I am about midway through my interview with the Church’s Steve Kilbey when, without warning, he morphs into AC/DC’s Brian Johnson. “She was a mean machine, she loves me, aargh!” Kilbey squeals. He might be misremembering the opening line of You Shook Me All Night Long, but otherwise, it’s a convincing impersonation of Johnson’s sandpaper screech.
Kilbey – who turns 70 in September – is trying to make a point about ageing gracefully. “When an 80-year-old guy stands on stage and is singing songs about the chicks he fucked when he was 22, isn’t that kind of disgusting?” he asks. “It’s like, yeah, grandad, but that was 60 years ago! Didn’t anything else happen in your life in the meantime?”
The Church, as former guitarist Marty Willson-Piper noted drily at the band’s Aria Hall of Fame induction in 2010, worked very hard at being aloof and enigmatic. Kilbey, the band’s arch leader, set fire to their carefully curated mystique in a wild, gesticulating, duck-walking, off-the-cuff speech no one saw coming. He hasn’t shut up since.
On this day, he is dialling in from Boise, Idaho, where the band have a day off en route to Seattle. Mostly, I have a good view of his inner ear, which he keeps glued to the phone even though we’re on speaker, due to severe tinnitus that has left him half deaf. In between questions, he speaks cheerfully and at length on anything put to him.
For anyone who grew up listening to the Church in the 1980s, it’s tough to reconcile this entertainingly unfiltered character with the once-taciturn singer and bass player who talked in riddles over the band’s opaque neo-psychedelia. They had a string of hits in Australia, starting with The Unguarded Moment in 1981, followed by the divine Almost With You a year later.
In 1988 came Under the Milky Way, which broke the Church in the US. It’s since been synced everywhere and for everything, from car commercials to the Donnie Darko soundtrack. It peaked at No 22 on the Aria charts and was awarded a gong for single of the year (back then, Kilbey refused to attend the ceremony).
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But at least he can still sing the song. “I feel like if I live to 150, I could sing Under the Milky Way and there’s no contradiction with who I am now, but the guys who are singing about rooting girls and getting into fights when they’re 80, I feel that’s kind of silly, and bordering on parody,” he says – back in character now, after that brief Brian Johnson breakout.
What Kilbey really wants you to know is this: the Church have released a lot of music since Under the Milky Way. In total, they have made more than 25 studio albums. The latest, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars (don’t ask; it’s complicated) is a companion piece to last year’s The Hynogogue, which garnered some of the best reviews of the group’s career.
Plenty has happened in Kilbey’s life, too. “Since I wrote those early songs, I’ve had children [he has five daughters], I’ve had severe drug addictions, I’ve been in Airplane! situations where the plane was going to crash … I’ve had terrible, ugly experiences and beautiful, spiritual experiences. Surely all of that must come into my songs?”
It’s a different band now. Willson-Piper left in 2014, replaced by Powderfinger’s Ian Haug; the departure of fellow guitarist Peter Koppes was announced in early 2020. Ashley Naylor, of Even (and also a long-term member of Paul Kelly’s band) was recruited in his stead. On stage, Naylor mostly plays Koppes’ parts on old songs, while Haug takes Willson-Piper’s.
But the sound of the Church – the dense weave of arpeggiated guitars, overlaid by Kilbey’s narcotic vocals and trippy lyrics – remains instantly identifiable. He is not concerned about repeating himself: “I’m like AI, I know I’m now feeding off my own information. It’s inevitable that I’m going to occasionally do something that sounds like something I’ve already done.”
Kilbey is convinced that this is the best version of the band he’s played in. They are certainly getting along well. “I know it’s more fun for people to read about Roger Daltrey knocking Pete Townshend out, Charlie Watts almost knocking Mick Jagger out the window and all that, but when you’re on other side of it, having friends in a band is really a nice thing.”
Some of this, I suggest, might simply be the belated getting of wisdom. Kilbey admits he was no angel back in the day. His manners are much better now. “When you’re a young man it’s perfectly OK to be scruffy and angry,” he reasons. “But when you get old, you need to be polite. Being a cranky old geezer is not a good thing at all, nobody wants that.”
But, I protest: the Church were never scruffy! They were all paisley shirts and coiffed hair and Marty’s hoop earrings and ex-drummer Richard Ploog’s golden mullet; they were beautiful. Ah, but memories are unreliable. By the 90s, Kilbey reminds me, things were going to seed. “I got junkie bloat. Marty grew a beard to cover up a wart. There were some very scruffy things.”
He kicked the class A drugs a long time ago, but still smokes marijuana before gigs. He says it’s a way to reimagine old songs that have, for him, been dulled by overfamiliarity. But familiarity is what his audience craves. Gigs are a delicate balance between the wishes of the band and what fans feel they are owed.
He still can’t abide The Unguarded Moment, a song Ian Haug occasionally cajoles him into playing. “Unguarded Moment represents something that isn’t me. It’s that Oz-pub-rock, Angry Anderson and Mi-Sex and Chisel and the Angels … It’s a little bit, I don’t know, bogan. Is that the word? Are people going to hate me for saying this? It’s so long ago!”
He has been similarly scathing about Under the Milky Way over the years, but has come to terms with it, knowing the words “something quite peculiar” will likely be his epitaph. Occasionally, he says, he looks out into the audience, sees couples swooning to it, and is moved. “It’s a nice song. I see the love and respect it garners,” he allows.
It’s time to go. But Steve has one last suggestion. “Tell the Guardian, when they want a proper music journalist, give me a chance! If you want a musician to write about music, from a musician’s point of view, here I am! I know a few two-syllable words and everything. Tell them I’ve been giving them $10 a month for about five years. That’s really big of me, I think …”
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The Church’s Already Yesterday tour in Australia runs 23 November to 7 December. Their albums The Blurred Crusade, Séance and Heyday are being reissued on vinyl throughout the year
Source: theguardian.com
