Kim Churchill sees opportunity knocking with Weight Falls

That’s no mean feat when you’re strumming your guitar while standing on top of a tiny stage made from milk crates and flanked by rows of denim jackets and black hoodies on coat hangers.

Welcome to the world of the in-store promotional appearance, Novocastrian style. For an event aimed at drumming up “hype” and “buzz” and basically shifting records and merchandise, there’s no pretension. 

In the cramped confines of The Famous Rock Shop in Newcastle’s main drag of Hunter Street, Churchill has created his own intimate atmosphere. The upstairs room is packed with about 50 to 60 people on a Thursday afternoon.

Some have spilled down the stairs and settled for just hearing the Bar Beach resident play six cuts from his new album Weight Falls, which debuted at No.6 on the ARIA charts this week.

Overwhelmingly the crowd are full of teenage girls, who have rushed out of the school gates to make the 4pm performance. It’s not hard to understand why. Churchill’s a good-looking rooster.

With piercing blue eyes, a black leather jacket and blonde hair flowing out from under a grey beanie, the 26-year-old is half surfer dude and half rock’n’roller. 

Yet it’s the flashing wide smile and gentle voice, which are the most endearing qualities about Churchill, and it’s how he draws in the audience.

The Famous Rock Shop performance is precursor to a whirl-wind promotional busking tour around Australia for Churchill’s fifth album Weight Falls.

It’ll pass through 13 cities in a week, racking up 10,000 kilometres on 10 flights for 33 hours onstage. The schedule would deplete the Energizer Bunny. 

While many successful musicians five records into their careers wouldn’t dare subject themselves to the unpredictable nature of busking, Churchill feels at home.

It transports him back to his roots when he began busking on the streets of Merimbula as a virtuoso teenage guitarist.

“It’s important, you need to keep playing like that,” Churchill says. 

“It’s almost like the callous on your soul. You need to have that hard edge to you. You can’t just keep walking out in front of sold-out crowds, in front of people who love you and hold you up on a pedestal.

“You need to go and play in front of people who don’t give a shit. That’s where the strength comes from in somebody’s music.”

Over the past two years Churchill has discovered more strength in his music than he ever believed existed.

It all began positively. Following the breakout success of his fourth album Silence/Win in 2014 and Triple J’s support of its singles Window To The Sky, Canopy and Single Spark, the majors came calling.

In an era when record companies are generally hesitant to invest in artists, Warner Music were prepared to give Churchill’s brand of indie-folk the platform to become an international star.

Around the same time Churchill ended nearly eight years of living a transient lifestyle and travelling in Peru and Sri Lanka by settling in Newcastle to be close to his Maitland-raised girlfriend Ali Buxton.

“I love it man,” Churchill says of Newcastle. “I don’t like to brag about it too much because I don’t want too many people to move here, but I reckon it’s one of the most special places right now.”

However, the pressure of expectation was immense. After writing and recording a full album of material Churchill was left questioning where his music was heading.

A brave decision was made to scrap the record.

“I think the songs were OK, but it was very grand and large,” Churchill says. “There was a lot of production and I was trying a bit too hard.

“Every time I didn’t feel like it wasn’t right, I’d say ‘let’s put a string quartet on that song’ and lay strings on another song.

“It was just all too much. I really hold up that honesty in art. When one can really communicate how they’re feeling with a child-like integrity. That’s what moves people and helps people be more honest themselves and more clear about how they’re feeling and what they want.

“It was just a case of getting away from all that grandness and large production and being me.”

Locked away in his Bar Beach house Churchill wrote a brand new bunch of songs in a week, starting with the title track Weight Falls, and instantly felt the wave of expectation ease.

“It was very liberating to finally toss away all that music, so even the album title Weight Falls is this wonderful process of letting all this dead weight fall away,” he says. “A whole lot of emotional baggage.

“I was lying to myself about what that other album was and letting it all go and just writing a bunch of songs that are about that feeling of getting back to who you are and getting back to how you’re really feeling. 

“The particular way you see the world and comments you can make that no one else can. If anything, the lyrics are about honesty.”

Only two songs survived Churchill’s executioner’s axe on Weight Falls.

Firstly there was the lead single Breakneck Speed, which sits awkwardly on the mostly acoustic and rhythm-driven album, due to its booming chorus and horn section.

The other was the touching ballad Rosemary, detailing the final weeks of his late grandmother’s life in a nursing home. 

“That’s one I wrote from the perspective of this guy George, who in the last week of his life, fell in love with my grandmother in the hospital,” he says. “She was in the last week of her own life.

“They shared this really odd time together and it was obviously because his mind was malfunctioning and shutting down and I thought it was beautiful that this old, hardened Australian bloke could just start throwing love at the first woman he could find.

“That song had to come across because it was a gift. I was so fortunate to have seen that really beautiful thing happen.”

Other songs like the current single, the groove and beat-driven Second Hand Car and Heart Of You, showcases a different side to Churchill’s songwriting.

While Weight Falls isn’t the big-production beast Warner initially expected, the label has high hopes for the album. It’s been released through Universal in Germany, Atlantic Records in the UK and Cadence in North America.

To support the investment Churchill won’t be seeing much of Newcastle in the next 12 months. In November and December he’ll tour Europe with German indie-folk group Milky Chance before another two North American and European trips in 2018.

At 26 and with a rising profile and the support of a major label, it appears this is Churchill’s best opportunity of becoming an international star. 

“All that stuff would be wonderful, and if I ever have the opportunity in my career to do something on the scale it’s probably now,” he says. “But at the same time I came to peace with all that when I threw up that other album.

“The whole thing with ‘oh my god there’s all these record labels involved, all these teams of people in other countries ready for new music to push and take Kim Churchill to the next level’, it really freaked me out and got in the way of my art.

“This time around the opportunity is there, but I believe I’ve gotten myself to a point where I’m not too fussed anymore if we have a huge global hit or not. We’ll just see.”

However, Churchill is excited by the opportunity to complete his largest foreign tours to date.

“I came to Newcastle and rented a room and settled down for about a year and got off the road and out of my van,” he says.

“It was wonderful and very important. But one of the most exciting things for me is being at the point that I’m going back out on the road and I’m getting back out touring.

“Having shots of espresso in weird coffee bars in Belgium and eating croissants and having a surf in the south of France one day and then eating a pastie in Cornwall the next. That’s what I miss more.”

On meeting Churchill you get the clear picture that he’s a real people person. Having grown up in the sleepy south coast surf town of Merimbula, he has maintained that country boy charm, but with worldly articulation.

Whether it’s mingling with fans at in-store promotions, marketing himself through social media or being interviewed by journalists, Churchill enjoys the peripheral duties of being a musician, which are often loathed by his peers.

“I’m really immersing myself in the creative, which is wonderful because I sat around for a long time waiting for the chance to get back out into the world,” he says.

“You’ve got to embrace it. You can get your occasional Thom Yorke or Bob Dylan, people who hate the process, and they do well out of that hatred of it.

“But for me in this day and age with social media, you’ve got to get on board and find the fun with it and enjoy doing it because it’s a part of the process. 

“At the end of the day you can look at social media as having to prostitute yourself to the world and whatever that nonsense is, but there’s also a lot of fun to be had.”

It’s that attitude which has also endeared him to the Hunter music community, particularly the roots and Americana crowd that frequent Maitland’s Grand Junction Hotel, affectionately known as The Junkyard.

Churchill first played the venue as a 18-year-old and felt instantly welcomed by fellow musicians like Matt Johnston, the director of Dashville. In 2009 Churchill would debut at Dashville’s Gum Ball music festival at Lower Belford, shortly after he won the Bluesfest busking competition with his shredding one-man band display of guitar, harmonica and stomp box.

“He’s made a lot of friends up here,” Johnston says. “Obviously at the same time as an artist and individual he’s grown as well in his reach around the world.”

Yet despite that growing profile, Johnston says Churchill is still regularly seen in the crowd supporting other Hunter musicians.

“With a lot of travelling musicians these days they obviously spend a lot of time in other parts of the world and you sometimes wonder is this the same spiel you tell your friends in Victoria?” he says. 

“But obviously with Kim that isn’t the case and he does call the Junkyard and Newcastle home and we’ve embraced him as well. Everybody’s pretty proud of him.”

Kim Churchill kicks off his national Weight Falls tour at the Cambridge Hotel on September 14.