It was incredible to feel the power of a US record company. It was like being lifted up by a huge wave and pushed skyward towards the Billboard heavens and the greenback pastures where our hearts had so longed to be. Or maybe I’m only speaking for myself … We never sat around discussing what we all hoped to get out of it – I don’t know how much the others actually longed for success. And success affected everyone differently.
WE HIT THE ground running in 1988: ‘Under the Milky Way’ was a bona fide hit single in Australia and especially in America – the rest of world never took it on so much, but it didn’t matter because America was the goal of every band that ever strummed a guitar. We’d always been determined to conquer America, but when it happened it wasn’t how I imagined it would be …
Despite our success with Starfish, which went gold in the US, there were some serious cracks appearing in our band. This time it was Richard at the centre of the disruption; his behaviour was becoming increasingly bizarre and erratic. Then he brought his girlfriend from Sydney on the road, which nobody wanted. She was a total wet blanket and we didn’t want her on our friggin’ tour bus walking around in her dressing gown and slippers! Richard promised to send her away but every morning she was still there. Sometimes he tried to hide her in his bunk like a stowaway. She’d complain if we were doing an encore because she was tired and wanted to go to bed: ‘Ohhhh, ya not doing another one are ya?’ she’d moan as we went back onstage at New York’s Beacon Theatre to play another boring old encore. She should’ve stayed at home.
Richard was losing interest in drumming – his playing got faster and faster and more and more iffy. He and I began to really clash, initially over the girlfriend, but eventually over everything. We’d been pretty good mates for a while but this was the beginning of the end. It may sound childish but it’s best when the band hangs out a bit together on tour and when making records – develops a bit of camaraderie and all that kind of thing. Richard’s isolating himself with his girlfriend wasn’t good for the tour or the band. He became more and more disconnected from us and the music, and then drumming itself. By the time the tour was over his drumming had descended into a quite unpredictable shambles. Just when we should’ve been slaying them we were crumbling apart like fools.
The tour began in the UK, where we acquired a big Estonian giant of a man called Big Mike. He was a wry and funny guy and sometimes he had to provide a little muscle. We started off with two sold-out gigs at the London Marquee again but our triumphant return was marred by someone hiring a toothless middle-aged stripper to celebrate – or ruin – someone’s birthday. I was fucking furious that someone had spoiled our night with that tasteless malarkey!
Then we jetted straight to LA for a showcase at the Roxy. Everyone who was anyone was there, including Greg Ladanyi, who told me he now understood what The Church was all about. It was a pity it hadn’t occurred to him while we were making the record! Marty bought a cheap Rickenbacker copy and smashed it onstage. It exploded spectacularly in a shower of sparks and plywood. Maybe it was a little premeditated and a few people must’ve seen it coming but still it was effective. Afterwards some of The Bangles lined up to meet us but I was so exhausted I hid in a closet to avoid talking to anyone. It was only the third gig of the tour.
After recording at KCRW in Santa Monica we flew to New York where we impressed the pants off of all the bigwigs at Arista at a gig at the legendary venue The Bottom Line. It was a very accomplished show and Clive Davis gave The Church and our new album Starfish the two thumbs up, which meant that everybody at Arista was focused on us for a while.
In New York we did a load of photo sessions and interviews. Suddenly it was all happening for real, like it did in the movies and Spinal Tap. Everyone at Arista was so nice to us. For such a left-of-centre band as The Church to get into the charts was an accomplishment for everyone: the band, the label, the crew, the management and all the rest.
It was a real honeymoon period for Arista and The Church. Everyone was on a little winning streak. It was our first record together and we were shipping serious units: we doubled Heyday’s sales in just a few weeks. And more than mere sales, the American critics were full of respect and praise. Everyone in America loved Starfish! A hundred kids in garages were already cranking out ‘Reptile’ on Saturday afternoons. ‘Under the Milky Way’ was everywhere: it was on Miami Vice for crying out loud! Somehow the song was defining 1988 for everybody, it was a soothing balm in airways saturated with the pop miasma. The song was ambiguous and indefinable, like it’d slipped in from another dimension. Everyone who liked it could congratulate themselves that they liked a cool song slightly left of centre.
On a big promo tour we hit Amsterdam and Stockholm and then Milan in Italy. We went down to Rome to do a TV show and recorded ‘Destination’, ‘Milky Way’ and ‘Reptile’. The guitarists had a huge meltdown over the amps they were supposed to use, which weren’t up to their usual standard; there was much arguing but they ended up using the studio amps in a performance you can see on the internet if you like.
After the show there was a bunch of fans at the gate outside the TV station. A curvaceous Italian woman who looked like she was straight out of a Pasolini film was hoarsely shouting ‘STIV STEEEV!’ I walked over to talk to her and was swamped by a load of kids asking for autographs. Seeing me looking overwhelmed, she grabbed my hand and pulled me away.
‘Mr Kilbey, have a nice night and be in the lobby by 2pm,’ boomed Big Mike’s voice over the general melee. I jumped on the back of the woman’s scooter and we zoomed off through the sunny streets of Rome. You know, I remember sitting in the cinema or drive-in with an uptight Canberran girlfriend watching these earthy, buxom Italian women with their deep laughter and their stormy passions in movies like The Decameron, but never did I ever imagine I’d be in Rome being hijacked by such a creature.
I didn’t know where the fuck we were going and I didn’t care. We rode around. She showed me to her friends. One guy wasn’t so happy to meet me. We smoked hashish and drank wine. Back in my hotel room she applied herself to the rites of Eros with impressive physicality. She didn’t speak a lot of English; it wasn’t especially necessary. She had an enormous appetite for laughing, and my Anglo squareness amused and bemused her. She put on my green suede jacket and my green suede boots and in nothing else marched around the room doing a lewd impression of me onstage. The seventeen-year-old Steve sitting just below the thin veneer of the pop singer was pretty impressed. I was living the life!
We hit Valencia and Madrid. We sold out some big venues and just like in Italy our star was on the rise. We did TV shows and interviews, and there were the slightly harsher ladies of Spain. Marty could speak pretty good Spanish, and passable French and German and eventually Swedish. I always envied him this instant leg up in whatever country we were in: his Spanish was so good they even interviewed him in Spanish on some shows. He was a real babe magnet in Spain, the ladies tried to devour him. I was a little jealous sometimes but I was kind of used to it and we tended not to go for the same girls anyway – it was always nuttier girls who liked me. Marty was a very obvious pop star and attracted obviously gorgeous women.
Sometimes someone in the group trod on someone else’s toes, romantically speaking, but it’s par for the course in bands I imagine. It’s funny how distant those days seem – a huge city every night and the attendant women. It seemed so life and death at the time: you’d meet a woman one night and the next morning swear you’re not gonna leave her. Until someone threatens you get on the fucking bus or else! You’d spend the day teary and mopey but by 2am there’d be a new senorita or fraulein to laugh and drink with backstage.
We had a couple of Aussie guys on the crew, Trevor and John, who were as Aussie as Aussie can be and whom I immediately began to stay up late with all the time. After a few weeks of jetting around from Finland to Italy, Amsterdam to Minneapolis, some of us were getting a little frayed around the edges. John was always partying. I ordered him to get some rest but he didn’t listen. Every day he was more and more tired and every night he was going out partying with a new girl he’d just met … needless to say they were usually very attractive women.
Then one day up the business-class end of a Finnair flight John broke down among all the businessmen flying from Helsinki to Stockholm. What a sight he was crying among the suits and buttermilk breakfasts! Pulling his long hair over his face as he sobbed out of sheer exhaustion. What a bloody carry-on!
Yet I wasn’t to fare too much better. We were going to Minneapolis to visit some huge vinyl warehouse where they were doing good business with our records. They wanted us to walk around and meet people and make polite chat – not one of my fortes in those days! After flying from Europe I checked in mid-morning to a beautiful art nouveau hotel and was trying to meditate when the most strange and terrible feeling swept over me like the very hand of dreadful doom. I was having a panic attack. I’d had one once before, just before the final external exams of high school. Convinced I would do badly I’d begun to hyperventilate until I was in a total state of madness and panic. My parents had called the doc then and he’d had me breathe into a paper bag while he rolled up my sleeve and gave me a sweet shot of intravenous valium. I’d been stunned and intrigued by the rush of the mainlined hit. With lightning speed the drug had spread out, calming and numbing everything. I’d gone from sheer panic to a dreamy tranquil state in seconds. The delightful velocity of the injected stuff and its transformative powers had not been lost on my teenage psyche.
There in Minneapolis – my suitcase full of wrinkled shirts and old socks, books and cassettes exploded open on the double bed – I felt like I was no longer able to keep the outside out. It was like I was losing myself in some awful cold unfeeling void. Just like the roadie on the plane, now I was crying. I hadn’t been much of a crier up to that point, so crying for no reason was quite a shock. I felt like I was gonna implode.
My door was unlocked and my manager Mike Lembo came in. ‘Why are you crying?’ he said. ‘Your record just moved five places up the charts!’ My blubbering and wailing gave him the best idea he ever had: he ordered up a stiff double brandy from room service.
The shock of the brandy gave way to a warm and sleepy impulse as the panic began to subside. ‘Mike, I can’t fucking go to the warehouse tomorrow!’ I said.
‘I know,’ he replied.
We went to see a doctor in the Minneapolis hospital. He examined me, softly banging my knee with a little hammer and peering into my ears and eyes. He called my manager in and said, ‘This man must have at least three weeks’ holiday right now!’
‘I know,’ Mike responded again.
When we got back to the hotel I was still shaken: ‘I can’t do that fucking warehouse thing!’ I said to Mike before I went to bed.
‘I know,’ he said again. ‘But you have to!’
At seven o’clock the next morning they dragged me out of bed and drove me to the warehouse. I was so unbelievably worn out that I was shaking and moaning. Along with a delegation of Arista staff I toured this bloody vinyl warehouse or depository or whatever it was and shook the hand of every last bastard hanging around. Everyone wanted records signed and photos taken. They were good, well-intentioned people in the Midwest colliding head on with the wimpiest, most tired pop singer they’d ever seen. I was so fragile I would’ve made Keats seem like Schwarzenegger. I was getting angrier and quieter as we made our way though the place, but the people seemed oblivious to my suffering: they just wanted a picture with the guy who sang ‘Under the Milky Way’, and they didn’t give a damn if he was a sullen, sulky twit in his green jacket and green boots and hennaed red hair. Boy, I must’ve looked a treat that day!
Another huge gig ensued at the London Town and Country Club, which is largely memorable for a big black bouncer telling my mother to fuck off because she didn’t have the right coloured bracelet. She eventually got in and said, ‘Son a big black man just told me to eff off !’ My mother was visiting England at the time and was pretty impressed with how big we were there. She couldn’t believe the fad for stage diving and nor, actually, could I.
The Church hit Paris for a mediocre show and mediocre turnout. Our record company guy there scored us some hash, so Richard and I got off our trees. After Paris we flew all the freaking way to Adelaide and then Melbourne and Sydney before flying out again to Montana, which was like that real old-fashioned America we used to see on Disneyland, the one hardly touched by progress. We worked our way down the coast after we did the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver and did great business in Seattle and Portland.
And then we went to San Francisco, where a couple of fateful meetings occurred … As we were coming down the coast I was talking about all our weird and whacky friends in San Fran we’d be seeing, like talking to this old gay fan who used to fucking question me about tiny details of record releases when I wanted to be getting chatted up by women. I said aloud that I hoped this guy Rodney wouldn’t be there to pester me. A few hours later as we drove over the Golden Gate Bridge we were listening to the radio and they were playing ‘Under the Milky Way’. When the song finished the guy dedicated it to Rodney, who’d recently passed away from complications due to AIDS. Jesus I felt like such a jerk!
Anyway we were told Melody Maker, the biggest rag in England, was going to put us on the cover and it was gonna be terrific. They were flying over Steve Sutherland to interview me, and then he could watch us totally slay the Fillmore West. You remember Steve Sutherland, the guy who gave us all those bad reviews, even for Heyday? I could recite his pans and jibes almost word for word; boy did I have a bone to pick with that guy!
So Sutherland shows up at my hotel and he’s a little weasel of a geezer. And I made a huge mistake: I thought I could rip into Sutherland and his bad reviews and that he’d print it all. In the flesh he was a spineless, chinless little man and again, just like Matt Snow, I was surprised how such talentless, gormless, beer-swilling blokes could dictate musical tastes all round the world. But all my words were for nothing. He was politely amused by my attack but despite the fact that we spent a few hours doing a photo session and everything, Sutherland just didn’t run the story at all.
So we lost our front page on one of the most influential rags ever because I wouldn’t be nice to this character or play the whole game. I should’ve learnt my lesson from Stuart Coupe! At the time I didn’t realise it but this was a severe blow to our chances of world domination. If only we were bigger in the English press, it would’ve cross-fertilised with our US popularity into a nice thing! My arrogance really fucked that one right up.
On the same afternoon there was a knock at my door and there stood Donnette – it was as if a veil had been lifted from my eyes. She was undeniably sweet and gorgeous. She moved like a cat. She had the coolest American accent like a female beat poet. She was super smart and she was very funny and irreverent. She also made it clear that she adored me more than life itself as she curled herself around me like an orphan kitten. Remember I’m just an overgrown boy from Canberra! I’m standing outside myself and I’m in a nice hotel room in San Francisco and I’ve just had an argument with Melody Maker, and now this woman is treating me like I’m the god Apollo. Donnette had a way of making me feel so damn good about myself: she constantly rewrote my faults as virtues.
Donnette totally understood me. She was a real soothing gorgeous honey and she swore eternal fealty to me but she was no stupid groupie: I loved the fact that Donnette loved what I did so much. Her devotion and her seriousness suddenly centred me in a lost universe of onwards rushing events. Although I’d hung out with her quite a bit before, that afternoon she suddenly rushed into my head and it changed the course of my life forever.
The gig that night was a ripper, the San Francisco audience re-anointed us. Sutherland was there looking smug as he drank with the Arista guys, knowing he was never going to write about that gig and its two encores at the legendary Fillmore. My big mouth had ruined us ever getting good press in England. But I didn’t know that yet and Donnette and I spent an incredibly romance-soaked night together, and the next morning all over San Francisco kids were walking around in Church T-shirts. It felt like a fairytale.
Donnette slunk off back into her life with her boyfriend and Game Theory. By day she worked as a chemist testing water or something while The Church worked our way down the coast getting a pretty good reaction wherever we went. The more I thought about Donnette the more I wanted to see her again as soon as possible. I started ringing her every day from my hotel and we would talk through her lunchtime about music and the cities I was seeing. Her very inaccessibility made her even more desirable.
I’d fallen in love with being in love, again. It was a sweet and motivating drug to be running on; I was high and low riding its roller-coaster rush. All my songs took on a new poignancy. I started to live only to talk to Donnette each lunchtime. Now all my memories of that tour are filtered through the elation of my crush on her.
It was a crazy time. I had certainly lost my head but we toured on regardless. We had some super-long drives on our nifty little bus with its double bunk beds – man, you crawl in there at the end of a long night and wake up the next day somewhere else entirely. It was an especially cozy feeling on a wet rainy night zipping along warm and safe, oblivious in your little curtained-off bunk, hearing only the road sloshing by outside.
Donnette and I cooked up a plan for her to come and spend a few nights with me in New Orleans. As this gig got closer and closer the anticipation of seeing her drove me forward. In Dallas we played a free gig and pulled a record crowd but we didn’t go down that well for some reason. In Houston I called Donnette from the rooftop pool during a spectacular thunderstorm – life had taken on mighty new dimensions: I’d be seeing her the next day. The gigs were fading into the background of my life. As we drove towards New Orleans every song playing on the radio was charged with meaning. Every tree and bayou was portentous of romance. She was flying in a few hours after The Church arrived. In the meantime we checked in to a fantastic hotel, old and dimly lit with rooms that were soft, calm and inviting.
At the airport my desperation to see her reached fever pitch. I watched literally everyone disembark the plane before Donnette finally emerged. She looked so damn good: lithe as all get-out, a fragile and slightly tired beauty.
That night everything was charged with an incredible intensity. Before the gig we’d squabbled with the opening band called The Mighty Lemon Drops, who’d been named the best band in the universe by NME and weren’t that happy about opening for us Australians. On that night we played at the legendary Tipitina’s in New Orleans and Peter Koppes accused The Mighty Lemon Drops of eating all the chocolates that we requested on our rider. I do believe he may’ve been right because a general brawl broke out over the missing chocolates with people pushing each other around until Big Mike waded into that fight and The Mighty Lemon Drops, um, melted away.
The gig was a corker. Richard picked up on my desire to impress Donnette and played a real blinder! I watched her in the audience all night. I sang the songs to her. It was a magical evening like from a romance novel. I’ve always been a showoff; it’s in my nature. Remember the gigs in the lounge room with Russell miming on the tennis racquets while I impressed some girl in the imaginary audience? Well this was that little dream in reality.
We caught a cab away from Tipitina’s and it was the heaviest rain I had ever seen in my life. Everything about that night inspired the song ‘Louisiana’ – the black rain falling in the night and all that. I sat in the back of the cab soaking up Donnette’s adoration as we drove through the impossible deluge. Ha ha, I was a true rock star! We had an uber-romantic few days. We walked around the French Quarter and drank hurricanes. We swam in the pool as the rain poured down. We lay in bed listening to the torrent fall steadily. When she flew back to San Francisco I was in a real daze of melancholy, albeit syrupy sweet melancholy. And so during my first big tour of America I was distracted by this thing with Donnette, and consequently all the gigs went past in a bit of a blur.
Then I made an enemy for life with some big shot from Arista when, informed of our latest sales figures, I casually said, ‘Oh, is that all?’ The guy figured I’d be ecstatic and grateful. But my blasé answer made me appear ungrateful; it was like a slap in the face for Arista and all the people there. What should’ve been exciting news had been tempered by our manager’s constantly telling me inflated sales figures to hype me up, so that when I heard the week’s sales figure for real it was only the same as last week’s inflated figure. I think it was 150,000 at that stage; Heyday had only done 60,000. This guy – who’d vaguely be the subject of ‘Pharaoh’ on our next record – later rose to power elsewhere and has hated me ever since. He was so angry with me for saying ‘Oh, is that all?’ that he stood outside our next gig and complained that we went on too long, that my singing was flat, that Richard’s drumming was too fast and that the guitars were too fucking loud!
Next we went to Montreal, which was a real blast. Marty bought himself a pair of boots with all these silver buckles up the sides that cost a small fortune but when he wore them at the gig no one could hide their laughter at how ridiculous he looked with his pants tucked into these ostentatious monstrosities. We never saw those babies again, thank God! They were a solid manifestation of the 80s zeitgeist, containing enough chrome and leather to build a martini bar. Meanwhile Marty’s attitude towards me still fluctuated wildly, although he was careful to keep it under control, as was I.
Now that the group was almost hitting the big time no one really wanted to rock the boat too much. Everyone more or less knew on which side their bread was buttered. Having said that, Marty had thrown a hissy fit at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston … It was an important gig but his self-righteousness held sway as he leaned against a column and occasionally strummed the odd barre-minimum chord. He was angry with someone or something so everybody suffered for it. He just couldn’t understand that you didn’t take your personal problems onstage with you. And if you upset him he might just ruin the gig to spite you! Peter and I never had and never would take a personal thing out onstage, but Marty just couldn’t help himself if his sometimes-fragile sensibilities were offended.
Once in 1984 he didn’t talk to me for a month because I had laughed at his white knobbly knees the first time I saw him in a pair of shorts in Cairns. As the group got more famous he fancied himself more of an ‘artiste’. It was a long way from the Nick Ward days!
Donnette joined me again in Minneapolis and our torrid affair resumed exactly where it’d left off. We filmed a video of The Church playing an old theatre called The Guthrie – rivalries were running high between Marty and Peter, who could also be a bit petulant. The director sat us all down and outlined his plans to shoot us individually stressing that if the camera wasn’t on us at any particular time we should just carry on. ‘We’ll be filming everyone individually at different times,’ he said. But when the filming started and the camera was on Marty, Peter took off his guitar and left the building in a huff; it took a while to locate him and get him back on the set so filming could continue. Anyway, if you watch the video for ‘Reptile’ you can see Donnette down the front dressed in white and rocking out!
Our stature was definitely on the rise in Chicago, where we did well at the Vic Theatre. Then we jetted out to The Netherlands, where we had a great chance and blew it at Parkpop, a big Dutch festival that was being filmed. We were having a bad time on stage, and Marty stupidly and rudely put his towel over one of the cameras as they were trying to film him playing a solo. That was the end of any goodwill for us in that part of the world! After a bunch of dates in Germany we ended up in Denmark at Roskilde Festival where an angry INXS were waiting for me because of some casual remarks I’d made about them in some music rag. ‘We’re a real band playing real music,’ I’d dribbled on, ‘not like INXS, or bands like that, hanging around airports with models on their arms!’
INXS were playing the festival and they were mad as hell. Spider, their Aussie roadie, came to our tent and told us that Andrew and Michael wanted to fight me! Oh dear, me and my big mouth again. Andrew and Michael soon wandered over, ‘Come and have a beer with us in our tent, Steve,’ Andrew said through gritted teeth.
‘I don’t drink beer and I’ve got all the drinks I want,’ I said politely.
‘Look just come with us to our tent!’ he said.
Michael Hutchence stared at me myopically yet disdainfully and said, ‘Come to our tent for a beer!’
‘Look I’m not going to your fucking tent!’ I replied. And they both stormed off and the fisticuffs were narrowly averted thanks to Spider’s warning through the roadie grapevine.
The Church went on to do a mediocre set while INXS were a huge hit with the gigantic crowd of over 80,000 Danes.
After this I took a month off in Stockholm where I bit the bullet and I told Karin about Donnette – it turned out she also had a little scene with a well-known singer in another band. He’d even been coming around to our place to see her! But she’d let him go and now she wanted me to let Donnette go too.
Karin and I and my two brothers, Russell and John who’d flown in from Australia, and her brothers all went on a strange holiday rambling about on these walking tracks up in some Swedish mountains above the tree line. Sometimes we even saw reindeers wandering about. At night we stayed in these kind of dormitory places where you make your own breakfasts and dinner. Coming off that heavy-duty tour and then walking along in the middle of nowhere with all these brothers was quite a jolt. No wonder I was restless and stupid then! It took a lot of adjusting just to go home after a long tour, but this was an extreme opposite.
My brothers had a blast in Sweden even though the Swedish summer gave them both hayfever. Karin and I stayed with her maternal grandmother and ate genuine old-time Swedish fare like nettle soup and homemade fresh-pressed juice called saft. We went for long bike rides in the surrounding hinterland of Katrineholm, south of Stockholm, and everything about that summer was golden and glowing. We stopped and ate lunch in lovely little places. It was an idyll and slowly healed me a little; the US show-biz thing and all its hoo-ha drifted away as I biked along in the beautiful Nordic summer with verily not a care in the world. This was the good life too!
And then suddenly summer in Sweden came to an end. I was back in the US where our record was doing pretty good for a bunch of Aussie hippies – it wasn’t knocking Prince off the charts but it’d definitely done solidly well by anyone’s terms. The record company was happy with us.
We embarked on a big tour with some strange bedfellows … there was Peter Murphy, the singer from Bauhaus, who was out on his own with a backing band. He was neither good nor bad in my opinion. We hardly spoke in person; he had an attitude like The Mighty Lemon Drops. He thought he was too damn big and famous to be opening for a bunch of Aussie hippies, but fuck it we had a hit single and he didn’t! So someone talked him into opening up for us on a double bill. I guess it wasn’t surprising that there wasn’t much of a crossover. His fans sometimes left when we came on – once I famously quipped, ‘That was the biggest retreat of the Goths since the fall of Rome.’
I remember a slight melee in a dressing room that involved Peter Murphy and someone else until Big Mike stepped in and Murphy ran around the room all distraught and melodramatic screaming, ‘Keep that man away from me!’ Ha ha! It was difficult to forget this scene when you saw him onstage coming on all vampire and naughty.
Weirdly enough Tom Verlaine was also on this tour: my former hero and idol as both a guitarist and lyricist. But Verlaine was mooted to ride on Murphy’s bus. The afternoon before we started the ride out to Phoenix there was a knock at my door and there was the 39-year-old shy, goofy, boyish Verlaine. He’d come to see if he could borrow my acoustic guitar. I’d just bought a brand-new black Guild 6-string acoustic guitar – it was the love of my life until some bastard stole it in New York a few weeks down the track. Verlaine was a charismatic geezer with his whole old-fashioned New York eccentric genius thing and when he picked up my guitar to check it out, he played one note and I could immediately tell it was Tom Verlaine from Television handling my little axe! Verlaine’s prowess on the guitar was astonishing to everyone in the band. He could do tricks, imitating seagulls and trains complete with a Doppler effect. He did all his sounds without any effects pedals, just old-fashioned manipulations of an electric guitar and an incredible familiarity that went far beyond even Peter Koppes’. Verlaine was one of the best electric guitarists the world has ever produced. Individual and original, a real innovator! His lyrics too were fucking fantastic. Some of the couplets on the Television albums are among the best in rock’n’roll.
After playing the guitar for a minute Verlaine asked if he could ride on our bus. He said he’d met Murphy and didn’t care for him or his music. Verlaine also knew we were all huge Television fans; our bus seemed like a much more attractive proposition for him, I’m sure.
As the tour wore on I became increasingly fascinated with Verlaine. He was nothing like I’d thought he’d be. He was always totally wired on caffeine and nicotine. He drank one coffee after another and smoked one cigarette after the last, all day long. He didn’t partake in any other drugs or alcohol. He didn’t need to because he was flying on the coffee and tobacco.
He was also a real ladies man. He often had ‘little sweeties’ lined up in several cities. He attracted gorgeous female admirers but sometimes his choices in women puzzled me. One night he was leaving a theatre with a girl done up entirely in goth clothing, including vampire make-up and the whole nine yards. I didn’t think Verlaine would be into this kind of chick, but there you go.
He rang my room one night in some hotel. ‘Ah Kilbey, I’m sitting down here in the foyer with some divorcees and wonderin’ if you could, ah, take one of ’em off my hands?’ When I got down there Verlaine was chatting up two middle-aged women who’d never heard of either of us before. I guess I did my job of keeping one of them company while he showed the other lady to his quarters. Another time in a hotel bar he said, ‘That woman over there must be a lesbian!’ When I asked why he replied in all seriousness, ‘Because she isn’t looking at me!’
On board our bus Verlaine was quite a hoot. He always washed his socks in the hotel, and then hung them out to dry on the heating vents on the bus. The whole bus was decorated with his drying socks while he walked around not wearing any at all. For some reason it gave a vague impression of him being homeless or something. One day I met him in the corridor of the hotel at Virginia Beach; he told me he’d been talking to the young pool guard and had made a big impression on her, he could tell. After my swim I talked to the same girl, who told me about a weirdo with no socks! She was surprised to learn he was a famous and brilliant musician.
One early morning we checked into a hotel in Rochester, New York. Verlaine rang my room. ‘Uh, Kilbey, come on let’s go for a walk and have breakfast!’ We went to some diner – it was freezing cold outside – and had eggs on toast and shared a plate of fries. Afterwards Verlaine made me pay 50 cents more because he said I ate more of the fries than him. And he had calculated the difference. He was always very mean and penny-pinching – quite literally.
After breakfast we walked through a forest until we came to this reservoir where we accidentally blundered onto some kind of deal or shakedown between a bunch of black guys and a group of Italian-looking types. They shouted when they saw us emerge from the trees, and started running towards us. Verlaine instantly assessed the situation and was off back down the slightly snowy forest slope hissing, ‘Come on!’ The guys were shouting and pursuing us; I could hear them crashing through the trees behind as they entered the forest somewhere back up the top. Verlaine looked like an antelope as he hurdled trees and bushes with his long legs. Eventually the pursuers gave up, and I met Verlaine at the bottom of the forest where the cars zoomed by on the highway. He was smoking one of those little cheap cigarettes and seemed totally unfazed. What a hero!
He did us the great honour of coming on and playing encores with us after a few nights on tour. We did ‘Cortez the Killer’ by Neil Young and ‘Is This Where You Live’ and ‘You Took’. It sounded amazing with him. Three totally different lead guitars at once. It was a dream come true: I will always remember those nights with Tom Verlaine playing. They were career highlights.
Meanwhile Donnette and I had been cooking up a plan to make an album together. She’d given me a tape of her singing, and a few songs really had a lovely melancholy feel. I thought we should make an album of sad weird songs and she would sing it. I’d acquired an Ensoniq keyboard for the purpose with a built-in sequencer, and every night after the gig was over I got out my keyboard and wrote pieces for what would eventually turn into Hex. And the next day I’d ring her up and play them to her over the phone. We’d decided that when the tour was over we’d record in New York and stay at Mike Lembo’s place – working on the music every night gave me a way to discharge all the energy I’d built up during the performance. I started to write some really great new tunes that would be on our record.
The shows were mostly good and we were going down OK; not slaying ’em in the aisles or anything, but OK. Richard had really lost interest in drumming by then, which paradoxically meant he sped it up – perhaps in an effort to finish the gig as quickly as possible.
Outside the Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I got into a spot of silly bother. I’d walked outside the gig during sound check and the door had closed and locked me out. I stood there and the fans began to converge on me. Someone asked for an autograph and I didn’t have any paper so I autographed a few one-dollar notes from my pocket. The rumour spread that the singer in The Church was giving away money outside the theatre and a load of people began pressing forward with their hands out demanding money. I quickly ran away and two guys pursued me demanding at least a memento. But I had nothing to give them – my pockets were empty. One of them demanded the piece of gum I was chewing; I thought that was crazy and I spat the gum on the ground. And lo and behold the two stupid guys fought over my piece of chewing gum! The mind truly boggles at the inanity.
Eventually the long tour was coming to an end. The American winter was coming down the line hard. Everything seemed harsh as we travelled in the darkness and snow, just trying to get around. At the very end of the tour we hit Brazil, some gigs in Sao Paulo and Rio. We were shattered. The cocaine was a dollar a gram and the pot was free. There were naked hookers running around one night. There was poverty and there was hope. I saw a kid without any legs dragging himself belly down across a pedestrian crossing with his hands. I saw entire suburbs of beggars who lived in rubbishy shanties. We were followed everywhere by little urchins selling Chiclets gum. Everything was incredibly cheap; breakfast with everything and juice and coffee was one dollar.
The shows were only just OK, and Richard just wasn’t trying anymore: we played some really big places but they were only half full. The promoters were disappointed and maybe the crowds were too. It’s an uphill battle when the drummer isn’t trying, like flogging a dead horse. Brazil did not go nuts for us.
So we reached another fork in the road where we misunderstood the power of the press: how to go more gently because after all you need them more than they need you. The Brazilian record company was very excited when we arrived because they’d scored a coup – we were to be on one of the most widely watched TV shows in South America, one that went to every country there! We were to be interviewed by the host, who was flying in from Argentina especially to talk to us. Exposure on this show and their playing our ‘Under the Milky Way’ video would help us crack the continent. The host apparently really liked the song and we were extremely lucky to get this kind of break; the record company people were over the moon.
But they’d underestimated our ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The appointed night came and we assembled at a beautiful and cool restaurant up in the Rio hills overlooking the city and the beach. The host turned up and she was about 40, haughty and beautiful with a deep and harsh-sounding voice. She was dressed entirely in white leather. We sat down outside in a courtyard and she asked her first question through an interpreter: ‘Almost everybody in South America is a catholic and we are interested to know why you call the band The Church.’ Before anyone could answer Peter jumped in with a joke he’d been working on for a while I guess, but oh man he picked a terrible time to test it out.
‘Because it’s easier to spell than …’ and here he made an unintelligible sound while shaking his head. He sounded like a wounded bull. The host demanded an explanation from the interpreter. He gave her the Spanish answer with the bull sound at the end shaking his head just as Peter had done. Furiously, she snapped her fingers and in a minute she and all her entourage had driven off while the minions were packing up the cameras and lights. The record people were writhing and tearing at their hair. ‘You don’t know what you’ve just done!’ they moaned. Now 150 million viewers wouldn’t hear ‘Under the Milky Way’ on the most prestigious show in town! We had blown it again. What a bunch of clowns! Now imagine if I’d been nice to Steve Sutherland and Peter hadn’t made his little joke. Yes, go on … imagine …
At the last gig of the tour Richard gave away parts of his drum kit and the microphones as well, which would’ve been a nice symbolic gesture if they’d been his! But they belonged to the promoter, who had hired them out to us, and he was not amused at all.
The whole thing ended in a mediocre shambles. Richard and Peter flew back to Australia and Marty flew to Sweden. I was flying to New York with a bunch of the crew to make my record with Donnette. That gig was the last real gig Richard would play with us: the band had lost its cohesion. We’d burnt ourselves out with all the accolades and all the arguments and all the drinking and drugging. The late nights had taken their toll on all of us. We’d developed a kind of rock’n’roll hubris and the universe was watching.