No Separation Between The Church And Dream State

Speaking from his home in New South Wales, Australia, Steve Kilbey is a bit serene. His band, The Church, is well into its fifth decade and shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. He’s still searching, he says, and that keeps the whole thing interesting to him. 

“All of our albums, all of our concerts, it’s always trying to get at this sort of one idea,” the bassist-frontman explains. “The reason why we’re called The Church is it’s a quasi-spiritual experience. I was going for that right back in the beginning, all those years ago. I think we’re still going for that.”

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Shortly after he says this, a puffy, adorable, blue-hued kookaburra lands right outside his window, much to Kilbey’s delight. “You see that bird?,” he exclaims, as if I could miss it. “I look up, and he’s just sitting there. And now he’s hassling me to give him some food, which is not something you always get in a rock and roll interview,” he says, correctly. 

Is a visit from the pride of Australia a sign that Kilbey has a knack for tapping into the divine as he goes deeper into the pursuit of truth, or just proof of how he’s gotten adept at rolling with the punches throughout his often unpredictable life? Some spiritual questions cannot truly be answered, though Kilbey notes that “the universe is always trying to teach me a lesson.”

The Church’s sumptuous and expansive new album Lacuna is their third album this decade and 28th overall, and arrives amid an ongoing flurry of activity that includes a recent career-spanning world tour, several solo albums and multimedia projects from Kilbey, including a novel (Eros Zeta and the Hypnogogue, named for two of the most recent Church albums). But Kilbey, 72, brushes off any suggestion that he’s trying to make the most of his time as he gets older.

“It seems like I’m always doing a lot of stuff, but it’s all just so random,” he says, and then he proves he’s not always so interested in looking at the bigger picture of life, as “that’s a self-defeating thing as well, when you start worrying about that too much. Now everybody’s going, ‘will this be your last Church album? Will this be your last breath?,’” he asks rhetorically. “I don’t know, I just try and keep it all at bay and not philosophize and think about it all too much.” 

The Church’s 2023 album The Hypnogogue was included on the SPIN editors’ best of the year list and was widely hailed as a rejuvenation after an extended break. It’s been a lovely time to be in The Church lately, Kilbey says, thanks to the band’s new line-up: long-time drummer/producer and now percussionist Tim Powles, guitarists Ian Haug and Ashley Naylor, multi-instrumentalist Jeffrey Cain and now new drummer Nicholas Meredith. 

“The great thing about it is that the guys in the band now were teenage fans of The Church,” Kilbey says. “I’m 15 years older than all the other guys in the band. It’s given them more appreciation for what The Church is than the original guys. It wasn’t such a sacred or wonderful thing to them.

“Everybody was concerned with jockeying for position and money and women and drugs and fame and success and blame and failure, and I don’t think the guys in the band realized how amazing what we were doing was,” he continues. But as a longtime fan, Naylor is still in disbelief.

“The Church have always maintained a certain mystique that often eludes other artists in this country. Perhaps it’s because their music is willfully uncommercial and uncompromising. As teenagers, my friends and I thought of them as being very cool, I can’t put it any other way,” Naylor says. He joined in 2020, and says, “working in the studio with Steve has been a revelation. I had no preconceived ideas of working with Steve, but I am always encouraged by his willingness to let the music breathe and enable us all to contribute to the process. He is a visionary who is not autocratic.”

This harmony has been a long time coming, Kilbey admits, as his long career has had its share of ups and downs. From the start, he quickly learned that success in the music industry never happens the way you want, but you just have to keep searching.

Kilbey was born in England, and his family moved to Australia when he was 5, eventually settling in Canberra. He likes that in-between aspect: not quite English, not quite Australian. “I can choose, a bit,” he says, never locked into anything.

The original version of The Church, which featured guitarists Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes and founding drummer Nick Ward (who was later eventually replaced by Richard Ploog), came of age during Australia’s pub rock boom, the continent’s scrappy answer to the late ’70s punk explosion, a time when Kilbey says it was possible for a young band to play to enthusiastic crowds every night. Even then, he was desperate to break away from the pack.

“We’re opening for these really terrible bands during the explosion. And I was going, ‘I’ll do anything for a hit,’” he remembers, chuckling. “And then in my deluded fantasy, I do a deal with the devil, and he says, ‘I’m giving you a hit, and then he says it’s going to be an ‘Aussie beer barn anthem.’”

He shakes his head, admitting that he was going for a “David Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Euro romantic singing about cold Nordic cities and such,” but instead he ended up co-writing (along with Mikella Parker, his wife at the time) “The Unguarded Moment,” a straightforward, fists-up pumping rock anthem that I, along with many of his fans, enjoy but that he continues to roll his eyes at. 

“We had the hit, but it was an uncomfortable hit because I didn’t like it. And it became the only song that people wanted to hear for a while,” he continues. “So we were running around playing to a lot of people who didn’t really like us, so we had to leave the song right until the end. And it was confusing because the song wasn’t that much different from the other songs we were playing. So the whole thing left me troubled.” 

He didn’t care much for The Church’s 1981 debut album Of Skins and Heart either, as he feels it’s overproduced and doesn’t really capture the band’s essence. “Don’t start with the first album,” he says, instead pushing the 1982 follow-up as the ideal entry point for newbies. “Start with The Blurred Crusade because it’s there that I feel we should have turned into ourselves.”  

Around this time he also signed a publishing deal, about which he insists, “I had no idea that the songwriters made all the money. The record came out. It was quite a big success; it went gold. But the guys in the band didn’t earn any money because it cost so much to make it,” he says. “The publishing started flowing in immediately, and I was getting big checks for $8,000 while the rest of the band had nothing. That also started off a winter of discontent in the band. 

“So there I was. I had my hit that I always wanted,” he continues. “It hadn’t been exactly the way I thought it would happen, and the band had an acrimonious relationship with each other. And a lot of the places we played, the people thought we were snobbish ratbags, which we kind of were, in a way. I got to admit, we did have a bad attitude. We had a bad attitude towards the audience, and we had a bad attitude towards each other.”

The next few years were a struggle for The Church, especially as they tried to break into America, which was always one of their main goals. Some of this, he admits, was their own doing. He angered his record company by bailing on an opening slot for Duran Duran that was supposed to break them to a bigger audience in the U.K. “I had a few goes at that and realized what we were up against,” he says. “There was no point. Their crowd hated us.” 

A U.S. tour with fellow post-punks Echo & the Bunnymen was a much better fit, and their 1985 album Heyday was their first to chart in America and developed a following amongst college radio types. But that wasn’t enough for their label Warner Bros., which dropped the band. “And we were back in the wilderness.”

The Church was planning to sign with a small English label when, to their surprise, Arista Records approached them. They were even more surprised when the label’s head, the legendary record industry insider Clive Davis, correctly predicted that “Under the Milky Way” would be a breakout hit. “The song kind of entered the picture as a bit of a dark horse, and the producers didn’t really like it that much. And the two guitarists weren’t that interested,” he says. “But they brought Clive Davis in when we finished the album and we played him this song, and we played him that song. 

“Then Arista, they treated it like it was a foregone conclusion that it was going to be a hit because Clive Davis had said so. They pulled out all the stops to make this a hit,” he remembers. “And they flew journalists to an observatory and would play them the album and ‘Milky Way’ would come on and they’d lay back the seats and open up the room while it was playing.”

And while record company promotional muscle certainly makes a difference, “Under the Milky Way” became an enduring nocturnal anthem because “I think I struck just the right level of ambiguity for people for it to be relatable to everybody who heard it,” he says. “They could impose their own life story or feelings or whatever they wanted and get out of it. And I think never before and never since have I managed to write such an ambiguous song.

Released in 1988, Starfish remains the band’s most popular album in America. Lush, moody, and opaque, it arrived just as underground groups like R.E.M. and the Cure were starting to take alternative rock into the American arenas. But if Starfish was their most popular album, the 1990 follow-up Gold Afternoon Fix was their most difficult. Feeling pressure to repeat their commercial success, The Church were fighting with each other and producer Waddy Wachtel, who had drummer Richard Ploog fired, all while Kilbey was beginning to use heroin. 

Looking back on it, Kilbey admits “the songs we wrote were really half-assed,” he says. “The fight for success had kept the band together and kept the focus. And then when we had the success of ‘Under the Milky Way’ and Starfish, the band no longer had any cohesion.” The single “Metropolis” did well on modern rock radio, but Kilbey still dismisses it, saying, “it wasn’t the hit we needed. It didn’t have the thing that ‘Under the Milky Way’ had,” he says. “Yeah, it’s a good song. But good has never been good enough for The Church, because we always have this expectation of ourselves and other people have an expectation of us.”

While it wasn’t the commercial comeback Arista hoped for, the epic, vision-quest psychedelia of 1992’s Priest=Aura is viewed by many fans as their masterpiece, a take Kilbey doesn’t dispute. “I know I could never make another album like that again. I just think it was just a wonderful set of circumstances that we had,” he says. “We still had the record company behind us. We had a really good producer, Gavin MacKillop, who they brought in. They realized we weren’t going to be the next U2; they knew we weren’t going to be a load of hits, but we still got a good studio, a good producer, and a decent budget. All the pressure was off. When we were writing that music, everything we did, to me, was turning to gold. Sometimes working on music is like pulling teeth. But it all just happened so marvelously without effort.”

The ’90s were a difficult time for Kilbey, who struggled with heroin addiction until he got clean in 2000. “It was a terrible struggle, and I made music despite being a drug addict, not because it was helping me. Being a junkie makes your life hard from the moment you wake up to when you go to sleep. I still made some OK records, I think. But it was awful; it wasn’t like I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t being wasted in some attic being all pale and dressed in black, sort of like a vampire,” he says. 

“It was being hot and sweaty out on the street somewhere, dealing with people who you didn’t want to be dealing with, spending all day running around. I had some absolutely terrible experiences. I guess I’m lucky to still be here to tell the tale because I naively wandered around places where I had no business being, trying to score heroin,” he continues. “Places in America where only my sheer naivety meant that I didn’t end up getting stabbed or shot because I was so stupid thinking I could wander around and score drugs in Cincinnati, or wherever the fuck I was.”

Once clean, he began embarking on a journey of self-discovery. He took up painting after his brother put out some of his demos on a small label and asked him to make a cover. “I was very hard up for money. We’re talking about the year 2000. I thought I could start painting and selling my paintings to my fans,” he says. “I sort of taught myself as I went. I approached it like my music, and I sort of made it up as I went along. Sometimes it’s very hard to start, but what I’m always learning is to trust the process,” a belief that has helped him become a bit of a renaissance man who has written books of poetry and essays and has had his paintings featured in exhibits.

As part of his inward journey, he has also come to believe he is on the autism spectrum. Though he has never been formally diagnosed (and isn’t really interested in doing so), he first began to suspect something when his nephew was diagnosed as such, and his brother said, “This is you. Now we know why you acted the way you act. Because you’ve got whatever he’s got,” he says, acknowledging that he wasn’t always the easiest person to get along with when he was young.

“When you’re talking about mental health, one of the things in the old days when they would assess somebody’s mental health, the psychiatrist would say, ‘I’m going to say some words, and you say the first word that comes into your head. ‘If they said to you the word “dog,” you were supposed to say “walk,”” he says. “But if you came up with some other word, a word that shouldn’t really be associated with that, then you could have something called semantic hyperpriming, where you could associate any word with any other word. I feel like I’ve always had that. And it’s worked out for me because I’m a lyricist, and I’ve turned this thing around to benefit.”

He adds, “and now marijuana amplifies that, and those things have helped me write all this music because I have a well of inspiration that other normal people may not have.”

His band also went through a period of reinvention in this century. Koppes left in 2019 (he was also gone for a period in the ’90s before rejoining in 1997) and Willson-Piper left in 2013. Kilbey understands that longtime fans have attachments to the older line-up, but he doesn’t pretend to share them. “I think it’s only understandable that people go, ‘oh, I miss Marty. And my first reaction is to go, ‘I fucking sure don’t. I can understand why you do. He brought a lot of good music with him. And he was a real character. 

“I also understand people think that the new band can’t be as good as the old band. And on paper, it never looks good when there’s just one original guy, and he’s got a bunch of new players. I myself would be very suspicious about that,” he admits. “But I think we are actually better live than we were because there isn’t all that argument. Like towards the end, with those guys, it was just so much; there were so many tantrums. In the old band, there was so much subtext. It’s unbelievable, like a marriage. We could never really have a conversation because everything was so loaded and there were so many trespasses from the past that were unforgiven.”

He’s spent this decade both pushing The Church forward (he notes that the new members have all contributed to the songwriting) while honoring the past, particularly on a recent greatest hits tour of America. He admits he hasn’t always gotten the balance right (he looks chagrined when he admits The Church signed up for an unenjoyable ’80s nostalgia cruise headlined by Poison), but to his delight, lately he’s noticed that when The Church tours, their crowds have gotten increasingly younger and more diverse.

“When we toured America, there were lots of young people there. There were lots of young people coming with their parents, which is really weird for me because although I love my dad, you never would have seen me going along with my dad to see something my father liked, or vice versa,” he says. “There’s also young people who aren’t there with their parents. And when we do meet and greets, I’m like, ‘why is a guy of 21 coming to see The Church? What do you find in this?’”

For most of this century, his audience was older white “blokes” with advanced degrees, whom he was always appreciative of. But he’s also happy that “there is diversity now. There are people who aren’t white, who aren’t straight, who aren’t lawyers, and I welcome them as amazing. I love it when I meet someone who, on paper, you wouldn’t think would love The Church. And I love that they have embraced us.”

He’s a bit pleasantly confused by this development, so I explain that shoegaze, and its gentler sonic cousin dream pop, have become very au courant among younger, TikTok- and Instagram-savvy music listeners who have discovered that the ageless genres both reflect and soothe the widespread isolation of modern times. He was familiar with the terms, as his daughters Elektra and Miranda have a group called Say Lou Lou that been tagged with the genre name, but he wasn’t quite aware the extent to which The Church have been grandfathered into the dream pop world, though he was well pleased once I broke it all down for him.

“I think pop music should be dreamy,” he notes. “I hate when movies or art or music or anything is about the mundane day to day life. I want something extraordinary to happen in the music. So if pop music incorporates the feeling of dreaming, I’m all for that. I think that’s where it should be going.”

If anything, accessing that somnambulant, hazy, in-between state has been the central goal of The Church, a platonic goal he’s been chasing his entire career, a feeling he can never fully grasp but which he can convey like few others. “I think I was always trying to get it. The very first time I sat down with an electric guitar and had a band, I was going, ‘I’m going to make this dreamy music,’” he says. “I’ve always been trying to get to where I am trying to pull off a pseudo-spiritual experience. That’s why the band’s called The Church. Every record I make, every show I do is all dedicated to that idea and trying to get other people to sort of see it that way and keep them all on the straight and narrow.”

And with that, our time is up and he excuses himself, as The Church needs to get back to rehearsing, and there’s also another album to write, more new converts to find, and more dreams to dream up.

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