Best known for their iconic hit Under the Milky Way, featured everywhere from the 2001 Donnie Darko film to AFL Grand Finals and car ads, The Church will return to Canberra later this year.

The Australian rock band, which has been around for 45 years, is bringing The Singles Tour: A Career Retrospective to the Canberra Theatre Centre on 9 November.

It will be the ARIA Hall of Famer’s first time headlining at the venue.

Tickets for the Canberra show are available at canberratheatrecentre.com.au/show/the-church-the-singles-tour

For this show, the band will perform 20 singles. What can audiences expect?
They’re going to expect all the hits, which is only really about five, depending on how you count them. Then a whole load of other songs separating the hits from each other. If we played all the hits together, the show would be over very quickly. It is kind of a career retrospective.

We can imagine it will be a very enjoyable night of mindless pop singles and deep cuts, hopefully there’s something for everyone.

I hope people come along to Canberra Theatre, it’s a beautiful venue, I don’t think The Church have ever headlined there, we’ve supported others — we were the support for Moving Pictures in 1982 — and I’ve done other things.

It’s been a long time coming, our first headliner. I think it will be a banger of a show.

What will be your favourite song to perform and why?

Probably The Hypnogogue (released in 2023). Of all the songs we’re playing that are on the menu, probably the later it was released, the more I like it, the earlier, the less I probably like it.

How would you retrospectively look back at your career?
It’s all gone through its ups and downs. It hasn’t been going up and up and up. It’s gone down and down and down. We’ve gone through lots of cycles. An up and down graph with moments of platooning, some new musical craze that would come along and make the previous one redundant. That’s the history of rock and roll: there’s a beginning, it evolves, and something comes along and wipes that out, everyone jumps on that and then the new thing comes along. Over our 45 years, lots has come along that has become seemingly redundant, then if you hang in, you become a classic.

You’ve previously said you didn’t like Canberra, and Canberra didn’t like you. How do you feel about returning with your band to perform?
Canberra didn’t like me, but my mother and father didn’t like me either. Nobody really liked me much, I wasn’t really popular at school. I worked in the public service after school. I didn’t have a friend in the world and couldn’t get anyone in the world to listen to music.

I moved to Sydney and within two weeks, I had so many friends.

Who I was just didn’t work in Canberra. I worked in the public service and complained that Countdown (the former ABC music television program), which broadcast at 6pm on a Sunday night, was replaced by the cricket.

I walked around the office, and no one knew David Bowie but did know (cricketer) Dennis Lillee.

I don’t think sport should ever outrun music because you can’t really compare them. I was offended music was being taken away from us for a cricket match. Who can remember what happened with that cricket match that replaced Countdown, but people still listen to the music from Countdown. I think music is the most important thing.

The good thing about Canberra for me was because no one really liked me, and I had no friends, I could go deep into music – sitting at home writing music and the prowess. If I lived in Sydney I’d have had a social life. If you look at a lot of really famous rockers a lot of them come from smaller towns where no one comes from.

If you come from New York, Sydney or London, there’s so much more to do and so many more temptations.

What keeps you motivated to keep on creating and playing music after 45 years as a band together?
it’s my vocation. It’s what I do. People tell me to slow down, and they go you just enjoy the ego of standing on the stage and playing. It’s just what I do.

I pledged my troth to music a long time ago and I spend all my money on buying instruments, equipment, records and what I imagine I will do until I can’t play anymore.

It’s my band, and the people who didn’t want to be in the band were kicked out or left on their own accord, and I filled them with people who wanted to be there.

We’ve got a lot more music in us, we made a double album last year in Texas, so I want to keep doing this because I love making music. Strangely enough I never would have given you this answer when I was 19. I like making people happy, when I started playing in bands the last thing on my menu was making people happy — it was aggrandising myself. Nowadays I get a lot of pleasure from the happiness these songs bring people even though I might not like them myself. I’ve got a lot of things around the wrong way. You might think music is about making people happy, I thought I was making music to make me happy. I realised you can do both, it took me a long time to get there.

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