Bespoke Wheels & Winged Heels, a 20-track anthology of Steve Kilbey (The Church)
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The Church founder Steve Kilbey announces solo anthology…
With Australian rock legends The Church enjoying their highest profile in decades, thanks to the widely acclaimed 2023 album The Hypnogogue and this year’s companion piece Eros Zeta And The Perfumed Guitars, Easy Action Records celebrates the 70th birthday of band founder, bassist, vocalist and principal songwriter Steve Kilbey with a major new anthology – the first such collection of Kilbey’s solo and collaborative work.
Born in Welwyn Garden City, England and moving to Australia with his parents at the age of five, Steve founded The Church in 1980, signing to EMI. The band quickly achieved homeland success with hit singles ‘The Unguarded Moment’ and ‘Almost With You’ and a string of Top 20 albums. In 1988 they found international fame with the album Starfish and the single ‘Under The Milky Way’, a #24 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. They’ve since been cited as an influence on numerous bands from The Smiths to The Killers, Tame Impala and King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard.
An extraordinarily prolific songwriter – by his own reckoning he’s made over a hundred albums – Steve released his first solo album Unearthed in 1986, recorded in his own home studio, followed in ’87 by Earthed, an instrumental ‘soundtrack’ to his first book of the same name.
Bespoke Wheels And Winged Heels brings together twenty songs, drawing from those earliest solo releases, right up until the present day, as well as including songs from his many collaborative projects, such as Jack Frost, with the late great Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens; Kilbey Kennedy with multi-instrumentalist Martin Kennedy and Speed Of The Stars with Frank Kearns of Irish alt-rockers Cactus World News. It also includes a previously unreleased song, ‘Desert Ship’, written for the play The Road to Tibooburra.
“Bespoke Wheels… is a compilation of my solo stuff and collabs taken from over an almost 40-year period,” explains Steve. “This should give the casual listener some idea of my musical adventures over that period of time. Each song on here is a taster of all the various threads I’ve been pursuing outside of my main gig which is of course The Church.”
