Project Description

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Steve Kilbey.

Interview with
STEVE KILBEY
from
THE CHURCH

(12th April 2025)

Interview with Colin Reid

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Steve Kilbey.

Watch the full interview BELOW

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AMNplify: Hello.
Steve: Colin Reid?

AMNplify. Hello, Steve. Hi, how are you?
Steve: What the hell is that behind you?

AMNplify: It’s you.
Steve: Why? I know who it is, but why?

AMNplify: I just thought it would be a nice touch.
Steve: did you now? Okay…..

AMNplify: Yeah, I was lucky enough to be at the, um, I think it was the end of the tour, The ‘Already Yesterday’ tour in Adelaide at the Hindley Street Music Hall.
Steve: Yeah.

AMNplify: Where it was bloody freezing out in the crowd so I went up to the balcony up the top and we were just looking right down on you. It was fantastic.
Steve: OK. I’m glad you enjoyed it. Of course, we’re not coming back there this year. We’re back to The Gov.

AMNplify: You’re going to The Gov? A bit smaller….no fancy chandelier!
Steve: No fancy nothing.

AMNplify: This is true. It’s good atmosphere when it’s full and I’m sure it will be full.
Steve: And it’ll be November, so it’ll be nice and warm. All that nice foliage out the back.

AMNplify: They’ll have the doors open to the beer garden.
Steve: Those beautiful Adelaidian nights.

AMNplify: I’m looking forward to that again. But first you’re taking it to the States.
Steve: Yes, in July. Yeah, if I get in. I don’t know why wouldn’t, but you know?

AMNplify: Yeah, I’m going to the States in June and I’m thinking, I’ve got Cuban stamps in my passport. I’ve got Chinese stamps in my passport.
Steve: Yeah? Hey, how’s this? Every morning, my partner was buying me this milkshake from a Vietnamese restaurant and it’s called a Havana. And every day she’d write milkshake, milkshake, milkshake and it goes through PayPal. All being done on PayPal. One day she wrote Havana and PayPal was suspended.

AMNplify: You’re kidding?
Steve: No, PayPal was suspended. Your PayPal has been suspended and closed down and like what’s going on? What’s going on? Can you please explain what this is? Havana, like an $11 charge for a Havana milkshake. So they’re watching, they’re watching everything, they’re listening to everything. Yeah, so you better go, you better go through your Facebook, mate, if you’ve ever written, if you’ve ever liked an anti-Trump comment or anything at all you’d better delete it, pal or you may be turned away.

AMNplify: I know. It’s a worry.  We’re only transitioning through for one day. It’s ….anyway, touch wood.
Steve: Yeah? You hope!  Don’t use the word transition, please. That could, even just saying, if you say, I’m transitioning, they’ll go, right, you’re out for a start.

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Steve Kilbey

Close up detail of ‘Angel of Coogee Beach’

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AMNplify: I know. I know. It’s insane, isn’t it? But yeah, so there is a huge number of dates. I didn’t realize how big you are. You must be still be big in the States.
Steve: Oh, I’m five foot 11.

AMNplify: Oh, well, that’s standard then hasn’t changed all these years.
Steve: Yeah. We’re about the same size in America as we are here. You know, you know, like a thousand people, if we’re lucky, you know, maybe some places a bit more, some places a bit less but, you know, it’s pretty good.  You know like a thousand people ain’t nothing.

AMNplify: yeah, no that’s it’s fantastic. I obviously grew up in the UK and I first heard you from a friend who had a couple of albums back in the in the mid 80s. So I was listening to some of your stuff back then before i didn’t come to Australia till 95 um so you know I’d heard of you and I knew the stuff but I was surprised that you (were so big in America) it must be great to be able to go and do, I don’t know what it is, 20, 30 dates in the States.
Steve: It is and look, I’m eternally grateful. It is special to play in America. I mean, they invented entertainment. They invented showbiz. They invented rock and roll. I mean, kind of.  They’re great audiences, they’re great venues. People over there really appreciate it. I mean, they appreciate it in England too. We haven’t been there for a while and they’re getting pretty angry but look, they really love it in America. They really love The Church. So yeah, I look, I do I count my blessings. I’m not, I’m not blasé about this. and go, yeah, whatever. I sort of, I do really.  I’m really thankful that it’s turned out this way. A lot of Australian bands, a lot of English bands could never crack America. I remember, you think a lot of bands that thought they were going to be huge in America and it never really worked out for them like Suede and The Stone Roses and you know, lot of Australian bands, you know, they couldn’t crack America either. Not like we like not exactly cracked it.

AMNplify : You opened the door.
Steve: We opened the door, we’ve got an open door and we’ve still got our toe in there every time we go back.

AMNplify : Hey when you when you tour, is the touring lineup pretty stable?  Is it the same band that I saw last November?
Steve: Yeah that’s the band that band that band that six piece band, just made an album last year in Austin as well.  That is The Church is as much The Church, each guy is firmly entrenched as a member of The Church. It’s not a   it’s not a kind of a revolving door of whoever can turn up it’s definitely and we have been that way now five, six years going on with Nick Merida playing drums as well, a guy from Camperdown in Sydney. So yeah, The Church is pretty as stabilized as this lineup.

AMNplify: Yeah, that was really great so you were kind of flanked by, I think you had Ash (Naylor) on your right and Ian (Haug) on your left with Jeff kind of behind you and the three guitars.
Steve: Yeah, yeah. It’s a cast of thousands. Yeah. It’s great playing with this band. Everybody’s really …the most important thing to me, they’re all happy to be there. They all want to be there. It’s not it’s not people you’re leading reluctantly out who have like tired of it and had enough. They’re all they were all teenage fans at one stage so they’re all happy to be there.

AMNplify: No, it was really (great), it was, and I’m not just saying that cause I’m talking, it was fantastic.
Steve: Thank you. Thank you, Colin.

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AMNplify: Yeah. It was wonderful. Um, yeah, I guess when you go to The Gov, with the six of you, you’re not going to have so much room on that stage. There’s a big stage at Hindley Street.
Steve: Yeah. Anyway. What can you do?

AMNplify: Do you go anywhere between, cause the American dates are like July, August, and you’re not here till November?
Steve: The Maldives!

AMNplify: Oh, fancy.
Steve: We’re playing the Maldives. Yeah, I’ve never been there. It was like, you know, a toss up….what’s more important to play London or play the Maldives? And everyone went the Maldives definitely! That’s where careers are made and broken!

AMNplify: (laughs) To be honest, I’m guessing its …well I know it’s in an ocean somewhere. I’m not even sure where the Maldives are.
Steve: It’s sort of like off the coast of India. I haven’t been there yet. I’m sure it’s fantastic. I know we’ve got one of those floating houses out in the ocean.

AMNplify: Oh my gosh, wow!
Steve: Yeah. Yeah. For a week I can live like a king.

AMNplify : I’m jealous that’ll be beautiful.
Steve: Yeah. I don’t know what the sound’s going to be like. It might be me banging on a coconut shell, but it’s going to be a great environment. I’ve heard that, I’ve heard the acoustics or all the kind of the equipment isn’t necessarily, you know, what you’re going to get if you play at the Horden Pavilion or something but yeah, hopefully we can compensate the lack of technology with the you know, the moon and the sea and island life.

AMNplify : Sounds wonderful. Can we all go? I want to go.
Steve: You can go if you’ve got 10 grand!

AMNplify : Yeah, right! And before that, you’re doing the Jack Frost.
Steve: Jack Frost, yeah. We did this in Perth. I’ve been playing for a long time with these…it is a father and son, Sean Hoffman’s the dad and Adrian Hoffman is the son and he’s a guitarist and a singer and he does such a beautiful Grant McLennan. And we did this and we’ve got a once again, a cast of thousands, huge band, string players, keyboard players. We did this in Perth that was really good and everybody said, we’ve got to do it again and I thought, yeah, let’s do it again. And they went and organized it. So is that coming to Adelaide? Is that coming there?

AMNplify : I saw it…it only kind of popped up on my feed and it was advertising Melbourne and I don’t know if you’re going anywhere else.
Steve: Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. And no, I’m afraid no Adelaide.

AMNplify: Yeah. What a shame, next time.
Steve: If there is the next, well, if there is a next time, yep.

AMNplify: Yeah another big one. And I also saw you in The Sticky Fingers Review. I you were filling in. (Steve covers his face and Colin laugh’s) Help, someone saw that! You were covering for Tim Rogers, I think he was unavailable, and you did a great version of ‘Sister Morphine’.
Steve:Yeah. Yeah. Some Rolling Stone songs like….you know, what the fuck am I doing singing ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together?’ You know, and I read a review someone some punter wrote “Steve Kilby is about as entertaining as a tablecloth”. yeah, but it’s true, especially compared to Tex (Perkins) and Tim (Rogers), you know, they can really inhabit, they can really inhabit those Rolling Stones songs. Me, not so much anymore. Once upon a time I would, when I was 20, I would have loved to been out there, you know, jiving around and doing all the stuff but now it just felt silly. But ‘Sister Morphine’, yeah, ‘Sister Morphine’, I can inhabit that song. But yeah, you know, you do what you do

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The Church

The Church

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AMNplify: You’re obviously a Rolling Stones fan.
Steve:  Of course I am but that doesn’t mean I want to sing ‘Let’s spend the night together’ but it was allotted to me.

AMNplify: I can’t remember you doing that one actually.
Steve:I did (laughs) yeah, yeah that’s how everyone forgot about it immediately. That’s the trouble. Look, I’m doing a Beatles one as well. I’m doing a John Lennon one and I haven’t been allotted my songs yet and I went, I am not doing, ‘I want to hold your hand’ type ones. I’m doing the, I’ll do the serious kind of ones.  I don’t want to do, it’s just, I just feel silly seeing all that kind of stuff. It’s just inappropriate. Yeah. I hope they don’t, you know, I hope they don’t give me any, “If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true?” I just can’t do that anymore!

AMNplify : Fair enough. Thate was a nice little Liverpudlian twang you put in there.
Steve: You like that?

AMNplify : (mimics a Scouse accent)Yeah. Yeah. I like that.
Steve: You know what I can do? When my dad died, my dad was a cockney. So I can do that, I can do cockney. But what I got really good at was my mum married a guy from Coventry and me and my brother’s got very good. “Steven, do you realize that there’s blokes in Sydney and they get five blokes on the dole and they rent a house and they go surfing all day?” And I go, “isn’t that great?” And he go, “noooooo”, “why not?” “they should be working”.  So we got, I got good at Coventry, so my English accents I can do.

AMNplify : So you got three now.
Steve: I’ve got three, yeah. What’s the third one?

AMNplify : You’ve got a little bit of a Liverpudlian.
Steve: Liverpudlian, yeah.

AMNplify: Little bit a Scouse twang.
Steve: Yeah, all right. I need to get my… It’s funny when I do my Glaswegian people go, what’s that supposed to be? Irish. And yeah, it’s. it’s hard. There’s a guy, do you know there’s a guy on YouTube and he does like 150 English accents covering America, Australia, England, Scotland, South Africa. It’s like this guy can he’s got all but he can’t do them one after another.  It stops, there’s an edit and then he comes back as you know, a Canadian and then it stops and he comes back.

AMNplify: So he gets right into character. can’t just.
Steve: Yeah, he can’t. It’s very hard to switch on the spot, to keep jamming with it.

AMNplify: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a knack. So, the singles tour, you’re only going to be playing singles?
Steve: Yep. Yep. Except for the encore. The encore maybe won’t be a single.

AMNplify : Ooh (expresses surprise that the encore isn’t single).
Steve: (jokingly) Yeah oh wow. Yeah.

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AMNplify: All right. Yeah, I liked your humour last time around talking about things like, I think you described ‘Under the Milky Way’ as something like, “I guess we have to do that terrible old song that everyone’s come to hear” or something like that.  I thought it was quite funny, that you were a little bit self-depreciating over the songs that you play every time.
Steve: Yeah, what can you do? I like, yeah, a bit of honesty. I, I, I oscillate wildly from complete hubris to self-deprecation. and I simul you know, simultaneously, I think I’m the best songwriter and the worst songwriter in the world. And those two people coexist in my head. And at any one point in time, I’m likely either one could get control and say anything at all. but of course, Australians, I learned this and being half English, half Australian and people go, you’re Australian. I’m not. I was born in England. My mum and dad were English and we came out here and yes, we lived in Australia, but everything, all our friends, all my relatives, everything we did and said and eat and thought and watched was English. And I really understand in England, you can go, “I’m the best fucking songwriter in the world.  I’m Liam Gallagher, I’m so fucking good” and everyone goes, wow! But you say that in Australia, I tried that on in 1981, “I’m the best songwriter in Australia. Who else is there?” And people fucking hated me. I was like a pariah. I had people coming up to me in supermarkets and going, “do you really believe that? How dare you say that?” so I learned quickly, you know, the kind of carry on that works in one country doesn’t work in another country. So, Australia, self-deprecation, know, you know, “thanks, I’m not worthy. I wrote this song under the Milky Way. I have to play it ha-ha”. But you know, in America you go, “I’m going, now I’m going to play the best song in the world ‘Under the Milky Way”. you know, they’re like (throws up hands in applause) it’s a funny thing. Your attitude is really important and you’re, I, you know, everyone knows I was a drug addict and I went to lots of NA meetings and almost everyone there had this dual thing going on where they thought they were the cleverest, smartest, most worthy person in the world and then, and then another side of them thought they were completely unworthy and didn’t deserve any friendship or love or anything at all. And, just like an electric engine, the negative and the positive was sort of driving their addiction. I think my yeah, and that that was me as well. But the negative and positive also drive my creativity. It’s sort of this self-loathing and also self-congratulatory sort of thing I’ve got going. So yeah, I don’t, I never know what I’m going to say on any one particular night. It could be either guy and from song to song I will say, “isn’t this a beautiful, wonderful song?” And the next one I’ll go, “I fucking hate this song. I’m just playing it for you bastards, it causes me agony”. And sometimes people come up and, “oh, you shouldn’t be so hard on yourself” or people get really angry “Don’t say that about that song. I love that song. That’s meaningful to me”.  So it’s really funny. And I’ve really made…Not a lot of people talk about how much they love or hate all their songs, but I’ve sort of really, everyone’s really made a meal of this because I’ve been so naively honest about my disdain for some of my songs. And they’re sort of like, “so why are doing them?” You know what? journalists now are “why are you doing the singles too? I thought you hated all these songs”. And of course, you know, I’ve learned from recent events that it’s very fashionable to completely flip you know, “oh electric cars are the worst thing in the world and then, you know, a month later, electric cars are great. I think everyone should have one”. You know, last year I hated ‘Unguarded Moment’ this year. It’s just, “I never said that, it’s the best song in the world. I can’t wait to get out there at The Gov and play ‘Unguarded Moment’. Boy, that’ll make all my dreams come true”.  You know, it’s like, it’s all   everything’s up for grabs.  Reality is a very flexible thing.

AMNplify: Your honesty is really great because I can’t imagine anything worse than being in a band where they tour and play the same 12 songs and he makes the same joke after track 3 and you know if the banter is not spontaneous…
Steve: You know what? I think Aussies, I think Aussies see through banter more than the English and Americans and of course the Europeans who don’t speak English.

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Steve Kilbey.

AMNplify: Yeah, the nuance of the language.
Steve: The nuances! Say, if you go, “I don’t really like ‘Unguarded Moment’”, they’re like “what, what, what”.  But I think, I think Australians, I think that was really good for me that we started off in Australia and Australian audiences are very hard to please. They’re not, they don’t go for all that. “Good evening, Cleveland. It’s so great to be here”. Though I have seen some awful bands from overseas doing all of that spiel. Simple Minds come to mind, coming on and giving them a load of old rubbish cliche. And the audience go, “wow!”.  Jim Kerr walked on stage, we did a tour with them and every night he walked on stage and goes “show me your hands” and the audience are like “arrahhh”.  I’m like, no, please don’t, don’t respond to that. no, I have to work, I have to, I sort of, I… I uncondition myself every night and I never know what I’m gonna say and I don’t have any pre-worked out banter. But banter is kind of important, it’s oh so important, it can’t be too long, it can’t be too short, and it has to… There’s a real knack to it. It’s almost as hard as writing the fucking songs and for a long time it eluded me and I didn’t have much bander at all. And when something would go wrong or one of the guitarists would be standing there tuning up, enjoying my discomfort as I stood there not knowing what to say to some huge audience who were there and he’s going, boing, boing, boing. I’m looking at the audience going “well er er yeah, you’re having a good time?” or whatever so it’s a real knack. And you know, when I formed the band, one night they had a rebellion and called a meeting while I was not there and wanted to kick me out because I was not a good front man. Not like, not like they had that, you know, Aussies like a good front man, you know, a man of the people, you know, who says..

AMNplify : you said Tex Perkins before, I mean he’s…
Steve: Yeah, what a great front man there. Look at him doing all that and he’s doing all that…

AMNplify “ Energy, sex appeal, engagement.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, he’s got it all. He’s got it all.

AMNplify : Yeah the lucky bastard.
Steve: Yeah, you should have seen him the next morning though. Hahaha yeah, where was his charisma then when he was dragging his sorry hungover ass onto a virgin flight!

AMNplify: Okay, so out of the singles there’d obviously be a few that you don’t play regularly. Is there anything that you like when you start looking at the list and go, “wow, I am actually really looking forward to playing that one again live” or?
Steve: Look, with this band, I really enjoy them all. And I’ve learned to calm down and I’ve learned to enjoy ‘Unguarded Moment’ for what it is. People really like it. You know, I’m sick of being an angry old curmudgeon. If I can, if when I was 16 I got my first bass guitar, if someone said you will write a song and every time you play it, the audience will be very happy and sing along and clap and be cheerful. I would have said, wow. And then sometime in my twenties, that idea disenchanted me and it felt stupid. And now, at this advanced old age of 70, if I can play a song that makes people happy and forget their troubles and brings back…you know people come up and say all kinds of serious things about these songs.  “I was in a tank in Iraq when I got my legs blown off and ‘Unguarded Moment’ was playing”. What do you think I’m going to say to that? “Oh, well, you know, I don’t really like that song. It’s stupid”.  So I, I can kind of, I can very vaguely voice my discontent and kind of have a very mild laugh at that and myself, but not too much to disparage people. So, there are some songs which I love playing the single after ‘Unguarded Moment’, ‘Tear it all away’. I love that song. It’s a great song. I love playing it. It’s challenging.  There’s this bass part that is boom and it’s a fretless bass. It’s boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It’s really hard to sing that and sing the words at the same time. It’s like, you know, it’s doing that. So that’s a really interesting challenge for me to get that right. And it’s a fretless bass. So you can easily under slide or over slide off the mark. And the song really has some sentiments I can still get behind. So some, some of the songs I really enjoy playing for their own sake and other ones I can just enjoy the reaction that it makes people happy and brings back some nostalgic feeling for them.
I have two minutes left. My beautiful assistant just told me.

AMNplify: Yeah, I’m kind of seeing out of the corner of my eye we’re running out of time. So thank you so much.
Steve: Colin Reid, what a pleasure!

AMNplify : Yeah, I’ll virtually shake your hand.
Steve: Okay. When we play The Gov come and say hello.

AMNplify: I will. Yeah, for sure. Definitely. All right.
Steve: See ya later mate

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Watch the full interview BELOW

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Press Release 17th April 2025 (HERE)

THE CHURCH
announce
‘’The Singles Tour:
A Career Retrospective’’
Australian Dates

Iconic. Legendary. Surreal. Sublime.

Come celebrate The Church’s incredible songbook on: The Singles Tour: A Career Retrospective

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The Church.


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