I was constantly battling the zeitgeist. Everyone was trying to make us oh so 80s but The Church were not an 80s band – even though we began in the 1980s we were trying to be a classic rock band.
IN 1987 ARISTA Records offered us a contract. It came entirely out of the blue; they just rang our manager one day. Just like that. Unsolicited. It was like waiting to catch a minnow and suddenly you got a whale on the line. I believe our manager asked for a lot of money and that may be true but very little of it came to the band. Instead we got to fly to LA and make an album with these two big-shot producers, Waddy Wachtel and Greg Ladanyi, at a place called The Complex, a huge set of studios all fitted out with the latest knobs and whistles.
We were accommodated at the Oakwood Apartments complex on Sepulveda Boulevard, and those of us that drove had cars hired for us. Ploogy and I shared one apartment, while Marty and Peter shared another across the garden. There were swimming pools and gyms and all that kind of thing. Arista had a vision for us and they thought Waddy and Ladanyi were the right ones to help us sell records in the US.
I had a funny feeling something good would come of it. I mean I knew we’d clash with these guys, whatever they wanted to do with us; we were argumentative at a basic cellular level, with each other and everyone else too. We each knew what we wanted from our music and compromising sometimes brought grown men to tears … We just weren’t into all those embarrassing 80s touches, like the whacking great snare drum punctuating the song with a massive wallop or the corny machine handclaps or the wimpy Mickey Mouse keyboard sounds. We didn’t like bass guitars with no heads, mullet hairdos or skinny ties. Or anything to do with new romantic, heavy metal or country and western music for that matter. We had a sense of ourselves coming from greater traditions. And we consciously and unconsciously understood what was and was not to be included in The Church.
Waddy was a famous sideman and musical-director type. He brought a lot of energy and a lot of discipline with him. He was pale and skinny and had a big mop of frizzy red hair and ran a band like a sergeant major drilling his troops. He usually had on a pair of John Lennon–style glasses too. He looked like a Furry Freak Brother come to life and acted like one too; he had a prodigious appetite for drugs. The blow never seemed to knock him around or distract him. He fucking batted on regardless. He must’ve had the system of a horse to endure the total chemical hiding he gave it every day.
On the other hand Greg Ladanyi couldn’t handle the stuff with such aplomb. He was all over the shop on the blow. Suddenly enthusiastic, suddenly deflated, suddenly and usually angry. He was about the same age as Waddy, round the 40 mark I guess. But he wasn’t travelling as well. His relationship with each member of The Church was troubled – he gravitated towards Marty at first and they were friends for a time until Marty strongly disagreed with him over some guitar idea. Then he and Peter clashed and he hurt Peter’s feelings, unnecessarily I thought. Ploog, he just couldn’t fathom.
My relationship with the producers was complex: I’d decided to let Waddy guide me and see where that got me … at least for a while. I’d made a conscious decision to listen to whatever he said and not immediately kick back. My whole musical life I’d instantly rejected any suggestions as to how I might improve things. I decided, as a situationist exercise almost, to put my cool hip self into this LA mainstream rock guy’s hands and see what strange thing might emerge.
I could never really figure out what Ladanyi was supposed to do – he was like a vibe merchant I suppose. He’d come rushing in the room after having a line or two and run around clapping his hands exhorting, ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ But he didn’t make much attempt to hide his contempt for us. One day he was reading Rolling Stone and he yelled out to Waddy, ‘Hey that fuckin’ Roger Kaputnik is engineering Springsteen’s next album … Fuck! Why haven’t we got that gig?’ Greg looked despairingly around the room at the bunch of unknown Aussie hippies he was stuck with.
‘And you’re here wasting your time with a bunch of unknown nobodies,’ I said.
Our eyes locked and he smirked, half in embarrassment, half in triumph. ‘Exactly!’ he muttered.
Anyway, Waddy was drilling us in this weird building in Santa Monica. Around us were troupes of actors and people making films and rehearsing and all kinds of things. The first morning we were to begin rehearsing I was lying in my Oakwood Apartments king-size double bed when I was woken by a diabolical racket. Alarmed, I jumped out of bed and went to the window to see where the racket was coming from. It was a rumbling, pounding, booming, shouting racket that I couldn’t comprehend at all. It was the first time in my life I’d ever heard rap music coming out of a car with a souped-up stereo system! And it shocked me. I was truly horrified to think of what it must’ve sounded like in the car itself. And what wreckage their ears would soon be in.
We’d arrived in LA with a bunch of songs we’d written individually or collectively back in Sydney just prior to coming over and now we spent a month drilling them down at this strange rehearsal place. We stood there and played those frickin’ songs over and over and over. Most had no lyrics; we drilled ’em as instrumentals. Waddy was there like the experienced pro taking in a crop of rookies – he was one of those classic characters who seems tough at first, but gradually reveals a heart of gold as things progress. He and I started to get along fine and became better friends as things went on.
At these drilling sessions all the focus seemed to be on the drums. Waddy was always searching for some elusive rhythm or timing or something. It was so important to him, though I couldn’t quite figure out what he was looking for. I sure was as tired as all fuck of playing those songs over and over. By the time they got on the record almost all the life had been beaten out of them: we played ’em as we had been drilled to play them. Tight and lean, with no surprises – especially in regards to the drums. No speeding up. No slowing down. Don’t vary the wallop or crash. Hit evenly. Richard was demoralised by all this and rightly so. All the marvellous flair and improvisation he’d shown on The Blurred Crusade and Heyday was now denied him. He was to act as a human drum machine.
Of course we should’ve stepped in; maybe if we’d been in Sydney we would have. But in LA I was so stoned and dazzled and preoccupied with everything else I just let it go. But Richard was falling victim to that nasty syndrome that happened a lot in the 80s, where bands get a top American or English producer and the first thing they do is sack the drummer. The 1980s did not suit drummers like Richard: he was a wild intuitive drummer; he didn’t play drums according to these new restricted tightened guidelines. He couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to, and it was at this point that he began to go under.
So while these rehearsals were easy – though tiring – for me, they must’ve been really tough on Richard. Waddy was meticulous and noticed every last thing everybody in the band was playing. If I made the slightest fumble or flam or slur or stumble he’d give me a piercing stare. But Richard took the brunt of his meticulousness. He could never escape or hide or deny the little mistakes he made; Waddy was used to working with these LA session drummers and he expected a drummer to be able to do his bidding exactly to the tee. And here we had Richard who played by feelings and had always done a fantastic job that way. Before this no one had told him exactly what to play and exactly how to play it and not to deviate from it. Richard was a guy who sat down at the kit and let the spirit of the music take over. He was right brain and Waddy was left, it was practically impossible for them to meet in the middle.
Meanwhile one night we were driving along and Ladanyi said, ‘Hey Kilbey, when’re we gonna do that song they sent me on your demo tape? It’s not such a bad song actually, I think we could do something with it,’ he said.
Embarrassingly enough it turned out he was talking about ‘The Unguarded Moment’ … the real finished version! I told him that was actually a song off our first album and had even already been a hit in Canada in 1982. When he realised his mistake he still tried to persuade me to re-record it for Starfish, thinking we could, with his help, record a ‘good’ version of it. Ha ha!
Meanwhile our days consisted of eating the best Mexican food and smoking the best Californian grass, as well as snorting cocaine with the producers. I don’t know what the LA music biz is like now but then cocaine was everywhere – we were all snorting it whenever we met anyone who had it, though the band never usually had their own supply. None of us were obsessed with it, though none of us said no either in those days. It sort of came with the territory and the studio. There was always a line to be had and they used to chop it up on the little flat bit next to the mixing desk. A few times the supply got interrupted and Ladanyi lost the plot. One day he said to me in all seriousness, ‘Kilbey have you got any cocaine because I feel a real bad attitude coming on!’
Another time someone procured a real big batch real cheap. I remember it was a kind of grey colour and that should’ve been enough warning – but hey I’ve seen heroin and cocaine come in a variety of rainbow colours and still found them to be efficacious. Anyway one little line of that grey cocaine made me feel weird-sick for three weeks after. It was weird enough at first but it got weirder and sicker later on, like sunburn. I knew enough from that first snort to leave it alone. Not Waddy and Greg, though, they went for it hard all day and night. The next day Waddy showed up but Greg didn’t – he wasn’t there for about a week. When he did show up he was grey-skinned and slack-jawed. He just lay there groaning and could hardly manage anything at all. After half an hour he was gone. But Waddy was unfazed and kept snorting that grey cocaine: ‘Fuck it!’ he said. ‘Might as well finish it now I’ve paid for it.’ And so he finished it all by himself.
As well as blagging coke from whoever had it, me and Ploogy were smoking pot like demons. One day we met this weird guy on the street and we went around his apartment where he played us music and showed Ploog how to freebase cocaine. We’d never seen freebasing before. I tried to intervene but was coming off as uncool so I just smoked the guy’s dynamite pot like a hypocrite and shut up. I avoided the guy from there on in but I think Ploog kept in touch. He wasn’t a bad guy but he was a wild character and not a good influence on Ploog. Not that any of us were – especially when you keep in mind Ploogy was only 24 at this stage and still very much a kid from Adelaide easily led astray.
Eventually we began recording the album proper. We set up in a huge room that looked like it used to be a basketball court and, just like in rehearsal, we played the songs over and over and over looking for the right take to suit Waddy’s elusive criteria. This was much harder work than we’d ever endured before. Nobody had ever driven us this hard and I still think it was probably unnecessary. We seemed to hammer all the life out of every song.
We worked on and recorded nine songs. There was a tenth as well, which our manager had asked us to record, which was ‘Under the Milky Way’. Marty and Peter weren’t that interested in it really. I wrote it in 1987 one night on a piano in a little flat out the back of my mother’s house in Smiths Lake. Karin had helped me write it. I’d cut the demo on my eight track at home, and that was pretty much the finished version. Richard really liked it too and agreed we should try it. Ironically he never got to play on it. It never got to be rehearsed at all actually since Waddy and Greg didn’t like it either, but we recorded it because our manager insisted.
Greg said I should do it on my own in the little midi studio inside The Complex – they had a new-fangled Synclavier workstation, which in 1987 was the top synth/sampler/sequencer in the world. There, a guy called Welles and I mapped out ‘Under the Milky Way’ and put on bass, drum machine and keys. (The sound in the solo is a backwards African bagpipe, which we put in there for a joke.) Welles and I worked away on the song while the other guys did other things in the big studio. Later Marty and Peter put the guitars on it. For drums Waddy decided it need a guy playing drum pads. He got in Russ Kunkel, who was one of the most famous session drummers out there at that time. Russ was a lovely guy, and he and Waddy spent a long time getting the drums and percussion just right; I really have to give that to Waddy, he helped get the beat of this song perfectly right. But at that stage of the game ‘Milky Way’ was the black sheep of the record. Nobody really liked it that much. Not even me.
When the bass parts were all done I was free to roam around LA and get into trouble. I hooked up with a few old girlfriends: one was Grace, who one day brought peyote over and we both went tripping inside the Oakwood Apartments. I jumped in the swimming pool and was totally out of my tiny mind. When I remembered to breathe I popped my head up to the surface and there was pretty little Grace sitting on a banana chair waving and smiling. She seemed to be having a good time. I, on the other hand, was troubled.
Later we went back to my apartment and it was a wonderful warm night perfect for romance. Instead, I spent the night apologising for what white men had done to the rest of the world. You see Grace was an Asian girl and I was experiencing some serious white guilt! So I apologised and apologised for hours. At first she was understanding, then bemused, then downright confused and bored as I banged on and on. I wonder what she made of all the nonsense I was spouting that night; it surely must’ve ruined her peyote trip.
Meanwhile Donnette Thayer knew I was in LA and would come down and visit me from San Francisco, where she lived with her boyfriend. They were in a band called Game Theory together. Donnette was one of the most alluring women I’ve ever met: she was sweet and languid and very intelligent. When I met her in 1986 she made it very clear she would always have time to see me. She made it perfectly obvious that I was her number one musician/ songwriter/whatever. She was like a devotee and her ardour was hard to resist.
Yes I already had a girlfriend but I guess we had one of those open relationships. Donnette, however, didn’t have an open relationship but she was prepared to see me no matter the consequences. She treated me like a real rock star in a way no one had done before, goading me to be reckless and stupidly confident. She could justify all my excesses and foibles. She made me feel like a hero. She turned up at the Oakwoods one day and I was made dopey by her petite sexiness and her tricky mind. Although I was her admired idol she teased me and provoked me all day long about almost everything, ‘Go on, Steve, you’re the rock star!’ she’d say all the time. She kept hopping on my lap, and insinuating herself all over me. Her body was lithe and light. She smoked and drank and swore and took sleeping pills. She always seemed slightly tired and vulnerable, like Marilyn Monroe, or at least that’s what I always thought. And, in her one-piece black costume down at the Oakwoods swimming pool, her figure blew Andre the sixteen-year-old pool guard’s mind: ‘Boy Steve you’re lucky having a girlfriend like that!’ he’d say as she swam through the blue water.
Donnette and I went to restaurants and cafes and smoked the pot she brought me from her mother who seemed to have some good connections. We talked about making a record together and I played her a few songs I’d written that weren’t for The Church, which we earmarked for a new joint project. Later we’d go on to make two albums together that I really still enjoy listening to, called Hex and Vast Halos.
Back at the studio when the music was done it was time to lay down the singing. Greg suggested that Peter and I go and have singing lessons in Hollywood and we both said yes just to spite him.
Singing lessons proved to be bizarre. There on Hollywood Boulevard up a few floors in the elevator was our singing teacher, Mark. I won’t say his last name … maybe he’s still there. But before he was a singing teacher he’d been a beefcake actor playing Samson in Italian biblical epics. Then, though, he sat behind a white baby grand playing scales for his pupils to sing. ‘La la la la la la la la la,’ he would sing and play as his voice traversed up the octave and back.
Then suddenly he’d stop and turn around and say, ‘Hey Steve, do the girls in Australia like to give head?’ An odd question, I thought.
He regarded me earnestly waiting for my answer. ‘Ah gee, uh, yeah Mark, I guess they do I suppose …’ I stuttered. What the fuck are you supposed to say to a question like that from a singing teacher on Hollywood Boulevard who used to play Samson?
Mark seemed cheered up by my answer. You could see him seeing himself arriving in Australia and all those head-giving women lining up to welcome him. ‘They do, do they?’ He said thoughtfully. Then suddenly we went back into the scales: ‘Try this! La la la la la la la la la.’
We’d sing for a couple of minutes then he’d say, ‘I had a woman come in here yesterday. She said, “Mark I’m the queen of the blow job.” So I said, “Honey get down on your knees and defend your title!”’ He let out a big guffaw before returning to scales. ‘Try this … la la la la la la la la la. Hey Steve, do the girls in Australia have big tits?’
I decided to humour him. ‘Oh yeah Mark!’ I said, ‘and not only that, they sunbathe topless on my favourite beach, Bondi.’
My singing teacher gazed off into the distance imagining all those naked Aussie bosoms turning a lovely golden shade under the southern summer sun. ‘Topless,’ he repeated, and rolled the word around in his mouth as though it was a delicious lolly. Our whole lesson he swung back and forth between his twin obsessions of fellatio and mammary glands.
‘A man shouldn’t get too many blow jobs, Steve.’ He said most sagely. ‘Steve, promise me you won’t get too many blow jobs!’ I promised solemnly to heed his advice. ‘That’s what’s wrong with all those big record execs like the guys at Arista,’ he said. ‘Too many blow jobs! It sucks the life out of ’em,’ he sadly opined. ‘Now try this: la la la la la la la la la.’
Eventually he confided to me sadly that his marriage had fallen apart. ‘Oh that’s no good!’ I said.
‘Yeah, some guy fucked my wife and farted on my sheets,’ he said. Wow! That sounded dismal! I went outside and waited for Peter to have his turn. When he came out Peter said Mark had said exactly the same things to him. And then he proceeded to do the same through every lesson we took with him – what a character! Greg said our voices had actually improved but I imagine it was a placebo effect; I never learnt much, but that Mark guy was some hilarious piece of work.
In the meantime I was beginning to write the lyrics for the album – as I said, most of the songs were just instrumental pieces. It made Greg nervous to work this way. He’d been asking for lyrics ever since we arrived in LA. When I didn’t have any he was surprised. ‘What are you gonna do … just make ’em up?!’ he demanded incredulously. He couldn’t see that that was exactly what I was going to do.
The stay in LA had definitely started to come out in the lyrics. One night we were having late-night sandwiches and chips at Canter’s Deli, a famous place for minor stars and their acolytes to hang out. A big cowgirl type approached me as I was leaving. Her opening line was a classic: ‘Whoever your girlfriend is I can fuck you better than her,’ she said. Back at her place (out of mere curiosity) I went into the bathroom for a pee. Standing there I heard something kind of scratchy. There was a rustling sound behind the shower curtain and I pulled it back to reveal a great big lizard sitting in the bathtub blinking at me. I jumped out of my skin and lost my nerve. Could that have been the catalyst for the lyrics of ‘Reptile’, one of my favourite songs from Starfish? It was all grist for the mill.
One day I went into the studio and more or less automatically wrote the prose poem that we put on the Starfish sleeve. It didn’t have much to do with the music or anything; just being so far away in space and time from my childhood in Canberra made me want to reassure myself. Writing about certain people and places and events always brought me closer to them, like writing these very words is doing now. I began approaching times long gone into the past as I sat there and wrote this piece and I tied it together by having the word Starfish in there. (I told you I wouldn’t be revealing the meaning of my songs like they’re a code that’s meant to be analysed and unpacked.)
I’d already decided that ‘Starfish’ was the main contender for the album’s name, it just felt so right to me. For a million reasons and absolutely none. Not everything has to have a sane rational reason behind it, especially in rock’n’roll. Although Arista still demanded an explanation – they wanted to call the album ‘Under the Milky Way’ but I wouldn’t budge. Neither would they. Finally I wrote them a long letter about why Starfish should be called Starfish. It was the most intense pseudo-poetic bullshit polemic that, hilariously, nobody could disagree with it. So I got to get my way. Blind ’em with science I always say!
A lot of people responded very positively to my nostalgic poem on the sleeve. I’m glad I wrote it. It showed another intimate side of what I do that perhaps might surprise given much of the sarcasm, irony and sophistry within the lyrics on Starfish.
After having had a bit of a breakthrough with Heyday, my lyrics had gotten more ‘moderne’ and a lot darker. On Starfish I was depicting a bleaker world than Heyday, which now seemed to be more naively optimistic. The album starts forebodingly and moves through different shades of melancholy – except for Marty’s ‘Spark’, which was youthful and exuberant, and Peter’s ‘New Season’, which was tranquil and soothing. One song, ‘North South East and West’ was all total LA stuff. ‘The numberplates that rhymed’ (BILL and JILL I think) were on two BMWs outside some mansion. ‘(Restore your lost soul for) two dollars plus toll.’ You sure heard that phrase a lot. ‘To a wolf from a lamb for just half a gram.’ Guess who that was about? ‘Wear a gun and be proud but bare breasts aren’t allowed.’ The US must be mad, I thought! But ‘North South East and West’ was also the band itself: four members moving in different directions …
Sometimes when The Complex was booked out we’d go to other studios around LA. One hot afternoon I arrived at another famous studio in the valley to find the door locked. I hammered on the door and a voice came over the intercom telling me the electronic door was jammed and that someone was coming to fix it. Could I wait?
A grey-haired guy in sunglasses was also waiting. ‘Fuckin’ door!’ he said. ‘But what can you do?’ So I sat down in the warm LA sun and had a chat with this guy about the weather and Australia and guitars and stuff. After a while the door jerked open and admitted us both into the air-conditioned world inside. We shook hands; he went to his studio and I to mine. ‘Nice to meet ya!’ he said as he walked away.
When I got into my studio the guys in there crowded around me asking, ‘How was Neil? What did you and Neil talk about?’ Fuck! I’d just spent the last 30 minutes talking with Neil Diamond. And I never even suspected I was talking to one of the greats … damn! I could’ve laid a copy of Starfish on him … you know, he just might have dug it!
Other famous people I met were Jackson Browne, who kindly lent us some amps – Jackson was impossibly boyish and incredibly gracious. Linda Ronstadt was another one I talked to without realising who she was. The Complex was a mecca for those Californian-sound musician types. I met some geezer from Toto as well, who was horrified that I’d neither heard of him nor gave a pinch of pelican’s poop for his band. I hate the kind of pompous stuff they played but they were all mates of Waddy and Ladanyi.
In the end doing the singing wasn’t particularly hard. Ladanyi was sometimes a pain in the ass demanding to know what this or that meant in my lyrics – ‘Hey Kilbey,’ he’d demand, ‘what the fuck is an exquisite fuckin’ corpse?!’ But before I could explain he’d cut me off mid-sentence saying, ‘Yeah yeah, I knew nobody could understand any of this shit.’ But we got it done. Their modus operandi was to record my vocal takes across six tracks: it took a lot of singing for them to narrow it down to the six tracks they wanted to work with. And then they’d mix and match in a process called comping the vocals. They’d take a word here, a phrase there, maybe just one syllable. It was a long, involved process. A lot of what you hear on Starfish is singing pieced together from numerous takes … strange, isn’t it?
Finally we went back over to the other valley studio to do the percussion. Ploogy and I both loved to do the tambourine and the shakers and the eggs. When we got there, there was a huge box of percussion instruments, the likes of which we’d never seen before. Ploogy responded by trying to play just about everything at once. ‘Why don’t you just pick up the whole box and shake it?’ the engineer drolly suggested.
With the album done it was time to do the mixing. This is the bit where they combine all the ingredients to create a sonically pleasing concoction. I thought the mixes were OK; they weren’t anything spectacular, but they weren’t terrible either. They were kind of dry, safe sounds. The mix didn’t stand in the way of the music like Nick Launay’s work on Seance, though it didn’t enhance the music the way Bob Clearmountain’s lovely mix on The Blurred Crusade did, either. But it was clear and easy.
I didn’t really like the roaring lions in ‘Destination’ but there you go. How Waddy arrived at that I’ll never know. I do know that they mixed the record at the highest possible volume that the human ear could withstand … Unlike Clearmountain, who mixed really softly and refused to even be in a room with loud music, these guys had it pumping around the clock. So we’d goof off around LA of a day and drive in at night to hear our record coming together. Of course we had input into the mixing too – sometimes our advice would be heeded, sometimes not. But that’s how it’d always been and I had long accepted it.
After a while Waddy and I sat down to sequence the record. This was very important in the days of vinyl, when the first and last tracks on each side had added emphasis. I’d already decided that ‘Destination’ should start the record: the lyrics were set up for that purpose. I suggested ‘Milky Way’ for the second track but Waddy said, ‘No man, you don’t want people hearing that one too soon.’ So we put it second last. Eventually we had things juggled around.
After settling on the order the guys from Arista and our manager came in to hear it in the studio. We played them all our favourite tracks. Greg Ladanyi was actually trying to sell them Marty’s song ‘Spark’ because he thought it had energy and maybe to spite me. I thought ‘Lost’ or ‘Reptile’ could be singles, though I had a sinking feeling the album had no single. The big shots all nodded their heads in agreement that this was a good album; I mean, they weren’t all that jazzed by it, but they certainly weren’t disappointed.
‘Play ’em ‘Under the Milky Way’,’ someone said through a patina of Californian pot smoke. Then those familiar chords started up on two double-tracked acoustic 12-string guitars. The voice came in, ‘Sometimes when this place gets kinda empty,’ the bass, the drums all came in … everybody knows how it goes by now …
When it finished the room was silent. Suddenly they all swung around. Our manager had a very strange look in his eye, which must’ve been something called avarice: ‘I think we can get this song on the radio,’ he said as his eyes glazed over. The guys from Arista were up and shaking my hand, ‘That’s a hit Steve,’ said the head honcho Clive Davis, who I was a little bit in awe of. Each guy from each department at Arista shook my hand and said ‘We’ll make this a hit!’ From that moment on there was never any doubt that ‘Under the Milky Way’ would be a hit!
When they’d gone the mood in the room was strange – no one, not even me, had seen that one coming. Except maybe Richard, who sadly didn’t even play on it. It was as much a surprise as anything else ever was. Over the years there’s been some revisionism over that song: most people working on it at the time considered it the weakest song on the record; it was the public and Arista that made the damn thing such a hit. The Church were merely onlookers. We had no idea that it would revive our fortunes and one day be considered a classic and a standard with hundreds of cover versions all around the world. What did The Guardian call it, an unintentional anthem? You gotta love that about the music biz – every song is like a ticket in a lottery. And The Church had just gotten real lucky!