EPISODE 17 - STEVE KILBEY

Young Southpaw talks to The Church’s Steve Kilbey about his new solo album 11 Women, the songwriting genius of Kilbey, Bolan, Dylan, Lou Reed, Lennon, McCartney, and the magic & mystery of songs themselves 

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Steve Kilbey: That’s what I want to do with songs, truly break through to that sort of hypnogogic state, where all the music and the words, everything, it’s just a flow of thoughts, that aren’t completely random. If you go too random, then you get meaninglessness. You don’t want that. You don’t want people to go ‘there’s no meaning in this’. You’ve gotta have this, it’s a very subtle thing and only the really great songwriters understand that. These subtle threads that keep you interested in a song, even though it seems on the surface, superficially it seems like there’s no thread. There is some kind of internal thread that the listener will grasp, and it will make you feel good that you’re sort of in on it. People write to me and go ‘your songs make me feel like I’m in on something’. And that’s cause you’re sort of grokking it, ya know?  

Young Southpaw: Yeah. ‘Sheba Chiba’ reminded me of like a Bolan rhyme as well.  

SK: Oh yeah, of course. Marc Bolan and David Bowie and Bob Dylan and The Beatles are never far from any of my songs. I played 11 Women to a girl who came round the other day and she said ‘wow, it’s really Marc Bolan’ and I go ‘yeah, of course it is’. But hopefully the good part of Marc Bolan and not the bad part. In my opinion, Bolan went really badly off the rails, and is a spectacular example of what not to do. He was really writing these wonderfully ambiguous songs and then he became really famous and it all went to his head and he started just making up nonsense. Instead of having this ambiguous dreamlike hypnogogic stuff, he was just making up nursery rhymes and nonsense. The last album I ever bought of his, there was a line ‘Uncle Bimbo drank up the sea of Galilee, and like a fool he promised it all to me’. And when I heard that line I went, ‘you’ve lost it, Marc. I don’t wanna hear that anymore.’ And there was David Bowie putting out Aladdin Sane, and I’m like ‘well, it really hurts me to do this, but David Bowie’s now my main man. Sorry, Marc.’ And I felt like Bolan had lost it. 

Later on, I read he was heavily into cocaine and heavily into drinking a lot of red wine and snorting a lot of coke, and he lost his mojo. Where the cocaine worked for Bowie. But for Bolan it didn’t, it just sort of made him egotistical, and he thought ‘oh, I can just do anything’. And you can never! You can’t! No one - not John Lennon, not Bolan, not me, no one - can just do anything.