Tales from the other end of the planet: Steve Kilbey's Eleven Women

Music will do strange things to a fellow. In normal times, it’s what turfed me out of bed at Rude O'Clock to queue for a must-have “exclusive” on Record Store Day that would, quite probably, be freely available later in the year. And at a more sensible price, too. It’s the same mild insanity that once sent me on a 12-hour road trip just to buy a Red Hot Chilli Peppers album (for context, I was on holiday in Mammoth Lakes, California, and the nearest Tower Records was in Fresno. To me, a 750-mile round trip seemed a logical use of free time). 

By similar token, I once went to Montreux for the day just to see Prince. The lengthy return train journey, plus two days off work, was totally worth being crammed into the Jazz Festival's Stravinsky Auditorium, wedged against the stage edge with a heaving crowd of 4,000 behind me, just to see Prince deliver three sweaty, cramp-inducing hours of funk, with hardly any hits. It will always be one of the greatest musical experiences of my life.

My last marathon music trip was again in California: in May 2019 I found myself in Los Angeles for work and discovered that legendary Aussie wooze merchants The Church were playing up the road. The fact that "up the road” was Santa Cruz, a six-hour, 380-mile yomp up Interstate 5, was somewhat immaterial. What was important was that The Church were playing, in its entirety, Starfish, the record that introduced me to them. With the luscious Under The Milky Way and Reptile, it was an album of the moment, produced as so many were in that period with an emphasis on mood and jangly guitars. It was the band's deserved breakthrough, placing them in the pantheon of global Antipodean rock exports in the 1980s, like INXS, Crowded House and Midnight Oil. Until 2015 I’d somewhat lost touch with The Church, until I was alerted to them playing the poky New Morning club in Paris, where I was living at the time, and in promotion of a new album, Further Deeper. It was, however, something of a disappointment, largely down to frontman Steve Kilbey appearing somewhat worse for wear. Thankfully, the Santa Cruz experience four years later was a wholesale improvement, making the drive up from LA, the overnight stay and the glorious trip back down California's more scenic Highway 101 all worth it. You can read my recollections of that gig here.

Kilbey has, however, been a fascinating character to follow, from afar. An enigmatic frontman, his dabblings in music, poetry, painting and even acting, are not the symptoms of a dilettante character but, simply, manifestations of one of those people who just have an abundance of creativity about them. Thus, his latest solo album, Eleven Women, is the product of a prolific output over the last 30-odd years, being his 12th solo release (in 2014 it was reported that British-born Kilbey had 750 original songs registered with Australia’s copyright agency, the APRA). In fact, Eleven Woman was the fourth new record Kilbey had been involved in last year, like so many others in his profession, applying himself creatively during the lockdown at home in Sydney. Kilbey, however, hadn’t even planned to make a solo album, having expected to spend 2020 touring and recording with The Church.

Picture © Naomi Dryden-Smith

The result is an album that is at turns heartwarming and enjoyably baffling. Loosely, it’s a series of 11 sketches about women, similar in premise, I suppose, to Eleanor Rigby, but with a lens distinctly similar to that which Kilbey applies in his painting. You could - at risk of a convoluted metaphor - look at Eleven Women as pencil sketches with dabs of paint on some, full colour washes on others, and more intricate brushwork elsewhere. There is psychedelia, such as opener Poppy Byron, with its mesh of guitars - some jangly, some Balearic - and 60s-vibe congas. Or Where Gloria Meets Rachel, which purrs along with a beautiful 12-string and mandolin shimmer. Kilbey’s post-punk sensibilities show through on Woman Number 9, which has echoes of Bowie’s Berlin period, although the vocal owes more to Syd Barrett’s whimsy as much as anything else. 

Over the 11 tracks there is a driving curiosity to Eleven Women, as it takes subtle left and right turns, the music and Kilbey’s at-times obscure lyrics combining to maintain constant interest from start to finish.  Some, like Shiba Chiba and Queen Of Spades veer into pure pop, while the moody Lillian In Cerulean Blue takes Kilbey’s bassy vocal into Ian McCulloch territory, a clear contemporary of The Church's breakthrough early alt-rock era. Kilbey’s vocals are, it has to be said, never the surest, but then there are plenty out there (or were out there) who were never exactly pure, either, from Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Mark E. Smith and even Morrissey. It depends on what you’re looking for, I suppose. On a track like Josephine (no, not a cover of Chris Rea’s AOR staple), a rustic, folky ballad, Kilbey’s singing weaknesses are highlighted, but on the quirky Birdeen, it reaches a similar tone to Midnight Oil’s Peter Garrett (yeah, yeah - lazy Australian trope, I know), which fits the song with perfection.

It was only after listening to Eleven Women that I discovered it was a classic lockdown production, recorded in just three days. That might suggest an artist in a hurry, but my reading was that Kilbey wanted to create immediacy. Albums can, if the people behind them are so inclined, take an inordinate amount of time to produce: just look at the decades between Peter Gabriel’s output, or the 18 months Bruce Springsteen laboured for to create Born To Run. Eleven Women doesn’t suffer from rapidity at all, even if Kilbey only recorded a couple of takes for each song. Rather than produce something slapdash, he’s created something warm, quirky, at times humorous, always genuine and quite unique.