Church frontman Steve Kilbey’s biggest regret? ‘Being a prick’

Nick Seymour from Crowded House has a theory about Steve Kilbey. “He thinks I ripped off my persona from Peter Cook in Bedazzled,” the Church frontman says. “Have you seen it? Peter Cook plays the Devil and he gives Dudley Moore seven wishes.”

One of them, in Stanley Donen’s 1967 comedy, is to be a pop star. The Devil grants it but then, as with every wish, he upends it to expose the folly of human desire. Watch it on YouTube, then fast-forward 14 years to the Church’s Countdown debut with The Unguarded Moment.

It’s spooky. “Totally,” says Kilbey. “Little Dudley comes on singing ‘Yeah, baby, I love you’, and all the girls are screaming. Then Peter Cook comes on very sombre and disdainful. Disdain for the audience, disdain for the backing singers; he’s up there droning, ‘I don’t want your love, you fill me with inertia…’

Kilbey with the current line-up of The Church: Jeffrey Cain, Ashley Naylor, Ian Haug and Tim Powles.

“I remember going to the pictures with my mum and dad to see that movie and I took in that lesson, big time.”

The moody young devil got our love anyway, even if his pop trajectory took some diabolical turns after that overnight rush of fame. But 45 years on, Kilbey’s charmed story of survival is peaking again, as the Church’s escalating Singles Tour sells out across the country. America follows next year.

Under the already-quite-hot circumstances, he was hence slightly disdainful about opening for Crowded House on the latest Red Hot Summer tour, also under way now. But his band, Kilbey says with a laugh, argued for the exposure.

“When you’re my age, it’s funny when people sell you on ‘the future’. I’ve been listening to this since I was 19! On our 2024 tour one of our American managers said, ‘Just give me five years, Steve.’ ‘Oh, you mean when I’m 100, I’ll have quite a career?’”

Long gone are the rest of the Church circa 1981. New guys Ashley Naylor (Even) and Ian Haug (Powderfinger) can’t believe their luck, playing the hits of their youth all over the world — and making the new albums they can’t stop conjuring, even as Kilbey’s prolific solo and collaborative projects, paintings and now graphic novels multiply.

Their first Red Hot show in Mackay two weeks ago was fabulous, the confessed curmudgeon admits. A new song, Sacred Echoes Part 2, went down well. And he got to have a good laugh with Nick Seymour about the Bedazzled thing.

Kilbey on stage in California in 2018.Credit: Getty

Humour has long been a counterpoint to Kilbey’s sombre legend. His 2014 autobiography, Something Quite Peculiar, recalled his life in tragicomic phases: “insular, confused and sulky”, “arrogant and blase”, “ugly junkie” and “eccentric uncle”.

These days he adds proud grandfather, as well as father to five daughters. As he holds court in his art-adorned flat in Sydney’s east, a short walk from his daily ocean swim, he mentions that according to one ecstatic recent UK review, he’s also the Psych Godfather.

“I’ll take it all,” he says. “You can’t do your first show and be a cult elder, but nor can you, at 71, be a pop star. You have to look at how different people have negotiated that change. And you go with the flow.”

It’s a lesson he learned late. The Church’s road from pop hits to cult status encountered plenty of resistance, mostly internal. Drummer Tim Powles has been a loyal creative partner for 30 years. Others left in high dudgeon.

“I drove them to it,” Kilbey says. “I often wake up suddenly, it’s 3am and the world’s quiet, and I’m remembering some stupid, nasty, horrible, unnecessary thing I said to somebody, and I wish I hadn’t. Why did I have to be so withering and acerbic?

“It wasn’t just morally [wrong], it really f---ed up my career. I’d go into a radio station in America and be really rude to the guy doing the show, walk out of there and the manager rings up and says, ‘You’ve just been cancelled on 270 stations across America’.

“So if you’re reading this article, please take this as a tacit apology. If I was rude to you, if I was arrogant or snooty, it was done out of feeling insecure about myself, and I’m sorry.”

He’s thought through his darker behaviours by necessity. “I went to a lot of AA [Alcoholics Anonymous] and NA [Narcotics Anonymous] meetings in my ugly junkie stage and one thing that struck me was that almost everybody had a twin thing going on, where they thought they were the greatest person that ever lived, and the worst person.

“I had that in spades. One side of me thought, ‘Wow, I’m the best songwriter in Australia’. But on another level I didn’t believe it at all. I was just trying it out to see how that sounded.”

He’s come to see these polarities like battery terminals driving the current of his creativity. “I’m never happy where I am. I’m driven on. I’ve got to make another album. I’ve got to keep showing them how brilliant I am. And then the other voice is going, ‘Can you make another album?’

“This is my make-up,” he shrugs. “But you meet very few well-balanced, successful songwriters and musicians.”

Kilbey’s deal with the Devil began in the Canberra summer of ’65, when his dad took him to buy his first single, The Rolling Stones’ Under the Boardwalk. Today he speaks with huge affection for the father he lost, suddenly, when his pop career was just beginning.

“He always worked hard, and he was cheerful, and he loved music, and he made sure I knew music was the most important thing in life. My dad grows for me, especially now that I have five of my own daughters. I want them to think of me the way I think about my dad.”

At 71, goodwill is literally keeping him alive, Kilbey says. “My cardiologist is like, ‘I’m not going to let Steve Kilbey die on my watch!’ And I’ve got a wonderful new dentist who’s doing my teeth for me because he’s a fan.”

Then there’s Texan multi-millionaire Kip McClanahan, another Church fan who grew up to become their “patron”. Despite a snooty start — he was thanked in highly curmudgeonly terms for buying a book of Kilbey’s poetry — the Psych Godfather credits his American friend for “spiritual guidance” as well as decades of financial support.

“I don’t fear [being redundant] any more. I don’t furiously read all the papers or watch what’s going on and think, ‘Oh my God, what’s going to replace me this week?’ Because you can’t replace the Church,” Kilbey says.

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“If I think about my favourite singles … I remember kissing this girl; or I remember putting on pimple cream in my parents’ bathroom … And the first note of that song brings it all back. Nothing can replace that or compete with that, ever.”

It’s a feeling, evidently, that thousands of Church fans can’t resist.

“Well, for f---’s sake, come backstage and say hello then, so I can be that arrogant sod I’ve been saying I’m not for the past hour.”

The Church play The Forum on November 8, as part of The Singles Tour: A Career Retrospective, and the 2025 Red Hot Summer Tour with Crowded House.