Steve Kilbey (born 13 September 1954, Welwyn Garden City, England) is the lead singer-songwriter and bass guitarist for The Church, an Australian rock band. He is also a music producer, poet, and painter.
Kilbey began his professional music career at age 17 when he joined a “cabaret band”. He then joined Precious Little, a rock band featuring future Church bandmate Peter Koppes on drums. Kilbey followed up with another band, Baby Grande, around 1978 while he lived in Canberra. Soon after, he formed The Church along with Koppes, Nick Ward, and Marty Willson-Piper. After some success in their native Australia in the early 1980s, Kilbey and The Church went on to international fame when “Under the Milky Way” (from their 1988 album Starfish) became a hit.
Kilbey has released six solo music albums and collaboratively written and/or produced recordings with the late Grant McLennan (of The Go-Betweens), Stephen Cummings, and Kev Carmody. Earthed, a book of fiction, was published in 1986, in conjunction with an album of the same name of instrumental electronic music. His book of poetry, Nineveh/The Ephemeron, was released in 1998 and was later republished.
Kilbey lives in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney, Australia, with his wife and three of his five children. His brothers, Russell Kilbey and John Kilbey, have also led successful Australian bands.
A biography of Steve Kilbey titled No Certainty Attached was released in June 2009 by Verse Chorus Press. Also in June 2009, an album with Martin Kennedy (from All India Radio) called Unseen Music, Unheard Words was released. Kilbey’s first solo record in eight years, entitled Painkiller was released in North America on Second Motion Records in early 2009.
~ Wikipedia
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the light still pours out of me
the need to experience everything
the most sacred place the most dirty place
the place that is no place at all
the emptiest place where the soul stripped bare of skins
and hardly recognisable to that naked i
they have sold you a lie brothers and sisters
and the rock and the roll is a path to that lies heart
ladies and gentlemen is it not best that we rock and rock on?
i strap on my plank with wires but its a stradivarius of a plank
boom boom boom my amplified notes that have busted my ears
i am an old soldier still fighting in his legion
my sword is my music
my arrows are my words
my integrity is my shield
my failures and mistakes scar me but i fight on
such a grandiose metaphor such is rocknroll
you can be high n mighty
you can be down and low
you can be gay or junkie or christian or fool
you can be lovely or ugly or rich or poor
self taught or conservatory it doesnt matter
rock put the power back in all our hands
now we the people can select our heroes
and we choose em from rocknroll because its all we got
you cant trust actors n politicians speaking someone elses lines
you cant trust rocknroll singers either …what the hell do we know?
but rock aint asking for your trust
rock aint asking for your vote
but it is asking for your money
and in return it gives you something
so sublime there is no word to describe it
some revelation some bliss some divine insight
some release of the feeling of love
some excitement some hope some pride some joy
only a few can ever invoke such things and that music we treasure
it brings the holy to even the most heathen of hearts
it sets the scene for an epiphany
it guides you towards a splendid feeling of being in the know
it creates a world for you
each record by the beatles built on and expanded from the last world
the initial solid modern construction would begin to sprout strange new wings
consider “the end” by the doors
who has ever conjured this mood before except maybe arthur rimbaud?
a journey within decadence and failure and random images of dissolution
when its all over you feel like you experienced something, eh?
oh that jimbo quite a poet and those lovely instruments
hear them embellishing and weaving the threads of the story
hear that voice leading you all over the place
through time and nightmare
its a play its a poem its a story its a vision
in this we somehow get glimpses of the supernatural world
the world inhabited by spirit by the dead by the drugged by the insane
a wild world oh baby baby
there is magic in this world and 3 short cuts
are sex drugs and rocknroll
all three together taken in regular large doses will open up your chakras
or something
the profound shift in any direction away from this dismal reality of here
when i was 16 i worked on a building site as a labourer
for 6 weeks of school holiday one year
at work it was brutal and hard and so male it was disgusting to me
everything was coarse and vulgar and loud and brutal
i got home and my antidote was to enter the world of “a beard of stars”
yeah marc bolan was the opposite of the guys on the site
here was romance and tragedy and strange strange magic
a middle earth set to some mixture of the weirdest rock
these songs seemed dragged from another continuum
where eric claptonesque forms are laid over baroque tapestries
where fey means faery and miracles are materialising
and the love oh my goodness
the love the love the love
bolan is in love with his babe
he is donovan playing romeo playing legolas playing caspian
away from the concrete dust and the muddy carpark and blokes
bolans world opened upon the first note of the record
it was not a world like a book to be explored once maybe twice
it was a world expanding open in breathtaking jumps
the more you listened the more you heard and ditto in reverse
this was not the hamfisted thump of your zeps and purples
nor the grammar school feel of yer yesses n genesises
nor the rebellious strut of the stones
not even the beatles
in all their trailblazing wanderings had hit upon this world
not even druggy not even deliberately weird
bolan had taken rocknroll instruments and techniques
and used them to outpour babylon and greece and narnia and druid
like half remembered books from childhood
with the witches and black cats and its elders and m m m magical moons
and against this backdrop bolan invokes youth and love and an ideal idyll
fuck its not everyones cup of tea
but the marvel is nonetheless that he pulled it off
and it gave me a chance to see the possibility
of reconciling all my favourite things into song
and somehow locking them there to be taken out when needed
i take bolans blueprint and i sometimes reassemble it in my own materials
thats alright thats what its all about
thats the business thats the way it s’posed to be
you take the best stuff and recombine it
thats what we do
thats what you like
~ Steve Kilbey
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R.M. ENGELHARDT 