The Churchs Steve Kilbey reveals TV newsreader Jennifer Keyte his first real love in new autobiog

ROCK star Steve Kilbey has revealed his first love was Channel 7 news reader Jennifer Keyte.

In his autobiography Something Quite Peculiar, Kilbey details meeting Keyte when his band The Church were doing an interview at Melbourne radio station 3XY in 1981.

Kilbey, who was married at the time, writes of Keyte, then working as 3XY’s news reader, “I really fell in love for the first time in my life.”

“I loved her immediately,” Kilbey writes in his book.

``I wrote Electric Lash about meeting her, and then many other songs too. I pretty much moved into her flat in South Melbourne for weeks on end. She was a truly fine woman: stylish, cultured and a real Australian aristocrat or something. She was very kind and warm, and we got on so well. When I left Melbourne I got very sad, which usually resulted in a song as I tapped into the sweet pain of separation for a young man of 26 who’d just fallen in love.

“To me, Jennifer was a goddess and she made me want to write songs to impress her. We were young and affluent, and both of us a bit famous after she got a job reading the news on TV. She showed me her Melbourne and on cold winter days we’d drive to lonely spots by the sea and talk and kiss a bit too. It was a totally romantic love affair — after the regimented drudgery of my brief marriage I was, for a while, really happy.”

Today Keyte reminisced about the relationship, which started when she was 21.

“It was my unguarded moment,” she joked, referencing the Church’s breakthrough hit.

“It was young love and it was a beautiful romance. I actually didn’t realise until now I was his first love because he was married. I was a young journalist at 3XY, The Unguarded Moment was on top of the charts. He was doing an interview with Greg Evans I think, he looked through the glass, our eyes met and that was it. The romance began. It was one of those lovely early romances you have such fond memories of.”

Electric Lash, a hit in 1983, includes a lyric about “the voice of the girl on the radio.”

“Yes, I was the girl on the radio,” Keyte said. “I knew he certainly wrote songs about me and about us. That was pretty special. There’s a few but they’re quite personal, Electric Lash is the obvious one. To Be In Your Eyes, that was another one that was beautiful.”

To Be In Your Eyes, from 1982’s album The Blurred Crusade, details their long-distance relationship which ultimately saw them split after a few years together.

Kilbey left Keyte for Swedish musician Karin Jansson, with whom he wrote the band’s biggest hit, 1986’s Under the Milky Way. Jansson is the mother of Kilbey’s twin daughters, Elektra and Miranda, who are now in duo Say Lou Lou.

Kilbey writes of meeting Keyte at Melbourne airport and telling her about Jansson, and “our relationship struggled on for a while but it would never be the same.”

“That’s how it works out,” Keyte said. “He was on the road travelling, I was a journalist working like crazy. He lived in Sydney, I lived in Melbourne, but it was a lovely young romance. We’re not in touch anymore, but our paths have crossed over the years and we’ve had a laugh. There’s a great fondness there. It always puts a smile on my face when I hear the Church. I didn’t know he was writing an autobiography, I didn’t know he was at that stage of his life! But he’s always been a wordsmith, he wrote such beautiful poetry.”

Something Quite Peculiar is released tomorrow.

The Church also play Brisbane’s Old Museum on Saturday night.

Kilbey will sign copies of Something Quite Peculiar at West End in Queensland on Monday at 6pm, Readings St Kilda next Wednesday November 5 at 6.30pm, Streetlight Music in Adelaide on Thursday November 6 and Bar Orient in Fremantle on Friday November 7 at 7pm.

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