EXCLUSIVE: Steve Kilbey To Finally Issue Album That Heroin Addiction Halted Two Decades Ago

After almost two decades revered artist Steve Kilbey is finally releasing the album Speed Of The Stars — a collaboration with Irish rocker Frank Kearns which began way back in 1998. 

Speaking to theMusic, The Church frontman confirmed that his struggles with a heroin addiction stopped the duo from finishing the album.

"I was there to work and I had to take two weeks off I was so sick," Kilbey recalls.

"I couldn’t get out of bed. Poor old Frank was running around looking after me and driving me to NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings in Dublin. So we had all these backing tracks that I think probably three or four of them actually got onto the album and then it just sat there for a long while.

"I think [Kearns] was burnt by the whole experience, I don’t think he was in a hurry to work with me again. When you have a really bad experience, I find music is a real thing that can carry that experience and a good experience.

"For a long while I couldn’t listen to the music because it was just reminding me of a terrible thing I had been through."

In 2012, Kilbey announced that Kearns had sent him the 'lost tapes' and that he was commencing work on it again, in which the two recorded a few more tracks together. 

"I’ve always got so many things on the boil, it just sort of faded into the background," he says of the delay.

"Then Frank and I started talking and he just said, 'Look, I’m going to come out there and we’ll do some more'. This year he came out again and we finished it off, we wrote some more songs and now it’s all done."

Kilbey confirms that the new album features four tracks recorded in the '90s, four from 2012-2013 and three or four from this year, when it was completed just last month.

"The music that we wrote then is sort of very mysterious to me, I can’t figure out how we wrote it or how we came up with it," Kilbey says. 

"It's definitely my best work. It’s my best singing, my best melodies, my best lyrics. When I listen to the album it achieves something I don’t think I’ve ever achieved…it’s very hard to say what it is."

The songwriter credits his writing partner Kearns, who featured in Irish '80s band Cactus World News, for ensuring their work saw the light of day. 

"He is a very forgiving man, he is a very warm man and I think he always felt that there was something here," Kilbey says of Kearns, who also appeared on The Church's 2009 album, Untitled #23.

"He very, very gently pushed me and nudged me. He realised I was sort of back form the dead, I was thinking straight…he coaxed me back into it."

Kilbey hopes to again work with Kearns on future collaborations.

"I would think, especially if this record is well received and it did well, I think definitely.

"I think we’ve got a lot of creative juice left between us, so yeah, I really hope so," adding with a laugh, "The next one sort of has to be a bit quicker I think."

Click here for more information on how to pre-order Speed Of The Stars.