Ahead of their ‘The Slings and Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune’ Tour, The Church lead singer Steve Kilbey sits down with Sean Fraser to talk about Canberra in the late ’70s and working in the public service, to getting a standing ovation before playing a note and painting the new The Church album album cover using pastels. The podcast of this interview can be found HERE.
[Sean Frazer] How are you been mate? What have you been up to today?
[Steve Kilbey] Today, I went and jumped in the ocean. And then I did a little bit of body surfing, which surprised me how quickly that tired me out so that wasn’t a great feeling. I sat in the sun. And then I came home and did a couple of interviews. I like doing interviews. It’s not that hard to talk about yourself. It’s better than working.
Yeah, absolutely.
You know, better than having a job. Jobs are the fucking worse thing. Look, I had a job once. I was in the public service.
Did you like it?
No. I sat there watching the clock going around. You hadn’t looked at the clock for a little while, it must be four o’clock, must be four o’clock. And then you look at the clock and it’s only 10 past three, and you go “Ohh Fuck!”. It was a horrible job. Yeah, when you’re wishing your time away. I reckon that’s really bad for your health, when you’re sitting there going, fuck, I wish it was sometime in the future.
What I get out of this is a really inspiring story though, you hated your job, you thought, you know, maybe one day this music thing will work. And it did.
Eventually, I gambled on myself. I was living in Canberra, and I have to quickly say although Canberra was a terrible place, it was really good for me because nobody liked me there, and I didn’t have really any friends. It enabled me to just totally focus in on music. Luckily, I did my hard apprenticeship there because when I jumped out of my job and moved to Sydney in 1978, there were so many distractions. There was suddenly a world where I had loads of friends, and there was drugs, and there was the sea and the surf and the weather, and parties and meeting like-minded sort of people like me.
I’m glad that Canberra didn’t have anything to offer so I could turn inward on myself. I think that’s a good recipe, to be a songwriter or a musician is not to come from a big city, but to move to the big city once you’ve done all the hard yards in your boring little place. What do you think of that idea?
I think you’re 100% correct. I think a lot of people come from the regions, to make it big in the city. It’s a scary thing to do though. Were you worried that all these things weren’t going to work or was the lure of the city too good? You know, you’ve got this job, you’re obviously getting paid weekly and then you think, I’m gonna toss it in and I’m gonna hit the city. Was it scary to do that?
You’ve reminded me of something my mother said to me just before she died. She said, “I bet you still wish you had your job in the public service.” Look, this is hard to say without sounding grandiose, but it’s the truth. I was always convinced I was gonna make it. To me, it was just a matter of time, and for convenience sake, I’d hoped that I could make it from Canberra, but you can’t, you couldn’t in those days, you had to move to Sydney or Melbourne.
I had a sense of manifest destiny, that this would surely happen for me, not because I was so good, but I would see people who were sort of starting to do well, and I think surely I’m as fuckin’ good as that. Or even as a kid I thought I’m gonna make it. This is what I need to do, and I’m gonna make it. And when I was 16, I got my first bass and I used to stand looking at myself in the mirror playing the bass pretending to play, you know, playing along with my favourite records and thinking, yeah, you’re in with a chance.
Were the people around you saying the same thing? Were they saying, “Steve, you’re gonna make it, your songs are great.”
No, they were not. They absolutely were not. And that was good for me. Eventually, my little brother when he got to about 16, he and I used to play on the tapes I was making. He believed in me but no nobody else. Nobody else. The girls I went out with, other musicians I played with in Canberra, none of them. My music teacher, my piano teacher, anybody you could have spoken to would have said, No, he’s not going anywhere.
What was the scene like in Sydney 1978? I mean, early ’80s, late ’70s, the Sydney rock ‘n’ roll scene was pumping, wasn’t it?
It was the golden age of rock and roll wasn’t it, you know, all these legendary bands, like on one night, like on a Tuesday night in Sydney, any old Tuesday night and you might have The Angels and The Models and might have AC/DC and you might have Rose Tattoo and the Chisels.
The last time I saw you Steve was actually this year in April. You were playing the John Lennon show at the State Theatre. That was a fantastic night.
Yes, indeed. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I’d forgotten about that.
How do you get a gig like that together? Do you just jump on the phone to Bobby and all the others and just say, “let’s play some John Lennon covers”, or is it a bit more than that?
It was the promoter, they are doing this thing, and then they need singers. They stick all this stuff together, and then you’re just a hired gun. And yeah, it’s a bit of horse trading with the songs. I didn’t get much option actually. The musical director rang me up and I guess I was the last one in the queue. I got the ones nobody else wanted. The one I did off Imagine was a pretty awful song.
Not long after that show, The Church went overseas to the US. What’s it like on the road in the US, especially being so far away from home and people knowing your music? I just find that that must be such an incredible experience.
It really is and I never take it for granted. America especially, it’s obviously the best country to tour and the audiences are the most enthusiastic. They really sort of understand us over there. This will go down really bad [but] I think the Americans sort of dig us more than the Australians do. Don’t get me wrong. there are obviously some Australians who really do dig The Church. When I say dig, it’s not so much liking it, but sort of digging you know, like, in the old fashioned hippie sense of digging something. They are very enthusiastic, because we’re from somewhere else, we’ve got that great value, as well as being more exotic. When you go and play downtown in Sydney, everyone knows you’re getting a taxi back to Coogee at the end of the gig. But when you’re just suddenly out of nowhere, after maybe a couple of years you suddenly appear in some city in America, and you walk out on stage, and there’s the band and they’ve been listening to Starfish for 30 years and all of this. Sometimes we’d walk on stage and we get a standing ovation before we played a note, which is really, yeah, and you go fuck, I’m in Florida and I’m getting a standing ovation before I’ve even done anything. So like, I’m very proud of that and like, enjoy it. Even if I could keep going for another 30 years I don’t think I’d ever get used to that feeling or ever underestimate it. It’s wonderful.
The American people are very hard to crack with music as well, very particular with what they like. And a lot of Aussie bands didn’t even attempt to go over there so it’s a credit to The Church and your songwriting.
I think the reason why that is, is because we were kind of individualistic. Like we had our own thing going on. When you put our record on you came into our little world. Rocking, rock and blues bands like that, they’re kind of competing against all the American bands that are already…. There was nobody like The Church.
When we started up, you’ve got to remember this, in 1981 when our first record came out, there was no REM, the only things that were vaguely in our ballpark had been The Cure, and they weren’t really like The Church anyway. We kind of came along and in many ways sort of created our own little sub genre of Neo psychedelia before anybody else. So it was great when we finally got to America.
And you got stuck there. You were heading home and then you got stuck. What happened there?
Well, I’m sorry to say that I’m not an Australian. I have to admit to being an Englishman, I have an English passport, a British passport, and they used to put this thing in there going, this guy’s a permanent resident, and he can come and go between these dates. It used to have this, like sticker, and then suddenly it became an electronic thing you can’t even read.
I did two weeks touring with the band in America, and then I visited my grandson in California. When I turned up at the airport, they said, “Where’s your visa?” What do you mean? I don’t know? And they said, no, you’re not going in. And so I’m standing there and not being allowed in which was kind of embarrassing. And then you get, “I’m sorry, sir, could you get out of the way I want to serve the customer” and you’re like, What the fuck?
Luckily, I have my identical twins, who both live in LA or just outside LA, and my grandson. So I just went and hung out with my daughters for two weeks until I sorted it out.
And you’re not just writing songs, and recording songs, you have some artwork, you’re very creative in that way as well. I saw a photo of you and a cheetah.
The cheetah! Look, the cheetah is now a cushion. Look at this.
Oh there it is. How good.
You know what, I’ve been reading this book just now. Just finished it today. This book about what happens to rock stars when they’re not in their prime anymore, and almost every motherfucker in the book is now a painter as well. Like Robbie Williams. Robbie Williams paints, Terence Trent Darby paints, whoever is in this book. And you know, “they’ve also discovered painting”. So yes, just like all the other sort of old rockers, I’ve discovered painting in my twilight years.
It’s good. Your paintings are good. Like you’ve just showed your cushion there with a cheetah on it. Unreal.
Can I show you my new painting?
Yeah. Where are we heading at the moment? Oh, this is your loungeroom right. Okay, so who’s that?
That’s, that’s going to be an artwork on the new church album. A little painting I whipped up. Yeah, so yeah, yeah, I paint. I’m a pastelist, which is a filthy medium.
What colour are you gonna do zebra, or are you going to leave it white?
What colour am I gonna do the zebra? What fucking colour do you think I’m going to do it? Can I tell you something about pastels?
Absolutely.
They are the most wonderfully intuitive art form. It’s filthy and dirty. I’ve got it all over my fingers just from picking that one up. You put it on the paper and you can kind of push it around, and it’s just your finger on the paper, pushing the colour around. And then there’s these erasers that you use, and you can sort of rub back into it. You can cut back into it, so you can do a blobby shape and then you can take bits away like kind of sculpture. It’s like a subtractive process the way I do it. I start on black paper, and doing someone’s face, I just put a big white bit of pastel, and then with the eraser I subtract away until the face starts to appear out of the blackness. And it’s so intuitive. It’s a whole other thing, you can get a really organic feeling.
How did you get into painting, into artwork? Is this something you’ve only just been doing in the last few years, or have you always done it parallel to your music?
My brother had a little record company back in the late ’90s, and he had found this record of all my old tapes. He said, “you used to do a bit of drawing and painting. Why don’t you have a go of doing your own album cover?”. So I did it and then he auctioned it off and then more people writing and saying, “I’d like to buy one of his artwork”. So in like 2002, I started sort of painting. First I was painting in watercolour. I had no idea what I was doing. And then one day, my sister-in-law came around, she had a little box of pastels and said look at this, you can wrap it around with your finger, and then you can take this eraser and take it away again, as much as you want or not. And you can get this kind of depth. And as soon as I saw her do that, I was like, give me them, and then I just became a pastelists.
Well, you’re bloody good at it.
I don’t know about that.
Ruby Fields, she’s a young artist and she covered ‘The Unguarded Moment. The Church songs, they are just living on aren’t they, through not only the band, but these generations continue to love the songs and cover the songs and I just find it so great that your music is able to last. There’s songs out there that last six months on the radio, and then they are never heard again. But there’s something about The Church, the longevity, is it amazing to see these young artists coming through and covering The Church songs?
It is very gratifying. It’s like, what more could you want. I’m an old man now, I’m an old guy. Every now and then you’ll meet some really young fan, like in their teens in America. We do meet and greets every now and then, and there’ll be a guy and his daughter, or a mother and her son, and they’ve gotten them into it. And this teenager really loves your music and wants to talk about it and ask you all about it. I think that’s absolutely marvellous. My own kids, I wish they liked it as much as that, so when a youngster does one of your numbers, it’s very gratifying. It’s good to, as you say, it’s good to have written something that’s kind of lasted a bit in this very ephemeral world. Yeah, she’s doing a song that’s now 40… that’s 41 years old. So I never would have thought the morning I was sitting there writing that song that I…. imagine if I jumped up and said “in 41 years time, someone cool would be covering this song,” they would have laughed.
She does a great cover and it’s a terrific song. You got this tour in Australia kicking off in September. It’s a long show, isn’t it? It’s two and a half hours. How do you get the setlist together for that?
Sort of horse trading I guess. Like on every level, we’re all trying to come up with the ideal setlist and you know, it’s to do with tempo, it’s to do with key and it’s to do with, you know, you don’t want too many safe, sad, moody songs in a row. You’ve got to break it up. Usually it’s our drummer, Tim has been traditionally the sensible one who comes up with the best set list and best running order. You’d think that might be me, but it isn’t.
Yeah, I’m actually surprised by that I am.
I don’t really want the responsibility. I’m usually happy, sometimes I’m not always happy with the choices but you know, we’re obligated to do some songs that I wouldn’t necessarily do if we weren’t obligated to do them.
Oh, there you go. Thank you for showing me your paintings, talking to me about music, America. It’s been a great chat.
Thank you so much, it’s been a real pleasure.
Take care Steve