Interview by Toby Creswell
I've got a terrace house and the back part is slowly separating from the front, eventually my kitchen will end up in the back garden. There's this inexorable crack which is getting bigger and bigger every day. One day I had a builder out to fix it and he said 'you've got a slow crack' I thought it was a great name for my next album. When I told Marty he said you really mean the slow crack between you and the rest of the band."
Steve Kilbey could only agree. While his band the Church may have just returned from Los Angeles with an album, Starfish, in the can, singer Steve Kilbey is actively pursuing a solo career which is providing artistic and financial rewards outside the band he has led for seven years. Hence Kilbey's third solo album in less than a year, The Slow Crack.
When the Church first emerged back in 1981 with the single "The Unguarded Moment" Steve Kilbey was already announcing that he wasn't totally fulfilled by the band, nor did he expect to be. The rest of the group - guitarists Peter Koppes and Marty Wilson-Piper [sic] didn't seem perturbed, but then they were rarely consulted about anything by the media. In a sense Kilbey was just being realistic about the fate of any group and he was being honest about his own ambitions.
Over the years the Church has begun to assume an identity greater than simply being a backing group for Kilbey. Other members of the band have been writing songs and group now tends to compose an ensemble. Drummer Richard Ploog has played with other bands, notably Salamander Jim, while Wilson-Piper (sic) and Koppes have both released solo records recently. On a personal level the band has become a closer if still volatile unit. But the changes of recent years have lifted a weight from Kilbey's shoulders.
"Seeing that the Church want to be more of a democracy there's no need for me to write songs for them because they want to write their own. And there's so many things that the Church don't want to do. The Church don't want to have synthesisers or sequencers or lots of pianos or drum machines or record albums at home. The Church has turned into this concept which has its particular parameters and it doesn't seem to work when we go outside them. I just want to do more things than the things the Church does."
Those things include publishing poetry. His first volume Earthed came out this year accompanied by an instrumental LP with the same title and another volume is in the works. Prior to that a collection of home recordings, Unearthed was released on the independent Red Eye label. To Kilbey's surprise these projects have proved almost as lucrative as the Church albums. Unearthed has been picked up by the Enigma label in the U. S. (home of Poison and the Smithereens) while Rykodisc has leased Earthed. A couple of tracks from that disc have been picked up for a documentary film on eye operations in the U.S.
"With the Church albums they always cost more to record than we ever recouped from the advance. It's strange when I think that The Slow Crack cost $300 to make and Starfish cost almost $300,000. And it isn't a thousand times better. You spend more and more money to get that small improvement."
Not that money has ever been a big motivation for Kilbey. He's a man who is decidedly Romantic, philosophically and artistically. His songs aim for an ethereal quality and have an abhorrence of the everyday. Kilbey's conversation is peppered with catchphrases like 'higher conspiciousness', 'surrealism' and 'psychedelic'. Yet at the is quite pragmatic and profoundly cynical about some of aspects of what he does. Most importantly however he is not in the least sanctimonious about his work, at times even self-deprecating.
The jibes of critics, particularly those in this magazine as Kilbey frequently points out, have hit home over the years. Their attacks are somewhat mollified somewhat by the legion of Church faithful who are literally fanatic about the band.
"People say, particularly critics, that the Church never change; that the records are all the same, but they don't say it about the Angels or the Smiths or AC/DC. "These are all bands who have developed a style originally and kept on re-defining it. With us it just seems that the same things keep coming up. Which I think is both good and bad. I think there's conceptual corner into which we've painted ourselves - we have a lot more variation than bands who've been ploughing the same old furrow. Heyday, the Church's last album is still the basic jingle-jangle melody and monotone singing and 4th form lyrics and all that, is still a lot different from Of Skins and Heart.
"I can go into the studio with synthesisers and drum machines and do the songs but then what are the other guys going to do ? And I don't think people who buy Church, albums and there's 100,000 or so around the world who buy everything that the Church puts out, I don't think they want that. I think they want us to keep refocusing our vision until we get it right - which I don't think we've done an album where we've got every track right on the money"
The latest Church album; their fourth LP with three EPs in between albums is, in Kilbey's opinion, getting closer than previous releases. The album was recorded in Los Angeles with legendary session musicians Greg Ladanyi and Waddy Wachtel producing and giving the band a leaner sound. After seven years together and no appreciable recognition outside the converted it was certainly time for the Church to try something different.
"It was kind ot a tense relationship " says Kilbey of the sessions for Starfish. "They (Ladanyi and Wachtel) weren't terribly impressed about making a record with us and our attitude was pretty much the same thing. I did it because I liked the random factor. It's just ridiculous on paper - a band like the Church going to California and doing an album with these two 'dudes'. But I think something good came out of the relationship."
"For this album I've written two songs which I knew the Church had to do and when I played them to the other guys, democracy aside, these were obviously good songs we'd be stupid not to do. When I wrote those songs I earmarked them for the Church. It just seemed fair that Marty and Peter should have a song on there and they had some good songs. Then it was just a case of OK, the rest we're going to write together' "
"I think it's a mixture of familiarity and contempt:' says Kilbey explaining the internal relationships within the Church. "I think I'm quite a good songwriter and yet sometimes I bring along really good songs and the rest of the band don't want to do them. There's a sort of frustrating feeling there. We've been together seven years and you tend to bond together. There's this feeling that we haven't made our definitive record, we haven't accomplished our mission together.
While the Church sound has been based on the traditional four piece line-up of two guitars, bass and drums Kilbey's interests lie much wider. His passion for the ringing tones of Byrds' guitar were a foundation of the Church but then his tastes for white noise and pure pop are still looking for an escape. What has remained constant is the muse.
"I can't say I write about this or this or this,' he explains. "I think I explore my own subconscious landscape. There are so many obvious thoughts - important, valid thoughts - but what's bubbling underneath are the things that interest me. The sort of things you think about as you're falling asleep; memories, half daydreams, they're the sort of things I write about. I find that's more interesting than the day to day world of stock markets crashing."
"The way I create music is that I play the first thing I think of and build on that with the next thing I think of. Then I put the lyrics on top of that. With the song "Fireman" I started thinking about an arsonist and it went from there. It doesn't mean anything and then on the hand it means many things. People say to me 'I don't understand lyrics' and I tell them 'Don't try'.
The Slow Crack represents a step beyond Unearthed in as much as it's a collection of eight songs which were recorded specifically for release. Kilbey chose to record at home partly to avoid conflict with the Church LP and partly for the intimacy that home recording allows. He confesses that the album has tape hiss. bum notes, rumble and technical problems, but these drawbacks are compensated for by the honesty of the project It's like an evening at home with Steve Kilbey in your living room baring his musical shortcomings. It's as direct as possible to the source."
The songs range from a cover of Company Caine's "A Woman With A Reason" to a couple of electro-pop songs, a blues piano track, "Surrealist Woman Blues" and a track Kilbey describes as "the most pretentious thing l've done in my pretentious life. I put a bit of Shakespeare to music."
Given Kilbey's search for inspiration in the unconscious. his florid imagery and his Romantic ideals to say nothing about the ambient tunes on Earthed one be forgiven tor seeing him as a born-again hippie. Fortunately he's got far too well-developed a sense humour for that and the innate cynicism of a man who has been in rock & roll for most of his adult life.
"To be part of the Nw Age meant you had to be a big par of the old age movement, capitalism, to get the money to afford the Transformation courses. I'm not terribly interested in it. I, as much as the person, would like a New Age to dawn, but I don't think becoming a vegetarian for a week is going to help that. It's going to take a lot more than a week down the coast with a guru."
Kilbey has found his own level of contentment with what he believes to be two successful albums. Starfish will hopefully be the Church album that will break the band on an international market while The Slow Crack is a further step in a long satisfying solo career.
"I think it's good to have both going at the same time' "It's like having a healthy body and a healthy mind. One of the first signs of dry rot is when people start to move away from that inner-city type thing. I think the first sign of stagnation is when everything you do is geared to maximum consumption.