Elegant Elegiac

"When All India released I think it was their first album, one of my brothers gave me a copy and said, 'I think you'll like this',” Steve Kilbey recalls the beginnings of the collaboration with All India Radio's Martin Kennedy that has spawned three albums so far – the latest one, You Are Everything. “I liked it and I made sure every time I did an interview for about the next year or so, when anybody said, 'What do you like?', to not sound like an old fuddy-duddy who's out of touch and also to let people in All India Radio know I like them so if they ever wanted me to sing on their record or anything, I'd say, 'I like All India Radio'. And sure enough, like a fish coming after a baited hook, after about a year, Martin Kennedy sent me a track and said, 'Would you like to sing on this track?'

“Of course I loved it and we just started up a kind of mail-order collaboration. We didn't actually meet until well after the first album [2009's Unseen Music Unheard Words] had been finished, and the next one [2011's White Magic] we actually met up and did it, and then the third one the same.”

The way this Kilbey/Kennedy collaboration works is that Kennedy sends Kilbey a series of musical sketches for which Kilbey then creates lyrics and then Kennedy embellishes back in his home studio. “A lot of the music carries over from my other band,” Kennedy admits. “I often have a lot of tunes swirling 'round inside my head, and I don't know which project to use them for, whether for All India Radio or the project with Steven, so I put them all into the music bank and withdraw them when I need to.”

“When we started making this album,” Kilbey continues, “I had in mind and I think Martin did too, we wanted something kind of deeper. The first album was kind of more minimalistic and I think was a good record, and the second record was very poppy and had all these very short, melodic songs, like this one but in the end it didn't kind of add up to anything. I think this third album has a lot more depth, whatever that means. It's not quite so glib and clever, and, I dunno, it's posing some hopefully interesting questions and alluding to some interesting things with the music.”

Kennedy's music certainly provides a sonic context for Kilbey's voice that's quite different to anything else he's produced, though, as he admits, it's not a million miles from The Church. “It's very simple, but after a while, all these simple things strangely enough can form something quite complex,” he says. “When Martin sent me one of the tracks to remix, I could actually see how he was doing what he was doing and I was stunned. Now obviously I've made records on my own where I play everything, so I know how a song can be constructed, but it's strange to see Martin's songs actually pulled apart and realising what's behind something that you thought was completely different.”

Among the words Kilbey uses in his blog to try and describe the result are “elegant” and “elegiac”, and they pretty much sum up this truly beautiful collection of songs the lyrics for which Kilbey wrote automatically, just going with whatever the music drew out of him. “By the time Steve's ready to do vocals,” Kennedy explains, “the track is in its bare-bones stage, enough for him to get a feel for it, and then usually I do most of the overdubs, all the instruments myself.”