As 2012 has come to an end, we are taking a look back at some of our favorite posts of the year by our guest editors.
Steve Kilbey is best known as the frontman of Australian legends the Church, whose “Under The Milky Way” was one of the defining alt-rock singles of the late ’80s. He has also released records with the likes of Grant McLennan, Martin Kennedy and Donnette Thayer, as well as a number of solo albums. Aside from being a member of the Australian Songwriters Hall Of Fame, Kilbey pens poetry and is an accomplished painter. His latest CD is Life Somewhere Else (Communicating Vessels) by Isidore, a collaboration with Jeffrey Cain (Remy Zero). Kilbey will also be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week.
Kilbey: Capable of making statements that no other thing can, rock ‘n’ roll was first played by some gorgeous Indian god who plugged his tamboura into the universal chi about 20,000 lifetimes ago and blasted forth his creation, peopled with searing, aching, soaring birds who were the quavers, the notches and the bass line of rumbling volcanoes.
The trampling was heard: the semi-automatic staccato windscreen-wipers, the jack-hammered kings stuck in a jam, whispering Sutras and lyrics and singing along to the mercurial radio, which vomits forth its diet of saint, sinner, loser and winner in 4/4 time. So, we hit the tremolo and accelerate in the ether, where the elves chase atmosphereans, and the howling feedback storms envelope the uptight 1950s. Oh boy, watch those ho-daddies go, go, go!
Yeah, Jesus was playing his Strat in the Amazon, walking with his black jaguar, flipping through a Mayan calendar and rapping about analog versus- digital.
And all that white-powder sand was snorted by the sea, which is getting so high as it shoots up a river mouth, screaming the words from a Bob Dylan bootleg, but tickets sales have been slow until the jungle gets out of rehab, until Earth gets the mastering finished, until Sky puts the words on the backing track recorded in Hieroglyphs and is set in Rosetta Stone.
Man, the Trojans needed the Crazy Horse like the flowers need the reverb, like the entire Old Testament as played by Bill Haley. And the Comets or the Gita interpreted by Hawkwind or Jimmy Page with his Crowley guitar, his private jet and his set of pan pipes.
In a club filled with violet smoke, I met a bloke who played the blues on his electric angel, but my heart was broken by the throb of the bastard band I never planned to understand, but I found myself singing their deep, long songs to right wrongs and register surprise.
Memory lines machine ahead, I fall on my Strat. I pick up my jazz. I program my box. I sort out my leads. I transmute base metal into the purest gossamer sounds. My method is to record butterfly sighs that echo through beach evenings where we travel in music to our old haunts, still rocking in the inviolate past, where the boys are all stoned and drunk, and the girls are wet before the ocean even starts.
The host comes on, drowned out in applause: One, two, three …
Video after the jump.
