The Time Being | Steve Kilbey

a thought struck me

i make my music for a me who isnt me

i imagine some brutal critical ruthless critic

in fact i am him

i guess you know i  rant on about  the music i cant stand

its like i’m in this tiny niche market and all the rest drives me crazy

i find and have always found most music unlistenable

that is , theres the stuff i love and verily i doth love it in spades

and theres the rest ….its pointless for me to listen to it…

there are  mysterious qualities one must have or acquire

a ha this is the bit no one can really manipulate

i was born the vessel of a potential songwriter

i had a few certain things in my favour

my dad playing the piano

my mum interested in words

i have the dogged persistence of an idiot/savant

i am an encyclopaedia on rocknroll make no mistake

my brain is crammed with millions of pictures songs and triviae

this is my phd

this is my longs life work

i have only just realised i had a lifes work

i mean i wasnt planning to be me as i am now

once i was a very shy unsure sulky little twit

but (just like my mother)

as i hit my fifties i guess the sheer gravity of all those years…..

i improved a bit

not so frosty and all that

anyway here i am

it seemed i had a small vocation after all

i have made some very elite rock music

some of my stuff is not for everybody

you gotta be interested in subtlety and ambiguity …all that carryon

taking my cue from strawberry fields i hope to conjure dislocation

with my music and my words and my voice and my trip

but what the fuck is my trip…….?

my trip is some fine line between song and suggestion

my trip is reincarnation

my trip is drug dream and all other states of minds

my trip is 1960s heavy but i have tried to distil the quintessence

i want to open that door in your head you need to go

my songs are shifting as you approach

they often give up their secrets and beauty later

the words can be daunting for some types of people (philistines)

the music is idiosyncratic and is a synthesis of everything i love

as a painter i just started one day

you cant call picasso or van go go my influences

i dont have any painting influences

but my music is such a blend of things

oh yes the beatles of course the original and best

but everything i heard went into my deconstructive process

i analysed rock songs every song i heard

i broke it down into its successes and failures

how were these accomplished ….

the whole damn thing

i was figuring it out

meanwhile i did little else

at school i was a clown and a pest

i wasnt much of a friend or boyfriend either

i was preoccupied you see my rocknroll

in canberra i had a guy at an import record shop ring me

as each consignment came in

I USED TO BUY

EVERY VAGUELY INTERESTING LOOKING RECORD!!

i ended buying loads n loads of rubbish

stuff i just could nae abide

but i got some good stuff too

stuff like metro for example

in guitar terms a huge influence on me/us

my head was full of rock figures facts riffs myths

i knew i had the ability to manipulate the elements

i believe i understood the deep deep beauty of this music

so much fucking awful pathetic rubbish but every now n then……

aaaaah….someone writes a good vibrations or love will tear us apart

or someone like iggy would make a raw power which was incandescent

or the stones would  up the  swagger and sleaze

neil young ….harvest…..such fragility …. a delicate thing

genesis had some astounding music and words

yes it was art

i liked the sex pistols but no other punk bands that much

i always appreciated it when someone pushed an envelope somewhere

be rawer be faster be slower be nastier be nicer be louder be softer

be something no one else has done

take it further in your direction than they thought possible

look at nirvana : an explosion of iconic and iconoclastic stuff

any way accidentally ive ended up playing to a discerning crowd

they want rock but they dont know why rock is supposed to be dumb

dumb as in ac/dc for example

if that schtick isnt dumb….

….the geezer in the hat bawling out that malarkey ..?

you see this is one of rocks great wonders and its weaknesses

rock tolerates heavy handed” dumbness” pretty easily

some silly old geezer every song sounds like every other

some rocknroll platitudes about rocknroll itself…real cliches..jesus..

rock also tends to reward great commercial success

with a total dismantling of any honesty or distance

if youre successful that is the main thing

it seems people stop noticing the sillinesses anymore

maybe you love ac/dc but to me its literally painful

its not even funny (beyond a limited benny hill nudge nudge)

bon scott was enough of a maverick rascal to pull it off

but with that geezer in the hat its just bloody stupid to me

an audience of teen boys

singing and gesticulating along to them is saddening

for christs sake we are the heirs of incredible art

the iliad and the tempest

we must strive

the beatles and stones were striving

dylans striving

bowie n bolan too striving on n off

and all the others

the byrds

big star

paul simon

bruce springsteen

julian cope

all those NZ bands

the go betweens the triffids the underground lovers

striving

patti smith television

leonard cohen yes and nick cave

greg dulli led zep pink floyd

they strive on n off

that is where the line between music and magic blurs

a guy with a guitar and 3 chords and some random words

it can bewitch or fascinate you or repel you forever

i love my type of rock so much

it is a pantheon that fits  hawkwind and lou reed and whoever i like

theres the contenders n theres the schlock

in the sixties n seventies n eighties n the nineties n now : schlock

and good stuff always too

the contenders always someone gonna cook up something good

i dont know

i’m usually wrong about the most ordinary things

i love some music vehemently

i hate some music dearly

i am an odd conglomerate of music myself

yes i loved every bread single

there was a beauty in there worthwhile of analysis

i’m not a punter n i never was

i was an obsessed rock fan crossed with a computer like brain

a brain which processed innumerable data and then interpreted it

and stored it

i took my whole from a million bits and pieces even i dont know

blustering bawling macho tripe

its like green kryptonite to me

at one end of rocks catalogue of horror is the boyband fairy floss

at the other the meatnpotatoes of heavy metal n nickelback n whoever

the angry yelling excitable types draining all your energy

you plot your course aided equally by that which attracts

by that which repels

i do this music now its pretty much my own

all the 5000 songs i love and hate fight it out in my head

its just the way i’m made

its the way that i do things

the need to worship and disdain i suppose

the SHP doesnt help me here

understand the madman and genius and average geezer coexist

in us all to varying degrees

some us got a bit more of the first two

its the way things have to be

it takes troubled tormented artists sometimes

it takes ordinary geezers who must count their blessings

it takes good guys n villains and fakes frauds and fairies

so i have partitioned off my little demi-acre here

here in this imaginary landscape of rock

where nothing is really good or bad

its all a point of view

the real question is :

why wont one of those glossy music mags in england

ever write about us for years n years….?

no images were found

the church

Red Hill Auditorium – Sunday 4^th Dec 2011

the church return to Perth for a special concert at the Red Hill Auditorium on Sunday 4^th December 2011. Since the last two sold out shows at the Quarry Amphitheatre in December 2009 the band has been extremely busy. In October 2010 they were inducted into the Australian Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame. In February 2011 they toured the USA with their “Future Past Perfect Tour” playing three classic albums in their entirety Untitled #23, Priest=Aura and Starfish. In April this year they played a sold out concert, “A Psychedelic Symphony” at the Sydney Opera House with the 70 piece George Ellis Orchestra.

At Red Hill the band will be performing songs from their deep catalogue including popular favourites such as Under The Milky Way and Almost With You as well as thought provoking lyrical gems entwined with evocative moods, crashing drums and bass and ringing guitars.

This show is also special by nature of the bill, including The Triffids and Ed Kuepper. Kuepper most famously from seminal Brisbane punk outfit The Saints and the newest ‘Bad Seed’. (Martyn Casey from The Triffids an established ‘Bad Seed’ already). The Triffids need no introduction to a Perth audience. Steve Kilbey performed as guest vocalist with them on their reformation dates in January 2008.

The show promises to explore the more creative side of Australian music with these three most interesting artists. Held in an open air setting at Red Hill Auditorium on a balmy night in paradise, this is a concert not to be missed.

too dangerous to keep

they say never work with animals or children

today went out to the zoo to promote an upcoming show

i got to meet some critters and i got to handle the snakey

ooh it feels kinda weird all these independent muscles flexing

heavier and not at all cold or slimy as youd imagine

still ……

i never signed up for this, did i?

did i….?

i did……..?!!!

ok

carry on

Tomorrow morning tickets will go on sale for the Future Past Pefect show at the Norwood Concert Hall in Adelaide.

This is the link to the BASS online sales pages that will go live at 9am tomorrow (Thursday 10th Nov 2011).
http://www.bass.net.au/events/enta/CHURCH2011/

Date of Concert : Thursday 29th December 2011
Venue website :  http://www.npsp.sa.gov.au/page.aspx?u=698
Venue address : 175 The Parade Norwood (entrance off George Street)

Steve Kilbey guests on “Afternoons” with Gillian O’Shaughnessy, Tuesday 15th November 2011 @ 17:00PM AEST (14:00PM WST). Live-to-air! 720 ABC PERTH (WA)
LIVE STREAM: http://bit.ly/bpBjae

LISTEN AND DOWNLOAD : http://blogs.abc.net.au/wa/2011/11/the-church-steve-kilbey-on-80s-rock-musical-jealousy-and-going-deaf.html?site=perth&program=720_afternoons

Click on this link to watch a clip from the presentation shown on MAX TV last month : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sl1XFiWDaqY

the 57 year old child

i believe in music

indeed music can do something nothing else can do

even what that is…is a mystery in itself

even to people like me who make it and play it it is mysterious

music and music only can express such sublime ineffabilities

the best music seems divinely inspired

music is very very important to us :

to those of us that love it

it is much more than entertainment

i have always expected magic from my music

i always try to put some into my own

its hard to tell though

after all which magician can do his magic on himself……

music slowly reveals her secrets to me one at a time

a new idea occurs to me and i take it into consideration

i realise i have many rigid rules that i seem to follow unquestioningly

each idea must be examined

each parameter must be tested

tempo

length

the tuning

time signature

key

every instrument  and its interaction with the others

simplicity

complexity

the intent

the performance

the recording

the sound

the emphasis

the melody

the harmony

the lines

the riffs

the backgrounds

the solos

the effects

the mixing

etc etc

with so many variations music can never be exhausted

no : all the good songs have not yet been written!

in the total bedrock of all possible song we have excavated one inch

there are new worlds yet undiscovered and abounding forever

there will always be new beautiful forms as yet undreamt of

having taken another incarnation in the 1950s

i grew up with rocknroll

it is my natural milieu

it has many uglinesses

it contains many wondrous beauties too

i used to say rocknroll is a cartoon medium

yet i now recant this opinion

the glorious peaks of rock are as high as any other

i dont understand ballet and opera and classical

but i sure know

that it cant get you much higher than strawberry fields forever…right?

and herein lies the true wonder of rock

the ability to express vague fleeting incredible ambiguities

strawberry fields forever…you think thats not as good as the mona lisa?

you think bach or someone used an orchestra as  weirdly?

you think wordsworth or someone had a better handle on english than john?

i bless the muses and my own muse that i was a child to witness it

can you imagine this?

strawberry fields forever

its everything at once

first of all its massively popular

then its almost totally unique

i mean who else had written such a song?

its out of the blue genius

in a single stroke of detached vision

john and george martin and the other beatles

they cooked up this four minute bit of art

redefining everything that rock or pop could be

and here our music becomes serious art

you know that can sometimes accidentally happen

you start out four moptops singing about teenage love

and through some rapid metamorphoses evolve into

some kind of aural dali

complete with melting feelings and bizarre juxtaposition

strawberry fields forever showed what was possible

i mean the beatles were moving in this direction a bit

but who could have expected this …..this exquisite song?

in this one song i would rest my case

and argue it out with whoever you got

show me something out there

a film a dance a poem a sculpture a painting a symphony

show me something thats both a popular commercial item

and a distant essay on isolation

and some sadness that can never be named

and every instrument collaborating in this dislocation

sure any idiot can dislocate you with a racket

any turkey with a weedblower can do that….

but to dislocate so dreamily so gently so warped and wonderful

to me this song is as high an art as any art ive seen

its an untouchable masterpiece

it remains unsurpassed and probably unsurpassable

at this point rocknroll turned into real art

real proper hang it in the museum stuff

alongside all the other geniuses

for me this was a new beginning

i hate ugly music

i abhor ugly sounds

i disdain dissonance

it is indeed easy to make a horrible ugly racket

just like its easy to do a horrible ugly painting

or make a horrible ugly dinner

or insert your own horrible ugliness here

as i get older and older

the horrible bloody rackets get harder and harder to take

i hate morbid stupid violent entropic deliberately ugly art

no hang on a minute

yes i get the point

yes i have done time with my own rackets

not because of tradition but because of experience

i avoid noise in music

a little bit of noise and ugliness never goes astray

but its like pepper or spices and you mustnt overdo it

the prospect of a bunch of middle aged white guys

bellowing out their impotent angers over a metallic racket

well it doth fill me with entropic inertia

rock should never be the same song after song

this great lesson we should have learned from the fab four

a record of angry ugliness or a night of ugly angriness is too much

its like a play which is all violence and nothing else

or a painting which is a pitch black giving way to nothing

the beatles constantly experiment

recombining old forms and new techniques

they are the ideal

they are rocks holy quadrinity

you see they were both esoteric and exoteric

they included everyone into their strange worlds

the beauty seduced you

before you knew it you could be in the unfamiliar

i demand some diversity therefore

and a bloody horrible racket by a rock band is anathema to me

i dont care if it supposedly has humour or irony or self-depracation

(though i sincerely doubt it does)

endless stuff about death and decay and disease and misery

accompanied by tuneless noise

it seems thats art out of balance

for are we not surrounded by these very things?

surely then the musician within whichever field he  jams

has a duty to capture only the sublimest emotions

the ones which heal and refresh and make one wonder

the ones which bring sex and love and heaven and earth

it doesnt make sense to me to listen to ugly stuff

youre indoctrinating yourself

youre uglifying your mind and it might be hard to get it out again

i can understand youthful musicians making rackets

it is understandable like youthful painters painting a mess

i guess the rock racket could be likened to an abstract painting

some abstracts are things of beauty while others are not

sometimes the rock racket contains beauty

heroin by the velvet underground

some neil young stuff

it exists

dont waste your time trying to find the artiness in a racket tho

theres always a construction site near you somewhere

go and interpret that….!

i myself am pleased where my music is going

my recorded works at any rate

i keep improving as a singer thats good

i couldnt have got any worse than when i started

i was not a natural singer

i kinda started to figure it out as i went along

i hate my singing on that first church record

its mannered its stiff its flat its pretentious

its so fucking pretentious its a joke

i was pretending not to be me

it wasnt really until heyday a real me emerged

all that singing on heyday was me

all the harmonies and back ups

(bar the choir on already yesterday and on youth w.)

peter walsh made me do it

he thought of most of the harmonies

my mind is strangely limited when it comes to harmonies

they never come that easily to me and theyre hard to sing

but suddenly there on heyday i emerge as a bit of a vocalist

i like myrrh from heyday the first track

i wish every one of my tracks was as good as this

it had everything i like in rock

it had a real sense of travel

it was about everything at once in a way

that song may be approaching art a little

the hex albums have some real art

so too jack frost

priest and narcosis

forget yourself

u23

theres not much art on GAF tho

pop music but not much art

real art requires a lot of effort and will

sometimes you even have to fight for your right to  be arty

by the time the fights over you aint got the energy to be arty

eg kilbey in a studio with an engineer sometime in the eighties

me : please can we put some effects on the backing vocal now

him : it can be dry for the moment

me : no, i said can we have some reverb…or something..

him : not now because of blah blah blah

me : look i really wanna hear some reverb on it

him : reverb wont fix it if its outta tune…

me : I WANT SOME FUCKING REVERB!!!!!!

him : ok, fuck, jesus ok….now what kind of reverb..

me : uh….? what…?…oh i ….never mind ..get on with it

him : no i’m gonna give ya some fuckin’ reverb steve …

me : fuck the reverb and get on with it …

him : you dont know what you want do ya…?

me : uh yeah um no i dont do i……

a stalemate

i take the challenge of reconciling old age and rocknroll seriously

the grandmaster painters painted on till they dropped

so too the jazz and bluesmen

what goes wrong in rock?

theyre are notable exceptions of people who keep their edge

or their esteem or the demeanour or whatever it is

we should not expect less from the old rocker

we should expect more

we should expect more beauty i guess in a nutshell

like a jeweller of 57

or an architect of 57

or a brain surgeon of 57

you should be pretty good by now

since 1970 you’d usually find me in bedroom studying music

or in a garage or hall rehearsing or jamming with guys

or sitting on my bed trying to force out songs i knew were within me

but nonetheless would not come without much more experience

ive lugged the gear

ive done the drives

ive been at airports on new years eve

the glory and the disappointment

always playing playing playing

listening analysing incorporating

surely then i must improve

surely then i must have improved

or at least continued at the same rate

with obvious ups and downs included

isidore life somewhere else is a real treat

it has wonder and beauty

it does have some ugly heavy handed moments

caliban comes on stage and says his lines

the beastly is represented here as well as the angelic

jeffrey samples myriad guitar phrases and everything precise

yet always jeffreys beatlesque turn of chords

a composer like caino has little need of dissonance

(tho i warn you it exists on this record!)

if you could pull endlessly beautiful things out of thin air

why would you ever wanna do ugly more than occasionally

you wouldnt would you….?

cainos music is sophisticated modern

and yet with a traditional aesthetic

its perfect for me to sing over

sometimes it takes me a while to figure it out

jeffreys music slips into fluxes inexplicably to me

at first until i understand his more fluid structures

i listen to each piece and the music write the words

i’m looking forward to its release

oh alabama can i see you and shake your hand

today i skyped cain-o in birmingham

and guess what..?

in his hand he brandished the isidore cd

life somewhere else

its ready and soon he will be posting all good SKPers their copy

caino ever the perfectionist wants the SKP people to have the physical copy

on account of the lovely packaging and stuff

the album itself meanders wildly through different styles

theres some weird long noisy things

theres some short extremely poppy things

theres all the clever and brilliant stuff youd expect from us

sad and exciting and melodic and densely populated music

caino must have been on some strange trip to dream this music up

i have merely responded with all the semantic hyper priming carryon  i do

raw guitars battle it out with elaborate mellotron arrangements

a progression and digression from the first album

its quite a record …..you wait till you hear it

caino guarantees the SKPers will be the first people on earth to hear it

wow thats kinda cool aint it?

meanwhile today we sent out the egyptian  registers

and guess what i forgot to put someones little sk artwork in there

(luckily perry from florida got 2 !)

would that person missing theirs contact us when it doesnt arrive …?

i’ll sort you out properly

soon the time being shop will be up and running

remember of course SKPers get a 25 % discount on everything

and soon an SKP only area with some real rarities ……

anyway thats about it

see ya soon you ninnies!

sk

without a world between them

impotent ham with wand of ash stood on cliff

and the onrushing sky crashed on the rocks below

and the ocean heaving itself upon the land like a beast

delusional wizard summons the tempest in latin and algebra

in forbidden languages normally unspoken under starburn

oh yes and see the weather listens to him so far away

a black dread hath filled the galleons sail

and smoke and cloud seem to mingle in tingling darknesses

and the first huge fat warm raindrop hits his daughters head like a tear

and the good elemental appears within invisibility

lightning bolt arcs towards the vomiting sea

a sickening white flash burns eye and the screaming of men

the sea is the colour of the coldest metal and its spume is bright green

the timbers are wrecked and hear us all groan as we are pulled down

its then i see i am coming from all perspectives

this is possible in poem only you see i am all players

the seawater is boiling cold inside my hoarse head

the exertion of my last great trick hath exhausted me

my daughter each in a tower of their own making

i wander in the woods i have tamed in my exile

i am the slinking thing the bad elemental

i am the lost and innocent sailor

i am the heartless and usurping brother

i am the hopeful son amidst all this wreckage

i am the leaves on the windlashed trees

and i am the salt that whirls through the air

in every flower and creature i see myself lurking

in every creek and lagoon

oh a wild grey day has come down on my island inside

where i star as myself  and it is written

cheats never prospero

and it is said that lightning is clean and faster than light

and that evil can be cleansed and washed from our hands

good and evil both work for me

but time still enslaves you and whips me ahead

the magic i do is but sleight of mind

and everything here an aspect of me

even the ending where all is made new

invitation to begin again