My solo albums represent the automatic, raw, unpolished version of what I do – I play all or most of the instruments myself, and I do the engineering and mixing too. Whether you think that’s a good thing or a bad thing depends on you. Some prefer the undiluted Kilbey and some prefer it focused through the prism of The Church.
HEYDAY WAS A great album, but I was a very prolific writer and I was writing tons of songs I wanted to get out there. So I decided I needed to make some solo records. My first attempt was a single called ‘This Asphalt Eden’, recorded at EMI. It cost a fortune and somehow got fucked up in the process.
Then I had a good sift through all the stuff I was recording on my new eight-track machine – there was definitely enough good stuff for an album. Fatboy Studios down the road from me had the same machine I had, and some more gear for mixing. I took it in there and a brilliant guy called Pauly Simmons sprinkled fairy dust all over the bastard. In the end I had a nice little solo album with some good artwork and a local release on the small independent label Red Eye. The tracks were kind of all over the place; I suppose I imagined it was like Brian Eno’s Another Green World or something …
Some independent charts had just started up in Sydney and my album went to Number One – gee that felt pretty good, though it didn’t really mean a great deal of sales. It made me feel slightly more relevant, but the album got mixed reviews. One said it was ‘music for dentists’ waiting rooms’. But some people liked the demo feel of it. It does contain some good and real songy songs as well: ‘There’s Nothing Inside’ and a final song for Jennifer called ‘Othertime’.
There’s some great electronic-type tracks as well like ‘Swamp-drone’ and ‘Rising Sun’, which is me getting the very most out of my old analog mono synth. And there’s ‘My Birthday the Moon Festival’, which is a weird little number done on a very cheap drum machine. Actually the drum machine part was what most people didn’t like: they’d hoped for an album with real drums but I had no way of recording real drums in my tiny bedroom studio in Rozelle! Anyway, I always liken my solo albums to sketches and see my Church albums as paintings. And they both have their own place in the scheme of things.
Around this time I decided to write a book of poetry. I’d been writing loads of poetry while we waited for Heyday to be released, sitting at an actual typewriter banging stuff out. The book was called Earthed. Yes it was a real hodgepodge of ideas and writing styles. Some of it reads really badly today and probably didn’t read much better then. A lot of it is to do with a character called Neumann who is some sort of spy. The whole idea is a little bit of a cop from Michael Moorcock and his Jerry Cornelius character to tell the truth, which is strange because I’d stopped reading Moorcock about ten years before I wrote Earthed. But I remember reading in one of the Jerry Cornelius books that Moorcock invited people to take up the tale where he left off. I guess I kind of did.
Earthed is sometimes OK and sometimes it’s a bit mediocre and merely derivative – when the book isn’t about Neumann’s vague adventures it’s a kind of exercise in this prose poetry style that I was trying to develop. It was based on the idea of looking like prose but doing the kind of things within it that a poet could do, like huge leaps of the imagination and trans-magical realism. I printed 2000 copies of the book with a little help from Mr Phil Tripp, and sold every one either by mail-order or actually walking around the hip record shops in Sydney and selling to them as needed. It surely must be one of the most successful poetry books ever published in Australia, where selling a hundred copies is considered pretty damn good!
The poems are about all the usual Kilbey preoccupations: drugs, magic, ancient Greece, religion, etc. To make matters even more confusing, I then released an album called Earthed, which was an instrumental album vaguely based on incidents in the book. The album also went to Number One in the Australian Indie charts, which was again a nice bit of encouragement. Like the book, the record is a bit of a grab-bag of sounds. There’s some very good stuff on there and there’s some for aficionados only, you might say. It was like I loved the idea of the album and the book but, typically, I didn’t follow through as much as I could or should have. Which is a shame, as it was halfway there, but I wanted the book and record out there much more than I wanted to do the serious work of getting the material ready. I just kind of knocked it all out casually thinking it was very surrealist of me (you know, doing things in an ‘automatic’ way). At the time I said I’d released the book ‘to impress girls in nightclubs’, which actually got me a little cartoon in The Sydney Morning Herald.
The book got some hilarious reactions. Particularly memorable was ‘J Wallace Grubblesnutch’, who slammed it with the headline ‘Earth to Kilbey, Earth to Kilbey’. Yes I guess it’s true: the book was a little pretentious and a little silly in places. On the other hand I’ve heard from many people over the years who were impressed or influenced by what they found in it. I’ve even heard from people who were so taken with the poems that they became an archaeologist or a professor in Ancient Greek, like I wanted to … remember?
Eventually in 1988 Ryco released a CD of Earthed, which came with the book reduced to a flimsy little booklet, which took away from its original snazziness. I’d used the best and thickest paper available for the original so the booklet seemed a bit lightweight in comparison, robbing the poetry of some of its gravitas.
Meanwhile Heyday had come out to nearly unanimously good reviews in November 1985. Australia seemed to reappraise The Church because of this record. Suddenly our shows were full again and people were excited by what we were doing. We were back on the front covers of the music rags – not as defeated has-beens but as reinvigorated champs. The American music press also began to give us very good reviews, in important magazines too: Heyday was generally accepted as a good record right across the board and was getting college airplay.
We embarked on a huge tour of everywhere. Starting off in Australia we played a gig in all the big cities and then some. Then we hit America opening up for Echo and the Bunnymen, playing in large theatres and small halls. Echo and the Bunnymen were a very hip band at the height of their powers and success; live, they were formidable and put on a good show. Their audiences were receptive to us and we definitely made some converts. It seemed there was room for at least two hip bands in the universe.
The Bunnymen had a new drummer playing with them called Blair Cunningham. He was the most friendly of the whole bunch and would actually sit down and talk to us. The guitarist and bassist seemed sullen and unhappy and the singer Ian was never with the others. He travelled on his own and avoided talking to anyone other than his minder – a big Aussie guy called Ted Gardner, who accompanied him everywhere.
Ian wasn’t beholden to sound check schedules or anything: he often waltzed in five minutes before the gig started and then no one got a sound check. I noted that his own band were as furious with him as we were. I mean come on, it’s great that Ian’s on a star trip but the rest of us wanna get a fucking sound check in! Ian did eventually speak to me at the very last gig, though it was hard understanding his thick Liverpudlian accent. He said something about how he didn’t think it would work out with us initially but was happy to say we weren’t bad for a bunch of long-haired Aussie hippies. Gee thanks!
There were whispered tales of long lines of girls at his door and long lines of coke on his mirror but I never saw any of that. But he was certainly succumbing to his own myth, and I wasn’t surprised when the band broke up amid various shambles. He’d made the mistake of thinking he didn’t need them, even though he quite patently did. The others then made the mistake of trying to carry on with a new singer, and the resulting album was torture. There was a lot to be learnt from all this – I simultaneously envied Ian and felt contempt for his star behaviour. As bad as I’ve been or ever could be, I would always turn up for sound checks and try not to let crews and other musicians down.
Throughout the tour a slow smouldering resentment was building up in Marty and being flung in my general direction. It got worse and worse every day. Eventually the oblique and cryptic remarks turned into full-on insults as he began to decide that he hated me. By the time we got to Europe it was turning into an all-out feud. The Church played at the first-ever Hultsfred Festival in Sweden, and in the middle of a song I walked over to Marty to indicate that I didn’t know where we were in the song. I was shrugging my shoulders and, laughing, asking him to help me. Apparently he thought I was telling him to get fucked.
A few nights later in Hamburg the shit really hit the fan: he said he wasn’t gonna play on the same stage as me. He said he’d do the gig on the side of the stage but not on it. Boy he was an angry little camper that night! He imagined himself Fletcher Christian about to throw off the yoke of the oppressive Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. In Marty’s fevered mind I was every rotten villain all rolled into one. Actually I was a tired and silly musician, who probably had said some stupid things, as well as being wilfully misinterpreted by others looking for something to complain about. As the time approaching our gig grew nearer we said some childish things to each other – bands are a hotbed for hurtful, childish comments; being a cross between a family and a little business you can imagine there was a bit of pushing about.
‘Come on,’ I remember Marty saying, ‘I’d have you for breakfast!’
Not being much of a fighter I had no doubt he could. One of our roadies jumped up and restrained Marty saying, ‘I’m not gonna let you hit Killer!’ (my nickname being Killer Kilbey … duh!).
When Peter Koppes tells this tale he says that at this point I started throwing grapes at Marty. I’m not sure if I did or not. You’d think I’d have remembered, wouldn’t you? Grapes or no grapes Marty stormed off into that good Hamburg night and disappeared. I informed the crowd that we’d be doing the gig as a three piece and if they wanted to go now they could get their money back. No one left. Thank God it was Marty who left and not Peter because Marty’s parts weren’t as crucial to the songs as Peter’s.
We played a furious and punkish set: bootlegs of it are in circulation and you can certainly feel the desperate energy of the night. The next morning I contacted our management and told ’em Marty had gone. It came at a bad time; we had gigs in London already on sale and Heyday was in the US charts at about 150. But Marty’s simmering petulance had to run its course.
With Marty gone I flew back to Stockholm to hang with Karin and try to figure out what to do next. I rang Craig Hooper in Australia and asked him if he’d like to join temporarily so we could fulfill our commitments – Craig had already played keyboards with us on some Australian tours and was a great player and a very nice guy. He agreed, and even cancelled some Reels gigs (his main band) to do it. It would’ve been a good thing I’m sure.
Marty was in Stockholm too and I heard through the grapevine that his girlfriend wasn’t impressed with his sudden resignation and had advised him in no uncertain terms to get his job back quick smart. So one day he rang me up and we met up at the Bistro Boheme in Drottninggatan, the very one where I had read the graffiti about Karin. We talked the whole thing through: it was, as I imagined, all a storm in a teacup. We both promised to behave ourselves and be nicer to each other for the sake of the band, but the subtext was really that Marty didn’t like me or approve of the way I carried on. I, for my part, agreed to stay out of his way and try not to offend his delicate sensibilities.
So what did I do to piss him off so much? Well I don’t think I was as bad as some have made out. I smoked quite a bit of weed, and therefore was always going up and down a bit with that; you know how the initial burst of talkativeness eventually breaks down into a blurry torpor? But I only drank one or two shots of spirits during shows. First it was scotch, then it was mescal, and then finally I ended up on Jagermeister or Unicum Zwack, the Hungarian herbal aperitif.
But getting back to those undesirable qualities that would make any band member flee a group in horror: I was sarcastic and negative. It must’ve been hard for the others to hear me moaning on about our lack of success. Even after we did two sold-out nights at the Marquee Club in London I was still moaning because I wished we were somewhere bigger. The music biz wound you up and fed you all these expectations and I was getting despondent. People were always whispering in my ear, telling me how big we should be and how big somebody else was. No wonder I was always in some hyper-competitive mode with every other group in the universe. I was becoming a bit cynical and a bit vacant and a bit unreliable and fickle I guess.
Italy was a surreal experience for The Church. We opened for The Cult, who were quite big there. Just like Echo and the Bunnymen, the players in The Cult were lovely guys but the singer was a real ponce on a stupid star trip. Needless to say he didn’t lower himself by talking to the support band. Live, The Cult were just another band rehashing some AC/DC licks. The singer put on a good show but the music and words were empty clichés. It pissed me off to have to support this malarkey and it pissed me off more that the audiences liked them way more than us! Envy and jealousy were definitely alive and well in my mind: they simultaneously hindered me from achieving my goals while goading me forward to keep doggedly trying.
In Italy I became really good friends with a guy from EMI Italy called Ernesto. He had a great big BMW bike and we sped around through all kinds of weather, me nervously hanging onto the back of the bike as we rode about doing all kinds of different press – for a few years back then it constantly seemed like The Church were just about to take off in Italy and Spain. A lot of people really dug us and our record companies dug deep into their pockets for more publicity.
We went down to Rome, the eternal city (officially my favourite city in the world). We ate the most wonderful food and drank the most wonderful wine at outdoor restaurants during the charged Roman evenings. Afterwards we played a bowling game in these special lanes set aside for after-dinner entertainment. Ploogy of course decided on the situationist stuff again, and bowled the balls at the feet of the guys from EMI Italy, giggling while he did it. Luckily everyone ended up laughing when it was determined there was no harm in it.
A few weeks before at a posh Madrid restaurant we’d been eating dinner and Ploog had started flicking his paella at Marty, and Marty had retaliated and flicked a big dollop on Ploog’s face. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Ploog loaded up his fork with paella, bent it back and let it go. The paella, which held together as it whizzed through the air, sailed over Marty’s head and – wouldn’t you just know it! – hit a very patrician-looking lady in her 50s who was eating dinner with her husband, who looked like a Spanish nobleman. He was absolutely beside himself as his wife tried to get the gooey rice out of her hair.
Marty could speak fluent Spanish so he translated what happened next: the nobleman demanded ‘satisfaction’ from Ploog for this grave insult to his wife; I like to think he meant an actual fucking duel. Imagine Ploog with a pistol at seventeen paces; I could’ve been his second! But our record company guy placated the nobleman by explaining we were a bunch of Aussies and Englishmen and that we were uncouth yobbos not worthy of his ire. The guy glared at Ploog, but was eventually persuaded to sit down and resume his dinner while Ploogy narrowly avoided some real old-world bother.
Meanwhile someone at EMI Italy had come up with the brilliant idea of sending The Church around Italy with a travelling pageant of pop artists. Yep, in the marketplaces of these cute towns we would mime ‘Tantalized’ to a bunch of puzzled Italians who didn’t know what to make of us. Also in the line-up were The Blow Monkeys, and Limahl from Kajagoogoo, and an Italian singer called Sexy Girl who performed with a koala strapped to her back for no discernible reason …
We turned up in one town on the Adriatic coast and stayed in the kind of hotel James Bond would’ve stayed in. Overlooking the slightly misty Adriatic Sea, there were crumbling columns on the shore and everything! We all had a dip in the water, which was so warm and inviting. We feasted in the dining room overlooking the sea where we could order anything we liked regardless of the cost. Our English tour manager Mickey constantly strained relations with EMI Italy by ordering those $250 bottles of Vin de Ruff, as he called them. Ploogy, in situationist mode again, started having the drum kit set up stupidly or missing the kick drum to see if anybody in the crowd noticed. I noticed and it looked stupid but I didn’t care.
Soon Ploogy began to disappear before the shows. A classic example was when Mickey was sitting backstage sampling another bottle of Vin de Ruff, and the guy from EMI Italy comes running in saying no one could find Ploogy and we’re on in five minutes. ‘You must find Richard!’ the guy is screaming at Mickey.
After tasting the wine again and beckoning the waiter for more Mickey says, ‘You fuckin’ find him!’ In his own way, though, Ploog was protesting against the silliness of miming – I tended to agree.
We had a few days off and Ernesto invited us to his family villa on Lake Como. You cannot even begin to believe how beautiful it is there; words fail even an old Italian-loving fool like me. Karin came in from Sweden and we swung in hammocks, drank even more wine and walked the ancient streets. It was a magical rest even though tensions were always present.
We returned to England and played a triumphant sold-out gig at the Town and Country. England was still keen on us despite a few bad reviews. One guy, Steve Sutherland, who’d sung our praises earlier, seemed to be standing in line to give our albums a bad review. He dismissed Heyday contemptuously with some glib putdowns describing ‘Happy Hunting Ground’ as sounding like ‘Felt stumbling through a Big Country rehearsal’. No it didn’t actually … the cloth-eared ninny.
Talking of disasters, I have to mention our gig in Stockholm at the Moderna Museet. Man, of all the places for something to go wrong! We were headlining this hip outdoor gig in the middle of Stockholm in summer. We should’ve fucking aced it! We turned up for the sound check and they had a brand new magnificent PA. The guitars were very loud but it was a very big stage so that was OK. They also had a very powerful monitor system that allowed me to hear my own voice above the drums and guitars. We played a few songs and I got it the way I wanted it, with nothing in my monitors except my own voice. We sounded great.
Another band was in line to sound check. The technician swore he wouldn’t touch my monitors; he didn’t need to – he had enough channels on his own desk. Sorted, I went backstage where everyone was jubilant. Karin and all her family were there, as was Marty’s new girlfriend Ann and her family. We were finally going to claim Stockholm as our own. It was such a perfect day; we smoked some Swedish hash and waited to go on, confident we were about to slay ’em dead. Yeah right!
We walked on stage to much applause. Everyone knew we had Swedish girlfriends and spent a lot of time there; they were willing us to succeed! But it was not to be. The first song ‘Myrrh’ started up. That incredible beginning as it gets more and more intense, symbolising to me a body vibrating as the soul departs in astral travel. The imminent take-off. It sounded fantastic ringing out over the Moderna Museet gardens. But as I got near my microphone I realised something was terribly wrong. The guitars were both coming out of my monitors at an earsplitting level. It was excruciating; I could hardly get near the microphone to sing. Then I discovered my voice was not in the monitors at all. It was the very opposite of what I needed – I couldn’t tell if the audience were hearing my voice either; I couldn’t tell anything over the roaring racket of the guitars. Apparently it sounded perfect out the front. But slowly I got angry and despondent and then bitter and surly when the monitor guy couldn’t or wouldn’t get the guitars out of my wedges.
The audience started slow clapping and calling out ‘COME ON!’ It sounded fine to them; they couldn’t understand the hell my ears were in just trying to cope with the noise. Eventually Marty attempted to swear in Swedish and it went down like a lead balloon. The sound onstage finally came good for the last half hour of the show, but by then we’d lost a lot of the audience’s goodwill and they started leaving. We’d really made a mess of it through no fault of our own. I wasn’t a hero among Karin’s people like I hoped I’d be: I was still the guy who always managed to blow it.
Then we headed back to America, where good reviews and goodwill from the Bunnymen tour had actually translated to a tangible increase in audiences. We killed it again at the Ritz in New York and our travels took us to San Francisco where I again encountered the incredibly seductive Donnette Thayer, a big-time Church fan and all round gorgeous babe. I certainly succumbed to her many charms that night! We both had partners but … wow she was a very cool American woman. She was incredibly pretty and feisty, but it wasn’t so easy to stay in touch in 1986 so that was it for a while.
So The Church wended its way back to Australia and did another umpteen gigs that were all well attended. We had new clout and new authority. The Aussies had handed us a new mandate to rock. For me, the old days of snottiness and arrogance were replaced with a trippy wonder and a desire to recede as a personality and bring music itself to the forefront of my work.
The press gave us a second chance, and a new wave of critics sprang out of high school worshipping us the way the old guard Aussie press never did. We’d kicked a goal with Heyday. We’d stayed in good places, drunk the finest whiskey and the best wine. We’d partaken of nice drugs and had met nice women. In Australia we had a new confidence and strength.
In those days established bands used to tour with an up-and-coming band that the agency chose to open for you. One such band was The Venetians, who were a new romantic band who were vaguely threatening to make it, but our audiences always hated them. This amused me to no end because The Venetians were a very jumped-up bunch of characters and took the game oh so seriously. They were a nice enough bunch of guys, but individually they were quite catty and bitchy. Even worse than The Church!
Their drummer Tim and I were never friends; to me he seemed the most stuck up of the whole lot. He was a good-looking young guy and he sure had all that complicated technology sorted out. I am ashamed to say I enjoyed standing offstage seeing them go down so badly. Their songs were shockingly awful 80s blather. They were trying so hard to be something that they simply weren’t – these guys should’ve opened for Duran Duran, that was the field they were in. It’s a strange thing indeed that Tim would come back into my life. I never picked it, he certainly didn’t seem like Church material at the time!
And then we got some bad news: Warner Bros. had dropped us. Gulp! Who was left?