{"id":454,"date":"2011-02-24T05:30:46","date_gmt":"2011-02-24T10:30:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=454"},"modified":"2011-02-24T05:30:46","modified_gmt":"2011-02-24T10:30:46","slug":"a-conversation-with-the-churchs-stve-kilbey-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2011\/02\/24\/a-conversation-with-the-churchs-stve-kilbey-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with The Church\u2019s Steve Kilbey (part two)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Continued from the previous post<\/a>, here\u2019s part two of my conversation with The Church\u2019s Steve Kilbey. All photos \u00a9 Bill Kopp. — bk<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Bill Kopp:<\/span><\/strong> Your band The Church<\/strong> has gone in a number of different directions over the years; in addition to acoustic renderings of your songs, album-long improvisations like “Bastard Universe,” the covers album A Box of Birds<\/em>. In all of these cases I get the sense that the band heads down these paths not to pander to any sort of fan demand, but rather because you simply find it interesting to do so. Is that an accurate observation?<\/span><\/p>\n

Steve Kilbey:<\/strong> Absolutely. We\u2019re a rock band; we\u2019re a curious band. We love the past: we love the Beatles<\/strong>, the Rolling Stones<\/strong> and Dylan and David Bowie<\/strong> and Marc Bolan and all the rest of \u2018em. But we also love to jam, we love short songs, we love Pink Floyd<\/strong>, we love some electronic music. We love folk music, we love the Byrds<\/strong>. So we love everything, and everything\u2019s in there. Peter is a huge Jimi Hendrix<\/strong> fan. He loves the blues, and he loves classic pop songs and the chord progressions in them. Marty loves prog rock! He loves Yes<\/strong>, Genesis<\/strong> and all that stuff. He [laughs] likes songs that are forty minutes long in 9\/8 time. And then there\u2019s Tim [Powles]<\/strong>; he\u2019s a drummer, so he\u2019s weird again. He looks at things from the point of view of time. But he\u2019s also a producer, so he likes interesting, unusual qualities in his music that no one would ever think of. And then you\u2019ve got me and all the things I like.<\/p>\n

So you throw all of us in together, and we still have a huge enthusiasm for rock music and all that came after The Beatles. And we\u2019ve got an endless recipe for doing odd things. Totally commercial three-minute things to long, rolling, messy epics. Covering other people\u2019s songs, and having people cover our songs. Everything we can possibly do within this format, we will want to do.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> On a personal note, I\u2019ve got between eight and nine thousand albums\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> Wow. A maniac! You\u2019re an obsessive man. Oh, my god. Why didn\u2019t they warn me?<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> \u2026and over the years there have only been two or three albums that I have bought on vinyl and<\/em> cassette and<\/em> compact disc. Gold Afternoon Fix<\/em> is one of those. <\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> Oh, my god. That\u2019s the album that I\u2026this is interesting. Now, you\u2019re not going to take offense to this, because you\u2019re an intelligent man. That is my least favorite Church album of all Church albums.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Really?! Why is that?<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s a classic case. We had made this album Starfish<\/em>, and it was a big success. We had been struggling up to that point, and our struggle had brought cohesion to the band. We had incredible cohesion between us because we were struggling against failure. Suddenly we were successful. We were like that wrestler who\u2019s got his opponent down on the mat; the opponent\u2019s just lying there. Some of the crowd are cheering, and some are jeering. So he stands up and he walks around showing off his muscles and stuff. Suddenly when he turns \u2018round to deliver the killer blow, the opponent has stood up and turned into grunge rock! And completely wiped him out. That\u2019s what happened with us.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That album\u2026to suddenly be quite successful, we very temporarily lost our mojo, I reckon. I mean, other members of the band will say, \u201cOh, no; that\u2019s a great album. I don\u2019t know why he doesn\u2019t like it; some great fucking songs on there.\u201d But to me, at the very best it was treading water.<\/p>\n

I mean, this is the thing: The Church are a great band, and I am a great lyricist. Even on a very mediocre day, we will do something pretty good. We never sink below a certain standard. And Gold Afternoon Fix<\/em> is an example of that: it did not sink below a certain standard. There are some good songs on there, there are some tricky chord progressions, there are some interesting guitar flourishes and neat lyrics. Some good effects. But overall, it\u2019s a disappointment. It should have been our killer blow; we should have turned around and fucking nailed the world, nailed America with the absolute epitome of all that we were good at. And instead we just kind of came out with that. We needed to drum up something extraordinary, and we drummed up something that was kind of, \u201cyeah, alright.\u201d There are people who really do love it. There are people for whom that was exactly what they wanted. I don\u2019t deny them that, and I\u2019m really happy that people like anything I do. But certainly \u2013 to me \u2013 it\u2019s our most disappointing album.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> From a fan\u2019s standpoint, sometimes it has to do with when the music hits them in their particular lives. <\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> That\u2019s right.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, there\u2019s song on the album called \u201cDisappointment.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> Yes, there is. Strangely enough, a lot of Americans would find it hard to understand when I would say this, but my specialty is writing songs about disappointment and disillusionment. Not depressive subjects; not the sorts of things that make you go cut your veins open. Not stuff about the devil, and killing your mother and father. More about that idea John Lennon<\/strong> flirted with, that feeling of \u2013 how I\u2019ve often felt \u2013 being slightly estranged from this world, of suddenly finding myself alone somewhere. And it\u2019s not entirely unpleasant.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019m walking along the beach on my own, my woman\u2019s left me and things are looking bad. It\u2019s a grey afternoon and it\u2019s just starting to rain. But I also find some incredible comfort in it. It\u2019s very hard to put your finger on it, but that\u2019s<\/em> the songs that I write. That\u2019s where I connect with the world, trying to describe these mixed emotions. I don\u2019t write songs about being righteously happy; I don\u2019t write songs about being furiously angry, and I don\u2019t write songs about being manically depressed. I write songs about very, very subtle things.<\/p>\n

That is one thing about Gold Afternoon Fix<\/em>; it did have some subtle emotions on there. A song like \u201cCity,\u201d when it\u2019s over, it\u2019s like, was the guy happy about all that or was he kind of detached? Like John Lennon in \u201cStrawberry Fields Forever.\u201d \u00a0<\/span>At the end of the whole song, you get this feeling of incredible, weary detachment.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Yes.<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> And nobody up to then — as far as I knew — wrote songs about weary detachment. That wasn\u2019t the sort of something that anybody had tried to consider. And in the spirit of that, each Church song describes some sort of subtle feeling. And Gold Afternoon Fix<\/em> is very much like that; it\u2019s a very subtle album. It\u2019s hard to say what mood you\u2019ll be left in when it\u2019s over. So in that way, you could revisit it a lot, and listen to it; you\u2019re never quite sure. When I think about it, the albums that I love always leave me feeling not-quite-sure. \u201cI think I\u2019ll have to listen to that again!\u201d And some albums, I\u2019ve been doing that for forty years. Sticking it on again just to try and find exactly what\u2019s going on.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Those records continue to reveal their charms on repeated listening. The best work that The Church has done is especially effective at setting a mood, of being especially evocative of a particular feel, whatever that feel happens to be. Even though the songs are varied in lyrical content, arrangement and whatnot, on each album they all seem to hang together in a cohesive way, rather than being merely a collection of the last dozen songs you guys wrote. Is that sort of hanging-together concept something that’s important and worked at, or is it simply a happy coincidence?<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> It\u2019s a happy coincidence. What happens is this: imagine you\u2019ve got four craftsmen. They\u2019re going to make a box with ten pieces in it. Their raw material arrives, and they have twenty or thirty pieces; they keep working and working and working. Eventually they have ten pieces. And because they\u2019re such good craftsmen — they\u2019ve been around for more than thirty years, so they know what they\u2019re doing \u2013 eventually they polish these ten pieces, and chuck them in the box in some fairly random order. But when the customer arrives and opens the box, he\u2019s quite delighted. Because by that stage the pieces will make some kind of sense. That\u2019s the nature of it, and it\u2019s also the kind of ambiguity that\u2019s sort of built into the whole thing.<\/p>\n

There is no — and there never has been a \u2013 guiding master plan, a vision for the whole thing on an album. It\u2019s always been, take out a sketch pad, scribble scribble scribble<\/em>, and eventually the outline of a horse starts to appear. And eventually you go, \u201cOkay, I\u2019ll go with that.\u201d And you start working on a horse. That\u2019s what The Church has always done, in musical terms.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> For the dates on this tour, you\u2019ve announced ahead of time exactly what the set list will be: first, Untitled #23<\/em>, then Priest = Aura<\/em>, then Starfish<\/em>\u2026 <\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> Wait, you\u2019re coming to see the acoustic show, in Greenville?<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> Yes\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> The acoustic show is not the “three albums” show. I hope people realize that. For some reason \u2013 some economic reason \u2013 we couldn\u2019t bring the three-album show to Greenville. We don\u2019t have time to reinterpret — we couldn\u2019t possibly \u2013 all those songs. So what we\u2019re actually playing \u2013 and gee, I hope I\u2019m not going to put anybody off \u2013 we\u2019re doing our \u201cAn Intimate Space\u201d show. It\u2019s a show we\u2019re doing in America and Australia this year. We\u2019re working backwards from our latest album, one song off each album through to our very first album, which is where we\u2019re going to stop. That one\u2019s a tried-and-true success; everybody likes that show. There was some problem with Greenville, getting the equipment there, or from that show to the next, or something like that. I\u2019m not sure what it was, but there was some reason we couldn\u2019t do the electric show. But somebody said \u201cWe could<\/em> do the acoustic show.\u201d So we\u2019ll go forward through the past to our first album.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> On these other dates, when you do the three album set, does that sort of take the mystery out of things, making the evening somehow predictable? Or will you somehow work some surprises into the mix?<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> I am going to be struggling so hard to play all these songs, it will be a mystery if I can get through it or not! And the surprise will be if I actually do. I\u2019ve got to deal with being able to do it, first. I reckon the songs will provide plenty of surprises. I can feel it happening at rehearsal.<\/p>\n

BK:<\/span><\/strong> The band has been together for more than thirty years.\u00a0 <\/span>The string of albums The Church has released over the last decade — whether reinterpreting older material or serving up new songs — they’ve gotten strongly positive reviews. After this tour, what’s next for the band?<\/span><\/p>\n

SK:<\/strong> We\u2019re doing the Sydney Opera House with a symphony orchestra. We\u2019ll film and record it for possible release; it\u2019s going to be a documentary. But after that, I don\u2019t know. Because there\u2019s not really much you can do after something like that, except maybe landing on the moon!<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Continued from the previous post, here\u2019s part two of my conversation with The Church\u2019s Steve Kilbey. All photos \u00a9 Bill Kopp. — bk Bill Kopp: Your band The Church has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interview","cat-41-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}