‘Renaissance Man’. Few people match the headline. Steve Kilbey personifies it. Kilbey first came into the public consciousness with his band The Church, who formed in 1980. The Church are currently on tour in America with the Psychedelic Furs. Their most recent album Further Deeper drew widespread acclaim. Kilbey is noted for his poetry and his painting. In some way, every day, Kilbey is creating.

His latest release is a collaboration with Irishman Frank Kearns, The Speed Of The Stars. The album, up there with Kilbey’s finest, has been a long time coming. Chatting to Sean Sennett, Kilbey explains the process behind the recording of The Speed Of The Stars and how the collaboration came into being.

The record with Frank was obviously a long time coming. How did you guys first meet each other?

The Church and his band Cactus World News were double booked at a gig in Connecticut somewhere. There was a lot of frosty silence between us. We didn’t really talk or communicate. They looked at us, I think because we were better looking or something, and we looked at them because they were renowned to be this hard-hitting political band.

We rubbed shoulders very uneasily. Then nothing. I was very surprised that at a gig in London maybe six or seven years later this guy popped up and went, “Steve, it’s Frank from Cactus World News.” “Oh, Hi Frank.” And we got talking. He said, “Come and visit me,” and I went and visited him. We really got on like a house on fire. He said, “Let’s make an album together,” and I said, “All right.” Then when I went back to do the album, of course, I was a heroin addict again.

We’re talking ’90s, right?

We met in the mid-nineties and he sort popped up at gigs. I found myself getting on really well with him. Seeing him in Cactus World News with the way he was dressed up, he seemed like some really hard-core Irish political extreme leftie or whatever the fucking political thing was. But he wasn’t like that at all. He was very much into Celtic mythology that I had read when I was a kid. We drove around Ireland visiting Druidic sites, strange places. We had a couple of days driving around Ireland. We hit it off really well.

He had this recording studio and he said, “Come back and make an album.” But by the time I got back there I had jumped back onto heroin, I had a brief respite when I first went to Ireland. When I turned up I was on the gear. I was booked in for three weeks. The first week I was all right. Then I was really sick, and then I just came back on board right at the end.

Then the trouble was we had this music we’d recorded that I had been so violently ill that the music reminded me of it. It took me a long time to even be able to listen to it again. It reminded me of how fucking bad I felt when I cold-turkeying off a huge heroin habit in Dublin.

Then Frank started saying, “Let’s do it. Let’s do it.” Eventually he came back out to Australia and we started writing music again. I think this was over three or four visits, we started doing the vocals. Then he booked into Rankin Street Studios in Botany and it’s got this amazing guy who works there, Ted Howard. Started putting his own backing vocals, doing extra overdubs, and started mixing the track. It’s been a long, slow, gradual process. Only completed in about March of this year.

So you were basically taking some backing tracks and beds you’d done in the very late ’90s and then I understand you did all your vocals in 2016? 

2014, 2016, yeah, all the vocals are new. Not all the backing tracks are old. About four or five of them are from those sessions. It’s kind of seamless. When I listen to it I don’t think of it that way. Even some of the tracks we did in Australia when he came back, the same drummer then overdubbed to those tracks in Dublin. Then he came out early this year, and we did three or four brand new tracks and got Barton Price in to play on them, from the Models. He did a really good job too. It all kind of fits together well. When I’m listening to them, I don’t think about which period they came from.

I thought the same thing. It sounded very seamless. What’s your song writing process for you guys, do you sit down with two acoustic guitars? 

Frank really likes it when I play piano, and I get to playing stuff on the piano as sort of a little melody. Then if I keep that going, he usually starts playing to that. Sometimes I play bass. We usually have a rhythm track going or a drum machine, and we start fiddling around until something comes.

He’s got this Eventide Harmonizer. Have you ever seen one of them? It’s a kind of box they invented in the early ’80s. People didn’t put things straight into them. You would record a vocal and you put it through the Eventide Harmonizer. People used to put guitars through them a bit. Frank plugs straight into it with his guitar. It wasn’t really designed particularly as a guitar box, but it’s got an incredible range of sounds. It does lots of beautiful things. He’s become sort of a master of the guitar and Eventide Harmonizer. That is his sound. He initially sits down and dials up a sound and the sound almost suggests the song.

I remember years ago talking to you about your lyrics and I think it was “Heyday” or “Starfish,” that you had the backing tracks. Then went swimming, and basically wrote the lyrics to the backing tracks in your head, and then came back and put them on. Do you still write lyrics that way or were you writing in the studio with Frank?

I complete lyrics when I’m swimming. When I swim I’m often working on lyrics in my head, and melodies. A lot of these songs Frank would come around and go, “Right, tonight you’re doing this. Here’s the song. You’re going to sit down and write lyrics,” and he’d often throw the pen and pad at me and go, “Now do it.” I’d go “Ahh,” and he’d go, “You’re fucking going to do it, Steve. Just fucking do it and then it’s over.” And then I’d go, “All right.”

I’d smoke a joint, listen to the track a couple of times, and then suddenly it would all very magically come into my head. I would start hearing the words against the music, and hearing the melody. Once I get that first couple of lines, it’s like everything else sort of flows. I don’t know where it came from or comes from. I’ve been doing it a long time. It’s a bit like asking a footballer how does he know exactly which way the ball’s going to bounce. You’ve been doing it for a long time and get a sixth sense for how these things should go.

The Jack Frost record (with Grant McLennan) struck a chord. Do you enjoy collaborations with people outside the Church? I assume you do.

Oh, yeah. I think Jack Frost was the only time I ever collaborated on lyrics. I don’t collaborate with lyrics normally. I do the lyrics on my own. That’s the one thing. I don’t like to collaborate on lyrics at all. I think that’s best left to one person. Frank and I collaborated on the music. We create the music from the ground up, and then that music kind of inspires what the lyrics should be.

Do you think you’ll do any gigs together?

If there was a demand, nothing would be better than to go and do gigs. If there was a demand, we’d be out there playing. If there’s no demand, I don’t want to try and take this kind of record into a bar and play it with no monitors. It demands to be done properly. I’m not going to shout it out somewhere. It’s going to have to be done properly. When we can afford to do it properly, if there’s a demand, bring it on. Bring on the demand and there we are.

Thanks, Steve.

You can purchase The Speed Of The Stars here http://stevekilbey.bandcamp.com/album/speed-of-the-stars