My essay on the lyrics written by Steve Kilbey for his band The Church:

THE INSTINCT OF THE INTELLECT

Miranda

How on earth can equations be so cryptic and self-evident at the same time, I am wondering, listening to the opening song of one of the most sacred albums of The Church. It opens in a daze of history, hanging around it as a mythical aura. The dawning of a world … with a guitar sounding like an ancient pan flute, which reminds me of a favourite Australian movie of mine, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. It’s a little-known cult film by Peter Weir about a group of  teenage girls in a chic boarding school going on an outing, a picnic, on Valentine’s Day in the year 1900 in the State of Victoria. A Saturday. Nearby the famous, haunted Hanging Rock. Where some of the girls will disappear, never to return, amongst them the beautiful fair-haired Miranda, a sweet dreamy cloud of blondness. The sounds of the movie are made up of the clear, soft voices of the young girls, a pan flute, singing the most bewilderingly pristine, archetypical, almost frightening tune, and the mysterious humming of the rock, of nature, of the universe itself. The setting of the movie feels like a dream world, “where everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and the right place”, Miranda says, while looking up at the huge rock spreading out above her. These words might have been written by Steve Kilbey, lines shaping just another one of his poetic little mysteries.

The Australian landscape has something so majestic about it, it makes you so quiet, you just want to look around and listen to what this ancient land has to tell you. Right from the start, when I first began listening to the music of The Church, I felt that the lyrics of Steve Kilbey fitted this landscape so perfectly; it’s as if in all their mysteriousness they were rising up from the depths of this rocky, mystifying, sizzling landscape with its strange century-old formations. The music often has something very serene, calm, self-assured about it, as if it were translating a thousand-year-old flow of sounds buried deep down under, in the caves of an arcane, cryptic space or in a container of vast, unfathomable truths that were just lying there waiting for someone to dig them up. Lyrics and sounds, waiting there, all alone, isolated by their sheer beauty and profoundness, with only a secretive, barely noticeable humming sound as a constant keeper and witness of their presence. Almost like a slumbering consciousness of the universe itself, waiting for someone who is capable of deciphering its complex sound-messages. A consciousness of world spirit waiting patiently for another conscious being that has the instinct and the intellect to make sense of its subtle communication and translate it into the form of human language.

I’m gazing at the cover of the album, at a wolf dog in a barren landscape of dust and sand – not unlike the Australian bush – with some remnants of an old civilisation gone for ever. Pyramids. The dog looks sad but it survived every hardship. Amidst the indifference of the universe, only stone material remaining. Still you can sense and feel all that got lost, the missing link between the fierce animal and the ingeniously shaped constructions: an intellect with the instinct to survive. Perhaps the best rock album I ever heard tries to fill in the emptiness, tries to overcome the loss, tries to envelop the mystery of what was and is for only too short a moment. This music is hardy and robust, its gaze is wise and circular, it is vital. And guitars, as no other instrument can evoke and measure the immense sound of emptiness. Emptiness is the heaviest of all experiences. Like time itself, you cannot touch it, but its weight is almost unbearable. All our words are connected in circles of meaning, and there’s no escaping from the confinement of their thinking, but the guitars keep ringing, trying to attain new dimensions of meaning, searching for new reverberations amidst the circular lexicography of Steve Kilbey’s lyrics. In the spiralling equations of a musical language Priest equals Aura. 

With the help of the guitars, Steve Kilbey cracked the code and I find myself in the midst of a violent energy of war. The universe doesn’t surrender without putting up a fight. But eventually… Eventually – “in a chasm dark and wide” (1) – he succeeds in turning this vital energy into a reconciliatory gest of a game of wordy equations; a soft spirit of reconciliation is always at the back of the lyricist’s mind. He makes peace with words, makes an end to the logic of contradiction. His vocal lines are half spoken half sung in an almost unstoppable, indifferent metre of history proceeding, a formal routine of words unearthed out of the depths of some unescapable, universal consciousness, in a dialectic process of words and music as if they were both following a necessary, historical or evolutionary scheme. Steve Kilbey acts upon the instinct of the intellect. And I disappear in his world of sound.
Miranda makes an appearance in this predominantly male bastion of Church goers. Her words are prophetic and ominous, untimely and precociously wise for someone so young. To go along with the mystery, I have to leave my analytical mind behind. In this spiralling universe,  music and words are encircling one another, enkindling each other with their forceful presence; words becoming soundful, sounds becoming meaningful. With this perfect, intimate conspiracy between music and language, Steve Kilbey enters the conversation of mankind. His lyrics arise in the midst of a spontaneous, ongoing synthesis of perception and imagination, voicing his very own, natural way with language. As if he has been immersed for the longest time in the voices of different eras, uttering their words…
Almost in the skies, high up Hanging Rock, Miranda hears the humming of the millennia-old rock. She speaks of the songs she is listening to. Words written to the sounds, by one – frontman and pastor of The Church, but not in the least parochial – who is in awe of it all, but who, most of all perhaps, venerates the sound and mystery of music.

The Sophist Of Seduction

Two words and their juxtaposition or combination can make you smile, innocently – like a pun does – but then again there’s more to it… “Intercontinental intelligence” from the Seance song “Travel by Thought” was the juxtaposition that brought a smile to my face. Even through my headphones I could hardly make out the words, almost imperceptible, hushed, like a secretive whisper in my ear. I am not even sure that is what he is saying, but that doesn’t matter; Steve Kilbey is tolerant of words and the freedom they sometimes require. It’s a lucky combination by one who knows how to roll the dice in a meaningful way. Not unlike the lucky strike that created a world so long ago. Such a lucky, almost perfect coincidence of conditions can’t but bring a smile to one’s face. Wouldn’t you smile if you were the apple of his eye, his unsuspecting prey? Wouldn’t you smile if you were his mistress, his muse called Music? 

Steve Kilbey rolls the dice of language in a heroic way of dedication and unlimitedness. And as it turned out, by doing so, his words revealed he is no less than a true connoisseur of the serendipities that language has to offer. Because how do you speak with someone who has all the freedom in the world, who never stands still for a moment, who balances gracefully and effortlessly on the waves of time, how do you tell her about your world? Steve Kilbey’s words clearly emanate from a ferocious desire to communicate with his muse, he wants to be her equal. This pulsating drive engendered by his longing resulted in a vitality of words that makes your head spin. But nothing the guitars can’t handle… He knows music transcends all truth. His first object of desire has never been to convey meaning in the ordinary way. Meaning is secondary in his expressionism of words. He is a man of action. What Steve Kilbey practices when writing is lyrical action. He behaves lyrically. His lyrics do not primarily refer to specific experiences or emotions, they are the experience! The expression is the only thing there is. His words are nothing but an instance of the poetic character of human activity in the way it can be encountered in music and other forms of human creative, artistic behaviour. His lyrical practice is like a spontaneous outburst, an aware spontaneity. Its unreflective springs are almost like an instinct. His wordy phraseology is a fluid skill and rhythm adopted from the flow of music itself. He thinks in words the same way he thinks in music. Spirit of music and spirit of language come together and unite as one. In an ardent fervour Steve Kilbey imitates his mistress. How do you please the goddess of music with words? How do you convince her you’re worthy of her? Like a sophist of seduction he leaves no strategy of words untouched, his words will convince her that he understood who she is. He will never consent to an unrequited love.

She calls out to him and he replies; a call-and-response interplay is the foundation of the Church songs, responsive harmonies and discords are the guitars’ way of being, intersections, defiances and provocations, temptations, games of attraction and seduction, of repulsion and rejection, everything in a Church song is antiphonal, not in the least the interplay of words and music. How Steve Kilbey’s words fall into the music is just a matter of gravity emanating from the core of music. His lyrics are the fruit of heightened senses and awareness, of the vitality of a lover. Call it the vitalistic principle of soul. I have never encountered it in the almost perfect balance of force, subtlety and originality that I found in the lyrics of the Church songs.

Afternoons

Steve Kilbey’s lyrics denounce an ungraspable present. Yes, he also stole this insight from his muse. The moment of music is intangible and at the same time it manifests itself as an eternal present that feeds from its past and hunkers for its future. It hovers between the melancholic certainty of the past and the hopeful promise of the future. He writes his words from the perspective of a present that is running ahead towards its past. That is simply the essence of musical time and Steve Kilbey infuses his words with this peculiar way of a form of art that behaves itself always and ever as a consciousness through time. The ever forward motion of music is an illusion and Steve Kilbey unmasked it. His songs tell of a presentiment of the end, of an ending that is nearby. An apocalyptic sense of loss and doom is always lurking behind the words. Amidst all the vitality and resourcefulness of the words there’s always the awareness that things will fall apart soon. His instinct is one of eros and death. Not seldom he pronounces the thundering, apocalyptic words of a prophet. His are the words of a coming apocalypse.

This world is too good to be true, too strange to be understood, too complicated for the mind to describe, so … he decided to just follow his instinct… But for now – as long as the music flows – everything is basking in the afternoon light of a pre-apocalyptic glow where a vital power is still reigning. But for how long? Euphemius – he who is well-spoken – will accompany his lady until her last dance. And just like hers, Steve Kilbey’s flow of moments is heavenly. How I love his afternoons when time seems to stand still in an eternal present of golden sunshine. “Abandoning the afternoon as it sinks into the night”, he writes in a song called “My Little Problem” (2). One afternoon in the universe, Kilbey has the ability to magnify each and every moment into a force of being and existing where every second holds eternity, every instant feels like an epoch or an era. Every moment is eternal and inscribes itself in the whole of things past and future. The orbit of his words circles the memory of history and the surreal prophecy of what will be. His muse reminds him of everything that was and her course still runs wildly envisaging any possibility. Through his lyrics Steve Kilbey always knows how to grasp the weight of any moment. “This afternoon is crushing down” (3). “And days will glow in distant times” (4). The light in his universe of words is like the haunting brightness on the last – never ending – afternoon before the rogue planet Melancholia (in Lars Von Trier’s sublimely delirious movie with the same name) crashes into Earth. Melancholia, through the smallest of cracks, invades his music and words alike. But unlike his mistress he feels the heaviness of time. A premonition…

At The Court Of King Knife

An eternal time and an eternal place seem to come together in every line he writes. His words are asymptotic to the whole of the world as humans experience it – or at least that is his goal – they are part of the ongoing conversation of mankind, both with itself and with the universe it was thrown into. Yes, to be sure, there is a sense of hubris in Steve Kilbey’s words – he knows that all too well – but still, it is the only way he can envisage that he could ever compete with her, she who holds all the courage, wisdom, mystery, beauty and strength he worships.

He is just so overwhelmed by the power she has over him…

And lest we forget, these are the words of a dramaturg who writes for the stage. The concert podium acts as the realm for the three dramatic unities which Aristotle laid down in his Poetics. The stage is the one time, one place, one act where Steve Kilbey performs his lyrics. Hence the vigour and command, the pride and self-confidence of his words. The inner chronology of a song is primordial, its span in minutes is the only time that really matters. The relatively short duration of a song is what lends his words an additional urgency and persuasiveness; their emotional weight and beauty all captured and condensed in the now of musical time. Steve Kilbey understands the art of writing words for the stage in a timeless manner. He writes songs to be enacted at the fictitious-world court of King Knife (5). His lyrics are the heroics of the Church songs, his voice the actor. Heroic verses are chiming through the sounds of the guitars, through the courtyards, churches, palaces, and amphitheatres and arenas, through the mountains and valleys, the endless plains of history unfolding. “Yes, the show will start without you” (6). A show of the spoken word. Steve Kilbey intently places himself in an oral tradition of performers of words. Music, once again, she leads by example. She is his very willing and accomplished guide and in her footsteps his words changed guise, they are no longer just a rational, intellectual form of Logos, they took over the mysterious character of Mythos. Just like music he is no servant of disambiguation. Myth has the connotation of referring to primeval times, to beginnings; it’s like a rite or ritual where meanings are founded through stories and fictional tales. His song lyrics are like little mythologies in the sense that they try to convey a symbolic voicing of the complex system of relationships between humans and the universe: “Voyage begins with a single sail” (7), the fabled opening words from the song whose title reveals unequivocally the scope of the questions: “I Don’t Know How I Don’t Know why”. Steve Kilbey writes about the grand scheme of things, in the way of the Presocratic philosophers, as a “natural philosopher”, who always has the cosmos in mind when writing about mankind. His words are permeated with a feeling of fondness for and familiarity with an “unknown whole”. There is a strong sense of sentiment, a deep-rootedness present in the songs of The Church; a knowing and a sort of relatedness-to-it-all that you find in any mythology. Together with music he opens up a space where everything that transcends human understanding can thrive. Words are his toys, nothing more nothing less. Only music can follow him when he’s at play.

Saturday

Steve Kilbey is finding his own way – when he is at play – in this cool dimension, where it’s always Saturday (8). How I love this line of “Laurel Canyon”! How much it intimates to me about the inner workings of his writing. When he retreats to this more relaxed dimension of compassion, receptiveness, gentleness and empathy. He shares these softer sides with the Church guitars too. As a girl who is not really into guitar bands, the Church guitars always stood out for me from most of their counterparts in other rock formations. They sound compassionate and sensual to me, gentlemanly and courteous, graceful, they have this very delicate touch-and-feel way of creating their sounds, a very distinctive ring and echo to them. Saturday being my favourite day of the week, it became a favourite word too. I’ll have a cup of tea and a piece of cake. It just feels so terribly relaxed, like the song’s poet – the singer – himself, an aura of seductive, inner poise always surrounding him. His poetry above all retains the improviso playfulness of an off-duty Saturday. The lyricist is just so cool and relaxed; he found forever solace and inspiration in the presence of his muse. His words are like shifting dimensions, paradigms that can change in a second with the chords of music. His words are ever lively, never stuck, just like she is. To me a Church song doesn’t really take off until Steve Kilbey has said the first word; he gifts the songs the most wonderful geneses. His lyrics are like the clearing in the dense forest of guitars. They shed light on the music and I need that glimmer. And while he may be on his mountain, all alone, like Zarathustra, writing his prophetic words – which in turn can be elegant or brutal, tragic or comic, sophisticated or plain, carnal or spiritual – there is one thing Steve Kilbey might be underestimating and that is his empathetic power. The poet assembles his world, looking up and looking down; a deep sense of spirituality and humility is the unwitting and unexpected foundation of his towering words. In Miranda’s world it is for ever Saturday…

The Moon’s Pretending

While the moon is pretending … that everything is still alright. In one of their most majestic songs, “Love Philtre” (9) – a perfect beauty of sound and word – Steve Kilbey reconnects in the most articulate and mystifying manner with the theme of a gradual decay and degeneration of world, the corrosion of both matter and spirit. Although the song – in true Kilbey-style – is delicately uplifting, anthemic even … It is pure solace. The moment the music gently wavers for a toss of the coin, is the pivotal second when Miranda turns around – her blonde hair swaying in the afternoon light – and heads for the rocky mountain. Never to be seen again. Miranda is a Botticelli angel. “The mountain was hard. – Her skin was smooth. – The rocks were scarred” (10). In some magnetic chance meeting Steve’s and Miranda’s paths must have crossed; he seems to have intuited her words and wrote them down: “There were voices singing above in the sky. – As I followed them up I was prepared to die.” (11)

“The moon’s pretending” must be amongst Steve Kilbey’s most insightful wordings. And it’s romantic, prescient and sweetly animistic – a fairy-tale moment in a somewhat darker tale of mankind’s fate. The moon just playing along with the game of appearance and semblance of the universe. A telling specimen of the stellar dream logic of this master short-story teller. “All that we see or seem is but a dream. – A dream within a dream.” These lines of Edgar Allan Poe open the storyline of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, cited in a beautiful young girl’s voice. Followed by the sound of the pan flute … or the guitars… depending on which sphere you find yourself in. Steve Kilbey’s lunar rumination on the illusion of love is just out-of-this-world! Unveiling the ruses and ploys of the universe in his kind, empathetic voice of compassion. The music takes part in the exposure, but as usual, in her most innocent way of sweet ingénue. 

It’s hard to describe what this particular combination of words and music does to the soul; I don’t think you can overestimate the potency and virtue of this song, its bravura. I can’t listen to it without tears welling up in my eyes. “There’s still a love to live for”, who can resist the touching, gripping way in which the music announces this heart-wrenching line? It may just be the ultimate verse of his that might suggest some way of closure to be found in it all … And when he reiterates the moon’s pretence – along the heavenly cloud of music it floats on – it’s as if all the words that the music of The Church has escorted and ever will, suddenly all fall into place, and as if the whole œuvre of lyrics written by Steve Kilbey culminates in these few words and everything starts to sink in. I fall silent. 

This song too wanders into another resplendent afternoon moment of musical radiance, filled with the voice of an ethereal presence allegorising all that we’ll never understand, and where – again – the light of The Church shines at its brightest. It reminds me of the three sisters and their friend, who – walking in the fields – saw the most angelic apparition of our Lady… (12) Because just like the four children who saw our Lady in all her radiance, Steve Kilbey never says what her message is, the message of Music for mankind.

Footnotes

1. Day 5 (Uninvited, Like The Clouds)

2. My Little Problem (Sometime Anywhere)

3. Anchorage (Untitled # 23)

4. Kings (Priest = Aura)

5. For King Knife (Man Woman Life Death Infinity)

6. For King Knife (Man Woman Life Death Infinity)

7. I Don’t Know How I Don’t Know Why (Man Woman Life Death Infinity)

8. Laurel Canyon (Further/Deeper)

9. Love Philtre (Further/Deeper)

10. Pure Chance (Uninvited, Like The Clouds)

11. Pure Chance (Uninvited, Like The Clouds)

12. Radiance (After Everything Now This)

Joke Roelandt, January 2023