way'. The hit single has been regarded as one of the most influential and recognisable Australian rock anthems of all time. Starfish also gave us 'Reptile', a song that never seems to date, and is a live favourite around the world.

In 2010 The Church were inducted into the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) Hall of Fame and reaffirmed their status as one of the world's great live bands with the 'Future Past Perfect' tour, performing their Untitled #23, Priest=Aura and Starfish albums to rapturous audiences in the US and Australia.

The five-year gap after the release of Untitled #23 became the most extended break between new albums in the band's career. Haug, formerly of Australian rock icons Powderfinger, joined after the departure of Marty Willson-Piper, sparking a renaissance with Further/Deeper (2014) and Man Woman Life Death Infinity (2017) and introducing new anthems like 'Miami' to the set.

In 2018, the band played the Meltdown Festival in London at the invitation of curator Robert Smith of The Cure. The Church went on to play sold-out shows in the UK, US, Canada, and Australia celebrating the 30th anniversary of the release of Starfish.

Afghan Whigs

The Afghan Whigs will release their first studio album in five years, How Do You Burn?, on September 9, 2022 via Royal Cream/BMG. The band will embark that same day on an extensive fall tour in support of the album, kicking off in Minneapolis at the Fine Line.

How Do You Burn?, their ninth album overall and following on from the brace of widely acclaimed records they’ve made previously since re-grouping in 2012, Do to the Beast (2014) and In Spades (2017). How Do You Burn? picks up the baton laid down by each of those records and runs it to the horizon. Work on it was begun in September 2020 - the COVID pandemic having forced Whigs frontman/songwriter Greg Dulli to abandon plans to tour his highly praised solo album, ‘Random Desire’ - and continued over the next 14 months.

The global pandemic dictated also that the band record largely apart from, and in different locations to, each other: Dulli, his co-producer Christopher Thorn and drummer Patrick Keeler together in California; bassist John Curley, guitarist Jon Skibic and strings man Rick Nelson laying down and engineering their own parts in Cincinnati, New Jersey, and New Orleans, respectively. “Once we got the system down, we started flying,” says Dulli.

For his supporting cast, Dulli called upon several serial collaborators including the late Mark Lanegan, who was a regular in Dulli’s Twilight Singers, a partner in The Gutter Twins and a close friend.  Lanegan makes his Afghan Whigs debut singing backup vocals on two tracks.  “It was Mark who named the album,” Dulli remarked.

Susan Marshall, who sang on the Whigs album 1965, returns to the fray for “Catch A Colt,” one of the album’s standout tracks, loose-limbed like Some Girls-era Rolling Stones and with the liquid polyrhythms of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk.

The multi-talented Van Hunt, who toured with the Whigs in 2012 and guested on Do to the Beast, brings his stacked-up, wall-of-sound vocals to both the plunging, voodoo-blues of “Jyja” and the audacious “Take Me There”, transforming the latter, says Dulli, “into this feral gospel song. We sing really well together, but what Van does production-wise… it’s unrelenting.”

Then there’s Marcy Mays, lead vocalist on ‘My Curse’, the torch-song highlight of 1993’s seminal ‘Gentlemen’ album, reprising her role here on the celestial “Domino and Jimmy”, playing Stevie Nicks to Dulli’s Lindsey Buckingham. “I wrote that song with Marcy in mind,” says Dulli. “No-one sounds like her; she’s got an incredibly unique, emotional and evocative voice.”

The Afghan Whigs - Dulli, Curley, Nelson, Keeler, and with Christopher Thorn now joining the band on guitar - will take How Do You Burn? out on the road beginning this spring.  Beyond that, says Dulli, their future is gloriously wide open.