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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702253065 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 08/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
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Talking Smack
Honest Conversations About Drugs
By Andrew McMillen
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2014 Andrew McMillenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5323-2
CHAPTER 1
Steve Kilbey
At the age of thirty-seven, Steve Kilbey found himself at a crossroads. He'd become a pop star fronting The Church, a band whose song 'Under the Milky Way', the lead single from their fifth album, Starfish, became a worldwide hit in 1988. He'd made quite a lot of money: he had a house and a recording studio in Sydney, a couple of cars, a load of instruments and some cash to spare. He wasn't filthy rich, but he was certainly very comfortable.
By this point, Kilbey considered himself a worldly drug user: he had started smoking pot in his late teens, tried psychedelics soon after and bought his first gram of cocaine after making his first record, Of Skins and Heart, in 1980. Eleven years later, he was recording for a new project named Jack Frost with his friend Grant McLennan, a fellow Australian pop star best known for his work with Brisbane act The Go-Betweens. One night, while out at a bar and feeling an empty sense of unhappiness at the life he'd earned, despite his success, Kilbey was taken aback by McLennan's proposal: 'Let's get some heroin.'
'It came right out of the blue,' Kilbey recalls in February 2013. 'It was the last thing on my mind. I went, "Oh, here's $100, get me some too." No one had ever offered it to me up until then. All the other drugs you might get offered, but no one ever says, "Hey, want some heroin?" It's not like that. If you've got a stash, you don't offer it. You don't really go around turning other people on. It's not the sort of thing you advertise.'
When McLennan made his proposal, Kilbey thought to himself, Yeah! That'll shift things around a bit. 'As a teenager, I'd been hearing how bad marijuana was; people were being arrested and chucked in jail [for using it]. And then, when I started smoking it,' he says, 'I thought it was the most benign, pleasant thing that doesn't seem to have any real drawbacks. I wrongly assumed heroin might be the same. I thought it might be the victim of really bad press, and that all the perils had been exaggerated.' He pauses for a moment, then laughs. 'And I believed that for a little while, naively.' He had no idea that his first taste of that substance would come to define the next eleven years of his life.
'I loved it. The moment the fucking stuff hit my nostrils, I was like, "Wow, this is what I'm looking for,"' he says. 'All my life, I'd had my conscience going, "You're a cunt, you're a horrible guy, you don't deserve what you've got. You did this and that, and your mum and dad didn't love you." All this stuff. And then, the moment that first line of heroin hit my nose, it all stopped. I was sitting there going, "Oh, I'm all right. I feel kind of cool. I feel like people could like me." It stopped that whole dialogue instantly, and I felt warm and cosy and happy.'
He acknowledges that not all heroin dabblers experience this instant affinity for the drug; some try it and think it's horrible. 'But for me,' he says, 'it was like' — he snaps his fingers — 'something I'd been waiting for my whole life.'
Kilbey wasn't the kind of guy to wait around for his friend to call his dealer; nor was McLennan reckless enough to give him direct access to the source. Perhaps the more experienced user had wisely recognised the sudden enthusiasm that Kilbey had developed for something in which he'd previously shown no interest. Kilbey says of McLennan, 'Sometimes he became addicted. He got little habits, and then he'd refrain, but he wasn't an addict.' He found McLennan's caution frustrating, because he refused to introduce his dealers. But the wealthy pop star saw no reason to hide his fondness for this drug from anyone. Around this time, some 'bad characters' started hanging around a house in Surry Hills that Kilbey had rented, which doubled as a recording studio. 'Some of them were heroin addicts,' he says. 'They were buying heroin for me. Eventually, I met some dealers. I was off and running.'
One of those characters was a doctor who had been deregistered due to her addiction. One day, Kilbey was snorting a line. In response, the doctor clicked her tongue and shook her head. He looked up, surprised. 'What's wrong?' he asked. 'What a waste,' she replied. Kilbey didn't understand; he thought he was using the drug efficiently. She beckoned him over, found a vein on the back of his hand and injected him. It was then that Steve Kilbey decided he wasn't going to waste any more heroin.
'For a while, it seemed to me like, "Wow, how good is this? I've got a doctor very carefully doing all the right things, talking to me about my veins and my arteries, finding different veins and showing me how to do it. This is really legit,"' he says. 'So I learnt how to shoot up. Bang. I was off, and on the downward spiral.'
It wasn't just the drug and the process of injecting it that gripped him. 'I was fascinated with all of it. I'd go round some idiot's house, and someone would be saying' — here he adopts a nasal, strained voice, imitating a junkie — '"Ahh, Jim is fuckin' getting sixty mils of methadone now."' His face perks up brightly, mimicking intense interest. '"Really?" The junkie would reply, "Yeah, they said he can have more takeaways ..." I was interested in all of this bullshit: who was in rehab; who was in jail; who was selling; stories of the great heroin of the past, from fucking Thailand or wherever. It was all I lived and breathed, this fucking rubbish world.'
He defines that year of his life, the beginning of his heroin habit, as 'a slow erosion'. Kilbey's creativity didn't falter, though. 'At first, I was super creative. I wanted to re-create the drug through music; I was trying to recreate this kind of languid, floating, deep, dreamy feeling.' This goal was best captured on The Church's 1992 album, Priest = Aura, a remarkable record that remains a fan favourite among the band's twenty full-length recordings. On the opening track, 'Aura', Kilbey sings, 'Where can a soldier fix himself a drink? / Forget the noise, forget the stink / And the opium is running pretty low / 'Cause when the pain comes back, I don't want to know ...' In 'Nightmare', the penultimate track on the re-release, he sings, 'I wanna consume, I wanna smoke up a forest / Shoot up a river, run up the bill / I want women and men / And when the whole damn thing is over / I want it all back again / Yeah, maybe I'll be happy then ...'
'That was a good one,' he says of Priest = Aura. 'That was the honeymoon. That's when you can hear it; you can hear it's working. You can hear that I achieved that thing. And then it went downhill after that. For ten or eleven years, I still made records [on it]. But I struggled a bit. When the gear arrived, I'd get so stoned I couldn't work, either. Working with people, producing records, I spent a lot of time on auto-pilot going' — here he slurs his voice, imitating a barely there shell of a stoner — "'Yeah, great, great, mate. Yeah, that's a great take.'"
The alternative was worse, though, when the drug was in absentia and the singer was hanging out for a fix. To demonstrate, Kilbey stands up from his couch, visibly shaking, and paces back and forth in an agitated state. He picks up my recorder from the coffee table and whispers into it, 'Where are you?' Whether this is for dramatic effect or a genuine accident, mistaking it for a phone, I'm not sure; he apologises, puts it back down and then mimes talking on the phone, pacing back and forth again. 'Where are you? Are you coming? Are you coming?' Still acting, he talks to an imaginary record producer, pretends to play it cool — 'Yeah, I'll be there in a minute. I'll come in and work for half an hour. Just give me half an hour ...' — then resumes his agitated whispering. 'Where the fuck are you?'
He drops the act and sits down as if nothing has happened. 'So it was never the best place, but nonetheless I did work,' he states matter-of-factly. 'And I had to keep working to make money, for the gear. I don't think the records I made during my heroin phase are the best records I ever made. The band were never very fucking happy about it, but there was not much they could do, either. They couldn't really kick me out. Whoever was there just had to put up with it. They became tired of, "Hey, can I borrow $100?"'
It's an understatement to describe Steve Kilbey as a gifted conversationalist. The tanned, silver-haired fifty-eight-year-old radiates intensity and engagement in the topic at hand. He is articulate, self-aware and funny. He uses simple adjectives such as 'idiot' and 'ratbag' at unexpected moments, which add to the humour of his storytelling. After he lets me into his bright, two-storey apartment off a quiet street in Bondi on a Thursday morning, I cast my eyes across his full bookshelves and striking artwork hung on the walls. Besides being known for his music, Kilbey is also a talented painter, with a small studio in his upstairs bedroom. Out the window is a view of the nearby hills; the ocean and Bondi Beach can be seen from the balcony.
Kilbey soon makes clear his problem with the volume of my voice. 'Listen, after forty years of rock and roll, I'm a bit deaf,' he tells me as we sit down in the living room. 'So speak loudly if you can, 'cause my ears are ringing so loud that to me you sound like ...' — he mumbles incoherently to illustrate the point. 'All the consonants are disappearing between my woooooo,' he says, imitating the high-pitch noise that he now lives with. 'So you have to really enunciate it.'
'Tinnitus?' I ask, loudly.
'Screaming tinnitus,' he replies. 'Oh well. They told me I'd go deaf, and I did.'
Partway through our interview, his partner, Sam, introduces herself, and spreads some avocado on rice crackers for both of us to munch on.
His slow erosion continued throughout 1991. 'At the beginning of the year, I was a confident, smart-arse, moneyed-up guy; by the end, I had a lot of people starting to realise I was on the gear,' he says. 'I was attracting a lot of ratbags. I'd used up a lot of my money. I'd gone through my "easy cash" — whatever was lying around — and then I started to cash in my super, and my long-term savings. I started rapidly running out of money and hocking guitars. Within a year, I was starting to go downhill; within two years, I was a mess, and everybody knew it. I was fucking up tours, borrowing money — stuff like that. It just went down, and down, and down. Of course, junkies were flocking to me like flies to fucking sugar, because I had money. I wasn't really watching the ball. I'd go, "Hey, go and get me two grams," and someone would come back and they'd fleeced a gram out of it. I didn't care; I'd say, "Oh, all right, yeah, sure." It was ugly and sordid.'
Heroin addicts share an adage among themselves: every habit is worse than your last. Every time you try to quit, then relapse, the effects will be felt more deeply and strongly than ever before. Steve Kilbey tried to quit. He'd tell himself that he wasn't going to use anymore. Then he learnt what heroin withdrawals felt like. 'It's a nightmare,' he says. 'There's not much worse that you could find, probably, other than chemotherapy or something like that. They're just the most terrible thing. Whatever you fear, whatever you were running from when you were using, that fucking devil comes back in spades when you're hanging out. Every rotten thing you could imagine that could happen to you, feeling bad in every single way, that's what happens when you're hanging out. You're so anxious and desperate to make it stop.'
Another adage: after a while, heroin users are addicted to the drug not because they're trying to get high but because they're trying to avoid the low. A shift in brain chemistry takes place. 'You move into a stage where you're in constant dialogue with the heroin: it's constantly saying, "You better sort this out, mate, or you're going to be sorry,"' he says. 'When you're not using, when you've run out, there's this threatening fear of, "What's going to happen if you don't get a fix?"'
This stark contrast between the highs and lows of addiction fascinated Kilbey. He'd be desolate in the absence of the drug, clutching his aching head and body, thinking to himself, The whole world's going to end, my girlfriend and children have left me — his partner took their identical twins to Sweden at the end of 1993 — I've got no money, I've hocked all my guitars ... But then he'd 'fix' himself, fully aware of the irony of that term. His eyes would brighten. The dark cloud would lift. Ah! Things aren't so bad! It's all right! Watching him act out this seesawing emotional state, a by-product of chemical dependence, I'm struck by his vivid portrayal of the agony and the ecstasy.
He remembers the 'incredible power of going from being totally in the black — being physically, morally and spiritually bankrupt, at the nadir of withdrawals; you're sweating; you've got diarrhoea; you're spewing; every bone and muscle and sinew in your body is aching; your head's screaming. And then, in one second, you put this needle in, and the fuckin' moment that stuff hits the vein it's like this thing comes up.' He sighs, mimicking the relief. 'It runs right up your body, until, within a minute, you're like, "Wow, I feel good now." So you've gone from the worst to the best in one second. That's a feeling of power over yourself, that you can do that.'
Friends and family tried to stop him. There were attempted interventions, where loved ones would tell Kilbey, 'Listen, I don't like you using this stuff. If you're going to use it, I don't want to be a part of your life.' And the heroin, he says, would reply, 'See ya! All right! Bye!' It didn't matter who attempted to intervene, the drug came first. 'There was never no choice,' he says simply — a rare ungrammatical sentence from a well-spoken man.
At one point, his mother — 'an old English woman, who's drunk ten cups of tea every day of her whole life' — even phoned with an offer: she'd give up drinking tea if he kicked heroin. 'She was looking for an addiction trade-off,' he says. 'But even that — nup. Nothing was going to stop me.'
A move to Sweden, to be closer to his twin daughters, didn't help the situation: it was easier than ever for Kilbey to score. 'In Australia, you had to know a dealer,' he says. 'It was always this hassle; you'd have a dealer, but they'd [eventually] get busted. Or you could go out to Cabramatta [in Sydney's south-west]. But in Stockholm, I bought a flat right in the middle of the city. One train station away was Central Station. You just fuckin' turned up at Central and there were always like a dozen dealers down there, with really good, fuckin' white heroin. So I just went crazy with the shit.'
He had a few run-ins with the local constabulary there, too. 'I got busted in Sweden a couple of times. They didn't really know what to do with me.' This statement amuses me, so I press him on the details. 'Well, they'd catch me with a little bit of heroin, and they didn't know who I was. I used to say, "Oh, I'm just here for a visit." I didn't tell them I was living there. I used to show 'em my passport, and they'd keep me in jail for a while. The cops were really stupid there. These big, blond guys would come in' — here he adopts a bad Swedish accent, and starts yelling — '"We do not like drug users in our country! We do not like this! We want you to go away!" And I'd reply, "All right, I will, just let me out and you won't see me again." A few months later, I'd get nabbed again. "Yeah, I'm leaving, I'm leaving now." So they never took it any further, luckily.'
He pauses, remembering one close call in particular. 'There was so much fucking luck involved,' he says. 'Once, I bought like fuckin' six grams on the street. This cop was running up, the dealer was running away. I took these capsules and threw them on the ground.' He mimes tossing a few vials onto the street a few metres away, then standing there innocently, minding his own business. 'These cops came up, and they were looking around everywhere! They went through all my pockets; they were looking everywhere. I could see these six fucking capsules lying on the ground, but they didn't look! Then they went, "He hasn't got anything," and went away, and I just went over and picked 'em up, put 'em in my pocket, and went home. It was like some miracle!'
Luck doesn't last forever, though, as Kilbey found out while on tour in New York in October 1999. 'I wasn't even a junkie at this stage,' he says. 'I was in an in-between stage. A friend of mine rang me up and went, "Man, there's some good fuckin' smack down in Alphabet City!" So I went down there, I bought some smack, and a cop seen me buying it. I went to jail for the night.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Talking Smack by Andrew McMillen. Copyright © 2014 Andrew McMillen. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Forethoughts,Steve Kilbey,
Wally de Backer,
Jon Toogood,
Paul Kelly,
Bertie Blackman,
Mick Harvey,
Tina Arena,
Tim Levinson,
Lindy Morrison,
Ian Haug,
Phil Jamieson,
Holly Throsby,
Spencer P. Jones,
Jake Stone,
Afterthoughts,
Acknowledgements,
War On Drugs by Stuart McMillen,