Steve Kilbey has been writing and singing amazing music for over 50 years.
Apparently he has an incredible 1,000-plus songs registered with APRA, the best-known being the music written for The Church, of which he was a founding member. Anyone with even a passing interest in Australian music will be familiar with much of Kilbey's back catalogue.Ahead of a tour of Australia by The Church later this year, this current solo show gives punters the chance to hear the band's great music that has defined Steve's success, at a range of much smaller and more intimate shows.
Sunday evening (8 September) sees Kilbey playing at Gold Coast's Coolangatta Hotel, promising banter to flesh out the stories behind the songs. Unusually, we are also provided with the set list prior to the event, and it seems laid out in a sequential manner (with the earliest music first). The set list doesn't cover the full four-decade list of Kilbey's albums, rather focussing on the better-known, generally earlier, material.
The crowd is clearly well-versed in his music, and the layout is plastic chairs, almost like an RSL or surf club. It's not a large crowd, but Kilbey clearly enjoys playing these local gigs, as he discusses later when introducing some of the songs.
Image © Bill Prendergast
Kilbey appears onstage, looking in great condition, ahead of his approaching 70th birthday (on Friday), and it's clear it will be a minimalist approach to the evening with no props, or supporting musicians, just Kilbey and his beautiful Guild 12-string guitar.
What is clear, certainly for the first half of the show, is there is a lot of banter, introducing the music and what was going on at the time the music was born. He's famous for this banter, and viewing his infamous, decade-old ARIA acceptance speech makes this abundantly apparent. The chatter is almost a stand-up comedy routine, but all clearly and cleverly linked to the music.
The set kicks off with the first single 'She Never Said', taken from The Church's first album 'Of Skins And Heart'. He mentions the first review, along the lines that The Church was a poor man's Flowers. "Wait until Iva Davies finds out how well tonight has gone in Coolangatta," he quips.
Listening to this song now, more than 40 years after it was released, to me it is really reflective of a lot of the late '70s UK punk scene, along with the 80s UK independent music (I'm thinking of Joy Division, The Stranglers amongst others).
Image © Bill Prendergast
The show moves into 'The Unguarded Moment'. I love the song, and it's played in a stripped-back manner to perfect effect, although Kilbey noted his dislike for the song, which to him sounds too much like pub rock. He relived his first appearance on 'Countdown' when the song was originally released in 1981. Chords were skipped in the bridge in the middle of the song, but neither Kilbey nor the crowd seemed to mind.
After these two gems from the first album, we move into 'The Blurred Crusade' that was incredibly not seen as an acceptable follow-up second album in the US, following some success of the first one.
We shortly hear the introductory chords of 'Almost With You', which of course drives the crowd wild, and the 12-string guitar is proving perfect in broadening out the unaccompanied music. 'When You Were Mine' is another of the well-known songs off the second album, a different introduction tonight, given the acoustic format, but again well played and appreciated.
We then move into the third album, 'Seance', which I had always felt does not quite reach the heights of the two earlier albums. The record was met with diverse opinions at the time, and was quite polarising after the first two undisputed classics. Even Kilbey recently stated that 'Seance' doesn't really sound the way it was meant to sound.
He makes this clear again with his pre-music discussion. The pieces from the third album are 'It's No Reason' (which surprised and was one of the evening's highlights for me) and 'Electric Lash', along with a quirky story describing how it came to be.
After a short intermission, we are treated to four songs from 1985's 'Heyday', heavily influenced by the UK's Simple Minds, before hitting the huge 'Starfish' album from 1988. Kilbey has written that 'Under The Milky Way' is "not really about anything at all. I just wanted to create an atmosphere." Well of course, the song still creates an incredible atmosphere and was also a massive hit. There are a range of acoustic versions online, and the song in no way suffers with the lack of bagpipes and other musical accompaniment.
'Reptile' is the second huge piece off 'Starfish' performed tonight, and again the acoustic version is (and must be) different from the studio version, but with the capo set higher up the neck, the opening chords are a stunning replacement for the original and its well-known electric guitar runs.
Image © Bill Prendergast
The third song off 'Starfish' tonight is 'Destination' ('Starfish' is the source of my all-time favourite piece by The Church, 'North, South, East And West', but presumably this was felt to lend itself less to this acoustic style of show).
'Metropolis' charted higher in the US than in Australia, and again Kilbey played a great version tonight, although with a very aggressive strumming pattern which set it apart from the studio version.
The show then moved into 'Ripple' off 'Priest=Aura', the album which he has described as The Church's "undisputed masterpiece". Overall a great show, quite humorous in many places, and Kilbey is one of Australia's music icons who must be seen live, preferably in a small venue.
More photos from the concert.
