On these pages, Siobhán Long recently criticised the atmosphere at gigs in churches, and while they can be risky undertakings, the rewards are worth it
At last year’s CTM festival in Berlin, Canadian musician Tim Hecker performed in the Passionskirche, a beautiful church built at the beginning of the last century. The Romanesque building holds roughly 700 people and Hecker played in total darkness to a full house. Manipulating the church’s massive organ through effects and blasting it through a powerful sound system, the hour-long gig was intense, unique and unforgettable.
Lately, churches have become a pretty noticeable part of the gigging calendar in Dublin, too. The Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green (where the above-mentioned Hecker also performed last year) and the Pepper Canister Church, located between Merrion Square and the Grand Canal, have seemed as busy with music as religion over the last while.
So what can churches offer that traditional venues don’t? Churches don’t have bars – unless you’re counting holy wine. Having no bar places the focus squarely on the music. As anyone who has ever struggled to hear a quiet act over the chatter of a crowd in Whelan’s or elsewhere will know, this ideal is not always the reality.
You don’t have bars in the same room as the stage in a theatre and there is plenty of music that deserves the levels of attention and respect we generally approach a play with. Reverence is a word with simpering connotations but giving artists enough space and attention to create something special is not by any means po-faced.
Sometimes there is more to a gig than having a few pints and a dance, and churches provide a beautiful space for events such as that to happen.
Right band, wrong venue
There are of course plenty of reasons why a church can be the wrong venue for an act. Loud drums and guitars can get lost way up in those magnificent vaulted ceilings. Most churches, like a lot of traditional venues, won’t have great sound systems. Churches are often cold, as what little heat there might be heads skyward with the guitars. Church pews are universally uncomfortable. All this could impact on your gig experience or it could melt away in the same way that being in a packed, sweaty, too-loud club can when you’re enjoying yourself there. You focus instead on how the natural reverb can make a voice or violin sound, in the religious sense of the word, awesome. You think about the way stained-glass windows can deliver a gorgeous backdrop.
At its best, a church – as with any other alternative venue – offers a physical and metaphorical space for artists to fill with their work, a new context for their sound to explore and relate to. As an artist or audience member, you can’t escape the personal and historical associations of the building, so how will you deal with them?
We have a long, complicated relationship with our churches in this country, as we do with our pubs. How will that affect your experience? Expecting a gig in a church to replicate the experience of a gig in a traditional club venue is senseless. Going to see a loud rock band or banging techno in a large church might not be a great idea, in the same way that going to see a philharmonic orchestra in a dingy basement might not be a great idea. There are always exceptions but it’s fair to say that the success of a live performance is always predicated on the audience’s reception of it and having a mismatch between the sound and the room is a sure-fire way to confuse that conversation.
Having a gig in a church poses some risks but the payoff can be huge in return. Given the right combination of act and space, what might have been a good gig elsewhere can become a special, sacred, unforgettable experience.
