Peter Koppes was born on November 21, 1955. He became a founding guitarist of The Church, helping shape the band’s interlocking guitar arrangements while developing his own work as a singer and songwriter. On Starfish, the band’s 1988 album featuring “Under the Milky Way,” he also took the lead vocal on “A New Season.”
His musical life began with a different instrument. Growing up in Canberra, Koppes became a drummer in a school band at 12 and learned guitar from his bandmates. His connection with future Church singer and bassist Steve Kilbey also began there: in 1974, Koppes joined Kilbey’s group as a drummer before moving back to guitar. After studying electronics and engineering and spending time in Europe, he reconnected with Kilbey in Sydney. The Church formed in 1980, with Marty Willson-Piper joining to share guitar duties.
An early fascination with the Hammond organ helped determine what Koppes wanted those guitars to do. In a 2016 interview with Effects Bay, he traced his approach to the sustained notes of a keyboard. “I drone strings like a keyboard player holds notes across chords,” he explained. Keeping strings ringing through chord changes allowed notes to overlap, while different parts from the guitars and bass could combine into a harmony that no single player was producing alone. Effects extended that approach: chorus brought his guitar closer to an organ’s sound, and echo let repeating notes interact with the next phrase he played. The equipment served a musical idea he’d been pursuing since childhood.
There was room for a clearly defined lead part, too, as his acoustic solo on “Almost With You,” from 1982’s The Blurred Crusade, demonstrated. Looking back in a 1995 conversation with Thomas Irvin for Shadow Cabinet, Koppes described the band’s movement away from songs structured around conventional guitar solos. For “Metropolis,” he recalled, they spent considerable time deciding that a solo built around one note would make the strongest impression.
That attention to the arrangement also informed Starfish. Speaking to Three Imaginary Girls in 2018, Koppes said the band’s experience writing together on Heyday had given them confidence going into the record. He described concise songs that required few overdubs. “A New Season” brought another part of his musicianship into focus: he sang a song he had written before the album sessions. In his notes for Mushroom Records, Kilbey highlighted its melody and unusual structure. Alongside Koppes’s contributions to the guitar arrangements, the track gave listeners a direct introduction to his voice and songwriting.
His own recordings gave that writing a separate outlet. From the Well arrived in 1989, followed in 1991 by Iridescence, an EP credited to Peter Koppes and The Well. The EP included a new performance of “Her Mark,” a song from From the Well. Koppes told Irvin that revisiting it let listeners hear the difference between the earlier record’s controlled production and a band’s treatment of the same material. “The band sort of puts more energy into things,” he said.
Those sessions also supplied material for Water Rites, released in 1995. Koppes explained that the songs left after completing Iridescence took years to finish, with work progressing as studio time and collaborators became available. The EP and album were separate releases drawn from a shared recording process. On the completed Water Rites, Koppes wrote all the songs, sang, played guitar and produced the album, extending the work he’d begun within The Church into a project built around his own compositions.
