The Time Being | Steve Kilbey

www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/resurrection-men-20110329-1cedt.html

“Three turbulent decades after they formed, the Church have resurrected their hits, writes Sacha Molitorisz”

Click link to read the full article.

des pear

i long for sleep

i long to walk that corridor to some warm dreamy place

turn off the voices

now i’m anybody i want to be

see me fly thru the sky

my winged spirit searching the astral for something

the eternal me has vacated the shell

tonight please be there

you will wait in the house i built in the clouds

the soft dopey music plays so quietly now

i arrive thru a painting and i go for a song

my words are all over the page

my method is to forget

my energy is to obsess

my lesson is to not learn

a troubled night

i get up over and over

i have a piss or have a drink and walk around a bit

but i always return to the same dream

a huge city where its always night

somewhere in town is a huge apartment block

inhabited by some loathsome  evil

right at the top of the building lives this terrible thing

i myself living in another tall apartment block

at the top of which lives my employer or benefactor or whatever he is

i am scared/in awe of this person who has some power over me

i cant work out if he owes me a favour

or if i owe him one but we are seemingly bound together

one of my daughters is missing presumably in the bad tower

i keep petitioning my boss to help me rescue her

i make the long trek up  the lonely stairs to where he lives

full of doubt full of trepidation

sometimes hes there

sometimes no one answers my knocking on his door

he is rich urbane and knowledgeable

i can never clearly see his face

sometimes hes angry to be interrupted

sometimes he promises me help

he gives me a pistol

he has friends in the police

we should alert the police

other times he says no police we’ll take care of it ourselves

i wake up i stumble thru the house trying to shake it off

when i lie down the dream starts up again

the city of night

the 2 apartment blocks

sometimes ive arranged a big group of vigilantes

we climb up the stairs of the evil tower to find my daughter

and the others missing in there

sometimes it seems like a huge terrible worm is at the top

sometimes its empty

sometimes hideous ordeals that amount to nothing in the end

then i’m back in the tower where i live

“go up and see him!” urge the various changing people i live there with

or sometimes on my own

i climb up and up the stairs

to see him

he again gives me the pistol or suggests the police

at the police station i stand in a line

but the station always closes before i get to the top of the line

at the evil tower ive broken in with my pistol

up the stairs i go

empty or full of foul things

i battle and struggle alone or with comrades

we never find our missing ones

the evil at the top is always elusive

eventually at the end of my last dream

(i must have woken up n fallen back into it 15 times)

eventually i realise

why yes of course

its the same tower

why yes of course

the man i’m working for

is the evil thing

a perfectly detailed world with solidity and dimension

all within my heaving mind

i sit here now unable to forget the torment of it

is it the great gothic novel?

is it a warning?

or is it just an incredibly complex recurring dream?

i dunno

but i cant shake it off

hell!

handsome

lovebringer  sing me ya elegy

twists n turns have burned me cold

i wake up n i’m old

i sleep  n in my sleep bad dreams come cheap

like everything bad starting up again

in my dreams when i am other men

in my head too small to contain all this self infliction pain

well it certainly is strange but ive gotten out of range

i shoot my words but 2 thirds are meaning less and less

i prosecute myself

the evidence stacks up

then i got the audiences backs up

the witnesses take the stand man there all me

the jail is my self

the sentence to be in this skin

no parole no good behaviour no out or in

solitary confinement

the chains are  my brains

my mind hems me in on all sides

these bars were in my stars

my own future turned round bit my arse

a tragedy or farce

i’m locked up but free

free to choose how i lose

dont wanna roll

dont wanna role in this play

i wrote it but i cant play it

i did it but i cant say it

bored with this metaphor and my fatal flaw

floored with sealing my fate

a fraud a fake

i need a brake

my heart aint listenin’ to

my head  where the signal is unread

red my mind

blue my mind

dont mind me

i will lose all that i will find

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/entertainment/a/-/entertainment/9052418/the-church-looking-forward-30-years-on/

Steve Kilbey remembers the first time he was worried The Church might become irrelevant. It was just a few years into a career now spanning three decades.

The moment arose in Kings Cross during the early ’80s and his blossoming rock band had just finished playing one of their early shows when a fan accosted him outside the nightclub.

“This guy came up and told me about this band called Spandau Ballet and said we’d better get with it or we’d be finished,” Kilbey laughs.

“He was persuasively telling me that we should become new romantics.”

Thirty years on and The Church are still going strong. Three quarters of its members remain intact (Kilbey, Marty Willson-Piper and Peter Koppes with drummer Tim Powles joining in 1994). They’ve watched by as musical fashions flashed and disappeared.

While Kilbey admits to enjoying a brief fascination with another English group, Simple Minds – it drove him to seek out their producer Peter Walsh to record The Church’s 1986 album Heyday – otherwise his band have remained fiercely loyal to their own ideology.

“In the early days all the different fads made me feel insecure but as each new thing came along it started to affect me less and less,” Kilbey says.

“Most things I’ve always purposefully reacted against, especially grunge, I had not time for that.”

Over three decades The Church have remained one of the most inventive and single-minded bands in Australian rock. Founded in 1981, the band have built and maintained a cult following here and overseas on the strength of songs like Under The Milky Way and timeless albums like Starfish and Magician Among The Spirits.

Spanning their 70-minute improv jam for 1998’s Hologram of Baal and a collaboration with a science fiction writer in 2008’s Shriek: Excerpts From The Soundtrack, of all the 27 albums arguably their finest was their last, Untitled #23, which won an unprecedented five stars in Rolling Stone magazine.

Last year The Church were inducted into the Australian Rock’N’Roll Hall of Fame. Kilbey delivered a speech that has already gone down in music industry folklore. It would have been the perfect moment to bow out, Kilbey always subscribing to the idea that it’s better to burn out than fading away. But the 56-year-old singer still believes the band have more to offer.

“There’s always more songs to be written and I have things to achieve, to keep getting better and to make that perfect record,” he insists.

“You can never rest, as you do each thing you’ve got to reach for the next.”

In addition to pushing new ground, The Church are revisiting their admired back catalogue. It started in 2004 with the acoustic album El Momento Descuidado recreating a number of well known hits alongside new tracks, then continued with two greatest hits collections, Deep In The Shallows in 2007 and last year’s The Best Of The Radio Songs.

Kilbey is happy to relive the past for fans around the world so long as he keeps his better eye on the future.

“It is a fine line but I can appreciate how going back and reworking things can make the idea of pushing on with new music more attractive and can also help you understand and write better new stuff,” he says.

“Kind of like an ongoing process because no one can go back and rewrite a book or repaint a painting but I guess in music you can go back and rerecord a song.”

Next month The Church will play a sell out show at Sydney Opera House alongside a classical orchestra dubbed A Psychedelic Symphony. The marriage between seminal rock band and multi-sectioned orchestra is being overseen by the arranger George Ellis, a lifelong fan of the band who swears he met Kilbey on a street corner in Balmain in the ’80s. Kilbey can’t remember the encounter but is confident that someone who understands the band’s fluid style can successfully recreate it within the more rigid structures of classical music.

“George straddles both worlds effortlessly,” Kilbey says.

“Most arrangers wouldn’t know how to combine the two sides but he understands the problems and how to overcome them.”

Ten years ago Kilbey might never have entertained such a nostalgia trip. When he was young he’d rather go and see a 19-year-old punk strangle a guitar than delight in a 40-year-old master. Only recently has the singer mellowed his insistence that The Church must militantly look forward.

“I used to think that new ideas meant new songs and that was all I was interested in,” Kilbey explains.

“I’ve come to realise lately that you can have new ideas for old songs and new ideas of representing them to people.”

Part of the ageing baby boomer generation, Kilbey has noticed a shift in attitudes to fifty-somethings continuing to pursue credible careers in music.

As long as middle-aged music lovers comprise a dominant force in the market, and fresh faced kids continue coming to shows, he sees no reason to slow down.

“One of the things you struggle with in life and especially in the music business is growing old.

“But you have to take the passing years and use the experience you’ve gained to create a better thing.

“At my age I don’t traffic in youthful enthusiasm and anger of a young man, I traffic in experience and wisdom and technical excellence in playing and writing, or striving for it at least.”

Three decades of hard work appears to be paying off. The Church returned from the US last month to what band members and critics have described as perhaps their best ever tour. Sell out crowds and standing ovations greeted the band as they spanned their back catalogue to the delight of audiences. Kilbey believes that even now the band have turned a corner.

“It was as if we’d been learning a new language for the past 30 years getting better and better slowly but surely and then suddenly we were speaking the language absolutely fluently.

“Suddenly we were speaking the language of The Church perfectly and instead of being a bunch of rockers thrashing out a song on stage we were actually musicians carefully reproducing things accurately with all the colours of the musical palate being utilised.

“Through every last note, whisper and beat on the drum everybody was perfectly in the moment.”

The Church play A Psychedelic Symphony at Sydney Opera House on April 10.” –
Ross Purdie, AAP Entertainment Writer, AAP
March 22, 2011, 8:49 am

shadow cabernet

headache

clouds gather

wanna hide away from all that is unhidden

skulk deep into some covers and dream a forever

so warm outside

the green billowing sea grasping at our shores

peace is delicate

my eyes blur the words

my ears veil the sound

nothing more to say than that

just another afternoon

before its all drifted away

mr clean with (soy) milk

arranging with an arranger

adding strings n things

whatsa a fuckin’ bassoon do n all that malarkey

a bit more friggin’ pizzicato

a tad more bleedin’ french horn

give those cellos a bitta welly guvnor

turn up the whatchamacallit for more wallop

fuck yeah more tremulated crotchets and make it allegro

make it presto hey

make the geezas on those woodwinds earn their top dollar

whip that lazy harpist why its patti hood from armenia

she escaped from the 13th century and now shes as slim as a teenager

still the old armenian magic in her fingers

telling stories of the distant stars and the struggle of life

telling stories of the deeply rivered land

and the  love that lives on after the bodys death

her fingers back n forth on the strings

like a widow weaving fate on her enchanted loom

like an eastern witch casting some mesmerising spell

backwards and forwards her fingers weave in mathematical poems

up and back she never misses her mark

as she plucks and she lays out

as she touches and watches

that beautiful sound oh that heavenly music

sprinkled all over the churches hammer and cruise

oh yeah pity you aint got your tickets coz its almost sold out

too bad this is a one off me old matey

dvd yeah but….

i really wish i could have all of you there

but still…..

back to work

black cat/white man

is there meaning in suffering

or are we simply suffering

random lifeform on a lucky planet

bizarre microbe evolved into poetry-writing monster

that primal pool of cosmic goo struck by lightnin’

vishnu dreams up planets floating out of his pores fully formed

weird visitors shaping us in their images

children from the future

ghosts before their time

ive got a feeling this is all a joke

ive got a joke this is all a feeling

so i got my feelers out sensing the atmosphere

i am bound to a certain extent by my age my gender my race my belief

time and space and race prevent much understanding

fragments come thru from someone unknown

i want to understand at least myself but i remain impenetrable

i want to change the settings but the panel is inaccessible

i see no way in i see no way out

the manipulation of opposites may contain a clue

but a clue to what……?

how do you manipulate opposites anyway

well you stretch them apart and in the middle is something else

and the mind held half on half off

flickering between the two opposite things or qualities

suddenly temporarily jammed open and in comes X

oh sk you say i can hear you what doth X equal

oh ho ho but i tried to describe X for 31 one years in sound n song

childe there is no simple equation for this thing X

but X feeds something inside your many selves

you your heart your mind your ethereal body your sexual desire

oh my god if i but could freely dispense X they would nail me up

i would be taken away in a big black car for a lonely ride

i would be found miles away insane or appearing and vanishing

everyone wants that X

everyone that had it never says no again

so these other ones try to learn to manipulate opposites to obtain X

but X is illusive and elusive and allusive

hard to sift thru all of the dross to find theres not a trace

no nothing in your test tube or philtre

the more you push

until eventually travelling in an opposite direction

youve become youre own opposite

with all the things that come with that

the humdrum surrounds us choking our senses

the mundane alternating between cozy and stifling

the momentary pull of jesus or opium

the jolt of injury the explosion of orgasm

the hurtling train of the thought in my mind

derailed it goes plowing through the fields of your memories

some call this madness some call it vision

some call it a nuisance and block it all out

the afternoon has turned nasty

the electricity builds up in our cortex and sky

love charged storm ….will it emit X

maybe indirectly maybe as an accident

X will be released in some gland in the cyclonic eye

washing right through us like red dye thru a cloth

crashing down on the buildings and towns

the human race comes alive reborn from the earth

children resembling seraphs

reassembled from spirit and atom of yore

convulsed up at the beginning of time

(i laugh to think it was that long ago)

spat out by creation whatever it was

formed by some god

unknown by a name

“As we now draw closer to the spectacular 30th anniversary concert event for Australia’s prolific and endearing ARIA Hall of Fame inductees, the church, please note that most tickets have sold out with just limited seating now remaining for sale.
Taking place on Sunday April 10th within the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House, this exclusive and one off extravaganza will see the church perform a selection of their greatest songs in a unique ‘best of’ event accompanied by the renown & respected conductor and musical director, George Ellis, together with his incredible orchestra comprising over 60 members.

Proudly presented by IMC in association with Max “A Psychedelic Symphony” is a once in a lifetime opportunity to experience the music of the church as they celebrate their illustrious 30-year career within the auspicious surroundings of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Sunday April 10th, 2011. *Last remaining tickets are available from the Sydney Opera House (phone 02 9250 7777) however please be quick to avoid disappointment.

And for another taste of what’s to come, check out the church performing an massive rendition of the incredible track, ‘Tantalized’ with the George Ellis Orchestra during their recent induction in to the Aria Hall Of Fame! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFGjiZ9H3Pw “- IMC

TICKETS From SOH Box Office
PH: 02 9250 7777
Online bookings: Box Office Online at www.sydneyoperahouse.com
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=60478

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