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Looking back on 2015 it was quite a varied year in terms of reading, although I would liked to have read much more, if only time would allow it. However there were plenty of highlights during the year. Late in 2014 I met one of my musical heroes in the form of Steve Kilbey from the Australian band The Church. In January I read his excellent autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar (2014) and then met him again with the rest of the band in July when they toured the west coast (they were brilliant by the way...). When literature and music meet I’m a very happy man indeed.

My book club reads this year yielded both pain and pleasure, with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992) taking the crown for the best book I’ve read this year. The Secret History was compelling, absorbing, manipulative and most of all just brilliantly written. Other book club related highlights include Ian McEwan’s succinct and stylish The Children Act (2014), Richard Flannagan’s Man Booker Prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North (2013) and Joan London’s The Golden Age (2014), which managed to both charm and move me in equal measure. Book club pain came in the form of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962), which was not mediocre by any means, just long winded and intensely and neurotically self-conscious. It was also a fascinating and challenging read, so in the end I’m grateful to have read it and I will certainly remember it for a long time to come.

If The Secret History was the best book of the year (in fact one of the best I’ve ever read...), then the biggest disappointment was Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia (1977). Perhaps Chatwin had great adventures in Patagonia, but he managed to make it totally boring on paper. Luckily there were plenty of other highlights from my own (non book club) reading to make up for the tedium of Chatwin. Miranda July weirded me out in a good way with her debut novel, The First Bad Man (2015) and Michel Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976) was simply a great piece of experimental cult fiction. Other highlights were Axiomatic (1995) by Greg Egan and Seven Eves (2015) by Neal Stephenson, both of which left me wanting to read much more of their work.

As for next year I aim to finish the thousand plus pages of Peter Watson’s Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud (2006). I’m reading it a bit at a time, mostly late at night, so hopefully I’ll get through it! What I really have my eye on though is my first love - science fiction. After reading Egan, Stephenson and then recently Huxley, it’s time to catch up with contemporary science fiction and some of the classics that I’ve never got around to reading. Maybe I’ll even read Philip K. Dick’s crackpot The Exegesis of Philip K Dick (2011) this year - now there’s some holiday reading....

Something Quite Peculiar - Steve Kilbey (2014)

Steve Kilbey hams it up at his book launch in Fremantle with yours truly, finger-food not pictured.

I’ve read a few music autobiographies over the years; Keith Richards’ Life (2010), and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles (2004) come to mind, but the gold standard in this genre has to be Julian Cope’s Head On (1994), in which Cope’s rather eccentric and intense personality created a wildly hilarious ride into the outer realms of rock stardom. Appropriately The Church’s Steve Kilbey is name-checked in Cope’s book, appearing back stage during The Teardrop Explodes Australian tour to offer Cope a solitary magic mushroom, causing the initially skeptical Cope to “levitate above the audience”. This anecdotal link between Cope and Kilbey is significant because both share a predilection toward exploring the frontiers of psychedelic music, and now Kilbey has joined Cope in the ranks of rock stars who have given voice to their own stories.

Just what is the allure of reading about rock musicians lives? Is it because they appear so god-like in the fan’s mind? They can be so readily placed onto pedestals by the impact of their music, powerful multimedia and apocryphal myths that circulate endlessly. Rock star autobiographies offer a glimpse at the human aspect behind the god-like archetype; it’s like being able to find out what was going through Apollo’s (the god of music and the arts, appropriately) mind during his pursuit of Daphne. An interesting idea perhaps, but also a nice segue to Something Quite Peculiar, in which we learn that at a young age Kilbey became obsessed with Greek mythology. Kilbey fortunately begins Something Quite Peculiar with his childhood, even though Greg Dulli bluntly advised Kilbey not to “...write about your fucking childhood, no one want to read that!” Just as well such sage advice was ignored because it is both refreshing and relatable to read about an Australian childhood. It’s also fascinating to learn what influences were brought to bear on the young Kilbey. There’s his music loving father, but also the rough and tumble world of Australian rules football umpiring (who’d have guessed!), school bullies, tragic teenage love and, of course, music.

All through Something Quite Peculiar music is the strand that holds everything together. The young Kilbey loved The Beatles and The Rolling Stones of course, but also intriguingly Chicago, Leon Russell and Jo Cocker. Then later came 70‘s greats such as T.Rex, Bowie and Brian Eno. Essentially a book about Kilbey is also a book about The Church. As a teenager in the 1980’s The Church played exactly the kind of music I wanted to hear. The band seemed so fully formed and perfect that it never even occurred to me to wonder about how it all happened. Fittingly the sequence of events that led to The Church’s formation reads like serendipity in action. When Kilbey’s Canberra band, Baby Grande, has to share a double-booked rehearsal space Kilbey meets brilliant guitarist Peter Koppes. When playing as a three piece Marty Wilson Piper comes back stage after a gig and Kilbey asks him to join the band before even establishing if he plays an instrument! Kilbey’s intuition was correct and Wilson-Piper became the perfect second guitarist for The Church. After ridding themselves of bullying drummer Nick Ward they let a smart-ass teenager with no drum kit calling himself President Camembert try out for the band. Any band that wants to come close to greatness needs an amazing drummer and the one and only Richard Ploog definitely had that special spark (plus the best surname for a drummer ever.)

For Church/Kilbey fans Something Quite Peculiar makes for addictive reading. There’s a plethora of great anecdotes and observations, tales of band ructions and the frustration of dealing with the unforgiving music industry (Capitol Records were “...fuck-knuckles to a man” apparently). Kilbey writes like a songwriter, with an emphasis on pacing and structure. There’s even the literary equivalent of a middle eight, with a prose poem detailing his experiences touring with The Church in Europe right in the middle of the book. The second half speeds up (life speeds up, don’t you know...) to match the weird intense energy of being in a band that’s making it, being on the road endlessly and dealing with intensely obsessed fans. The chapter about the making of Starfish in L.A. is a cracker, with Kilbey’s wit and humour coming to the fore. Kilbey perfectly conveys how you can be fulfilling your dream whilst at the same time having to deal with the terrible bullshit that comes with it.

The Church’s initial history is a slow burn to significant international success, then followed by the inevitable comedown. Post Starfish makes for sobering reading, with members leaving (Koppes came back though) and Kilbey succumbing to heroin addiction; but typically there was also some great music made during this period as well. Something Quite Peculiar ends with Kilbey finally kicking the habit a decade later and then there is a ten year jump to The Church playing the Sydney Opera House in 2011. Some have been disappointed with the jump in time, but as all good artists know what you leave out is just as important as what you leave in (there are, however, some unanswered questions*) and does the reader really need to know everything anyway? In any case all you need to know is that Kilbey and The Church kept on going all through those years, making great music, playing fantastic live shows and proving to have more endurance than pretty much every Australian band that emerged in the 1980’s.

Something Quite Peculiar is essential reading both for Church fans who can’t get songs like Violet Town out of their heads (that’s me) and also for the more casual fan who might only be familiar with the Starfish era. As far as rock star autobiographies go it’s engaging, well written and funny as hell. If this book came out in the 1980’s then people would be calling Kilbey a ‘survivor’, something I’m sure he’d dislike. What you can say is that Kilbey, and The Church, are an example of great artistic tenacity to keep doing what you love irrespective of trends and opinion, and that is something to be admired.

*
Do the surviving members of INXS still want to beat up Kilbey?
Did Ploog get into catering post Church and is he still a situationist?
Does Tom Verlaine still get around in just socks?
What happened to the chewing gum?

No Certainty Attached: Steve Kilbey and the Church – Robert Dean Lurie (2009)

No Certainty Attached is written by long time fan musician and writer Robert Dean Lurie, who in 1990 at the tender age of 16 saw The Church live on a tour of the U.S. Thirteen years later Lurie contacted Kilbey to ask if he’d be involved with this biography and to Lurie’s surprise he said yes. Fittingly the biography begins with some words from Steve Kilbey himself:

Lurie attempts to come to some kinda understanding of my paradox. That is, I can be so nice, or I can be not so nice and hardly anything in the middle. And it’s funny that Lurie puts the boot in at the end and he reckons that the fambly manne (sic) thing is an act, and my everyman pose is faux, and really I’m the same old prick, and Rob, you’ve hit the nail on the head, actually…

As a long time fan of both The Church and Kilbey’s solo music, the question of whether Steve Kilbey is the same old prick is something I do not particularly care about (as interesting as that is). For me the music is the main consideration and I consider The Church to be one of greatest Australian bands of any era. What the above quote reveals is that No Certainty Attached is not one of those sycophantic and superficial biographies. The fact that Kilbey’s ego is not pandered to and that Lurie himself is part of the story makes No Certainty Attached one of the most enjoyable music biographies I’ve read for a long time.

It’s easy to warm to Lurie, his writing style is unpretentiously affable and over the course of the book his relationship with Kilbey and The Church progresses to the level of friendship. Lurie’s life is very much tied up with Kilbey in terms of being a source of inspiration and ongoing fascination. Lurie recounts his first meeting with Kilbey in 1998 as a support for a solo gig, a meeting that provided him both disillusionment and a certain level of fulfillment. The book contains several interludes in which Lurie ponders the ambiguous boundaries between fandom and his burgeoning relationship with Kilbey. Bravely Lurie recounts how during one of their interviews for the book Kilbey openly tests him for evidence of sycophancy; a test that Lurie fails, much to Kilbey’s displeasure. But Lurie later admits that it taught him a valuable lesson.

Although Lurie’s presence in the book is welcome, it’s Kilbey’s story and the history of the band that makes the book an essential read for Kilbey/Church fans. There’s the usual childhood background, with Kilbey emigrating with his parents from the UK in 1957, eventually settling in Canberra. Steve Kilbey the child was a Doctor Who fan and as Lurie notes was, for better or worse, a smaller version of his adult self. Kilbey became a reluctant teenager, recalling that he was disappointed when he realized that his childhood had ended. Lurie notes that as a teenager Kilbey dated a girl that he was attracted to because she looked like Roger Waters circa the 1971 Meddle album. Hilariously he couldn’t understand why this didn’t go down well. Recollections like these give the biography a welcome level of charm and warmth.

Steve Kilbey's girlfriend in high school

The tale of how The Church came together as a band is a fascinating one. Lurie does a fine job recounting the history of The Church, but one of the best things about the book was that I found out about Kilbey’s many obscure side projects that ran parallel with both the Church and his solo career. It’s possible I could be spending a lot of money online searching out these records. Kilbey’s career is like a labyrinth with many rooms containing obscure treasures.

No Certainty Attached also contains a few revelations; including that incredulously the first lineup of the band included a guy who bullied Kilbey in high school – Nick Ward. Lurie’s interviews with Ward reveal that twenty or so years later he probably would still be bullying Kilbey had he stayed in the band. What is it about drummers? I was also amazed to learn that Kilbey endured a ten-year heroin addiction, which began post Gold Afternoon Fix (1990) - naughty Steve, but I’m glad he survived to tell the tale.

Lurie’s serpentine tale of strife, inspiration, failure and musical brilliance ends in 2006, where again he meets with Kilbey on tour. The meeting is friendly and you can detect that fambly man vibe between them. At the end of the book Kilbey has the final word in a hilarious stream of consciousness via his blog in which he refers to Lurie as having been “…some seriously uptight fanboy” and how he divested himself of that and wrote “a good book”. Kilbey is correct and Lurie should update it soon as The Church released one of their best albums in 2009 (Untitled #23) and are still touring to this day. I advise Church fans to read this book, but no doubt many have already. Also check out Kilbey's interesting blog...