“Well, one of the guys in the band left, and then, we had incredible bushfires here,” says singer-bassist Steve Kilbey in a recent Zoom call from his home in Australia. The Church performs on Tuesday, March 28, at the Kent Stage. “COVID also stopped us. Australia was the most locked-down place on earth. After a while, I think illegally, I started driving around to studios. There were no cars on the road. It was amazing. You could drive in and out of the city like it was 2 a.m. You were allowed to drive to do business, but I was still getting ready to be pulled over by some copper. I rehearsed it and figured that I would say, ‘My business is making music in a studio.’”
The fact that The Hyponogogue is such a heady concept album might also explain its particularly long gestation period. The songs revolve around a loose sci-fi concept that deals with artificial intelligence and songwriting.
“I didn’t sit down and go, ‘This is the concept,’” says Kilbey. “We were just making a record. It started to occur to me that I was starting to sing about things I didn’t understand. There were lyrics and ideas that – to get a little mystical on you — came from what I like to think of as this overriding artist who lives within you and steers you toward things even if your subconscious mind doesn’t understand what it’s steering you toward. I’ve always been open to that. My muse was pushing me towards these lyrics and these songs and these ideas. As we went back and worked on the album, it occurred to me that it could be a concept album and once that idea got up and running for me, then I started making it work. It’s like getting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and forcing them together.”
The storyline centers on a futuristic rock star who goes through writer’s block and then hears about a person who has invented a machine that can produce the hits of the day.
“This guy who is a kind of alternative rocker who goes and uses the machine and falls in love with the woman who invented it,” says Kilbey. “She falls in love with him, and it has some kind of disastrous consequences. I’ve left that part open. It’s the bare bones of a story. The songs are the details. It’s not chronological like [the Who’s] Tommy. It’s all over the place, and it’s the vaguest notion of a framework to hang all of these songs on. I read a review that said, ‘What a stupid story. I like the songs, but you can ignore the story if you like.’ I thought, ‘Yes. That’s true. You can ignore the story and just focus on the songs.’”
Since the album’s completion, AI has been used to write everything from songs to book reviews and poetry. When Kilbey started writing the songs on The Hypnogogue, he wasn’t aware of how timely the themes would be.
“Someone has asked AI to write a Steve Kilbey-like song, and it did it,” says Kilbey. “Interestingly enough, people who tried that got the same results. It seems like it can only write one Steve Kilbey song. What it came up with was disappointing and took the most superficial aspects of my lyrics and regurgitated them in a limp way.”
The album’s opening tune “Ascendance,” a tune that starts slow with dreamy synths and sporadic drums, recalls early Pink Floyd with its soft vocals droning guitars. Kilbey says the musical influence came from a very specific source.
“I have to say that the inspiration for ‘Ascendance’ is a Hawkwind album called In Search of Space,” says Kilbey. “I had never heard of Hawkwind. They were on the eve of releasing their second album in Australia. In 1972, there was no good music on the radio. But this [Australian DJ] Chris Winter said, ‘Here’s a new English band called Hawkind. Here’s the first track from their new album.'”
Kilbey says he was in his bedroom listening at the time, and the album’s first tune blew him away.
“The first track sounds like a hideous great spaceship putting itself together, and all the pieces start to clank and resonate,” he says. “Eventually, it lifts off. It’s like you’re there, and the machine is trying to get it together and finally the whole thing lifts off. I’ve always been really impressed by that. ‘Ascendance’ is to give the listener that idea. It’s a special chord progression. It’s like that drawing by M.C. Escher that features a man walking up a set of steps and never getting there. I wanted to achieve that with ‘Ascendance.’”
Even though the lineup has changed over the years, the Church has achieved a great degree of consistency. The new album serves as a worthy addition to the band’s catalog that stretches back to the ’80s and ’90s, and Kilbey says the current lineup is plenty capable of playing both the old and new songs. In addition to Kilbey, it features drummer and producer Tim Powles, guitarist Ian Haug (formerly of Australian rock icons Powderfinger, who joined the band in 2013) and Jeffrey Cain (Remy Zero), a touring multi-instrumentalist who is now a full-time member of the band. The band has also recruited Ashley Naylor, a long-time member of Paul Kelly’s touring band and one of Australia’s finest guitarists.
“With this record, all of these very talented musicians had a desire to cooperate,” says Kilbey. “Sometimes, that doesn’t happen. It was a lot of collaboration. The other side of cooperation is being able to say if something doesn’t work. We had an open relationship. The old Church achieved that a long time ago and then moved away from there and into an argumentative period. I’m not necessarily the most creative guy, but I can provide a context within which other musicians can jam. And with this record, everything magically fell into place.”
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This article appears in Mar 8-21, 2023.