Sex, Drugs & Molly Meldrum: An Excerpt From Steve Kilbey's New Book

Sex, drugs, inadvertently offending Molly Meldrum... The Church's Steve Kilbey did it all during the heady days of the 1980s. In this excerpt from his impending autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar (out November 1), Kilbey recounts how his younger self dealt with early success, first love, a second album, "sharehouse" living, the duplicity of the press, and making an arse of himself on TV.

THE FIRST BLUSH OF SUCCESS

I had finally fully morphed into the guy I’d always wanted to be: some skinny dandy with eyeliner and a bunch of stupid kids screaming at me. I already looked world-weary – suffering from some fragility caused by ennui and too much stimulation. I’d waited a long time for this moment and fortunately I didn’t blow it. The Church played it up to the hilt, grabbed our 4 minutes and 13 seconds of fame and held on for grim death.

Richard was a lot of fun and had heaps of energy. Gigs became exciting. We were free to have some fucking fun at last! We did gigs, smoked dope and even started work on a new record, which was to be a double single. Chris Gilbey and I had dreamed up this idea that we’d get two singles in the charts at once. Wouldn’t that be a coup!

"because they thought I looked like such a bloody poofter"

Then EMI, who were getting ready to release ‘The Unguarded Moment’, gave us the good news that we were to appear on Countdown, which could make and break acts in 1981. We flew down to Melbourne and entered those hallowed halls of the ABC. We’d all been watching Countdown for years; it was an institution. For our set they gave us this stained-glass thing that looked like an aura. We mimed along to our song – me pouting like a fey little fop. (Kids at my youngest brother John’s school wanted to beat him up because they thought I looked like such a bloody poofter on the TV.) Someone wrote an article the next day about me pulling David Bowie faces. The other guys looked pretty good too: there’s Marty looking like Prince Valiant, the perfect pop star; Peter, tall and thin and handsome with his mane of hair; and Richard so young and cool as he mimed along to Nick Ward’s drumming.

Our gig the next night was sold out beyond belief. They were turning people away. We made so much at the door that someone gave me a wad of cash and told me to just spend it and shut up about it. Suddenly I had a bunch of friends everywhere I went; I was seeing about five women at once and definitely breaking up with Michele once and for all. We got ourselves a proper big old manager in the legendary Michael Chugg who, instead of sticking a cigar in my mouth when I agreed to have him manage us, stuck a joint in my mouth and lit it. Wow! This was what I always wanted … wasn’t it?

"They plied me with a huge joint and a line of charlie and then a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label."

Two weeks later I hosted Countdown and made a complete turkey of myself. My narrow perception of who I thought I could be turned me into a bit of a simpering buffoon, which wasn’t really me at all. I had some good raw material but I blew it. I should’ve trotted out my inner cockney charmer just like my dad used to do. Because if my dad had ever got a chance to be on telly he wouldn’t have come across like a ning-nong! But I was suddenly bereft of any personality to speak of and I failed the test.

Another dismal time after that I had my arse hauled onto a fledgling quiz show somewhere in Melbourne in 1981. They plied me with a huge joint and a line of charlie and then a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker Black Label. By the time I got out there I would’ve made Percy Bysshe Shelley seem like Chuck Norris, I was so fragile and longingly reticent. I was so embarrassed by the host and his questions and the audience and just about everything else. Of course the most embarrassing thing was me: this jumped-up silly sod sitting there being so bloody embarrassed! Talk about the blush of success!

Once on a Saturday morning show I was sitting there stoned, smug and silent when in a commercial break the host Donnie Sutherland got right in my face and hissed, ‘If you’re not gonna talk … why did you fucking come on here then?!’

Meanwhile back in the studio it was a real joy to be working with Richard. He was so full of energy and explosive vitality and he had the drums totally sorted. His bright, jokey personality brought a much-needed breath of fresh air to The Church: we finally found our sound and realised what we could be.

My singing and voice had dropped a lot of the pretension; not all of it by a long shot, but a lot of those awkward mannerisms disappeared as Richard energised the band with his teenage enthusiasm. You just couldn’t tire that guy out. He was everywhere at once. He had everyone in stitches. He could smoke as much weed as anybody, and then he’d sit down and play the songs perfectly and differently every time.

Sex and drugs were becoming ever more prevalent at this time, and I got the opportunity to, ahem, sleep with a lot of women. I didn’t need to do much chatting up after I’d been on Countdown a few times, but it wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured it. My new fame was a double-edged sword. I’d go to a party, the ladies would crowd around but the men would be real angry with me and I’d slip off quick.

"Someone wrote an article the next day about me pulling David Bowie faces"

Just because I had the opportunity to sleep with a lot of women doesn’t mean I took the opportunity every time it presented itself, but sometimes I did dally with the young ladies I met backstage after a gig. Fame is intoxicating like that: you get near to it once and you wanna chase it forever and ever. Girls were almost throwing themselves at me, writing me love letters and propositions; our roadies had girls perform sexual tricks in the hotel rooms, but I never saw that myself. Marty did once accidentally and was quite appalled.

Soon enough I really fell in love for the first time in my life. I’d been doing an interview at radio station 3XY in Melbourne and I locked eyes with a young woman named Jennifer who was reading the news. I loved her immediately. I wrote ‘Electric Lash’ about meeting her, and then many other songs too. But first I had to pursue her a bit, which as you know I wasn’t averse to. I jumped ship from The Church and stayed behind in Melbourne, got her number from a friend at 3XY and called her up. I’d never done that before. I’d been with Michele for a while, and then there was just a few months of naughtiness before I met Jennifer. So I rang her up and asked if I could see her. She said sure. We spent a lovely evening together but I didn’t try any funny business. We saw each other a few more times and eventually it was apparent that she felt the same about me so we were quite inseparable for a while. I pretty much moved into her flat in South Melbourne for weeks on end. She was a truly fine woman: stylish, cultured and a real Australian aristocrat or something. She was very kind and warm, and we got on so well. When I left Melbourne I got very sad, which usually resulted in a song as I tapped into the sweet pain of separation for a young man of 26 who’d just fallen in love.

To me, Jennifer was a goddess and she made me want to write songs to impress her. We were young and affluent, and both of us a bit famous after she got a job reading the news on TV. She showed me her Melbourne and on cold winter days we’d drive to lonely spots by the sea and talk and kiss a bit too. It was a totally romantic love affair – after the regimented drudgery of my brief marriage I was, for a while, really happy.

"Michael Chugg who, instead of sticking a cigar in my mouth when I agreed to have him manage us, stuck a joint in my mouth and lit it."

Those were halcyon days. I spent Christmas 1981 with Jennifer’s lovely family in Essendon, in some gorgeous stately house there. It was the sort of place where the gentlemen took brandy after dinner and played billiards. Man I’d come a long way! My band was pretty popular, I was making a good bit of money, and I was in love with my famous and good-looking girlfriend. I couldn’t have hoped for a better result. One night on tour in Surfers Paradise I remember Richard putting on a cassette of the Beach Boys album Pet Sounds and me sitting there and wondering at the loveliness of my brand new life. I took in every detail of Brian Wilson’s masterpiece, which I’d never listened to before in its entirety. Here I was in a big apartment, enjoying a few joints after a gig, finally having broken into the inner sanctum of the music biz. We were on telly, we had a big-shot manager, we sold out gigs, and we had a recording contract and everything!

Some biggish cheques began rolling into my letterbox, so I bought Michele out of my Rozelle house, and in came Russell who lent me some money he’d inherited from Dad to cover part of her share. Russell was about nineteen and he brought with him a lot of friends as well as his girlfriend at the time, Kim Sandeman, who had moved with him from Canberra to enrol in a nearby school of fashion and design while Russell started up a band. My house was flooded with loads of kids all younger than me hanging around and smoking bongs.

But Kim and I were often at odds. One day I came back from being on tour and saw a guy in the street wearing a paisley shirt that looked just like one of mine. A really rare one actually: an unmistakable one that I’d worn in a video once. And I said to the guy naively, ‘Oh wow I have a shirt like that!’ And the guy kind of nodded like he wanted to get out of there. Inside there’s another guy wearing a paisley shirt just like one of mine, only this couldn’t be one of mine because the sleeves had been roughly cut off. And then Kim hove into view … wearing what looked like one of my skivvies cut up into weird geometric shapes.

‘What the fuck is going on here?’ I asked, not unreasonably I thought, considering the circumstances.

Kim just shrugged and said, ‘Well I thought when you moved into a place you got to share everything with everyone … so, you know, we’re wearing your clothes.’

She’d also spilt something black and thick all over my red carpet and then put something else on top of it to hide it. My house was full of people wearing my clothes and acting like I was so uncool to be angry. Still Kim remained in my house for about three more years: we loved to fight with each other – I was her oldie to rebel against and she was my wayward kid to chastise and catch out!

This was so not how I pictured things would be.

Now I realise it’s about time I explain the paisley shirts once and for all. So here’s my version, though the other guys would probably tell it differently. In fact, for almost every memory I have Peter Koppes will contradict me with a different version! So with that general caveat applied to everything I say, I’ll tell you my version of how we came to wear the paisley shirts.

Back in 1981 the guys in The Church wore tight black jeans and some of us wore black suede boots; we tended towards either mild glam or mod or psychedelic even. I’d always loved paisley and floral since the days of Lyneham High School socials, but in 1981 there wasn’t a single paisley shirt in a high-street shop anywhere in Australia. They were still around, though … flooding into op shops along with the rest of Australia’s unwanted clothes.

So The Church were touring, touring, touring around Australia and every town on and off the beaten track had at least one or two op shops: St Vincent de Paul, the Salvos, Lions Club, Rotary – they all meant rare shirts and pants. So we started hitting the op shops hard. We used to race each other inside to find the best clothes first. As usual I was the worst offender. One day we hit a garbage bin as Peter was backing into a parking spot, but I still jumped out and ran into the fucking shop and scored some shirts ahead of him! The nastiness increased when we’d advise each other against buying shirts only to grab them for ourselves. I definitely wrestled Richard for shirts, which became torn as we fought over them, but honestly there was a superabundance of paisley shirts. We were inventing what would later be called the Paisley Underground. We might not have been the very first to wear paisley, but it’d been sixteen years since The Beatles had done it so we claimed the title anyway!

After a while the ladies in the op shops began to remember us and put stuff aside. One day a lady in Kempsey in northeastern New South Wales took me into a back room and showed me box upon box of unopened paisley shirts from the 60s! Some of them even came with medallions. It was like bloody Christmas. And the most amazing thing was that I owned literally hundreds of paisley shirts but only ever paid five dollars max for any of them.

So the more we wore paisley the more we seemed to be … wearing paisley. After a while it became a uniform for me and Richard, though Marty and Peter only wore it occasionally.

The Church pioneered Psychedelia Mark II, though my pride in this fact is tempered by the knowledge that much of what we did was enormously influenced by The Beatles and The Byrds and Dylan.

We’d kind of worn out the paisley by 1983, but other bands all over the place had picked up on it and were keen to be identified as psychedelic. Which accounts for certain sneering comments I used to make about all the bands that paid $120 for their paisley shirts.

I was talking about the Johnny-come-lately types that’d adapted the fashion and look and even the sound but hadn’t grokked that psychedelic music was supposed to be trippy and surrealistic. Back then, when we started out, there were no other psychedelic bands on this planet that I knew of. It was almost a dirty word. The Church pioneered Psychedelia Mark II, though my pride in this fact is tempered by the knowledge that much of what we did was enormously influenced by The Beatles and The Byrds and Dylan. What we did had already been pioneered before in the 60s, from whence all modern music still seems to spring. Originality seemed to have vanished from rock music by 1980, but we were as original as we could possibly be and still ‘make it’. So for a while it was paisley and Beatlesy things galore as we got everything lined up to go into the recording studio to make our second album.

Life in those days was pretty idyllic. I lived in Mansfield Street, Rozelle, in a house teeming with cool young arty people. My brother’s friends were all musicians, and new instruments and new gadgets would come in and out of my studio. I’d get up in the morning and smoke dope and sit around listening to music blasting in my lounge room. I had a skylight put in the roof. There was forest wallpaper and black and red walls and red carpet with black stuff spilt on it. There was always some dress design pattern or photos or dummies or something lying around. And loads of people smoking bongs day and night and sometimes taking acid.

I remember the time I met these three air hostesses and they had a house in the hinterlands. We went there and they had a pool and everything. We all ate these magic mushrooms and I was swimming in that blue pool surrounded by the laughter on the gentlest evening imaginable. It was one of those rare moments where everything was how I wanted it to be. This incredible night in the tropics, I sat with my legs dangling in the pool drinking champagne and I could see the faint distant glow of Southport where we’d just played a sold-out gig and done an interview with the English music mag Sounds. Maybe there was room for me in England after all. The future seemed full of promise. I was so high that my jaw was aching from smiling. I was ecstatic. I was young and successful and having a good and trippy time.

Things were going so well for a while there. Once on tour we arrived late at the Gold Coast airport and our plane was beginning to taxi away from the gate. Unchecked, we ran out the door carrying our luggage and waved to the plane. Legend has it that some hostie looked out and said, ‘Stop! It’s The Church!’ And the plane stopped and they put a staircase there for us and we climbed on and got bumped up to business class. Ah, those were certainly the days for both The Church and civil aviation!

At home I was spending my evenings and nights recording incessantly. Often I had a little audience of a few other muso types offering their suggestions and generally geeing me on as I created song after song after song in preparation for entering Studio 301 in the middle of Sydney to make the first really good Church album. After the stodge and bluster of the first record The Church were finally ready to be The Church. Our second album was going to be a beautiful-sounding record thanks to our producer, engineer and mixer, Bob Clearmountain, who Chris Gilbey had wangled out of the universe for us. Bob had already produced or mixed a load of top albums, including for the Stones and Roxy Music; getting him to work on our album was a real coup.

Bob was a quiet and modest kind of guy. He was no studio tyrant, although he was Number One at the time. He never liked the music loud in the studio. He was very focused on work and had his own idiosyncratic way of doing things. For instance, he recorded the kick drum at the end of a long tube of special carpet he brought with him from New York. Bob was also the guy who brought about the popularity of those famous Yamaha NS10 speakers, and had been the one to come up with the idea of the tissue paper that hung over the front of them because they were supposedly too ‘toppy’. After Bob gave them his blessing every studio in the world had a set of those speakers. One day a guy rang Bob up to ask him what brand of tissue he recommended for them! Bob’s influence at the time cannot be overestimated.

The Blurred Crusade was so much more accomplished than the first album. I was free to follow after the sounds I heard in my head.

I enjoyed making the album with him, even though he later allegedly said I was one of the most stubborn people he’d ever worked with. Then again, he also said The Blurred Crusade was one of his favourite albums he had ever made. 

The Blurred Crusade was so much more accomplished than the first album. I was free to follow after the sounds I heard in my head – like how I wanted a harpsichord on one track, so one day a guy turned up and assembled a complete harpsichord for me to play around on. Bob was very encouraging and nurturing and all that stuff. Really that album was an almost unimaginable leap forward for us.

After we finished recording it I dropped into EMI to pick up my mastered cassette and then walked on down to Paddington Markets where I bumped into a friend of mine who had a brand new invention, the Sony Walkman. I smoked a joint and sat in the shade and listened to the album from beginning to end. I was quite shocked at how luxurious and lush it all sounded: Bob had done an amazing job and I was gobsmacked. Our difficult second album was nailed! I felt sure people would like it.

Oh what a carefree time in my life that was! The Church flew and drove around Australia playing gigs and it was all fun and games for a while. Ploogy got better and better on the drums, especially if he had a new girlfriend at the gig and then he was just unstoppable. On the rare days we had off I hung out in Melbourne at Jennifer’s flat and we always had a good time.

In early 1982 The Blurred Crusade came out to pretty good reviews. The single ‘Almost with You’ was a moderate hit too, although the second single ‘When You Were Mine’ pretty much sank without a trace. The record ended up selling over 40,000 copies in Australia, which was double gold at the time. I think it still sounds fairly fresh and vibrant. Peter plays some very lyrical and very melodic guitar. I played all the keyboards and all of them were real: real piano, real Hammond, even a real Celeste at the end of ‘Field of Mars’, which I thought would be a good song for Marty to sing. I wrote that song about a graveyard in Sydney called the Field of Mars, which was where my neighbour was buried. His name was Ron Wiseman and he died of emphysema, which must be a terrible way to go. He’d been a good friend to me in the few years I knew him until one night an ambulance took him away and he never came back.

The article came out and I looked like the biggest wanker you’d ever seen. It upset a lot of people, including Molly Meldrum, who I had to go around and apologise to … I also said I was the best songwriter in Australia, which upset all of other best songwriters in Australia.

At this time Ploogy and I had become friends with a journalist called Stuart Coupe, and we used to go over to his house some nights to play records and things like that. When Coupe asked me to do a big interview with him for RAM magazine I thought I was in safe hands. Ah but I was about to learn the hard way about the duplicity of the press! Coupe came over to my hotel room at the Diplomat one evening while we were on tour; Jennifer was there but she fell asleep listening to me rabbiting on.

We smoked some grass and drank some booze and Coupe pulled out a packet of speed and I stupidly snorted some, which made me rave on more and more stupidly, like a real braggart. I thought we were sort of friends but I guess we weren’t. I thought Coupe would temper my ranting; I took it for granted that all the silly stuff I was saying wouldn’t be used against me. Boy was I ever wrong. The article came out and I looked like the biggest wanker you’d ever seen. It upset a lot of people, including Molly Meldrum, who I had to go around and apologise to. Coupe had asked me why I’d got to host Countdown so quickly and me, being facetious, said, ‘Well it wasn’t because I had any talent, it was obviously because Molly fancied me.’ And Molly had not in any way done or said anything that indicated that. It was unfair of me to say it even as a joke. I also said I was the best songwriter in Australia, which upset all of other best songwriters in Australia, and I insulted the band in an arrogant and high-handed way. I didn’t think Coupe would’ve put it all in but he did. It was too good a story to let any notion of friendship get in the way.

I was shocked and unprepared for the wave of sheer hatred and outrage that followed, even though my mother had always said that my big mouth was going to get me into trouble. I officially became the most unpopular man in the music biz. Only Michael Chugg had a good laugh. He was the only one who found my jumped-up arrogant pop star act vaguely amusing. I was jolted badly though. I didn’t have the resolve or strength to play Public Enemy Number One. The other guys in the band were miffed and it drove a wedge between them and me. I don’t blame Coupe or even care about that anymore, he was just doing his job. Fast-forward to 2014 and we’re friends again now.

"I officially became the most unpopular man in the music biz"

Meanwhile, overseas was beckoning. In Sweden ‘The Unguarded Moment’ had made its way into the charts. It also became a hit in Canada. In England, while not a hit, the new and cool version of ‘Unguarded’ had been played on The Old Grey Whistle Test and people were digging it. The Blurred Crusade received rave reviews. It wasn’t easy to get good reviews in the English press back then and we were greatly heartened. So when the news of a long overseas tour in September, October and November came through I was incredibly anxious and excited. We were doing Sweden, Denmark, France, Holland, Germany, Scotland and England. We were going over there to crack it!

Something Quite Peculiar, by Steve Kilbey, is released tomorrow, November 1, through Hardie Grant Books Australia (RRP $29.95; order here).