The showed was recorded at the ABC television studios and will be broadcast on May 4th 2000. The band played a shorter set, around 40 minutes, and I should've taken notes on the set list...it included Destination, Buffalo, Hotel Womb, Endless Sea, Myrrh, Two Places at Once, It's No Reason...nothing that they didn't play in the concert shows.
It was so good to listen to the band play their songs without a "big front of house" amplification system - it was just them and their amps. Everything was clear and I felt like it must sound a bit like this in the recording studio when they work. One step closer to The Sound :)
Most of the songs were played perfectly, but Destination had to be restarted, as Two Places at Once when Marty cracked up laughing after singing the first line of his verse ("Trinkets sing on a desert wind..."). He blamed Tim - "He looked at me !!" :) The Endless Sea was also restarted. Marty broke a string during his solo in Hotel Womb...oh, and during his swelling guitar part in Destination ("Draconian wind unforetold") he had the presence of mind to *sshhh !!* a woman behind him who was talking. Overall the audience were clearly Church fans. Many were singing along; it's *so* hard not to do that after spending ten years doing it !! And nobody clapped early at the end of Destination - it seemed everyone there knew Marty closes the song with another set of guitar swells.
The best non-musical thing that happened involved Marty and the people running the show. The band asked if they could play another song after the filming was done, just for the studio audience. The floor manager, Ann (?), asked via her headset and was told "No". Marty asked if he could talk to them (see the last two pics in the set above) and upon receiving the same answer told them that he could introduce them to girls ! "I can do that for you !" he said, but the answer was still no. It came down to money apparently - the studio was open until a certain time and that was it. If the crew stayed longer then it'd cost more money. It's a good thing that nobody mentioned the song the band were going to play was Cortez, who's average performance runs about ten minutes !
As I pointed out to anyone "official" who would listen to me, this show will be recorded, copied and shipped all over the world to fans eager to see the guys in their first televised fully-electric show for years and years. In fact, I don't know of another live tv appearance at all, and there's only a couple of televised concert songs floating around. Even if there ever was one, it's never surfaced anywhere near me, so this show is The One To Get. I asked the people behind Studio 22 if they'd consider releasing the show on video tape (DVD ?!!), perhaps with extra footage that wasn't broadcast, and they said they'd think about it. After all, the band might as well make some money from this, seeing as hundreds of copies will undoubtedly be made and sent overseas. Perhaps if lots of people wrote to them ?
May 7th - Well, three days after the broadcast I can definitely say it's worth releasing this show on video ! The broadcast version only included 4 songs and I'd like to see the rest of the interview the band recorded. I know the show is quite short, only half an hour, so you can't do much more than a couple of sound-bites between songs, so if it came out on video we could see everything the band had to say and sing. And we might see Peter ! Peter ? Peter Koppes ?! Yes, the tall bloke with the guitar and flying fret frying fingers, credited as the bass guitarist in the broadcast, didn't make an appearance in the interviews, which seems a tad unfair.
To finish on a high note, I'd like to thank Studio 22 and the ABC for giving us the chance to finally see The Church play on television, and also for inviting fans to be part of the audience...plus the webcast, that was cool too ! My thanks also to the band for having the confidence and talent to play on T.V.
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