On heroin your dreams and visions will be complex, labyrinthine and intriguing. Behind your eyes are swimming empires of golden warmth spreading out to limitless horizons. Poetic visions come tumbling out of your mind. Such sweet warmth, such inexorable grooviness. Such an easy easy path … such a beguiling spirit hiding her cruel face …
ONE NIGHT GRANT and I were sitting in a pub at Bondi Junction drowning our sorrows … only I was on lemon squash. Grant said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna get some heroin!’ Really? That sounded perfect. I’d never had heroin before but that night I was willing to give it a try.
We drove around to Paddington where Grant had some dealers known as ‘the girls’. I chucked in a hundred dollars and Grant went into the house for a while before emerging with a smile on his face. We went back to my place in Rozelle; Karin was away in Sweden. The twins were very much on their way. Grant took out a little baggie and tossed it to me. ‘Here, have a line of that,’ he said.
If you knew Grant you would’ve thought him the cleanest-cut guy you could ever imagine. And in many ways he was. He avoided swearing and he was very polite to young girls and old ladies. I guess that’s what made it all feel somehow safer. A million things were running through my head but it seemed that if Grant was using heroin that maybe it’d just gotten a bad rap like all the other drugs that had been demonised by the lying, tricky Western governments. I chopped out a line and snorted it. It was the beginning of a long and terrible affair that only petered out after eleven years.
My first snort was nothing spectacular, because at first heroin is a subtle drug. It’d take me a while to recognise and then crave its nebulous effect. But I’ll tell you now the essence of how it worked on me. All my life a nagging voice had been telling me I was no good, and now that voice shut up for the first time. I felt comfortable. I felt cool. I felt detached. I felt like I was a child just in from playing outside all day, pleasantly drowsy after a nice warm bath. All my worries and anxieties receded. I followed daydreams across the screens of my mind and everything was all right. All those rotten deeds you did, all those sneaky games you played, all those nasty things you said, all that jealousy and envy – with heroin all of it is suddenly silenced. I was calm and I was happy.
After a while you might start to nod your head a bit and find yourself in a shallow dream-filled sleep. Time elongates then. Time has no meaning in this world. You might be born somewhere and grow up and live a life and get married and have sons and fight in a war and then you open your eyes and realise that only 30 seconds have passed in the real world.
Like all drugs, heroin begins to start up a dialogue with you and it whispers beautiful words in foreign languages that you want to get to know so badly, ever so badly. It will become apparent why heroin is called the White Lady, a gorgeous creature with a chequered past. Hell, nobody understands my White Lady. It’s been said that she has fucked a lot of people over but now she’s come to me and I can see it was all lies because she is soft and sweet. I feel like I’m in on the most private confidential joke when I snort her up my nostrils and taste her drip down the back of my throat. How I love to chop out those big white lines of smack on a jet-black piano, and roll up a 50-dollar note to sniff her up.
Wow, instant serenity! Bonhomie on a stick. You start to lust after it, you start to desire it. You start to become obsessed by it. You love to hear the mention of its many names. You love to put your finger in your pocket and nudge that fat little bag of smack sitting so snug there.
In next to no time at all, I was connected. The stuff found its way to me of its own accord. Suddenly I was living in a house in Surry Hills where I had installed a 24-track studio with the aid of another guy … and a lot of people were coming by this house to use heroin there. It was a little heroin mecca for all kinds of people. I had loads of people to go and buy it for me. I was well cashed up at that point too. I had a couple of hundred grand I guess just lying around in the bank and nothing much to spend it on. Jesus Christ I’d come by all this money so easily; did I even really deserve it? There was some poetic irony in wasting it all on something so sweet! My thinking was already becoming addled. I had a dirty little bedroom in the three-storey terrace where my studio was now located. I’d go up there and take out my heroin and commune with the great white spirit.
At first there were no side effects: there were no catches. The White Lady had been given a bad reputation for sure; maybe all those guys shooting up had a problem but not us snorters! I wondered why people had to put heroin in a needle when it was so nice just to take it up the nostril. I had all these great new friends and they all liked heroin too – it’s like they all suddenly came out of nowhere to be with me and help me spend my money. That was the honeymoon phase when I was a heroin proselytiser and turned people on left, right and centre.
When The Church toured in Tasmania we met a guy in Hobart who’d send you a little canister of opium if you put some money in his bank account. And so I regularly began to get little packages from Tasmania. The opium and the heroin were two sides of the same coin: the opium was dreamier. I smoked it and I ate it and I drank it in strong cups of treacle-tasting coffee. Then I lay around listening to music or went into my studio and began to work on what would become Narcosis. I became interested in describing the heroin state in music and words. I wanted to reproduce that profound dreaminess and sickly-sweet heavy feeling of being down, down in some deep place.
So far so good. I’d snorted a load of stuff and hadn’t had any bad reactions … until the day I was walking through town and feeling kind of weird like I was having a hot flush or something. Then all of a sudden I broke out in the most unbelievable sweat. By the time I got on the Balmain bus I looked like I’d fallen into a swimming pool. It wouldn’t be the last time the sweat would ooze and flow from my body like a river. With heroin it’d eventually happen every day whether I was high or if I was withdrawing. It was always a both-ways bet on sweat.
Which is when I started to think I’d better get off the stuff. I went back to my real house in Rozelle and was shocked to find that I couldn’t sleep at all, even though I desired it more than anything. Time passed so fucking slowly a minute would seem like a year. All the voices in my head came back with a vengeance. My legs and arms were aching a fair bit too. It was like growing pains only amped up a few notches. My nose wouldn’t stop running, and when I sneezed I’d get this kind of cold electric shock that’d be followed by shudders of revulsion. I still couldn’t sleep even after a few days of shivering on a couch watching late night TV. But everything had a strangely alien unpleasantness attached to it. Everything was raw and hurting. Music that I loved suddenly hurt my ears. TV shows and video clips brought on a burning restlessness and blinding, white-hot anger. Reading a book was impossible; I couldn’t concentrate. Water felt like it was burning my skin. Heroin entices you with beauty, and she keeps you with an unbearable ugliness that no one can face. The toughest, most brutal thug becomes a whimpering child in the face of the stuff. Sometimes the stuff lets you think you have a bit of freedom, but you have none. There’s no leeway or grace period when you deal with the stuff.
But the problem is not the stuff: it’s the absence of the stuff. It’s when you can’t find or afford it. And it’s expensive. A gram is 300 bucks and I could easily do two grams a day then if I was stupid enough, and I often was. The stuff is highly illegal and suddenly you’re up against a whole new side of the law that as a mere pot smoker you may not have encountered. If you keep going, you’ll be frisked and searched and patted down and maybe handcuffed and led away. If you still keep going you’ll become friends with thieves and prostitutes and homeless guys and all kinds of weird people from other walks of life.
I had no control over the stuff. If I bought up big for a cheaper price I could get five grams for $1200 – that’s one gram free! – but it never worked out for me in actuality. I could never control myself with something that I loved so much, though love seems a funny word to apply to a drug, I admit.
Was I really some unspeakable fiend for pursuing this chemical detachment and then hiding from its hideous withdrawals? Or was I just some poor bloke who’d encountered his nemesis not in gambling addiction or alcoholism, but in the wicked poppy that has destroyed so many lives? Illegal or legal the stuff has you figured out – it reads your mind and listens in on your plans to get rid of it. It stands in freedom’s doorway as you try to leave, mocking your pathetic efforts to be free of it. Every habit is worse than the last and comes on faster. These are the unfailing equations I learned to abide by and expect.
Back in Rozelle in 1991 and I was still writhing around on the couch in the front room of 91 Mansfield Street, and feeling so worn out and shattered. Just think, I could’ve gotten up and walked away from the whole thing right there, and there’d be barely a distant memory left. But I pursued it until the damned thing pursued me.
I’m sorry to say I probably gave it two weeks and then was back sniffing the stuff. Only I’d learnt my lesson and then had a strict regimen of Saturday nights only. Which quickly deteriorated into Saturdays and Wednesdays only. And eventually all the other days got added in as well … Sure enough I got another nasty little habit sniffing heroin and smoking opium, the twin dreamy undoers of men. Again and again I went through the entire trauma of withdrawal, and again I soon enough got back in the ring to take another shot at it. But it always floored me. So that was the recurring pattern of my life for a while.
Eventually I stopped trying to withdraw. I did everything within my power to keep on going by hook or by crook. I left no stone unturned to score. All of my modest means were at the stuff ’s disposal – and it demanded every last cent I had. If I’d earned more it would’ve demanded that as well. I would only face the true horror of withdrawal a few times after that, and those episodes made the Rozelle days seem like a picnic.
Meanwhile the twins’ birth was approaching in June. And The Church was working on its undisputed masterpiece in the shape of an album called Priest=Aura. Arista recommended Gavin MacKillop to produce it. We liked his work, so he flew out to Sydney at the end of autumn that year. Gavin was a very cool and funny Scotsman and we immediately got along and saw eye to eye on almost everything.
The Church had spent a few weeks in a rehearsal space in Ultimo having extremely productive and revealing songwriting sessions. I was still in my honeymoon phase of smoking opium, and the music was flowing out of me and everybody else. Peter fooled with the stuff for a while too. Marty and Jay Dee did not, but the opiated feeling was reflected in the music. Jay Dee was a fantastic collaborator and fitted in perfectly to our songwriting method. We came up with all this good stuff so quickly and effortlessly, as if by magic. It was the opposite of the turgid Gold Afternoon Fix writing sessions. We were on fire, killing it song after song. It was strange how easily the music was coming to us so quickly and completely. It was like scooping songs out of another world.
We recorded again at Studio 301 in Sydney. Gavin was a wonderful producer: he was across every aspect of the music, and really became a big part of what we were doing. Everything sounded so big and spacious. Gavin pulled great sounds and worked really hard on this record. We knew we were making a masterpiece. We knew it would probably be misunderstood, that it might take some time before people could see how good it was. For me, this record blew all the other Church records right out of the water – it was everything I wanted to do with music. Thanks to opiates I did momentarily catch that dreamy, slowed-down warmth on some of the tracks of this record. It was a new grandeur, a new authority … a new era.
I made a stylistic decision to play only my Fender 6-string bass on Priest=Aura. This gave it a completely different feeling from a regular, deeper, more indistinct bass guitar. The 6-string bass is like a hybrid of bass and guitar though really it’s neither. It actually has a very limited application, but I milked that guitar for everything it was worth and it gave Priest=Aura such a different sound.
(On the brand new Church album being completed at the time of writing, I have been playing a 6-string bass again. And on those tracks people have been saying that it reminds them of Priest=Aura –that’s how strong the association is.
Another factor contributing to the unique sound of Priest=Aura was Marty’s new use of a volume pedal on many of the tracks. Without the normal attack of a guitar he sounded a lot more ambiguous in the music and so everything had a lot more room to breathe. Peter came up with some excellent new things, with some tricks he had up his sleeve. And Jay Dee rocked!
When it came to the lyrics I hit a new level, which I wasn’t going to be able to get back to for quite a long time. The honeymoon period with the opium and the stuff was still lingering on, at least creatively. It’d be a lie to say I didn’t initially find those drugs useful in chasing after words. I don’t ever know where the words come from for songs; I just listen to a piece of music and words start coming together in my head, as if from nowhere. Sometimes I have to give things a little push along with my thoughts, but with Priest=Aura whole songs would just download into my head. As soon as I started I knew I was on one big roll because the words were streaming to me as quickly as I could write them down. Every song had its own special thing going for it. I can’t really describe it much more than that: the magic happened and the music and the drugs and the experience all came together and I wrote some lyrics that I still haven’t surpassed in all these intervening years. Aura was influenced by the Gulf War, but it went far beyond that and incorporated all sorts of mentions of all kinds of things from all over the place. I was seeing things from a new vantage point, and it gave me a temporarily broad perspective. ‘Ripple’ was nasty and cynical; it had a new directness and a new acerbity. ‘Paradox’ was about the honeymoon with the stuff, really trying to drum up that floating feeling. ‘Swan Lake’, about the imminent arrival of the twins; ‘Lustre’, a song about some vague wickedness or another; ‘Mistress’ is probably a bit self-explanatory; and ‘Kings’ is a marvellously historic song in which I think I prove that the ancient world was probably more groovy than you think.
The bizarre tale of the ‘Disillusionist’ was where the callous cynicism of Gold Afternoon Fix gave way to some real rottenness that was half me and half imaginary me. Ooh what a naughty boy that ‘Disillusionist’ is! And the heartbreaking ‘Old Flame’, one of The Church’s most tender and sad moments. Then there’s the daunting gloom rocker ‘Chaos’, in which all the anxiety and loathing starts to come out and finally the album finishes on ‘Film’, a noir movie soundtrack just waiting for the visuals to go with it.
Priest=Aura had it all: the sound, the vision and the implications. It was the ‘big music’ you sometimes heard people talking about. The album got some mixed reviews – surprisingly it got a few good ones in England, which was in the grip of the shoe-gazer musical movement (if you can use such organisational terms for such random things as rock’n’roll!). One reviewer said the record would have the shoe-gazers running back to mummy to ask for more effects pedals. But Rolling Stone in the US slagged it with a really bad two-star review. (Ironically, Rolling Stone re-reviewed it and gave it four stars in their big record review book. The second time around it was praised as the frickin’ masterpiece it always was.) It was just too far out in 1992 for some dense people to grok something so elegant. Its failure helped to undermine me a little bit more.
At the same time I was working bit by bit on songs that would become Narcosis, my next solo record. These songs were like a parallel Priest=Aura world only with even more emphasis on the heroin and opium. The reverbs were cavernous and the voice and lyrics were disconnected. The opiates were obsessing my thoughts and feelings. The lack of them became a sore spot in my whole life – Grant and I were using together and a nastiness appeared in our relationship.
I was spending a lot of time at the Surry Hills house in Albion Street. It was a monster three-storey terrace with a bunch of different people living there when I first turned up: there were punk drummers and students and ordinary working people who just had a room and kept to themselves. It had four or five bedrooms. Grant and I would have the stuff and walk around writing songs; sometimes we’d go out onto the footpath and accost passers-by with snatches of Dylan tunes. I’d try to chat up ladies on Grant’s behalf, much to his excruciating embarrassment. Grant would sit on the step puffing imperiously in his strange sideways manner. They were wry and slightly bitter times.
Narcosis came out and did absolutely nothing. It struggled to even get a review amid the clamour for grunge and Britpop – things that now seem antiquated although Narcosis does not. It was a great record and I released some different versions eventually adding more tracks. It was a document of my great fall from grace, and still makes riveting listening if you have the nerve.
On the 7th of June 1991 Anna Miranda Jansson Kilbey and Elektra June Jansson Kilbey were born by caesarean section at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Camperdown. A placental test showed they were identical twins. They were both tiny premature kids and they struggled a bit at the beginning. Both their grandmothers were there, one from Sweden and one from just up the road at Smiths Lake. As Anna Miranda was being weighed and blood-tested she let out these little weak cries. A familiar voice came on the radio, which was playing somewhere in another room. It was my brother Russell singing his latest single ‘Thrive’ on 2JJJ. I hoped that was a good omen.
The twins soon turned into wonderfully healthy little girls. We called them the Twillies, which is a cross between the Swedish word tvilling and the English word twin. I sometimes even called them the Twilliepops, which later led to them being called Popparna (the pops) in Swedish. They say a loved child has many names: as they learnt to talk, Miranda named herself Minna, and so the family has always known them as Elli and Minna.
Fatherhood was a big set of mixed emotions for me. I loved the kids with all my heart, but Jesus Christ they were hard work. Of course Karin bore the brunt of the hardest parts, and as a mother she was cheerful, practical and thorough. She was also quite fiercely independent and decided to get out and get away from the kids as soon as she could safely do it. So she’d go for a little stroll for an hour leaving me with the two little screamers. It was good for all of us, I guess. For a while when Minna was first born she’d suffer no one but Karin to handle her. One afternoon Karin went out for a little walk and Minna started crying, and soon I had our neighbours in our house all trying to console this tiny baby screaming at the top of her powerful lungs. The moment Karin returned and took her in her arms the crying magically stopped. Sometimes it’s hard being a father.
Unfortunately by then heroin had her hooks deep into me. In fact, I shudder to think about these awful days. It’s quite an upheaval to write much of the story from here on in … It doesn’t come lightly or pleasantly like the earlier chapters: each memory fills me with shame and revulsion and sadness in differing amounts. As I look back on myself, helplessly floundering and starting to lose everything I had, I don’t know if my feelings towards that man are anger or scorn or pity. As I sit here I want to rush into the past and give that idiot a great big fucking clout. A thick ear, as my mum used to threaten me with. My life started to unravel in a hopelessness that was not tragic so much as embarrassing. Heroin didn’t make me glamourously thin; it made me podgy and flabby. It didn’t curb my appetite; it gave me a hankering for sweet milky custardy things. But that was the least of it. It did worse than just damage your looks.
Because I had a partner and family and responsibilities I was suddenly enmeshed in an instant set of lies as to where I was going, why it had taken so long, and how much I was spending. At first when I was just dabbling with the stuff I’d been quite candid about it but as it took hold and dragged me down I began to lie my pants off. And after a while, as the stuff takes hold, the addict starts to enjoy telling lies and he’ll enjoy maintaining complicated fantasy worlds that anyone on the outside will immediately spot as a web of utter lies.
Very few people can use the stuff and not turn into a naughty fibbing ne’er-do-well who’ll say almost anything if it involves a fix at the other end. Yes, a fix! Because by now I was shooting the stuff up into the big vein in my right forearm that I never before even knew existed.
On the top floor of my house there lived a lady called Katie, an ex-doctor who’d been chucked out of the profession because of some malarkey with – you guess it! – opiate prescriptions. And she had a boyfriend called Tim who was in jail for importing the stuff. Katie gave me my first few shots. And later on when my big veins shrank away she helped me find other veins to shoot. Katie was a lovely woman and brilliantly intelligent; apparently she’d come top of her year finishing medical school. She was not your usual addict. She administered shots in a precise doctorly fashion, dispassionately commented on what was actually going on as she did. ‘There!’ she’d softly exclaim as the needle probed my vein, a tiny flash of crimson blood appearing in the solution without even being pulled in. ‘OK, here we go,’ she’d say as she expertly pushed the disposable syringe’s plunger down, discharging its contents relatively painlessly into my vein. After whipping the needle out she’d ask, ‘How’s that?’ with a wry smile.
A lot of people have tried in many different ways to explain the feeling of a shot of the stuff. I’ll have a little stab at it myself I suppose, although it really is quite an ineffable feeling. One famous Australian songwriter who was once on the stuff said something about people being scared to mention that heroin can have quite a quasi-spiritual feeling to it, and I must agree. The first shot was quite the revelation. I had fallen in love with heroin by snorting it but injections took me to another level. It suddenly occurred to me that sniffing it was a terrible waste … just like Katie said. From then on I’d rarely do that because as soon as the injection was in my blood I felt that sweet, sickly-soft bash as your whole system reeled in the most delightful way. The taste of the stuff appears at the back of your throat and for some reason this bitter chemical taste is most delightful! Instead of the creeping euphoria of a sniff, the shot delivers instant gratification. It rushes through your body and mind, taking away all aches and pains and bad feelings and self-doubt. Katie and I would then smoke a joint and drift off in a disembodied haze in the gloom of her tatty room.
Tim came out of jail and he wasn’t at all like I’d expected. He was already in his 40s and had been an opiate addict his whole adult life. He’d been in and out of jail but was the gentlest, most charismatic and softly spoken guy who looked at the whole thing in a sadly philosophical manner. He’d endured a thousand cold turkeys and always came straight back to the stuff. He couldn’t and wouldn’t ever have one day without it if he could help it. But he wasn’t a thug or a pusher or a whining cartoon junkie. He was a decent, intelligent bloke who just happened to be addicted to something that was just about the most illegal thing you could ever think of.
The very word heroin scares many people, and that’s partly because the media and the laws have whipped up an unnecessary hysteria. Tim’s problems with the stuff were all legal problems. If the stuff were actually legal most junkies’ problems would recede to being merely the medical problems that injecting drug users must expect to find when pursuing their course. And that’s enough to cope with, without all the other carry-on with police and customs and the underworld one must enter to find it in the first place. There is no actual reason to compound the misery of the addict. He is already suffering enough.
For a while I managed to make as much as I was spending. I got a big advance for my publishing from Sony, and I got in a few production jobs. One was Canadian songbird Mae Moore, with whom my relationship eventually soured towards the end of the record because of my habit. You can read all about it on her retrospective album if you want to get some more details. Another record I produced was Australian chanteuse Margot Smith, a truly gifted woman, albeit already on the path to alcoholism when I met her. I got to produce half her debut album Sleeping with the Lion. I co-wrote a chunk of it with her. Margot came in and drank her wine, and smoked my pot and snorted my stuff. She was a real wild child who had an appetite for anything that was going. Her talent was impressive and her singing was sublime but it was obvious she was doomed if she didn’t stop drinking, even at that early stage of the game. Meanwhile Karin and the girls spent more and more time in Sweden. I didn’t blame them for wanting to be there because I was starting to become a real mess: a sweaty unreliable fool.
The Church had done a tour of Australia that made no money. Peter was disgruntled and left the band for a while. There were no bad feelings, not even a discussion; he just upped and left. Jay Dee stayed on a little longer, though we had nothing to really offer him. Eventually Marty and I were the only ones left, and we reconvened at the studio in Albion Street with Dare Mason producing. There, as my heroin addiction worsened and deepened, we came up with the strange record called Sometime/Anywhere. It was OK but my honeymoon with the stuff was over and it wasn’t particularly helping me anymore. The album is passable, but I’d run out of steam. Compared to the wonderful Priest=Aura it was an unsatisfactory affair in every department. It remains an unlistenable oddity to me – every song feels like pain.
Thankfully Marty wasn’t judgmental of my addiction. He ignored it as much as he could, only occasionally offering a wry comment. But I was starting to become truly miserable and wretched. I’d run out of money, so I started borrowing it and pawning my not inconsiderable guitar collection down at the local hock shop to keep up the raging habit riding my back. Everyone was angry and disappointed with me, myself more than anyone.
Eventually Karin moved permanently to Sweden where she might as well be, seeing as I’d lost the plot. The ‘stuff ’ was the only thing I had any real loyalty to, and I became a shadow of my former self. Groups came to the studio to hire it out and I’d demand the money upfront in a very unprofessional way. I was running down all my resources. I was out of control. The stuff now had me completely by the balls and the pleasure had gone out of it for the most part. I was merely running from the horrors, and sinking lower and lower in some bizarre midlife crisis.
I still kept making records though. I still kept plodding on against the odds … but the stuff had well and truly corrupted my friendship with Grant, and in an ironic twist Grant’s own problem with the stuff had worsened in direct proportion to my own. We’d score and use together, and like all drug buddies we ended up squabbling over our dealings. I had more money than Grant, and I’d buy more and use more and sometimes unnecessarily rub that in. Heroin makes people cruel and callous. Grant was shady and deceptive in his dealings with the stuff too. The outside world hadn’t twigged that he was using, which is exactly the way he wanted it, but it’s even harder to play the role of the incognito junkie.
During this ugly and final phase of our friendship we made another Jack Frost album. Tim Powles, whom you might remember as the drummer from The Venetians, was then a drumming gun for hire around Sydney. The Venetians had long since fallen apart, and Tim had played for everybody since then – including some of Australia’s biggest bands who you wouldn’t have expected. His drumming was totally solid and he was a reliable, no-nonsense type of character. He’d already done some drumming on Sometime/ Anywhere and we’d been impressed by his work, so we got him in on drums and wrote and recorded a bunch of songs.
The songs are hard and tough and sad numbers.
Grant and I really outdid ourselves on the Snow Job record. Grant was shocked when he saw the cover art I chose after the album lay around unreleased for a while. It was of Buddha and some chick in lotus position, and Grant blushed and stuttered and blushed and stuttered some more. Inside the record there’s Grant wearing a beanie and two sets of shades, and me on the nod on my couch. The record did very little and garnered few reviews when it did come out. Grunge and Britpop ruled the airwaves and there wasn’t any room for Jack Frost I suppose.
Things constantly churn over in the pop world, and The Church were considered passé if they were considered at all … but I was too far gone to notice. I was on a losing streak and had no expectation I would win. Heroin was beginning to knock the hubris out of me.
Something had to do it; it might as well be the stuff.