By Tom Lanham
July 2026
“True humility does not know that it is humble. If it did, it would be proud of the contemplation of so fine a virtue,” once observed German theologian Martin Luther.
At 71, songwriter/painter/poet/novelist Steve Kilbey can easily relate. As much fun as it’s always been for the bandleader of Australia’s psychedelic-jangle combo, The Church, to claim credit for his artistic achievements over 46 productive years. But these days, he’s found it much more gracious to downplay the temperamental artistic ego. For example, look no further than his group’s ethereal, military-cadenced new single “Sacred Echoes (Part Two),” which lyrically runs down a sparse laundry list of sustenance needs, then slips into Kilbey’s fervent, repeated chorus of “And now you say you’re gonna take it all away,” all set to a flickering black and white video backdrop of impoverished American farmers, coupled with vintage Dorothea Lange snapshots of Dustbowl Okies from a hardscrabble 1930’s. Had the man suddenly gotten into photography? How had he discovered the stark work of Lange? Was there a new Great Depression-themed album on the way?
Kilbey sighs, then humbly confesses that he was unfamiliar with Dorothea Lange and her oeuvre. He. Merely asked a cinematographer friend to come up with footage appropriate to “Sacred Echoes “’ grim poetry. “So I talked to him about the idea of hope in the middle of hopelessness, because that’s what the song is about,” he says. “And he found those (Lange pics) — I had never really heard of her or seen her work or thought about it before. So it has nothing to do with me — the guy who made the video created all of that. I just wrote the song.”
Not that the Sydney native is averse to visuals. As a busy painter, he actually created his own Blake-splashy tarot deck. Uhh, didn’t he? Well, no, he admits. “That wasn’t really me — that was another guy. He grabbed my lyrics, and he just made that tarot deck because I don’t really know anything about the tarot. I mean, I did the art, but I can’t take any credit for the deck.”
The Church has also kept up with the post-Patreon/pandemic times via the Nightfriends page, available through its website. For the modest sum of $100, or $10 a month, fans can access: pre-sale band concert tickets; early show entry; rare tracks and videos; a community chat room; plus an exclusive Nightfriends T-shirt. Kilbey just seems stuck in humility mode at this point. “No, once again, it had nothing to do with me. Our manager said, ‘There’s a subscription website — and ours is called Nighfriends, but I don’t know anything about it, and we haven’t figured out a way to get any money out of it yet. But the band is angry because I never really participate.”
Kilbey’s laissez-faire attitude extends to The Church’s current “The Singles — 1980 — 2025” US tour, postponed from last year due to a medical emergency. “I didn’t even think I would be going to America,” he recalls. “But the tour was wildly successful in Australia, so our managers in America said, ‘You should do that over here.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah. Okay. Why not?’ And so we did.” Additionally, the group had two new albums to promote, its 26th and 27th, the surprise hit The Hypnogogue and its companion volume Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars, which tell the dystopian sci-fi story of a fading futuristic rock star named Eros Zeta, who seeks out a device that can extract song ideas from his sleeping (echoing Kilbey’s longtime fascination with humankind’s lucid dreaming state, and its untapped writing potential. Along the way, he becomes addicted to an otherworldly drug dubbed Sky, which nearly kills him, a storyline more fleshed out in the vocalist’s accompanying novella, “Eros Zeta and the Hypnogogue.” Again, he says, it was his manager’s idea, not his, to pen an actual book explaining his records’ complicated plot.
When you see The Church on American stages this summer, they walk on to the composer Vangelis’s eerie theme music to Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece, Blade Runner. Who suggested its use to Kilbey? Nobody, he exults proudly. “Finally! Finally, something that was MY idea! I’d always loved that Vangelis album, and it just seemed like it was begging to be used in our show. I’m sure we’re not the only ones to ever have done, but it was just such a wonderful piece of music.”
There was only one other force that weighed on Kilbey’s decision scale, he adds — the actual pandemic itself. Or in other words. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. “I think that everybody realized just how important music WAS, so I think music got a lot of people through those times, so I don’t think that I’ll ever take music for granted, ever again.”
Humbly Kilbey — who keeps looking increasingly professorial as he ages — took an hour to discuss how his life has subtly changed of late.
IE: How’s your health? The first impression I got after seeing recent photos is that you look like you’ve been working out, like you’re very muscular now.
STEVE KILBEY: Ha ha ha! No, I’m not that healthy. I’ve got heart disease. I’ve got arteriosclerosis, and they’re waiting until I’m ready to have a bypass. But we’ve all got our burdens to carry.
IE: And any day on this side of the grass can’t be too bad, right? But was that the medical emergency that canceled your tour last year? Or was it someone else’s?
SK: No, that was my partner having breast cancer. She’s alright now, but I had to stay — I couldn’t just run off and leave her.
IE: Something occurred to me today while watching All About Eve for the umpteenth time. And I got to the end of it, and I was looking carefully for a line out of place, a gesture, movement, or bit of dialogue. And it’s perfect, just like Sunset Boulevard. And maybe it’s because I’m getting towards the end of my life, but you look back on these perfect pieces of art that never diminish over time, and they’re like, for instance, your song “Unguarded Moment,” which never diminishes. So how do you view such art now, and its importance to us humans? Especially now?
SK: It’s everything. It’s all we have. You know, everything you do is familiar, and you do everything that you have to do so you can get that all out of the way so you can read a book or watch a movie or listen to a record. And without it, what have we got? We have nature, which I guess…well, yes, we have nature. So nature and art. Without nature and art, you’re finished, I reckon.
IE: The last time we talked, mid-pandemic, you were visiting tidal pools along the coast of Sydney.
SK: Oh, yeah, yeah! Well, I’ve moved, you know? I’ve moved out of Sydney, and I moved three and a Half hours up the coast, north. And I never go inland, so I’m on the coast, and I live next to a lake, a lake that’s across a sandbar from the sea. And I try to spend an hour every day in the lake, and then get in the sea. I think they’re wonderfully therapeutic things, so I swim. And it’s aerobic, but it’s so much more than that. And actually, I came across an article the other day about swimming, and it said how good it is for you on so many different levels. And if you’re swimming in natural water, like I do, it’s obviously even better than swimming in a chlorinated pool. So this lake that I live near and that I walk down to and have a swim every day- it’s therapeutic, and it’s got therapeutic minerals in it. I actually drink it — I get in the water, and I drink a couple of handfuls of it. And I swim across to the other side, and halfway in the middle of the lake, it gets really shallow, and you can put your feet down and bounce around on the sand. And I feel rejuvenated every day — it always does its magic. Some days I go down there, and I feel really burnt out from just this world, and the lake always does its thing. I also live very close to the sea, which is just across from the lake. And every time there’s been some beautiful beaches here, and the water is absolutely pristine. It’s so clean and clear, and there are dolphins and whales, so I get a lot out of it. The other day,I was just sitting in my lake, sitting in the shallow bits, right out in the middle of nowhere, and I was looking at the three different types of birds that were catching fish. There are pelicans coming along in a sweep, sweeping up the fish in their bills, dipping them in the water until suddenly, they lunge. And then I’m watching these herons, and the herons are diving like dive bombers, and they hit the water and go under and get their fish. And then I’m watching these osprey — which I presume they’re osprey, or sea eagles — and they don’t like getting wet. They’re circling around, and then suddenly they come down, and they just pick a fish out of the top of the water, without actually getting in the water themselves. And it’s just marvelous to see all of this going on. And I feel really privileged. I dunno. It’s more important. Then, running down the streets of the city and hailing a cab with a briefcase full of documents. So this stuff sustains me. Along with reading books, watching good television, and going to the movies. And listening to music! Like, while I’ve just been painting for an art exhibition.
IE: In which medium? Oils or acrylics?
SK: No, neither! No, I’m past all of that. And you can see it on my Instagram page — I do these paintings of where snakes and these underwater plants merge, sort of where they join up. So that’s what I’ve been doing, getting ready, and I’m sending them all off today to this exhibition. So I stand there, and I paint, and I listen to music for hours and hours, and the time goes past really quickly. And that’s how I’ve spent my semi-retirement, basically, I would say.
IE: In the lake, do you ever put on goggles and scuba dive?
SK: No. And I have swimming goggles, but it isn’t very clear, so you can’t really see much. So I’ve never really been big on scuba diving, and I’ve never done real scuba diving, and I’m not really very good at snorkeling. I’m just a surfer/swimmer, and I sort of do breaststroke, and I do backstroke. And I dunno — it’s a real privilege.
IE: Have you ever seen anything scary out there? Like, “Uhh, okay..it’s YOUR lake, Mr. Horseshoe Crab”?
SK: No. There’s nothing scary in the lake. Luckily. A lot of Australian lakes that are adjacent to the sea might have sharks in ‘em, and there’s always the possibility, I guess, of running into a snake. I’ve seen a couple of poisonous snakes on the edge of the lake, and sometimes poisonous snakes — or any snake, really — they swim across the water, you know? But I’ve never run into anything, touch wood. But I’ve been coming up to this area for a long time, and the locals have always said that there aren’t any nasty things in the lake. And it’s a really beautiful lake, and in the middle of the lake are all of these islands, these uninhabited islands that you can swim to. And then there’s a sand bar, like a great gig sand bar at one end of the lake, and across the sand bar is the sea.
IE: Have you found anything collectible out there?
SK: Every now and then, I find a nice shell, or I find a nice rock. But it’s actually illegal in Australia to take that stuff home, you know? But I dunno. What can they do?
IE: And the same supposedly goes for opals. When I visited Sydney a few years ago, I heard that if you take an opal out of the country, you’ll wind up cursed. I love that city, though. And especially the one place it’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t eaten there — the strange little late-night food cart called Harry’s Cafe Du Wheels, with mushy-peas-filled hot pot pies like the Tiger. I wonder if it’s still there….
SK: Yes. Harry’s Café du Wheels is still there. He keeps trying to expand. But his original one does really well, but I believe every time he tries to start up somewhere else, it collapses. He tried to start up in Bondi Beach, and it didn’t last very long. But yeah, the original one is still definitely going.
IE: In a completely unrelated question, what was Sky, the drug that your **Hypnogogue protagonist Eros Zeta was on in last year’s companion album, Eros Zeta and the Perfumed Guitars? And in the novelization, you expanded the storyline, “Eros Zeta and the Hypnogogue”?
SK: Okay, so my manager said, “You should write a novella about this,” so I did. And in the novella. I elaborated on Sky, and Sky is an alien drug that was found on board a crashed aircraft, and obviously, it produces a sort of euphoria. It produces every good thing you could imagine, but then when it runs out, there are terrible consequences. So in the novella, so I wrote about it that once you’ve taken it, you’re hooked — it only takes one exposure before your system gets hooked. And in the novella, I write that it takes an alien intervention to get him off it. And luckily, he has a friend who’s a doctor, and they find it in a crashed aircraft in China, and these Chinese doctors get in touch, and they’ve sort of synthesized it from a drug, and it’s a drug that’s only supposed to be used by dying people who’ve. Got nothing to lose. So anyway, these alien people show up in his dreams. They don’t actually arrive in reality, but they come in his dreams, and they get him off (sky). It’s a very painful, horrible experience to get off it, but eventually he does.
IE: Well, this sounds like a weird follow-up question, but it’s actually not: Did you ever think you were visited by extraterrestrials? Or been in contact with any?
SK: I have been. I was. And yeah — that’s where I got the idea from. When I was seven — and I haven’t talked about this a real lot — but when I was seven, it was exactly as I write in my novella; I had this series of weird…it was not a nightmare. It was a terrible experience, and I used to beg my parents, “Don’t leave me alone! Don’t leave me alone!” And of course, they would sit there with you, and then they would go away, and then I would fall into these nightmarish dreams where this intelligence was getting me to jump through these hoops, and I had to do this stuff. And it happened over the course of a couple of weeks, every night, and then they were sort of judging me. And then…I’m not sure, but later on I talked to a guy about it, a guy who was big on this sort of thing, and he started talking about it, and he said, Yeah, he had the same thing. And I was seven years old, and I didn’t really understand what was going on. But this was his theory — it wasn’t like guys in a spaceship jumping out or walking up the steps. This was a sort of thing that all occurred in my mind, and the guy said, “They’re harvesting DNA. And they’re coming from a place where they have everything, but they’ve run out of DNA.” So they were harvesting my DNA. And after that, after that experience was over, I was sort of changed. Something changed in me. But (my alien encounters) weren’t happening at all on a physical plane. Mine weren’t what anybody watching could have seen. It was far more insidious and sophisticated than that. If, indeed, it really happened. I mean, obviously, it was so long ago that I now have doubts. But the really weird thing was, I had these little scars on my. Back, and my mother started saying, “Where did you get those scars?”And I said, “I cut myself on a fence,” which never happened. And the answer just popped into my head every time. And then over the course of the years, people would say, “Where did you get those little weird scars?” And I would just say, “I got them. By crawling under a fence.” But if you look at the scars, they’re not the sort of scars you could get from crawling under a fence — they’re like little perfect incisions. And I showed them to this friend of mine, the conspiracy theorist guy, and he said, “Yeah — they harvested some DNA from there.” And whenever people would ask me about it, like, this answer would pop into my head, and it was sort of like I couldn’t give the real answer, going, “I don’t know where I got them.”
So I’d just go, “Yeah, I crawled under a barbed-wire fence when I was a kid, and it cut my back.” And people go, “Oh, okay.” But when you look at the s cars, that’s obviously not what happened. There are these perfectly perpendicular little white scars down near the base of my spine. And that’s all I know. I lied about them automatically, and it was like the answer was put in my head when anyone would ask. But I don’t know what that it. And all of it might not even be true, and I don’t go around fervently reliving my life. But there’s only one more thing I have to say on this subject: I have read that there are a number of symptoms of someone who has been tampered with by aliens, and another one is ‘A spontaneous decision to become a vegetarian.’ And when I was like 17 or 18, like a switch had been flipped, one day I got up and said to my parents and everyone I knew, “I’m a vegetarian. From now on, I’m not eating meat — I have to be only a vegetarian.” And there was absolutely no reason behind that — it was like a switch had been flipped. And when I was really pressed, I used to cast around for answers as to why that had happened. And I’m still a vegetarian to this day — I cannot contemplate or abide the idea of eating meat.
IE: In our last interview, you had a great quote about that, something like “As long as there’s a single fish left in the sea, there will be some idiot out there trying to catch it. Meat is not sustainable.”
SK: That’s right.
IE: If I could, I’d like to boomerang right back to China. China gets it, gets the whole importance of sustainable futures — China has the most EV’s, or electric cars, in production, and they’re totally affordable, and they also understand the importance of renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and all that. Indigenous cultures are also aware of it, like Native American tribes and the Aboriginal cultures in Australia.
SK: Yeah. Everybody was aware of it except old white guys like us! Ha!
IE: You have to hand it to Australia, though. It was the first major country to impose an age limit on social media platforms for kids under 16. Now other nations are following suit, even the United States, with the recent landmark case against social media, whose influence was determined to have contributed to a teenage girl’s suicide.
SK: Yeah, yeah. I dunno. I dunno — I’m just a bloody pop singer, man. I don’t have any answers. I just write music — I dunno. And my philosophy and my religion? It’s all just a hodgepodge of stuff I’ve picked up over the years, so I’m no authority. So I dunno. I’m sitting here looking at a rain forest, just sitting on my balcony and looking at a rain forest, and I’m watching some birds fly around in the clouds, and I think, “This forest does not give a fuck about any of this stuff.” And it’s very refreshing, just very refreshing.
IE: But look at the totally outrageous weather that besieges us, any time of year, no matter where you are. The Earth has simply had enough of us. Is there anything that gives you hope?
SK: Yeah, I have hope. I’ve got hope.
IE: On your current Singles tour, have fans approached you with your songs, forever linked in their mind to a completely different personal story of their own?
SK: They do! They do! And that’s what songs are. That’s the marvelous thing about music, and painting, and everything. You hear a three-minute song, and then suddenly, you’ve got a whole story, you know? If you really love a song, your mind fills in all the details.
IE: Are there any reinterpretations that made you uncomfortable? Or where the fan got the song’s meaning completely wrong, like “I see a pterodactyl eating all the villagers”? And you’re like, “Uhh, no — “Under the Milky Way” is NOT about a pterodactyl
SK: It’s all valid, it’s all valid. I have never contradicted anybody’s opinion of what a song is about. I think if they care enough to think of an interpretation or think of a story that they connect with a song or something in their own life, I’m just happy with that. I guess that’s kind of what my songs — and all good songs, really — can do. When I was a kid, I’d put a record on, and I’d lie down and listen to it, and I’d escape into my own world, a world that a door would open with the right records. A door would open in your head, and you could explore these worlds. And more than a book or a film, you can listen to a record. I’ve been listening to records my whole life now — I’ve been listening to my favorite records for 50-odd years, and 60 years in some cases. And they still go on giving, and I still see the stories, and I still think about ‘em. And I think that’s quite an amazing thing that music can do that almost nothing else can do, which is you can listen to a record every day of your life and still enjoy it.
IE: Which is kind of like the great movie Almost Famous in the beginning, when Zooey Deschanel’s big sister character is leaving the family home, and she whispers to her kid brother Patrick Fugit, as aspiring young rock writer Cameron Crowe, and informs him that she’s secretly stashed a bagful of her coolest albums underneath his bed. She’s like, “Put on ‘Tommy’ with a candle burning, and you will see your future.”
SK: Ha ha haaa! And there you go. That’s such a great film. I really love that film. I keep meaning to watch it again because it’s the sort of movie you can get out every ten years and watch all over again, from start to finish.
IE: Maybe you can relate to this. But as I’ve gotten closer and closer to the end of what I’d always believed to be an amazing, nearly five-decade writing career, I discovered, sadly, that a lot of Naysaying Haters just weren’t appreciating me and all my thousands of heartfelt interviews. It’s been truly heartbreaking. But every time I start considering finally penning my colorful autobiography, I grind to a halt thinking, “These thankless fuckers do NOT deserve to read even a single paragraph.” So brace yourself — it might never see publication. And again, I’m haunted by Rutger Hauer’s tragic quote in Blade Runner after listing all the vivid phenomena he’s witnessed zooming through the galaxy. “But soon all this will be lost, like tears in rain,” as he lies dying. And it always strikes me as being painfully true.
SK: Yeah! That’s right! It’s hard to get used to, isn’t it? I agree with you. This thing that seemed so solidly permanent? I think about it all the time. And I hear a lyric from Bread, “Dreams are for those who sleep/ Life is for us to keep.” But it isn’t! Life is NOT for us to keep! Life is so fricking impermanent, you know? Somehow, you’ve got this terrible, debilitating disease (I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s in 2018; From its jittery symptoms to surreal dopamine-scrambling prescribed medications for it like Mirapex, it’s truly been a nightmare). I’ve got my arteries in my heart full of this plaque. And with one little accident, any day now, or any month now, it’s all gonna go wrong, and it’ll all be over. When that last little bit of plaque fills that artery, and the blood doesn’t go through, you know? Two minutes later, all of this is over. And, like tears in rain, I will be gone. My energy, my spirit, will be somewhere else, doing something else, and it will seem like none of this ever happened. And then, in 100 years’ time, no one will care bout any of this./ They won’t care about Trump, and they won’t care about Geese, and they won’t care about Nick Cave, and they won’t care about which movie won the Oscar this year. You know what I mean? It’s all incredibly impermanent.
IE: And civilization, in retrospect, is not judged by its sporting events.
SK: Yeah. I know! I know! And look — some of the guys in The Church are big football fans, and there’s one guy in particular, Ash, and if his team wins, it makes him so happy. And I just think, “Fuck. I wish I could be happy because the football team won the game! I wish that could make ME happy.” But I don’t. Begrudge him happiness, either. But it is incredibly impermanent. But I really do believe there is something after this.
IE: I was going to ask what you believe comes next…
SK: Well, I don’t believe it’s all for nothing. It’s not just written in the sand, and I still feel the same. I feel there’s gotta be meaning to this, and I feel there’s gotta be more than just this life, even though this life will be gone like tears in the rain, and there will be something after that. And I don’t think it’s just wishful thinking. I think we will go on and live more lives, and hopefully learn from the mistakes in this one, and then maybe be better in the next one. In my next life, maybe I won’t say horrible things like I used to say to people (he had a well-publicized decade-long battle with heroin addiction that seriously altered his behavior).
IE: Well, I was out of my mind on coke and crank in the late ’80s, so the last things either one of us should be reminded of are drug-years mistakes. But it’s weird, the weight that the pursuit of pleasure placed on both of our otherwise productive lives. You loved smack. I loved cocaine and crystal meth. So what weight does pleasure have in your life at the end of it?
SK: Oh…everything. Pleasure? Yeah — escape. Oblivion. A warm cocoon. Yeah, I’m still looking for it, but these days I find it by having a swim in the lake or having a warm magnesium bath. And it’s amazing, you know? I was watching this TV series, and there was this old man, and he was in bed, and he was dying. And he had all these morphine pills. And this young man who was visiting was stealing his morphine, but the old guy couldn’t do anything — he could only just watch. And the young guy said, “Once when I was a kid, I fell asleep in the back of a car. And when we got to where we were going, my dad picked me up out of the back of the car, and he took me and put me into my bed. And I’ve spent my whole life looking for that feeling again, and that’s what your pills will do for me.” He sort of explained it in this very rough way, and that’s exactly right — that’s what I was looking for. I was looking for that warm cocoon of cotton wool, wrapped up, sleepy, and not having to think. You’re aware; it’s nothing; you’re not a stone. And that’s what I was looking for. I wanted to turn my mind off and just be warm, peaceful, and dreamy. And you can find that. But you’ll find that you can’t have it 24 hours a day. But you can find it through other things, not like smack. You know you can meditate.
IE: After I got clean on a three-month return-to-the-Midwest rehab in ’89, where they taught me “You use? You die.” I discovered, “Wow! Tuesdays are new-release days for books and video, Fridays are when new films hit the theaters and new music hits the shelves!” And I was always excited about finding new art.
SK: Yeah! And that’s much healthier, isn’t it? And you don’t have to spend all your money. And you’re not being chased by the police.
IE: I can’t believe I was never arrested! You know the little tiny pocket in your jeans, right above your bigger one on the right side? I always had a little brown vial of coke in there, with the hinged spoon. I was, as they say, always holdin’.’
SK: Yeah. I always had my finger in that pocket, too. Touching my little baggie.
IE: But we’re both still here for some reason. Plus, you have a symbiotic support system with your wife, where you take care of her, and she takes care of you. Plus your two daughters, now famous overseas for their band Say Lou Lou.
SK: Yeah. And I’ve got my daughters — I’ve got FIVE daughters!
Appearing July 7 at Park West, Chicago
– Tom Lanham