Starfish: How The Church Made Their Classic Album
In February 1988, an Australian band that had spent most of the decade adored by critics and largely ignored by American radio released the album that would change everything. Starfish, the fifth studio record by Sydney's The Church, became the group's international breakthrough, sold hundreds of thousands of copies in the United States, and produced "Under the Milky Way," a song that has outlived trends, decades, and even the band's own commercial fortunes to become one of the defining alternative rock singles of the 1980s. More than three decades on, Starfish is routinely cited as The Church's masterpiece and one of the great "chiming guitar" albums of its era, a status confirmed by repeated reissues, anniversary tours, and its regular appearance on lists of the best Australian albums ever made.
A Band Looking for a Breakthrough
By the mid-1980s, The Church — Steve Kilbey on bass and vocals, guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes, and drummer Richard Ploog — had built a devoted cult following on the strength of albums like The Blurred Crusade and Heyday, records prized for their layered, hypnotic guitar interplay and Kilbey's dreamlike lyrics. Critical acclaim, however, had not translated into commercial success, and the band's American label situation was unsettled. That changed when the group's manager, Mike Lembo, made contact with Arista Records A&R executive Mitchell Cohen. Arista's founder, Clive Davis, a label boss famous for discovering major talent, signed the band essentially sight unseen, drawn to a roster logic that already included artists as varied as Patti Smith, Whitney Houston, and Lou Reed. It was an unlikely pairing on paper, and it set the stage for an unlikely recording process: an introspective, guitar-driven Australian band would make its next album not in Sydney, but deep inside the Los Angeles session-musician establishment.
Recording in the Belly of the LA Machine
For Starfish, The Church relocated to Los Angeles in 1987, renting an apartment on Sepulveda Boulevard and living there for roughly three months while they wrote, rehearsed, and recorded. Pre-production took place in Venice Beach, where the band drilled the songs relentlessly, described by one account as rehearsing "like a gang of bank robbers going through the plan" before ever stepping into a studio. The album itself was tracked across several of LA's most respected rooms, principally The Complex in Culver City, with additional sessions at Ocean Way, Village Recorders, and Record One — facilities that had hosted some of the biggest West Coast rock and pop records of the era.
Production was handed to Greg Ladanyi and Waddy Wachtel, two veteran figures of the Los Angeles studio scene best known for their work with Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, and Warren Zevon. Engineering duties fell to Shep Lonsdale, assisted by Duane Seykora, with Ladanyi, Wachtel, and Lonsdale sharing mixing credits. It was a deliberate departure from the murkier, more layered production of earlier Church records, and the pairing was not without friction. Wachtel and Ladanyi came from a world built on precision, clean separation, and session-musician polish; The Church came from a tradition of jamming, effects pedals, and psychedelic sprawl. Accounts of the sessions describe a genuine culture clash between "the West Coast scene's obsession with perfection and smoothness" and the band's looser instincts, with drummer Richard Ploog reportedly struggling most under the strict, click-track-driven approach the producers favored. In one frequently retold anecdote, Ladanyi is said to have walked out partway through a session to go play golf, a small but telling illustration of the distance between the Australian band and its American handlers.
That friction proved most consequential on what would become the album's signature track. Ploog could not land the feel the producers wanted for "Under the Milky Way," so the band recorded to a click track and later brought in top session drummer Russ Kunkel to overdub the final drums and percussion. The song itself had been written well before the LA sessions: Kilbey composed it with his then-partner Karin Jansson, a member of the band Curious (Yellow), in a moment he has described as almost entirely unplanned — "I smoked a joint and started playing the piano and she came in the room and we just made it up." Its title nods to Melkweg, the famous Amsterdam music venue Kilbey frequented. In the studio, the track was built around a 12-string acoustic guitar figure and finished with a distinctive EBow solo played on a Fender Jazzmaster, engineered to produce a keening, almost bagpipe-like tone, with additional texture supplied by a Synclavier sampling keyboard operated by an engineer credited only as "Awesome Welles." Elsewhere on the record, session players David Lindley (mandolin) and Greg Kuehn (keyboards) filled out the arrangements, while Wachtel himself contributed backing vocals, giving the album a broader instrumental palette than the band had used before.
The result was a noticeably different-sounding Church: more open, more sparsely arranged, and less densely layered than Heyday, without losing the shimmering, effects-laden guitar interplay of Willson-Piper and Koppes that had always been the band's signature.
Release and Reception
Mushroom Records issued Starfish in Australia in February 1988, with Arista handling the international release; early vinyl pressings even included a bonus 12-inch EP of extra tracks. The album reached number 26 on the US Billboard 200 and number 11 in Australia, and went on to sell around 600,000 copies in the United States alone, earning a gold certification and making it comfortably the band's best-selling record. "Under the Milky Way" became a genuine hit, climbing to number 24 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart, while further singles — "Reptile," "Destination," and "Antenna" — kept the album's momentum going through 1988. The band supported the record with a marathon 94-date tour spanning the US, Canada, Europe, the UK, and Australia, at times sharing bills with Peter Murphy and Tom Verlaine of Television.
Reviews at the time were strong, with coverage in Rolling Stone, Kerrang!, and the Los Angeles Times, and retrospective assessments have only cemented the album's reputation. AllMusic's Ned Raggett called it "sometimes too clean around the corners" compared to the "song-for-song masterpiece" Heyday, but praised performances that range from "fine" to "fantastic" and credited the record with setting up the band's deserved American breakthrough. Other critics have gone further, ranking it among the finest albums of the entire decade.
A Classic, Cemented by Time
Starfish's status as a classic has only grown with age. It was placed in the top 40 of a 2010 countdown of the "100 Best Australian Albums," the band performed it in full during their 2011 "Future, Past, Perfect" anniversary tour, and it has since been treated to multiple audiophile reissues, including a 2010 double-disc Second Motion Records edition with acoustic versions and unreleased material, and a 2021 Intervention Records vinyl reissue mastered by Ryan K. Smith from the original analog tapes and personally approved by Kilbey. "Under the Milky Way" has taken on a life of its own well beyond the album, most famously via its inclusion on the soundtrack to Donnie Darko in 2001, which introduced the song to an entirely new generation, alongside its use in television, film, and even a performance with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra at the 2006 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony.
What makes Starfish endure is less its polish than the tension baked into its making: a psychedelic, guitar-obsessed Australian band forced through the precision machinery of the Los Angeles studio system, emerging with a record that kept its atmosphere while gaining a clarity and reach it had never had before. That collision, uneasy as it was in the room, produced the album most listeners still reach for first when they think of The Church.