The Time Being | Steve Kilbey

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=191564417556192

http://lifemusicmedia.com/?p=17069

Tour dates are in our calendar. Please note that the Melbourne show will now be at the Cherry Bar in ACDC Lane.

Steve & Ricky will also be at The Espy, St Kilda on Sat 23rd July w/special guests The Demon Parade, Lady Strangelove  & Crooked Saints – event invite here

View gig photos  by Cai Griffin in Tone Deaf’s gallery – click here

Tim Powles will be on Radio 107.1fm radio North Queensland at 2.30pm tomorrow (Thursday 30th June 2011). This show is broadcast live on the net here http://www.radioportdouglas.com/

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE http://podcasts.radioportdouglas.com/TimPowlesOnPortFM20thJune2011.mp3

It went for approx an hour. Great interview with timEbandit

the addict immaculate

dont get hung up on the terminology

try to find the idea within the words

modern science is uncertain where addiction resides

yes it is a series of neuro chemical blah blahs

it is also a crafty opponent that seems to out think you at every level

as you plot its demise in the secretest corner of your being

it fucking laughs to itself

baby it  knows your tiniest little inkling inside out

its got you bugged in heart and mind

its blocking your own internal dialogues

it obscures the heart and mind from each other

it fills you with irrational fear

it manipulates your choices

it jams your common sense

it bombards you with its propaganda

and it censors the information going in

it switches off self preservation measures

it over rides logic

it tells you one and one is three and you believe it

you find it hard to fight it because it isnt anywhere

but it always knows what your next move will be

it plays you like a fish…. let you go …reel you in

its got your number

it knows you

it is within you

you invited it in

i believe all substances that affect our consciousness have some spirit

or some program

or some agenda

or some disembodied intelligence behind them

and these spirits hide inside us

like lobbyists championing their cause

and telling you how badly you need them

and putting a spin on anything concerning them

and if ever cornered becoming angry and desperate

if you ask your friends why they smoke

after youve waded through all the usual rationales

you will invariably find that they become quite angry

because the spirit will not let them access the answers

and in their bafflement they become surly and incommunicative

and protective of their addiction

the spirits inner voice can sound just like your own

and it can threaten and cajole and whine and remonstrate

talk you into or out of anything  it wants

it tells you you enjoy smoking more than you do

it tells you that stopping will be harder than it really is

it tells you that you will stop…one day…but not yet….

it spews out hard luck stories why you need to keep going

dont let other people control you by getting you to quit

you’ll quit when youre good and ready but not today

you read all those statistics about cancer

you see all the pictures and the voice thinks of something

the spirit convinces you it wont happen to you

you’ll be the one percent that doesnt get something from it

i knew a woman who was a heavy smoker

she had a terrible cough

i said maybe you should slow down with the cigarettes

she said the cigarettes helped her cope with the cough!

i mean whos coming up with this stuff…?

who is manning the switchboard in your brain…?

something is telling you to keep doing something thats killing you

something that barely gives any reward but to satisfy itself

for this most meagre pleasure you are prepared to die horribly

and prematurely

and the spirit goes on yabbering year in year out

helping you procrastinate helping you relapse

helping you ignore those nasty warning signs

sometimes a whisper sometimes a roar

the voice of the spirit

listen

can you hear it?

st steven supermartyr

i hate fucking cigarettes

i detest and loathe and fucking abhor the fucking things

these fucking cigarettes are some fucked up fucking shit, right…?

what the fucking fuck???????

filthy stinking stupid idiot things that do nothing

at least fucking alcohol does something even if its horrible

oh yeah sorry cigarettes do do something

they fucking kill ya

heres the deal imagine this

13 bucks for twenty little putrid sticks

that stink out inside and outside in

dirty mucky ashy smelly foul foolish fucking useless things

for a hundred bucks a week habit you can develop a disgusting disease

you wont get any visions or dreams or loss of inhibitions

you wont get any drowsiness or euphoria or blurred eyesight

you wont hallucinate or overdose or trip or get loaded or pissed

or high or down or out there or stimulated or anything

what do you get?

fucking nothing

i keep using the word fucking

so as to emphasise to an nth degree the total imbecility of cigarettes

no one can defend them there is not one good thing you can say

“oh it gives me something to do with my hands”
yeah…so you gonna trade your fucking lungs for that..?

i mean before smoking who ever fucking said that…

gives me something to do with my hands…

do you think cavemen sat around

wishing that their hands had  something to do…?

do you think aristotle fucking wondered what he could do with his hands

as if his hands were restless and demanding “something to do”

what a fucking joke a killing joke it is

what about “it calms my nerves”

try fucking having throat cancer n see how calm your nerves are

a total criminal absurdity

a wicked cosmic joke so incredibly blatant we almost ignore it

for the last forty years since we kinda “found out” about smoking

we have ignored the vicious pernicious fuckwit grip of this killer

its just totally stupid

and it goes against the grain of intelligent western thought

one day it will have to go just like fucking bullfighting

in fact they are both totally idiotic things

no there is no beauty or inexplicable enigma to em

both of em are death

a negation of life

fuck you kilbey you take drugs you say

fuck you kilbey you are an ex cigarette smoker yourself hypocrite

or as one alcoholic cretin recently re-marked to me

when informed that i did not take kindly to booze in MY house

he said : you sound like the reformed whore in church, steve

and there you go some little axiom to justify yer unhealthy habits

so when kilbey says fuck dont smoke cigarettes

you say fuck you kilbey you took fuckin’ heroin, BABY!!!

yes i did but that doesnt help your tongue cancer

yes kilbey is a hypocrite

but surely its better to be the fucking reformed whore in church

(ha ha)

than the unreformed whore getting fucked by some horrible brute up the back lane

or what?

are you following my fucking logic this is not rocket surgery!

it kills you

it does nothing but feed itself

no that is not just a metaphor

maybe i know nothing about anything

but i fucking understand addiction

my friends whom i implore DO NOT SMOKE

i was addicted to smack for ten years

it gave me a lot of time to consider the mechanisms of addiction

yes i consider myself an expert like a thief is expert in thieving

i am not proud of my knowledge or how i obtained it

but is knowledge nonetheless

i tell my friends look there is some kinda spirit at work in this

an opium spirit

a tobacco spirit

a wine spirit

a vodka spirit

a marijuana spirit

yes metaphorically

yes on certain levels

levels you may not understand unless

you get someone like me

someone who examines thought as a living

i write words and the words come to me

and i have observed how these words arrive

i see where the words come from

and until i tangled with heroin i didnt understand

humanity is in some apparent symbiosis with many things

with animals with plants with environments

the fruit contains the seed so some creature  eats it

walks around

and excretes it somewhere else

the fruit tree cannot get its seed over there by itself

the tree makes the apple so human will eat it and help it propagate

the human benefits from the apple and grows loadsa trees

this is as our symbiotic relationship with tobacco

fuck are you telling me humanity

is not in some sorta symbiotic relationship with tobacco….?

tell me this :

if tobacco had no use to man would it still be around after millions of years?

it had to figure out something didnt it?

i mean every fucking thing that gets through each century

has to have something going for it, right?

otherwise you fade away

you gotta have strength or speed or endurance or adaptability

in the plant world i guess things must die out too

they have the problem of no mobility and they need to get about

usefulness to another species is a big fucking plus i’d say

ok so theres this substance and its usefulness is to man

only this fucking symbiotic relationship is now a hoax

i reckon the native americans for example used tobacco “correctly” :

yeah on special occasions  they would smoke a large quantity at once

eg dig this

a junky in stockholm once told me that hed tried every fucking drug

i said what was the weirdest scariest fucking trip man

he said tobacco

i said what do you mean…tobacco…?

but this swedish junky had once visited new guinea

and smoked tobacco with the natives

big deal i said

no man he said

this fresh tobacco in this great big pipe

its like smoking a hundred cigarettes at once

he said it fucking knocked ya right out of this world

you know i could kinda imagine it

like when you start smoking and you get your first nicotine rush

its fucking horrendous

like dizzying  nauseous breathless kick in the guts

imagine that feeling times 100

thats the correct dose i guess

one huge fucking blast occasionally

the native cultures dont puff on fucking cigs all day n night

they use it with a certain ceremonial feel that almost prevents abuse

the men would gather and i guess have their ceremony

i dont fucking know say some stuff

to give this smoking some context or holiness or tradition

i dont know do i……

ok you smoke this great big pipe

with the circumference of a small cannon

and one can only imagine

BANG! youve gone from 0 to 1000 in one tenth of a second

the swedish junky convinced me of his weird tobacco epiphany

yes i do believe there is something out there to be observed

and normally i am the first idiot wanting to see what it is

every fucking substance got its own dimension

heroin dimension is warm and sleepy ….at first….

the cocaine dimension is exhilaration

whatever i guess angel dust has its own dimension

datura has  got a dimension and its hideous

tobacco definitely has a dimension but i dont wanna go there

it may even be a useful dimension

i dont know

i have never really read an interview with a sioux

talking about his tobacco experience

one assumes it had some big pluses

but um white man is not using tobacco in this way

i smoked a million cigs and not one tiny revelation

like ingesting a tiny bit of some drug

never getting the real effect but just constantly under the surface

the trouble is not so much with the substance tobacco and its effects

the trouble is the means by which we fucking get it into our systems

the way it comes in

not what it does

the native users smoke it occasionally not constantly

not with all the additives and all the fucking other shit

i bet the native users dont suffer all the chronic smoking bullshit we got

we’re smoking this stuff

we’re getting no revelations

we’ve fucked it and modified it

like how we made cocaine from coca leaf

they say the cats in south america who chew the coca leaf are cool

at least cooler than the raving egotistical cocaine addict in the west

not all people react to cocaine like that

drugs are like alcohol

people react   in a whole gamut of ways

going from total negative disinterest to crazed apostle-like mania

but by fucking with the coca-leaf the west did its usual dumb thing

some of the active ingredients were extracted from a melange of molecules

the west considered some parts of the coca leaf unnecessary

maybe they thought it inert or something

other bits are souped up with a chemical process

the mode of transmission is changed perverted

now its superfast  superstrong but supernasty too

it wasnt sposed to be

youve fucked with something far deeper than you can understand

something had already figured out how it was supposed to work

god or the plant itself or something else …nature if you like

it doesnt want to kill its host

tobacco doesnt want to kill its host

no drug does…enslave them yes but not to harm them too much

the 2 sides of a symbiotic relationship need the other to stay in good shape

the sucker fish on sharks

the shark says get rid of my irritating parasites and you can hang onto me

the sucker says cool i’ll get to work right away

he knows the shark aint gonna hurt him cos they gotta good deal

but either god or evolution or some other force… nature for example…

has somehow sorted it out and theres a real mesh of interconnectedness

and that is how it works for mutual benefit

the size and shape of both the fish for example

if a human redesigned one of the fish  if it were possible

you can be sure it would go wrong maybe in some hideous unseen way

thats what happened with tobacco and the west

we are not using it we are abusing it

it wasnt supposed to be like this

we are creatures for all our intelligence

we are subject to the material rules of our reality

tobacco smoke

esp in cigarettes and the 20 a day smoking of them fucks you bad

hang on

smoking tobacco constantly kills people yet we tolerate it?

somehow our symbiosis is outta whack

cos our partner is dealing us death

if it was anything else killing us so unnecessarily as this

people would be going fucking beserk that it was banned and hard to obtain

but we have accepted it

its hard to stop now it is so thoroughly rooted in our lives

but my fascination is actually with the tobacco spirit in dialogue with us

now a kinda perverted fucked up spirit urging you to smoke

even tho its taking out people left right n centre

young women especially dying faster sooner nastier

big multiplier /good odds on an early death

fuck that spirit of tobacco is selling you some trip aint it?

more tomorrow

Steve Kilbey, Tim Powles, Craig Wilson and Ricky Maymi will be on ABC National with Andy Ford at 11am this morning performing Block and talking about the recent Universe Within Autism Awareness and Benefit Gig http://www.abc.net.au/rn/listen/player.htm

27/6/11 – Listen to the audio here http://www.abc.net.au/rn/musicshow/stories/2011/3253457.htm . Tim Powles talks about the autism benefit and then adds percussion to Thom Moore (a guest singer at the benefit) on the church’s song ‘Already Yesterday’

the bondi strindbergs

i am the chill severe papa down here in these colonies

our lives paradoxically skandanavian in its existential struggle

a harsh conceited man who has made and lost fortunes

father to an unlikely number of daughters each impossibly lovely

my coach has broken down in an enchanted forest

i am old but still vaguely handsome as i wander in the snow

years of city living have left me unprepared for the wilderness

i am a merchant and my ship of dreams has run aground

my horse disappeared into the darkness

my fortune was only in words and words became cheap

and i said something once and no one remembered

and i said something once and no one forgot

the trees are old and scarred they seem to sneer

the moon over head is neither here nor there

its place in the story unclear

the night is antiseptic and frozen

the sparkling stars are captured as if on velvet membrane black

a loud voice in my head shouts defiantly at the night

the other voices are quiet and waiting to see

and the forest squeezes itself in roots and in fronds

its thought given form in spirit which animates matter

an unknown past

a distant future

oh now for the warm bath the opium pipe the touch of woman

oh for the crisp sheets oh for the toast and jam and mulled wine

the night full of its beasts unseen but moving in undergrowth

the night full of traps and pits and rusty old hooks

the night full of whispers from the grave

the night full of its mists smelling faintly of some far-off laboratory

the night of thorn the night of claw

the night of snout the night of bone

expelled from time during some dismal spell

and now you merchant have wandered into the domain of Lunacy

who am the master of these lands and some great feline terror

and he will play with you in his long lit halls

and things will move of their own accord

a very bad dream

a long moment between lives

http://www.theaureview.com/interviews/the-au-interview-steve-kilbey-of-the-church-sydney

June 22, 2011 – 3:12am — Larry Heath

Tomorrow night, Steve Kilbey is joining Peter Koppes and Tim Powles from The Church for a one-off intimate performance at the Red Rattler in Sydney, to raise money and awareness for Autism Spectrum Australia. I had the honour of catching up with Steve last week to chat about the initiative, his work with Ricky Maymi from The Brian Jonestown Massacre and some of his collaborations from over the years – including the recent GB3 with Glenn Bennie.

You’re about to play some shows with Ricky Maymi on the back of the mysterious album The Wilderness Years, By David Neil – how did your relationship with Ricky come about?

I don’t know how you’d describe our relationship – it’s a bit father and sonish. He’s been a mate of mine for a long while now, we like a lot of the same music. He was in Sydney and I had this concept about this dead rock star who’d never really done anything, only released some very obscure records, and so Ricky and I said – let’s try and make the records that this guy might have made. It’s always good to have a premise when you set out to do something. It’s very difficult just to sit down and say, I’m going to write a song. It’s much easier to say I’m going to sit down and write a song that gives you this feeling, and these are the background details to it…

Well we’re excited to hear it! You’re touring throughout Australia and New Zealand in July and August. But you did do a few shows together last year?

Yeah. We’ve got a band, we’ve got a father and son bass player and drummer.

There you go! It’s almost like a double father and son act!

*Laughs*…. Exactly.

And this comes shortly after you performed shows as GB3, with Glenn Bennie, you’re definitely jumping between the projects at the moment!

Yep. On the go!

How did that show go?

This GB3 record is an amazing record. It’s definitely up there with anything I’ve ever done. I’ve always wanted much more for it than it ever gets. Bigger venues and more people and more reviews. All the guys in the band have day jobs, and you can’t get Glenn to understand how amazing he is. If ever I compliment him on stage, and say ‘The Amazing Glenn Bennie’, he gets a bit angry. He’s lived a career of modesty. So I’ve always wanted more for that band and that record. It’s been a struggle to get it out there.

You released the record back in October if last year – what was the cycle like getting it to that point? From the time you and Glenn first had the idea to work together on the project, to the time it was released in stores…

Some cycles for my projects can be quite long. GB3 took a couple of years. David Neil is about three years, since it started. Others happen reasonably quickly.

There have been plenty of these sorts of collaborations over the years – from your Jack Frost project with Grant McLennan to Isidore with Jeffery Cain of Remy Zero.

And Martin Kennedy – he and I have started working on album number three. Always juggling a lot of projects.

But it always comes back to The Church, and today we’re talking about the Autism Awareness and Benefit gig you’re playing at the Red Rattler on the 23rd of June. How did this event come about?

The Church have an executive producer slash patron who is a wealthy professor from America. A fan of The Church who has helped us finance projects for 14 or 15 years. One of his daughters is autistic and it is his cause. It was his wish that The Church take up the cause as well. It’s really the only thing he’s ever asked of us in return. So we’ve been looking for an opportunity to raise awareness of this condition.

On a personal side, I have a nephew who has Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a mild form of Autism. Now our patron’s daughter has the sort of Autism where she is locked into her own universe, she’s inaccessible. Where as my nephew, in some ways he’s completely normal, and looking at him you wouldn’t know. He actually has a brilliant mind, he’s interested in arcane things like magic and the middle ages, chemical symbols and stuff. On the other hand, he can’t say hello and goodbye and thank you. He can get frustrated and upset quite easily.

When he first came into our extended family, everybody was quite confused. I thought he was just a naughty little devil… thought that my brother was letting him get away with too much! But once it became apparent what was going on, it changed everything – it’s a completely different thing. It became so much easier to approach him knowing that he had Aspergers. So I think that raising awareness is very important. This charity we’re involved with for this event, their specialty is in working to re-educate siblings of Asbergers and Autistic children, to be able to accommodate them in their lives.

My nephew has a sister that’s older than him and a brother who’s younger, they really had to learn to sacrifice a lot. If he comes into a room and he wants to sit on a chair that they’re sitting on, they’ll have to get up and let him sit there. They can’t do what a normal kid would and say ‘that’s not fair’, because his mind doesn’t work in those terms. And that’s where this program comes in to help the siblings understand that. I believe it’s a very worthy cause.
I’m not an expert in it, but I believe that the incidences of Asbergers and Autism are on the rise – but maybe that’s because we have a name for it now. Years ago you were just a naughty little bugger! Like my nephew, always wanting to sit in the same chair and things like that, but at the same time he’s got an absolutely brilliant mind. He’ll end up with a really important job, because he’ll be able to sit there and focus hour after hour on a task – far beyond what you or I could do. You look back at the geniuses of history, and hey’ve often said that people like Einstein and Newton had signs of Asbergers for that very reason.

It’s brilliant that you have this opportunity to bring light to the cause – what can people who attend expect from the performances?

There’s a Church side project called The Refo:mation, which is the band minus Marty. For the first time ever we’ll be playing songs off an album we released a while back. Ricky will be there playing guitar. Some other musicians will join us, some who have Asberger’s themselves and others who have been affected by it in their families.

Our MC is from a band called The Camels, and he has a brother who has been rated the most Autistic person in the Southern Hemisphere. That’s the private universe. Nothing’s coming in and nothing’s coming out. It’s like having a computer with all these files in it that you can never open.

———

INFORMATION ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE:

There will be no door charge on the night. Instead, punters are asked to be generous and dig as deep as they can by leaving a completely tax deductable donation on entry of around $60. (Tax deductible receipt can be issued)

For more information on Autism spectrum disorders, visit: http://www.autismspectrum.org.au/ or call the Autism Information Line on 1800 069 978 or 02 8977 8377.

UNIVERSE WITHIN: Autism Awareness and Benefit Gig with members of the church and special eclectic guests.

Thursday June 23. Red Rattler. 6 Faversham Street, Marrickville.
Doors Open at 8pm.
Entry via $60 donation to Aspect being collected at the door.

Steve Kilbey, Tim Powles and Craig Wilson will be on FBi 94.5fm radio (Sydney) this Tuesday the 21^st of June at 10am EST to chat about the upcoming Universe Within Autism Awareness and Benefit Gig that’s on this week and there’s a chance they may also perform a song.

FBi 94.5fm radio – http://www.fbiradio.com/pages/on-air# for online streaming

http://www.heyheymymy.com.au/2011/06/19/steve-kilbey-interview/

“the church are one of Australia’s most enduring bands simply because the never went away. It’s a definitional thing. But for their many fans it’s also a devotional thing. Especially for one professor in America. In this interview Steve Kilbey explains what all that means and why his ARIA Hall of Fame speech was a happy accident.

HHMM: Firstly let me ask you about the benefit show The Church are doing. It’s called a Universe Within and it’s being held at The Red Rattler in Marrickville in Sydney on June 23, and will donate money raised to the not-for-profit organisation, Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect). Is Aspect and Autism a cause close to the bands heart?

SK: It is our cause. We have an Executive Producer/Patron. He’s a professor from America, he’s rather wealthy and 12 or 13 years ago he popped up at a gig at a time when we were struggling a bit and he offered to help us finance projects and tours and underwrite costs. He was as good as his word and really The Church would not exist without this guy at all. We wouldn’t have gotten through the hard times. One day we said to him, “You’ve done so much for us, what can we do for you?”.  And he said that he wanted us to get involved in the Autism cause because he had a very autistic daughter. Sometime after that my brother had a son who has Asperger’s Syndrome, so now there is a double connection for me into this. Autism is a strange problem. I’m not an expert but I believe the incidence of it is on the rise and I believe we don’t understand a lot about it. I also know that families have a lot of problems when autistic and Aspergers kids come along, and siblings often have a lot of problems, because you have to be very understanding and all the old rules suddenly don’t apply. You can’t often reason in a normal way with these kids and Aspect has been doing some re-education of siblings and helping them to live with this. Just because an autistic kid arrives in a home doesn’t mean the family knows how to deal with it.

HHMM: I guess there’s the problem of the siblings not understanding why the autistic child gets special treatment…

SK: And these do get special treatment. You cant say, “No, its’ not your turn now”, because it doesn’t work like that. So it’s great that if you are having troubles adjusting to this thing that you can go away and learn all about it.  I know that by brothers son has a younger brother and an older sister and they’ve been very understanding but they have to sacrifice a lot. The whole family does. If the kid wants to sit in the first seat in the car, he sits there. It’s not because he’s naughty, it’s just because that’s how his mind works. So there is a real need for re-education, I think.

HHMM: You remain very busy. Is being in The Church a constant process of re-invention or is it not as deliberate as that?

SK: We are always plotting our next move. There are fucking emails every day from and about The Church every day.  I stopped reading them and replying to them and then I find myself saying “Why are we doing this?” and I’m asked “Didn’t you read the email?” If you don’t read the emails then don’t complain! It takes up a lot of time and a lot of work just keeping track of The Church and all our creditors and debtors and merchandise and all our records and publishing deals. It’s like this huge on-going load of malarkey and it takes up a lot of time and energy. And that’s forgetting the actual creative process of playing guitars – that’s just running the industry of it. It takes up lots of time and nothing’s ever easy with The Church. It’s never a simple thing. It’s not like we are Mental As anything who are happy just to turn up and play whenever someone asks them.  With The Church there’s always a lot of second guessing and it always involves a lot of complications.

HHMM: Does it amuse you to see other bands announcing reunion tours and album anniversary shows, when The Church have never actually gone away?

SK: Some of those tours when the band gets back together are very lucrative and because we didn’t stop it’s no so lucrative for us, because it’s not that unusual to see us play.  When Divinyls  got back together a few years ago we ended up opening for them because they had a novelty value, but I think The Church were a far more important and superior band. They were like a pop band with hit singles but because they were getting back together they had the novelty that we couldn’t compete with. If we had broken up in 1985 we’d probably be doing the Megadome now! But you can only do it once.

HHMM: At what point in that process did you realize or accept that The Church was a life sentence?

SK: That’s an interesting question. I think it is now. I think we will all do it until we die. And when someone dies we might even replace them and keep going, unless it’s me. But I’ve always said to them that if I die they have my permission to replace me and please don’t stop. So it might end up being like Phantom and in 300 years time The Church will still be playing gigs with all these new members. So I don’t know about it being a life sentence. I know that if someone had said to me when we got together that we’d still be together in 30 years I’d have laughed, but it just seems to go on and on and on…

HHMM: Is the creative process a lot different know that you don’t have to give a thought to which song is going to be a the single or which song is going to get radio airplay?

SK: It’s much easier now that that whole pressure has gone out of it. Back in the 80’s you could have a brilliant album and if it didn’t have a hit no-one would hear it. Everything was about that one song that was going to be a hit. Now we know that we are never going to have a hit and that none of our singles are ever going to be played on the radio and its kind of a great relief.

HHMM: You know how people post videos on their Facebook pages? Well someone posted the video to Under The Milky way and described it as “The Church’s biggest hit so far.” I thought that was optimistic!

SK: (laughs). That’s  unbelievable optimism and naivety!

HHMM: You are also a serial collaborator. What do you look for in a collaboration?

SK: Usually when I collaborate its as a lyricist and a singer and I look for a brilliant atmospheric piece of music that I can sing over. When I first heard what Martin Kennedy was writing, it was just obvious that it had been written for me. So I look for something that I can do my thing over the top of. Sometimes people send me stuff that is good but there is no room in there for me. I need something that will spark my imagination so that the images for the lyrics start coming to me and with the people that I have chosen to work with, that’s always been the main reason.

HHMM: So could you explain “The Wilderness Years by David Neil”?

SK: I started writing on my blog – for no real reason – about my adventures with this dead Canadian folk singer. He’s called David Neil because he’s a cross between David Bowie and Neil Young.  He existed for a short time in the 1970’s and he died, shot by a jealous husband in a plane crash while having an OD, all at the same time. He left behind some tapes that because of my association with him back in the 70’s would be left to me to curate. So Rick Maymi (from the Brian Jonestown Massacre) and I decided to sit down and actually create this record that I had been writing about. When I write about him in my blog I always put snatches of lyrics and snatches of songs, so we actually sat down using those as bases, to create this record that could have been made in the 1970’s by this guy who had no fame or fortune. I sing in a totally different voice and it’s not normally the kind of music that I normally do. It’s very poppy and rocky and I reckon it’s interesting.

HHMM: You mentioned your patron earlier. For a number of bands and artists of your vintage, everyone is finding their own way to survive.

SK: You have to. The old ways don’t work anymore. There’s no big record company out there to pay for everything. For a while we were on big labels and when you tour they pay for it.  We had a record company underwrite a tour of Europe in 1990 that lost 200,000 pounds. Our record company paid for it but we will never get any royalties from any record because of that 200,000  pound loss and others. They would pay you to make records and they would fly you round everywhere and suddenly that all ended and you have to find another way of doing things. We would not have been able to make any records, or do anything without our patron. He is everything to us.

HHMM: It’s come the full circle, because that’s how arts used to be paid for. The term, “a patron of the arts”, exists for a reason.

SK: Exactly. It’s not a bad thing. If I was a zillionaire and I met and artist I really admired, I’d be happy to say “here’s 10 grand, go and make another record”. What else do you do with your money once you’ve bought the Ferrari and the yacht then you can look around and realize you can help a favorite singer or a favorite band. It’s a great thing and its an age old tradition. I would be completely happy if some geezer turned up and said, “Hey Steve I’m going to put you on a hundred grand a year and you are going to write songs and paint and write poetry for me.”. And usually the bolder and more original and strange you are the more you need a patron. Thank God they are out there.

HHMM: I had to ask about your speech at the ARIA Hall of Fame. People’s reaction to that speech has been fantastic and they found it so refreshing. Was it simply a case that people weren’t expecting the unbridled enthusiasm from someone like you and it was just time to shatter the serious elusive mystique?

SK: I didn’t expect it either. I didn’t know what I was going to say, what I was going to do. It was just like being on a bus. You sit there and get talking. That’s the sort of bloke I am. When I find a subject I’m interested in, I just let it all out. That’s what happened that night. On another night I could have tried to repeat that form of stand up and it wouldn’t be funny and I would be insulting people or I would be too highbrow or too aloof. Luckily for me that night all the stars came together and I just stood there like a naive guy and gushed it all out without any kind of mask. I was just saying things that came into my head and I just got on a role and I’m just very, very lucky. I think that speech impressed people more than my thirty years of music.

We had agreed that we wouldn’t have a speech and that we’d “let our music do the talking, man”. And as each person got up and thanked people and I realized it would be churlish to get and award and just stand up and mumble ‘thank you’.  At a thing like that somebody wants to hear you talk about your career and the people who helped you do it and you adventures and your take on the whole thing and as the evening wore on that I had better think of something to say and that our plan of not saying anything was not going to work at all.  But I was incredibly lucky. It was like pulling a poker machine and I got a payout. On any other night I might have got two lemons and an orange.”

UNIVERSE WITHIN Autism Awareness Benefit Gig
Thursday June 23. Red Rattler. 6 Faversham Street, Marrickville.

Doors Open at 8pm

Entry via recommended $60  donation to Aspect being collected at the door.
Exclusive items for silent auction on the night.