The Church: Rock ‘n’ Roll Aromachology
Frontman Steve Kilbey talks about the band’s latest LP Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars
For this video chat, Steve Kilbey wanders through his home in Sydney, Australia, before settling down on his porch.
He flips the camera to show his view, which is dominated by a large palm tree and other houses under an overcast sky. “The sea is just behind that horrible building there,” he quips. “Ironically, you can’t see the sea.” He is quick to offer up this kind of wordplay throughout the chat, an amused gleam in his eye each time.
His affable mood seems largely due to the fact that his band, The Church, have just released their latest album, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars. As the band’s sole constant member, Kilbey has led The Church through a remarkably prolific career since founding the group almost 45 years ago – this is their 26th studio album. (And that’s not even counting Kilbey’s many solo albums and side projects – in all, he estimates that he’s been involved with approximately 80 albums so far.)
“I am in tune with my muse. I am in tune with the universe, as far as music goes, and words and music are at my fingertips when I need them,” Kilbey says. “Honestly, if someone said, ‘I’m going to put you in a studio for the next 365 days, and every day you have to write a song,’ I would go, ‘Okay, I can do that.’”
As a result of this ability, he adds, “This album was so easy to make. We went in the studio for a week, we jammed, I took some of the jams away and sang on them, we threw it all together, and we had an album that everybody likes. So I’m very happy with it.”
Longtime fans will love that on Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars, Kilbey continues to create Church songs that blend atmospheric, woozy psychedelic rock with beautifully poetic lyrics. Clearly, as he approaches his 70th birthday in September, Kilbey is inarguably a master of his craft.
“I was born to write songs,” he says. “From the moment I could think, I’ve been in contact with something – I don’t know if it’s a higher part of myself, I don’t know if it’s a collective human subconscious, I don’t know if it’s the universe, I don’t know if it’s the goddess Sarasvati, the goddess of art and music in Hinduism. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve always had this ability to write words or music whenever I want.”
Kilbey says he can’t remember a time when he wasn’t completely obsessed with music. As a kid (born in England but raised in Canberra, Australia’s capital city), he adored The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan.
“And then one day, I discovered Marc Bolan – and then about a year after that, I discovered David Bowie,” Kilbey says. “I felt like these people were connecting directly with me. But that wasn’t good enough for me: I had to understand why they connected with me. And so I had the very pleasurable job of playing their records over and over and over. I listened very deeply.
“The trick is, when you analyze someone who’s having a wonderful effect on you, you don’t repeat the actual device they’re using. You don’t do it in their way. You’ve got to take those mechanisms and recontextualize them as your own. And that’s what I did. I’ve studied the masters, and I turned it round for my own use.”
One of the most distinctive things about Kilbey’s songwriting is his abstract, poetic lyrics. He recalls being interested in poetry as a small child, especially because his parents cultivated this interest. “My mother and father would teach me poems, and they’d trot me out when the parties got boring,” he says. “I’d stand there proclaiming these fucking poems and everyone would have a good laugh: ‘Look at that pretentious little sod sprouting all that poetry!’”
Soon, he began filling notebooks with his own writing. Besides music and poetry, he also absorbed influences from reading about mythology and religion, and immersing himself in epic fantastical classic literature such as fairy tales, The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.
All of this had a permanent effect on the way he navigates the world. As he puts it, “My mind is like a switchboard where everything is talking to everything else, even if it shouldn’t be.” This led to problems in the “real world”: “Teachers would go, ‘You seem like an intelligent person; why do you do so badly?’ It’s because I’m not interested in this fucking shit you’re teaching me. But I thought if I’d been allowed to just study music and poetry and writing all day, that would have been far more useful for everyone.”
As a young adult, Kilbey joined various rock bands. That didn’t earn enough money to pay the bills, though, so he took a day job in an office. “I was very bad at it,” he says. “I spent all day writing poetry and sort of mucking around.” That was his last attempt at following a more normal path.
He moved to Sydney, where the music scene was flourishing. In 1980, he formed The Church, and the band quickly landed a record deal. They released their debut album, Of Skins and Heart, the following year.
Through the 1980s, The Church became one of the most beloved bands in Australia, and they remain highly popular there: in 2010, they were inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame (the Australian equivalent of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame). In the U.S., the band had a significant hit in 1988 with the ethereal track “Under the Milky Way,” and they have remained cult favorites here ever since. (This summer, they will tour North America to support Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars, co-headlining alongside the Afghan Whigs.)
VIDEO: The Church “A Strange Past (Edit)”
Kilbey is relieved that his music career has turned out so well, because it’s the what he’d always wanted – but also because, practically speaking, he simply doesn’t think he could’ve managed doing anything else.
“Look, I’m not very good at many other things,” he says. “Like, I bought this machine that gets rid of all the heavy metals out of my water, and the guy has been around twice to show me how to change the titanium filters. And every time he shows me, I immediately forget. In fact, I can’t even concentrate while he’s showing me. I’m standing there thinking of a new song I want to write. He says the words ‘titanium plates,’ and instead of looking at what he’s doing, I’m standing there thinking, ‘Wow, titanium plates…what I can do with that phrase?’”
He actually demonstrates this tendency at the end of this interview: when I ask if he has anything else to add because our time together is drawing short, he brightens and exclaims, “There’s the beginning of a song, isn’t it?” With a laugh, he adds, “When you see me on top of the charts with my new song, ‘My Time with You is Drawing Short,’ and you see I’ve done 10 million streams, you can take me to court and go, ‘I gave you that fucking phrase!’”
He really does have to go, though – he has more music to write, after all. In fact, he says that The Church are already set to start recording another album next month, and he also has various side projects in the works.
And after that? Undoubtedly, there will be yet more music pouring out of Kilbey. As he says with a grin, “It’s like a constant, ongoing process, searching for inspiration and ideas you can use. You’re always gathering, you’re always sifting through everything you hear and see and feel. I’ve been writing songs and writing music for so long, it’s just become second nature to me.”
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