Steve Kilbey: During the early days of Covid 19, I met a guy called Julian who asked me to be in a short silent film he was making called ‘Space Junk’. ‘Space Junk’ was about a stranger (moi) who comes to a remote-ish Australian town during the pandemic and has a number of adventures including aliens and angry villagers and other various kinds of weirdness.
The film got kinda finished and had a couple of screenings in a room but then seemed to be abandoned and never properly completed. Julian then repurposed it for a musical about a washed-up and ageing rockstar called Lord Jim (moi again) who takes a strange crew off to Tibooburra searching for his comeback.
Julian asked me to write all of the songs for the musical, which I did and enjoyed doing too. I recorded them all with a wonderful band of players who also appear on my albums 11 Women and The Hall of Counterfeits, whom I dubbed the Winged Heels.
Well then after sitting in the can for ages I have decided to release this weird collection of tunes. They are in no particular order so you’ll just have to figure it all out for yourself. Or just make up your own plot and story and sit back and enjoy. I have also thrown into the mix some contemporaneous songs I was working on with the Heels at the time but I now look upon them as perhaps part of the musical and let you try to make some sense of all this.
Steve Kilbey, band singer, songwriter, bassist, painter, writer, poet, actor, sage, dispenser of
arcane wisdom is one of Australia’s most loved artists.
The popular song “Under the Milky Way” won the “Best Single of the Year” award at the
Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) awards event in 1989. For his work with
The Church, Kilbey then accepted, together with his bandmates, an induction into the ARIA
Hall of Fame.
Steve got his first bass guitar at age 16, joined a band at 18 and went on to form a number of different groups before forming The Church in 1980. He has gone on to release many solo albums and collaborations with recording artists from around the globe.
“Kilbey’s solo recordings are challenging and evocative. . . joyous and dreamy to saturnine
and sardonic” – Ian McFarlane.
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