Still Under The Milky Way

Steve Kilbey, Lead Singer and Songwriter Of Australian Rockers The Church, Is Still Crafting Ethereal, Majestic Masterpieces

I’m enjoying a phone chat this morning with Steve Kilbey (left), co-founder, lead singer, bass player and chief songwriter for The Church, the hard-to-categorize Australian neo-psychedelic band that is still hypnotizing American audiences nearly 40 years after forming in Sydney.

Kilbey, who’ll be performing with the band at the Belly-Up in Solana Beach on Tuesday, May 7^th, is sitting in a Starbucks in Buffalo, New York, sharing his thoughts about life, music and the bittersweet taste of rock & roll success and excess.

I’ve been a Kilbey loyalist since I first heard the jangly yet atmospheric opening guitar riff of The Church’s Almost With You from the band’s brilliant 1982 album The Blurred Crusade. It was a cross between the Byrds and David Bowie, but with a dream-like vibe all its own.

For most of the 1980’s, Kilbey and his bandmates enjoyed critical acclaim and a loyal following in the United States among the alternative music crowd and anyone who appreciated atmospheric, poetic music that rocked.

But the Big Hit eluded them. That is, until 1988, when the band released Under the Milky Way, the first single off its heralded Starfish album. When MTV began airing the video for the song, it rocketed The Church to the rock-star heights the foursome had dreamed about growing up in Australia.

In its 38-year history The Church has recorded an astonishing 26 albums. But Milky Way is the band’s signature song. It is a near-perfect musical creation, an evocative, ethereal piece of sonic art, with a touch of 60’s psychedelia that is also melodic, accessible and even hummable.

The combination of the haunting 12-string guitar progression, which I determinedly taught myself to play on my 12-string the first day I heard the song, and Kilbey’s mystical vocal delivery of some very cosmic lyrics just blew me away. The song, written by Kilbey and his then-girlfriend Karin Jansson of the band Curious (Yellow), has never left my head. It’s one of the very few tunes of which I have never grown tired.

Kilbey has written or co-written hundreds of unique and enchanting songs. Each one is a unique and complex soundscape that ebbs and flows from verse to chorus and reaches levels of power and poignance and a lovely weirdness that few other bands reach.

The Church -- now comprised of original members Kilbey and Peter Koppes, longtime member Tim Powles, and relative newcomer Ian Haug -- can best be described as a combination of ethereal and majestic, which one might think are incompatible.

How can a band be both eerie and earthy? How can a band be both trippy and clear-minded? How can a band be elegiac and otherworldly yet still be fun and rock your socks off? Perhaps the real greatness of The Church’s artistry in fact lies in that seeming contradiction.

“I think the greatest thing art can do is present contradiction, or paradox. Majestic and ethereal, happy and sad, soft and loud, people are very attracted to that idea,” says Kilbey, who explains that when he hears a sad song, it makes him happy.

“My heart and mind open up. Ideas rush in because of that contradiction,” he says. “You can be majestic and ethereal at the same time. Not only in music, but in film and in painting. Give them the universe in a three-minute song, with ups and downs and happiness and sadness.”

Kilbey says the enormous success of Milky Way and the follow-up single, Reptile, which is equally surreal and infectious, gave him the clout in America for which he and his mates longed.

“If you’re in an Australian band, you naturally want to make it big in America. It is where rock and roll began, it has the most big cities, the audiences, the venues, the record labels, the busses and highways and planes. Everybody wants to be big in America, that is the number one mission,” he says.

But Kilbey was not prepared for the realities of fame or fortune, which altered his universe and scrambled his brain.

“I became a proper little rock star for five minutes,” he recalls. “I made a lot of money. I was away from home. My relationship broke up. And it all sort of happened at the same time. Imagine it: all the good and the bad, girls, fame, money, travel, misery, tedium, waiting around, and addiction. The whole gamut. It was just like, ‘bang,’ my whole life changed.”

Kilbey says the band had attained success in America, but at an enormous cost.  

“It happened. Wow, it was a dream came true. But now what?” he says. “We were struggling for eight years, got famous, and we fell out with each other. We became disillusioned, and when we came back for the next record the wind had gone out of our sails. I don’t think we handled it well. I did not handle it well personally. It made me become cynical and then, you know, I just thought it would go on forever.”

Kilbey says he had a big chip on his shoulder in those days: “I wanted to prove something. It was a long process. I went off the rails and become a heroin addict in 1999 and 2000. But I stumbled out of that a better person.”

By the time his heroin nightmare was finally over, Kilbey’s moment on rock’s A list in the United States had largely waned. But it proved to be good for his soul, if not his wallet.

“I was back at the bottom, struggling again. I had gone back to the start. I started all over again,” he says. “After that experience, I was humbled. Whether you have humility or not, life humbles you. You need to have some humility.”

Kilbey has gone on to reclaim his spot in rock and roll as a unique and gifted artist. He’s been prolific, both writing and touring. If you are not familiar with The Church beyond the Milky Way, I recommend you give a listen to such songs as Metropolis, for which all four members of the band in those days were credited with writing.

An epic, life-affirming song that brought a tear to my eye the first time I heard it, Metropolis best exemplifies the majestic side of the band. It’s as exalting as anything recorded by U2. There were in fact many in the music industry who predicted The Church would be the next U2.

Meanwhile, in the New Millennium

The Church’s recent recordings are just as good as the vintage stuff, if not even a little better. And how many 1980’s bands can say that? Of all the newer material, my favorite song is Laurel Canyon, which has a pure 60’s hippie ethos but with The Church's surreal touches. Like so many Church songs over the years, Laurel Canyon haunts me like me a friendly ghost. The song is simply beautiful, and it happened, as so many great songs do, kind of by accident. 

“We were in the studio and I went out to buy a sandwich, and when I returned Ian [Haug] and Peter [Koppes] were just sitting strumming a chord progression, and they recorded it,” Kilbey explains. “Ian joked about it being a Laurel Canyon song, it had a hippie, CSN [Crosby, Stills & Nash] vibe. The title was already there. All songs get a nickname, and sometimes it sticks. It was a starting point. I sat down and listened to the music, and put a bass on it. It’s about a couple that was once together in Laurel Canyon and is now broken up. It’s just a feeling.”

The most recent album is Man Woman Life Death Infinity. It’s the second with the rejuvenated line-up of Kilbey, Koppes, Tim Powles and Haug, who was formerly in another popular Australian band, Powderfinger.

Man Woman Life Death Infinity has the band performing at a very high level. Songs such Before the Deluge, I Don’t Know How I Don’t Know, and Another Century show that the band is still on top of its game.

"This is The Church's water record," Kilbey recently said of Man Woman Life Death Infinity. "I guess water is my element. I've always marveled at the sea and rivers and rain. It wasn't conscious of it at all but on reflection, it definitely is a preoccupation on this record. What that means, I don't know."

In A Just World…

In a just world, Kilbey and his bandmates would have already given their acceptance speeches at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. There’s no reason other than luck or lack thereof that The Church isn’t breathing the same rarefied air as U2, Pink Floyd or The Cure, all rightful members of the RRHOF.

But Kilbey, who cites glam rock legends David Bowie and Marc Bolan as his biggest influences, has expressed misgivings and mixed feelings about fame. A serious artist in the largely frivolous world of popular entertainment, he’s not always looked comfortable in the skin of a pop star.

But he’s demonstrably more content than he was at the height or his rock star daze. Dare I say Steve Kilbey is happy? He’ll be the first to tell you that he’s a nicer person now than he was back in the day. The cold-shoulder, F U attitude was standard operating procedure for art rockers and punk rockers back in the day.

Kilbey is a more loving and attentive person now and seems at peace. It took a hellish ride through the very darkest corners of life to get here, but Kilbey’s discovered something that on some level he has probably always known: music makes him happy, and sad, emotionally layered music makes him happiest.

Still residing in Australia, he enjoys coming to America now and is grateful that people still come to the band’s shows and show their love for the songs.  This time around, he continues to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of the “Starfish” album and “Under the Milky Way” song by playing the album in its entirety, along with a second set filled with gems from the band’s ridiculously deep catalogue. The tour began last year and is attracting enthusiastic crowds and positive notices across the USA.

“We have a nice following, and I love it,” says Kilbey, the subject of a recent documentary, Something Quite Peculiar:The Life and Times of Steve Kilbey.  

“If you have an old car and you buy it and keep it for 20 years, and you hold onto it another 20 years, it is a vintage car. It becomes a whole other thing,” he says. “It’s not for me to say, but what I’ve observed is that we have reached the point where the audience venerates us.”

Kilbey says people who come to see the band play now are like family. They grew up with the band. 

“We are part of the soundtrack of their lives. It is nice to receive that feedback, to get all that love. We pour it into our instruments, this reciprocity is a wonderful feeling,” he says.

The Church has what you might call a maturing, grown-up fan base. But I should add that when my daughter, who is 19, recently heard one of my homemade CD’s of favorite songs from The Church, she fell in love with the band and it became one of her favorite CDs.

Evidently, ethereal and majestic are in again. But superb music and great art, which The Church has always combined, never really go out of style.