Q & A with SK - Acoustic and Intimate Bondi Beach Pavilion (pt. 1) 12/08/00

Interview with STEVE KILBEY by JOHN KILBEY

Applause

(To Audience)

JOHN

Just before we throw the questions open to the public, we had people email questions to the Karmic Hit web site over the last week and …we've sort of got the most frequently asked questions here which might get some of your questions out of the way as well…

(To SK)

It seems like most of the questions that we got were in regards to your lyrics, and people want to know, you know, what inspires your lyrics? Dreams? Books? Past lives? Drugs? What is it? Where do they come from?

STEVE

All of the above I guess.

JOHN

OK. Next question…

Audience respond with laughter and Steve strums a couple of bars.

STEVE

It's just a really hard question to answer really, "Where do lyrics come from?" …and my minds gone completely blank.

JOHN

Well, do you know where they come from?

STEVE

Do I know where they come from? Ah…to a certain point you can kind of follow them, you know, on from where they… where they're originating, and after a while they just kind of pop into your mind. Like there's … like there are some songs I can deliberately see …where I got the words from, you know, sort of what effect I was trying to create. Other ones are just… kind of like ah, "September 13" it just kind of …the whole thing just kind of popped out in one go. So some of them…some of them really do come from your subconscious, they just kind of appear and other ones its like a process - I want to achieve this effect and I can achieve it if I put these certain kinds of words together.

JOHN

Because when you were talking about the hotel room before… (in "Hotel Womb". See CD for exact quote.) and you were talking about the guy that wakes up in bed and looks over…

STEVE

Mmm

JOHN

…like you were talking in the third person, so I'm wondering if … Like the schism betwween John (Lennon) and Paul (McCartney) where John wrote about himself, Paul wrote about people he made up. Where do you fit in with that?

STEVE

Yeah, I… I think everybody writes about themselves

Wailing noise, actually baby crying….

STEVE

(cont)

I thought that was the shark alarm … Yeah, I think everybody writes a bit about themselves and a bit about…other people you know and kind of mix it up. I mean talking about this whole thing about writing about yourself… We (the Church) were in the car the other day on the way to Newcastle and we're all saying that one of us should write an autobiography and then you've got the problem of involving other people in your autobiography you know like…can I really… is it fair to kind of drag other people in? So you have to kind of do a bit of…you know, "the names have been changed to protect the innocent" a bit. When you write songs if you're going to write about yourself and about things that kind of matter to people, people who don't want to be…you know, in the wrong place at the wrong time, whatever that means I've got no idea.

JOHN

I'm just going to throw a few words at you and … Just say how much of an influence these things have had on your songwriting…Ah, spirituality?

STEVE

"Spirituality." (said with rising inflection) That words just, that's become a meaningless word, I mean, people come up to me and say "Ah you're really into spirituality" and what does that mean?… What does, I mean…

JOHN

(Interrupting) "Esoteric" then…

STEVE

No, no, no… that particular word… This is a word I get a lot…"spirituality"… I think that the word's kind of … disappeared into this new age fog of meaninglessness. You know, you get people who coming up saying, "I'm really spiritual. I know you're really spiritual, cause your lyrics are really spiritual," but…

JOHN

Why do you think they think your lyrics are spiritual?

Audience respond with laughter.

STEVE

(mockingly) I don't know.

JOHN

Okay. What about emotions?

STEVE

You can't be a songwriter without having emotions. I mean there's certain things you've got to have, you know; emotions, other people…Emotions are a prerequisite. It's like people saying can you make soup without water, you know, you need emotions really…

JOHN

Do you listen to the top forty?

Audience respond with laughter.

What about relationships?

STEVE

Oh, once again I mean…you know. Everything is about a relationship to something else isn't it? These are really hard questions to answer John… JOHN

Sorry

STEVE

You should have let me look at them before, I could of thought of something glib.

JOHN

OK, what about this one? Do you write songs primarily for yourself or for the listener? Like, what's your motivation for writing songs?

STEVE

Well I want to enjoy it and I want other people to enjoy it. I guess it's pretty much a fifty-fifty split. And I've also realised if I don't like it then other people probably won't like it and if I do like it a lot then somebody somewhere is going to really like it. 'Cause …I've written a few songs that I don't really like and they kind of got used and not really to my surprise I found that other people didn't really like them very much either. So… I think you've got to please yourself and if you can please yourself then other people will like it.

JOHN

OK I'll throw you in the deep end a little bit here, I was wondering if you could ah…I'm going to ask you about how your songwriting's changed over the years, and is there any chance you could strum one of your earlier songs…pre Church?

STEVE

Yeah, you asked me about this before. This is the very first song I ever wrote …No, there are two first songs, but this is the first-first song that I wrote when I was about ten…you have to remember I wrote this in my head on the way home from school one day it sort of went…. (sings melody) It's a bit like "Unguarded Moment" actually… Hang on… (works out riff on guitar then sings)

And that was the first song I ever wrote….that was when I was about ten or eleven.

Audience chatter and laughter.

JOHN

Is it a true story?

STEVE

It's true, yeah.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I was just going to say it sounded a bit Violent Femmish.

Audience laughter.

JOHN

What about the second-first song you ever wrote?

STEVE

The second-first song was when I actually learnt two chords on the guitar and it went like this… I remember playing it to a guy and saying "What do you think?" and he said "It won't go anywhere cause it's just C and F and you need to have kind of weird chords in your songs if you…you've got to have D minor diminished thirteenth plus nine if you're going to write a success." It went like this, it went, I haven't played this for thirty years. If you're still too big to accept my friendship, I guess there's nothing I can do or say, But don't rely in your friends, They won't pick you up when you fall, They can't hear you when you call They don't care at all… It sounds a bit like…it sounds like it's sort of … I don't know, an old Lou Reedy song.

JOHN

I liked it actually.

STEVE

You liked that? It's yours.

JOHN

What's the chorus?

Audience laughter.

Or that was the chorus….

STEVE

That was the chorus…yeah, and then…and then there was a song… I finally wrote a song I liked it was called "Skyscraper Carnivore". (To John) Do you remember that one? It went…

Well I'm a skyscraper carnivore, Living on the thirteenth floor, The wife's got scabies, The dog's got rabies, The kids are having fun just having babies, And the guy next door says that you're a cool cat, But a long haired hippie could do better than that, I pay my rent, I'm smoking "Kents", I ain't doing bad for a guy that's bent…

Applause/ laughter

JOHN

Well, I can hear some of your earlier influences in that song.

STEVE

(mockingly) Spirituality?

JOHN

But ah, like what were just some of the influences on that song.

STEVE

That song?

JOHN

Yeah.

STEVE

Um…

JOHN

I mean, what were you playing around that time?

STEVE

What was I playing?

JOHN

How old were you for a start?

STEVE

I guess I was about eighteen, nineteen.

JOHN

So were you listening to …?

STEVE

I was listening to…I just got… Oh, there's people leaving already…(To couple leaving) See you later, yeah…I know there's a good show on, I'm going to miss it myself… …sorry where were we…what was I listening to? I just got "Rock 'n' Roll Animal" by Lou Reed and…I thought that was pretty cool.

JOHN

OK, another question. We've got copies of your book, your latest poetry book (Nineveh/The Ephemeron) over there, if anyone hasn't got it pick one up. So you're writing poetry, you're writing songs… Is it a different process or…

STEVE

Totally. Totally different…

JOHN

Do you know what your doing before hand?

STEVE

Yeah, yeah… I mean, I've said this a million times but writing a lyric is a real…not really as easy as it looks, 'cause you know, you've got to have the meter and its got to rhyme, and its got to kind of mean something but not too much… Where as poetry can just be anything. Poetry can be a haiku, or surrealism or symbolism or imagism. You can just do anything you like when you're writing a poem. A lyric is a much harder thing to write. It's much more precise. I think its a much more…it's a harder skill to acquire, writing lyrics. Really good lyricists - there's not that many.

JOHN

Who do you think?

STEVE

Who do I think's a good lyricist? Oh God, I don't like advertising other people at my gigs!

Audience laughter

JOHN

There must be someone.

STEVE

I can never think of them you know. Normally I lie in bed at night and think Geez isn't Chaz Bloggs a great lyricist, I should tell people about that and then when someone asks me I never think of them. You know, all the Dylans and The Beatles. All that crowd.

JOHN

Just going back to… is it called "Carnivore Skyscraper"?

STEVE

"Skyscraper Carnivore."

JOHN

OK, where do you see that your craft has gone from then? If songwriting's a craft, what skills… or do you think you have changed your actual craft of songwriting since then. Where has it changed, where has it improved…?

STEVE

Well, actually when I was playing it I was thinking it's really not that much different from if I said, "Here's a new song I've written." I mean the bit about the rabies people might think, "That's a bit odd." Maybe I'm just like this songwriting machine that just pops out songs and I'm just as likely to pop it out now as twenty years ago or twenty years in the future. It's funny cause we're making a new album and we wrote this song and Marty said, "Isn't this a great fucking song, it's such a great fucking song" and I said "But why didn't we write it before", and he said "What?", and I said "Well why didn't we write it last time?", and he was looking at me like I was sort of mad, but I think about that. Why does it take you so long to write a particular song? So I've come to the conclusion that in my own case I'm just as likely…I don't think I'm getting any better or any worse, I just think I'm waiting for these songs to come. For some reason particular songs seem to take a long time to come. Other ones…the one that comes next week will come next week and it couldn't have come five years ago, 'cause that's just the nature of it.

JOHN

So do you make up many of your lyrics on the spur of the moment.

STEVE

Yeah spur of the moment's how I write them all. That's a funny thing too because I remember we were making this album in America and we had all these backing tracks, and these American guys were going, "Well, where are the fucking lyrics man?" and I was saying "I don't know. I'm just going to write them." "What do you mean, you haven't fucking written them yet." And it's like, does it matter if I write them now or… it's going to take me five minutes to write them and it's just as likely I'll write them tomorrow as a week ago and they're like, "What are you just going to make 'em up?" and it's like "Well what do you think..?

Audience laughter

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Do you find your favourite songs to be the ones that come in one sitting as opposed to ones that you really agonize over?

STEVE

Yeah, the quicker they come the better they are I reckon…yeah definitely. The agonizing over ones usually aren't very good. The ones that just - boom! They're the best ones.

JOHN

I've got two more questions before I throw it to you guys. Is there anyone that you'd like to collaborate writing with, and why?

STEVE

Ah… I mean you always say, you know, yeah Bob Dylan…no I'm pretty happy collaborating with the people I collaborate with at the moment.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I'm a big fan of Stephen Cummings, I was just wondering how you got to work together?

STEVE

Stephen Cummings… he just rang me up and said do you want to produce my album really. It was just as simple as that. He kind of liked…I think he liked what we were doing with Jack Frost, the kind of ambient things with the songs and that's what he wanted.

JOHN

Last question - If you did that first song about Sue when you were ten, you've been writing for quite a fair whack, why are you still making music?

STEVE

Well, that's kind of what I do really and that's all I can say. It's like going up to a carpenter and saying why do you do that. That's what you do in life isn't it?

(End of Part One)