Breaking The Vow Of Silence

The main thing that one takes from reading Steve Kilbey’s new autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar, is a slight bemusement at what an incredible life the maverick musician has led. From his youthful trek to Australia from the motherland with his ‘Ten Pound Pom’ parents, to his upbringing in Wollongong and Canberra, to his initial musical forays in his teens (naturally a quest to impress the ladies) to fronting The Church through the halcyon days of the ‘80s, this is a story of adventure and hedonism – a life lived to the fullest – almost without parallel.

It’s not that everything went right for Kilbey or was handed to him on a platter – often far from it (and equally often caused by his own foolhardy worldview and actions) – but this is a tale of a man with uncommon resilience and a powerful survival instinct, which is why he’s still intact and chasing his dream of concocting the perfect song, having endured numerous episodes which would have undoubtedly claimed a lesser-willed individual. And this endurance gives the tale an aspect of redemption as well, as he brutally examines his life’s lows (as well as highs) and comes to some often self-flagellating self-realisations about both his exploits and the person that he used to be.

“You’re only the second person who I’ve spoken to who’s actually read the book. The first was my mother, and she really liked it up until the bits with the sex and drugs – she liked the childhood stories,” the affable Kilbey chortles. “It had to be a ‘real’ book and it had to be interesting, but it couldn’t be like what I’ve been doing with my blogs and prose and other things I write – it couldn’t just wander around. As great an artistic device as it is to do that meandering, stream-of-consciousness kind of thing – which I do in my blog and which I do in lyrics all the time, you can jump from one thing to another and it doesn’t have to make any sense – but suddenly when confronted with writing an actual book where people are expecting things to happen sequentially, you can’t just go, ‘Oh yeah, speaking of that…’ and then go off and write four pages on something random in the middle of something else.

“Except for the bit in the middle where it was necessary to lapse back into my prose – [the chapter titled] I Sing The Infernal Eternal Tour – that’s another take on my reality. It’s very much now the eccentric uncle sitting down and writing it all, I doubt very much whether those characters at the time would have written what I have now at the end of the line, looking back at this ridiculous fucking adventure of life. It’s like now I’m the eccentric uncle looking back and writing about his younger self, but at the time when I was twenty-five or twenty-six and touring in England or something, it was deadly serious. I guess this core of me was looking out going, ‘God, this is a hoot!’ but there was this layer hiding that where I was really taking it seriously, and the struggle every day just to keep the troops in control and keep it up and trying to brainstorm some new thing and keep explaining the manifesto to everybody… Because everybody in the world wants to change you, when you’re young and it looks like you’re going to be successful everybody you meet’s got a bit of a spiel for you, so it was sort of hard; I wasn’t really ready for all of that. I thought I was, but looking back I didn’t handle it very well.”

Kilbey lists many of these strange music travails that he experienced over the journey, and paints a portrait of the industry as a routinely strange beast where musicians – despite being responsible for the art which generates so much money and prestige – so often find themselves at the very bottom of the food chain.

“You know what,” Kilbey continues, “I met Andrew O’Keefe, the TV star, in the sauna today, and he was saying, ‘You’re not going to get rich off Spotify’, and then we both said at the same time, ‘Musicians don’t have to get paid because they love it and they’d do it anyway’ – we both chorused in on, ‘…they’d do it anyway!’ It is a weird business, and it’s so bizarre because the guys at the very centre of it – except for the one percent, your Pink Floyds and your Michael Jacksons and all those guys, and in Australia maybe Powderfinger – but except for those guys we’re all struggling but we do it anyway, because we do love it. If someone says, ‘Hey look, you know that gig they were going to give you two thousand dollars for? They can only give you two hundred now’, you’ll almost certainly go, ‘Oh. I’ll still do it, I guess’. It is a weird business, and it was constantly chipping away at me – the realities of it, and the lies of it, and the elephants in the room and all of these things got to me – and if I could have just relaxed… But it’s easy to say that, it’s like a prize fighter speaking thirty years after he stopped fighting, going, ‘Oh, if I was only more relaxed when I was fighting Muhammad Ali I could have landed that punch!’

People thought that we could be successful if we wanted to, but that we were just being ornery and deliberately and willfully spiteful.

“But of course that’s the nature of it; it’s easy to be relaxed sitting on a step and looking out at a garden, and going, ‘I shouldn’t have been so uptight’, but that doesn’t factor in the incredible competitiveness of it as well. The incredible competitiveness of the charts and the fixation on the charts, and the fixation of how you or your manager or whatever could instantly index you on any certain day – and you still can to a certain extent – against all of your competitors. Sometimes that was really harsh for a band like The Church, because we didn’t sell as many records as Icehouse or whoever – we just didn’t – and we didn’t pull as many people, so there was this incredible force upon you to be successful. Yet you knew in your heart of hearts that what the band was channelling – or what the band was doing, or what the band was stumbling into – wasn’t viable like that. People thought that we could be successful if we wanted to, but that we were just being ornery and deliberately and willfully spiteful and not successful. They’d poured a load of money into us and now these little snotty bastards were going to decide to fuck them over by not being successful, but it wasn’t like that at all!

“We wanted to be successful but we didn’t know how, and when we tried to be successful – or when we tried together to force something to be successful – the trouble is that if you go, ‘Oh right, it’s 1990 and this is what everybody’s doing’, by the time you get your version of ‘successful’ out, it would be 1992 and everything would have moved on. That’s what all those guys in the record companies would do – they’d always try to make you be like whatever was happening right now, and when you had a feeble crack at whatever that was just to shut them up and get them off your back; by the time it came out it was hopelessly out of time and an awful idea right from the start. I saw that early on and it had to be stumbling along – and it still has to be! I still have to stumble along because it doesn’t unravel that easily for me – people go, ‘You wrote a hit, why don’t you write another one?’ and I go, ‘I dunno! They’re just not fucking coming like that!’”

Another highlight of Something Quite Peculiar is the tale of the genesis of The Church’s massive 1988 smash hit single Under The Milky Way, and how neither Kilbey nor any of the band – with the exception of drummer Richard Ploog – initially saw much merit in the song which would transform their lives and careers so substantially.

“It was a totally random thing and I never spotted it coming,” Kilbey marvels. “I did a couple of demos but even then I had no inkling – back then I used to write five songs a week. I recorded it and I put it on a cassette tape and gave it to Richard along with some other songs that I wanted him to listen to more than that, and then Richard was going, ‘Hey, that’s great!’ Then our manager got hold of it, and he was saying, ‘You’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it!’ and he kept hounding the producers when we were recording, going, ‘We’ve got to have that fucking song on there!’ So it was very reluctantly recorded [for 1988 fifth album Starfish], and no one even thought about it – on every album there’s usually a couple of songs that you’re trying to brush under the carpet a little bit, like, ‘Don’t listen to that one, listen to these ones!’ But then the label people spotted it, and it’s like having a game of poker after you’ve been playing poker for a long time and then suddenly all the fucking cards fall into place and all of the other guys make all of the wrong moves and suddenly you’re on a winning streak where no matter what you do you can’t go wrong – it was sorta like watching that happen for the first time, and as I write in the book it was like being picked up by this buoyant wave of success in America. At last here it was and this is the feeling, at least for a little while until the carnival moved on.”

And one would imagine that, for a songwriter, such random victories must be a double-edged sword, because how do you try to capture lightning in a bottle like that again when you’re a craftsman if it’s already proven to be completely random?

“It has a bad effect on you, because the best way to write a song is to have nothing in mind – certainly not anything in mind like what will happen with a song after you’ve written it,” Kilbey reflects. “You don’t want to be thinking, ‘I’m going to sit here and write a fucking hit single’ – I dunno, maybe that works for Max Martin, or maybe that works for Lennon and McCartney – but it doesn’t work for me, and when I write that way I usually don’t like the results and if I don’t like it how can I expect anybody else to? It’s true, that’s just how it is.

Record companies shouldn’t be telling bands what music to write or how to be or anything.

“This didn’t happen to me but it happened to a band my brother was in: the band would record their latest songs and do some demos, and then somebody from their record company would go into MMM and go, ‘Would you play any of these songs?’, and if they said ‘no’ to any of them the record company guy would go back to the band and go, ‘Don’t do this one, this one or this one’ – maybe all of them! Maybe they’d go, ‘Keep working on this one because this is the one that they said they might play’ – it’s a bit like when Prime Ministers get dismissed because of polls, it’s the wrong way around. It’s not the way things should be. Record companies shouldn’t be telling bands what music to write or how to be or anything; it always bemused me the way that a record company would pick us up as we were – as scruffy and stumbling and unmanageable as we were – and then immediately try to change us, or as they saw it ‘groom us’. It’s like a woman marrying a man and then spending the rest of her life trying to change him into something he’s not. I always felt, ‘Why don’t you get the one you want to start with? Why get us and then try to make us dress like Duran Duran?’”

Funnily enough, Kilbey discusses crossing paths with bands like Duran Duran and The Cult over the journey and not really getting along – The Church must have played with some pretty random mobs in their day?

“We played with loads of random, weird people and there’s loads of anecdotes I left out,” the singer chuckles. “When I first started writing the book, the lady who signed me to Hardie Grant [Publishing] said, ‘We don’t want your book to be a  series of anecdotes’ – that was one of the first things she said and it stuck in my mind – so a lot of my anecdotes about other bands and other musicians don’t get in the book. It’s surprising, now that the book’s finished, I realised that there are so many holes in it and so many gaps and so many things that I didn’t put in there, and that’s the nature of it – if I wrote it next year it would probably be a completely different book – so once again it’s just a random snapshot of stuff.”

Kilbey is brutally honest throughout the time – one assumes that it must be hard being so forthright when you know that this honesty might very well put some noses out of joint, when people who have featured in the story eventually read about their own contributions. When asked by Kilbey whose noses might be put out of joint, the first one which springs to mind is The Church’s original drummer (and Kilbey’s high school nemesis), Nick Ward, who is portrayed in a less than flattering light.

 I always find in my life that when things are good there’s always something bad happening in there, like it’s a lovely summer night and you’re out in the garden and suddenly you’re attacked by mosquitoes. [Nick Ward] was the mosquitoes in that scenario.

“Oh yeah,” Kilbey concurs. “I thought about this a lot. I didn’t know what I was going to write – and I had no agenda with him – and then suddenly as I began writing the story I got so angry at him and so angry at me, and after all that time of him making my life a misery at school and being a complete ne’er-do-well – a completely vicious twit – I thought he would have changed and I let him in my band, and as I wrote it was like Groundhog Day, with this guy bullying me and then when Marty [Willson-Piper – guitar] joined, bullying him. I thought, ‘I have to write something about those early days, and fuck him! He was such an idiot, he deserves this!’ I have to be honest and admit that I was weak and frightened of him and he made me nervous – it all had to be in there. I always find in my life that when things are good there’s always something bad happening in there, like it’s a lovely summer night and you’re out in the garden and suddenly you’re attacked by mosquitoes. He was the mosquitoes in that scenario; I’m just starting to have some success after trying so hard for ten years, I’ve worked hard and written all these songs, I’ve lugged gear out of all these pubs and clubs and garages, I’ve done so much stuff and am finally having some success and I’ve got this fuck-knuckle like him in the band berating me and belittling me. He would make comments onstage like a complete asshole and I’d just put up with it – I don’t know who’s worse, him or me for putting up with him.”

Kilbey is brutal about his own mistakes throughout Something Quite Peculiar, so doesn’t come across as petty or vindictive when calling others to task, but there are still times throughout the narrative – such as when he was in the band Jack Frost with much-missed former-Go-Between Grant McLennan, and was introduced by his bandmate to the heroin which would plague Kilbey’s life for decades – where the truth feels slightly uncomfortable.

“That’s the truth and that’s what happened – that’s my life,” he muses. “And you know what? If you want to turn somebody on to heroin, watch out, because he let a genie out my bottle and he was surprised. He thought that I was just going to go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s interesting, wow, aren’t we bad guys? What’s next?’ But instead I was, like, ‘Hey, I want more! Right now!’ It’s tougher obviously now that he’s gone [McLennan sadly passed away in 2006], but I hope that I made it clear in the book my love and affection for him as well – I hope that came across, although maybe it didn’t. I don’t blame him for any of that either – he didn’t know what was going to happen, I was big enough and ugly enough to look after myself.

“So yeah, once again, that’s what’s happened and I’ve just got to look at it all now like that’s my story. How boring would it be if I brushed over any conflict – ‘Nick Ward, he was alright’, or, ‘How did I get into heroin? I just found some one day and started taking it’ – it would be too hard. All my life I’ve had really conflicted emotions and have been always convinced that I was right, but at the same time I’ve always taken people’s criticism and attacks with such a thin skin. Like if two or three people complain about a gig, for me that instantly negates the hundreds of people who went apeshit, which is really ridiculous.”

The Church’s longevity and uncompromising nature over the years has given them an aura of a united team all swimming in the same direction, but Kilbey attests that it was actually a quite fractured and divided unit over most of their decades-long tenure together.

“Oh yeah, I think up until Starfish – although I didn’t write about this very much but Peter [Koppes – guitar] left the band for a couple of weeks in 1982, and then he came back – but up until about 1988 and Marty’s little hissy fit, up until then the outside world had kind of kept us together, like that whole ‘kicking against the pricks’ idea,” Kilbey explains. “We might hate each other, but it’s us against them out there. But then once we had some success, that kind of lean and hungry nature fell away and we started to fall apart and suffer from hubris and stuff like that so nothing was holding us together. I was the worst, but the other guys played a role – there was a lot of laughing and bitchiness behind people’s backs, or feeling left out when the other three would get up and do something and not invite you. I always felt like I was the guy they didn’t want along, but just like The Beatles I realised at the end that nobody felt any unity with anybody, and it was only illusory that if the three of them went out and did something on a particular day that it seemed like they had a bond. It might have started off with them all bitching about me, but at the end of the day they weren’t best of mates either.

“And I don’t think many bands are [best of mates]; from all the bands that I’ve seen out on the road, and all the bands I’ve seen playing – from what I know of the music industry – bands are not mates, they’re more like brothers. If they’re long-standing bands they’re like that, there’s a lot more history than that, and sometimes you might have a love/hate relationship – or you might just fucking hate someone – but you feel like you’re stuck with them, because you’re in the band or they’re your brother or whatever. So it’s always been a weird relationship, or a weird dynamic, and it was breaking apart all the time and just being held together by the promise of something just around the corner that often never materialised.”

Was it weird chasing the ‘rock star dream’ for so long and the getting there only to discover that the reality was miles removed from the expectation?

“It’s sort of like, ‘What do you expect?’,” Kilbey shrugs. “It was different and yet it was exactly what I expected, but I thought that – unlike everybody else – that it was a bit like life, that I could grasp it and hold onto it forever and tame it and ride it and manipulate it. But it wasn’t like that – I couldn’t – and I had my ten seconds of fame and then I made a lot of miscalculations, and sort of fumbled it, and by the time I realised that I was back in the saddle grunge and Britpop and all of that sort of stuff had arrived, seemingly wiping us out. However, I reckon now if you go back and listen to a grunge record or a Britpop record and then put on something like [1992 album] Priest = Aura, I sort of think that Priest = Aura has aged a lot better than some of that stuff that people said was wiping us out. But once again in hindsight you can see all this stuff.”

The kind of things that made me lean towards drugs and hedonistic experiences was also the driving thing making me write all those songs and having some kind of vision about what I wanted to do with music.

Having revisited his entire life to research his autobiography, is Kilbey proud of the amazing journey that he’s undertaken and the life that he’s had the privilege to experience?

“No, I don’t feel proud, really, but I appreciate my adventures and I appreciate me surviving my adventures,” he tells. “There’s been at least a thousand times when something could have come along and knocked the wind totally out of my sails, and I sort of somehow stumbled through it. So I have a lot of gratitude to the universe for permitting me to have this adventure. It was the life I had to lead. I could have ended up with so much more – I could have done so much more – but the things that were my weakness in real life were my strengths in being a musician. The kind of things that made me lean towards drugs and hedonistic experiences was also the driving thing making me write all those songs and having some kind of vision about what I wanted to do with music and getting other people to fall in line with that.

“At the end of it all it’s hard to blame the guy that got me into trouble because he’s also the guy that wrote all the songs and stuff – it’s all just one person in there really. So I’m just grateful and happy to be alive, and very happy to still be making music. To be able to still make new music and having people who are interested, having survived all that turmoil, now to spend the rest of my life just exploring this thing of rock music and where The Church can actually take it with my three excellent musical companions – if we can learn a lesson from all this argy bargy and not argue anymore now that Ian Haug’s in the band, if we can cut down all the arguments and concentrate on seeing what we can actually do within this realm of rock’n’roll, then my future excites me.

"I don’t think all of the songs have been written, I don’t think all the amazing guitar and bass and drums music has been produced. I think that against what’s been written already that there’s an eternity out there waiting to be explored with this combination of instruments. Just like a jazz player, this is what I do, this is what I love, this is what I understand, and I want to get better at it and make some breathtaking music.”