Recorded in early-mid 1974, these rehearsal tapes are revelatory for anyone who thought The Saints appeared out of nowhere with their self-released 1976 debut single, “(I’m) Stranded”. The group documented here – Ed Kuepper on guitar, Chris Bailey on vocals, Ivor Hay on bass and Laurie Mysterio on drums – swings harder than the volatile, amphetamine-rush punk rock of the best-known line-up (where Hay switched to drums, and Kym Bradshaw joined on bass). Instead, what you’ve got here is a classic suburban garage gang, with essential first-album cuts, like “(I’m) Stranded” and “One Way Street” taken at a slower clip, and more grounding in R&B/soul standards (“Knock On Wood”, “River Deep Mountain High”). In his liner notes, Kuepper writes that this is one of Bailey’s best vocal performances, and he’s not wrong – there’s something about the snarling garage-band sneer here that he’d never quite fully convey on subsequent recordings. Here’s the DNA of the greatest group Australia ever produced – in beautifully brutal tape-recorded quality.
Ed Kuepper
If Ed Kuepper is known for anything, it’s for the three years from 1976 to 1978, where his first band, The Saints, off-handedly defined and then rejected an entire genre of music, while influencing an entire generation of musicians. The story’s well-known: self-releasing their debut single “(I’m) Stranded” in 1976, the key Saints line-up — Kuepper (guitar), the late, great Chris Bailey (voice), Kym Bradshaw (bass), and Ivor Hay (drums) — found themselves hailed as progenitors of punk, after rave reviews in the UK music press caught both the band and the Australian culture industry by surprise. Moving to London after recording their first album, (I’m) Stranded, The Saints had a top forty hit with “This Perfect Day”, before falling out of favour with the UK music scene for not sticking to the punk script – they had long hair, after all, and their music was way too creatively voracious for punk to contain.
By their third album, Prehistoric Sounds, The Saints had transformed their sound from buzzsaw garage rock to a mutant R&B/soul/garage hybrid. But there was inter-personal friction between Bailey and Kuepper, which led to the group’s split in late 1978. Bailey would continue with the Saints’ name, releasing some great EPs and albums – check Paralytic Tonight Dublin Tomorrow and The Monkey Puzzle, for starters – but it never quite felt the same without Kuepper, who subsequently returned to Australia and, for a time, thought he was done with the music industry. The legacy of that first Saints line-up, though, is undeniable – they pretty much kick-started the DIY, punk rock ethos in Australia; outsiders and antisocial misfits were emboldened by seeing that first line-up live, with Nick Cave recently recalling, “It is impossible to exaggerate the resulting galvanising effect on the Melbourne scene… the Saints were Australia’s greatest band.” And “(I’m) Stranded” and “Know Your Product” are widely accepted as canonical texts of Australian music.
But some of Kuepper’s best work has been done after, and outside of, the legacy of The Saints. Indeed, soon after that group split, Kuepper formed a new group, Laughing Clowns – named after the titular song that would have been the next Saints single, had the Kuepper-Bailey line-up stayed together – and went on to release some truly staggering music. While in some ways an extension of the approach The Saints took with Prehistoric Sounds, with piano and brass a constant presence in the group, the Laughing Clowns’ music went way further, with Kuepper drawing from the free jazz he’d heard in London – Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler – and building improvisation into the increasingly capacious songs he was writing.
They were never really post-punk, and they most certainly were not punk-jazz or jazz-punk – leave that to the James Chances of this world – indeed, if anything, they extended a mood, and an ethos, that stretches through an alternate musical history, from the songs of Brecht and Weill to the unpredictable hypnotism of Can at their best, via Carla Bley’s compositions for the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra. Part of the magic of Laughing Clowns was the line-up – with players like Jeffrey Wegener on drums, Louise Elliott on saxophone, and Les Millar on upright bass, Kuepper was surrounded by sensational musicians who played with an exploratory sensibility that suited Kuepper’s expanded horizons.
Laughing Clowns disbanded in 1985 – after, notably, Kuepper had also done a brief stint as a touring musician with Bailey’s Saints, though this time on bass – after releasing three albums, and a clutch of great singles and EPs, all later compiled on a three-disc collection, Cruel But Fair. Kuepper subsequently launched a lengthy and at times tempestuous solo career, beginning with 1985’s pared-back Electrical Storm. At his most productive, Kuepper felt like an elemental force – see the early nineties, where he produced a good eight albums in quick succession, five solo and three with his third group, The Aints, whose fearsome volume and intensity reconnected Kuepper with the spirit of those early Saints performances.
Kuepper’s solo music of this time tended towards acoustic, reflective material, with the occasional pop gem (“La Di Doh”, “Real Wild Life”) in amongst a body of work that touched on plenty of different genres – there’s an overarching interest in blues and folk forms, but you can still hear elements of the garage simplicity of The Saints, the eloquent freedoms of Laughing Clowns, plus dalliances with electronica and sampling culture, the latter best heard on songs like the “Fireman Joe” from 1996’s Frontierland, which Kuepper once quipped was his ‘psychedelic pop’ album.
But after releasing a clutch of more curious albums across the nineties – for example, the instrumental mood palettes that are dotted throughout The Blue House, or an unofficial series of mail order-only albums, like I Was A Mail Order Bridegroom and Exotic Mail Order Moods, where Kuepper would often ransack earlier material for reconfiguration – Kuepper’s solo output slowed significantly. This was partly due to other commitments, whether the reformed Laughing Clowns, a series of brief resurrections of the Kuepper-Bailey line-up of The Saints, or two stints as a touring guitarist with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (in 2009 and 2013). The reformation of The Aints in 2017 had Kuepper reclaiming and grappling anew with the material from that original Saints line-up – there’s a sense, here, of setting the record straight, and breathing new life into Kuepper’s history.
For this writer, Kuepper has always been a standard-bearer for Australian music, without ever aligning to some daft, misguidedly jingoistic idea of what ‘Australian music’ could, or should, be. He’s a heavy presence in our culture – sardonic, droll, wise, endlessly creative, continually inspired, genuinely unpredictable. His guitar playing is every bit as idiosyncratic, and jaw-droppingly inventive, as his songwriting and his singing: indeed, he’s never quite got his due as a face-melting noise guitarist. And he’s one of a very small number of musicians from his generation whose new music excites me, or who I’d still go to see live in new contexts, such as his current touring duo with The Dirty Three’s Jim White. There’s no one doing it better, nor with such style and eloquence. All hail the self-proclaimed ‘king of rock’n’roll’.
The Saints’ 1976 debut single, “(I’m) Stranded”, was an incendiary device – launched from Brisbane, Australia, this self-released slab of punk voltage earned them ‘single of this and every week’ in English magazine Sounds. The subsequent album was more of the glorious same – a guitar sound that slices through venue walls, a brutally imperfect rhythm section, and a vocalist, Chris Bailey, both flippant and fierce. Each song was a masterpiece in rock reduced to essence – no fuss, no flash.
On Eternally Yours, The Saints were careful enough to avoid the dogged sameness that cursed so much punk, while staying true to the core of their music, where the amped-up noise of MC5 and The Stooges met the physicality of great R&B. They’re augmented here by a brass section, which gives the riffs in “Know Your Product” extra oomph; elsewhere, “This Perfect Day” is amplified everyday insouciance, where songs like “Orstalia” mix canny social commentary with febrile energy.
1978’s Prehistoric Sounds feels like a huge shift for The Saints, at first blush, until you remember that their songs were always grounded, somehow, in soul and R&B – they’ve just taken their collective foot off the distortion pedal this time. Lead songwriter Ed Kuepper is stretching out here, the songs slower and more exploratory, though the Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin covers might be the best signs of what’s at play here. It was a salutary ending for The Saints’ first and best line-up, which imploded soon after the album’s release.
If diving in at the deep end is your modus operandi, then Cruel, But Fair: The Complete Clowns Recordings is where to start with the Australia’s Laughing Clowns – everything they ever released across three discs. It’s non-chronological, which helps the songs sit together, but at the expense of an ability to chart the great leaps they made between albums, from the Grand Guignol of their self-titled debut to the scabrous, pithy songs on 1982’s Mr. Uddich-Schmuddich Goes To Town, and then into their two most assured sets, Law Of Nature (1984) and Ghosts Of An Ideal Wife (1985). By the latter, a lot of the rough edges have been sanded away, which is both blessing and curse – Ed Kuepper’s songs pitch more directly at the listener, but some of the extemporising interplay between band members gets lost. Their classic, “Eternally Yours”, turns up twice, and it’s always a pleasure to hear, but the real benefit of a set like Cruel But Fair is illuminating the darker corners of a group’s catalogue – see gems like “Collapse Board” from the 3 EP, or the entirety of 1983’s Everything That Flies 12". Few groups have made art rock, free jazz and post-punk feel such natural bedfellows, but then again, few have had songwriters as quixotic and sui generis as Kuepper.
After the Laughing Clowns imploded, for a final time, in Australia, Ed Kuepper “sort of retired”, he once said, though not really: the songs for his debut album, Electrical Storm, were written during that ‘retirement’, while on his honeymoon. It’s an extraordinary collection: trading in the freewheeling possibilities of his prior band Laughing Clowns for a tight three-piece line-up, including Wet Taxis’ Louis Tillett on piano, Kuepper’s songs here are finessed, no unnecessary gestures, and when he does get expansive, as on the title song, the drama is played lightly, the better to allow the nuances in the writing to shine.
If Ed Kuepper’s debut solo album, Electrical Storm, was a stripped-back affair, on Rooms Of The Magnificent he starts to stretch out again, bringing piano and brass back into his arrangements, and inviting guest vocalist, Melanie Oxley, to join in for many of the songs. It’s brighter, more direct, the songs closer to pop, but still with the slightly acidic tang that’s characteristic of Kuepper’s writing. It features some of his loveliest material, like the woozy, blissed-out “Sea Air”, and the folksy reel of “I Am Your Prince”. He’s invited some members of his previous group, Laughing Clowns, back into the fray, too, and their presence enlivens Rooms Of The Magnificent. He’d make better albums still, but there’s something definitive about this one.
Everybody’s Got To further streamlined the approach Kuepper took with his previous solo album, Rooms Of The Magnificent. The songs are direct, nudging closer yet toward pop mores – blistering brass arrangements, swooning backing vocals, and the closest he really came to rapprochement with the glossy, booming production sound that marred so many eighties albums. There are some excellent songs here, like “No Skin Off Your Nose” and “Standing In The Cold, In The Rain”, though some of the other material gets lost in the production haze. It’s still a great album – Kuepper seems incapable of anything less – but of all his eighties material, Everybody’s Got To suffers for its period piece designs. You still need it, though, for the masterful songwriting.
There was a break of two years between Today Wonder and its predecessor, Everybody’s Got To. Listening to Today Wonder, you suspect Kuepper had gone through some major disarmament – the sound here is minimal, at times brittle, with only acoustic guitar, voice and Mark Dawson’s empathetic, sculptural drums. A songwriter as idiosyncratic as Kuepper is made for this kind of reduced, intimate context, and on Today Wonder, his writing is renewed – a few of his all-time classics appear here in the first incarnation, like the devastatingly affecting “Everything I’ve Got Belongs To You”, and the mysterious, alienated “Horse Under Water”. There’s also an update of his Laughing Clowns trademark, “Eternally Yours”, and Tim Hardin and Skip James covers that nestle tidily among Kuepper’s own songs. A breathtaking album, by any measure.
For many, Honey Steel’s Gold is Kuepper’s finest album, his resonating classic. It’s certainly one of his most powerful collections of songs, and the performances – with a group that included his long-time drummer Mark Dawson, and pianist Chris Abrahams, now best known as a member of The Necks – are uniformly limber and elegant. There’s a classicism to some of the songs, like “Closer”, that recalls the wood-panelled folk of ‘70s Witchseason productions, and there are hints of the underlying drone logic of the blues in songs like the title track. Really, Kuepper’s breathing out here, after clearing the air with the preceding year’s Today Wonder – and this was the beginning of a particularly winning streak of music for him. Maybe it is his masterpiece, after all.
If you’d been missing the livid buzz of Ed Kuepper’s most hair-raising electric guitar playing – that wall of noise he constructed as the scaffold for the songs on the first two Saints albums – well, Ascension is a most welcome reintroduction. The difference is, it’s now welded to Kuepper’s advanced songcraft. The combination is a powerful one, as much as his more acoustic late ‘80s form made for some great albums. On songs like the opening “It’s Still Nowhere”, Kuepper’s guitar is bright white light, burning heat and fire into your forehead; “Like An Oil Spill” channels the unchecked fury of the Saints’ “This Perfect Day”; by the ending, eleven-minute “Ascension”, Kuepper’s flying free, duelling with saxophonist Tim Hopkins, making the title’s (perhaps unintented) parallel with the classic Coltrane album feel almost apposite. There are only a few guitarists who can slam a deafeningly loud E-minor chord into your earlobes and make it feel like the past, present, and future of rock’n’roll are simultaneously screaming through your skull. Kuepper is one of them.
Parts of Black Ticket Day feel like an extension of 1991’s Honey Steel’s Gold – Kuepper is taking more time to patiently develop his songs, as with the nine-minute “Blind Girl Stripper”, which gives him scope to experiment, bringing in a string section on the aforementioned song, using found sound on “All My Ideas Run To Crime”, and desolate sax phrases at the start of “Walked Thin Wires”. He’s an explorer by nature, though the terrain he covers here doesn’t always jibe with the drollness of his writing. That said, Black Ticket Day’s best moments, the ones that catch you off-guard, are when Kuepper makes pop an act of scepticism, as on “Real Wild Life”, or essays a lovely, direct melody – see “There’s Nothing Natural”.
Autocannibalism doubles down on the intensity of previous Aints albums, SLSQ and Ascension. There’s something particularly furious about Kuepper’s guitar on much of this album, and songs like “You Can’t Please Everybody” and “Red Aces” feel relentless in their pursuit of an accelerated form of rock music – even more than the Laughing Clowns, this is where Kuepper comes closer to the ecstatic eternal at the heart of free jazz. The very best thing on the album, though – and indeed, that The Aints ever did – is the ten-minute mantra of “Linda & Abilene”, where Kuepper and co. grind one simple two-note riff into the dirt, while Kuepper’s guitar unleashes waves of metallic drone. It’s perhaps his single most exhilarating performance, in a career that’s not exactly short on them.
Ed Kuepper was at his most prolific in the early nineties – across five years, he recorded eight albums, either solo or with The Aints, all uniformly high quality. Serene Machine is an exemplar of his form during this creative burst. After the extended song structures on albums like Honey Steel’s Gold, and The Aints’ Autocannibalism, he’s reined in his more prolix tendencies, and Serene Machine is tightly focused and a fulfilling listen. The acoustic guitars are richer than ever, here, with thick swathes of twelve-string strum pushing songs like “Reasons” into hypnotically dense territory. The more expansive moments, like the synth-swathed melodrama of the following “This Hideous Place”, feel far more integrated than similar songs on albums like Everybody’s Got To – Kuepper’s ear is finessed now. Another great album in a stellar streak for Kuepper.
It’s not often that Ed Kuepper’s music recalls any of his peers – he generally stands apart from those around him. But there are aspects of Character Assassination that recall Richard Thompson’s solo albums: there’s a directness in delivery here that cuts to the chase, much as Thompson’s songs do; Kuepper seems to have peeled the songs right back, their tone almost conversational at times. The arrangements are sparing, mostly, but they’re always effective, and when Kuepper goes filmic, as he does on “My Best Interests At Heart”, the brass section, and the glittering, chiming guitars are perfectly staged; there’s also “So Close To Certainty”, which features some lovely, sweeping string arrangements. On “La Di Doh”, he even lets his pop heart shine through, though the melodies all through Character Assassination are masterful.
Smile… Pacific has always felt like a weird, slightly ornery entry in Kuepper’s run of solo albums. Parts of it almost return to the clarity and concision of Electrical Storm – “Everything In The World” reads like a pop update of that album’s minimalism – but there are also wild sideways leaps, like the lamplit romance of “Without You”, and the swirling electro-acoustic interruptions of “Starstruck”, which regularly butt heads with some rough-housing riffs. It’s a good reminder that Kuepper’s always been an experimentalist at heart, happy to take risks with his songs and their settings when the material demands some sidereal intervention. Even the bluesier numbers here, like the opening “Sinnerman”, are subtly warped.
Kuepper’s recorded output slowed in the new century, and he seemed to be reconnecting with his past – the Laughing Clowns returned for a time, and a Bailey / Kuepper / Hay line-up of The Saints played some shows. But when he did hit the studio with new material, Kuepper sounded rejuvenated. Jean Lee & The Yellow Dog is a concept album based on the story of the titular character, the last woman hanged in Australia. With partner Judi Dransfield-Kuepper writing most of the lyrics, Kuepper worked up his most potent collection of songs in some time, since, perhaps, 1994’s Character Assassination – the performances here can get ferocious, the recordings bustling with febrile excitement. The album also features a gorgeous cover of The Go-Betweens’ “Finding You”, and there are some notable guest appearances – Jeffrey Wegener of Laughing Clowns is on drums throughout; old sparring partner Chris Bailey turns up, as does Warren Ellis of Dirty Three/The Bad Seeds, and ex-Go-Between John Willsteed. A stunner of an album.
When recording albums of new material, Ed Kuepper tends to draw on a community of musicians to back him, so 2015’s Lost Cities was a surprise, of sorts: it’s maybe Kuepper’s first solo album ‘proper’, Ed alone in the studio, playing every instrument, and producing. So, the drummer’s out of the picture – and Kuepper wisely doesn’t try and find other ways to fill that space, rather allowing the songs to float in amniotic textures, a muted blush of reverb and electronics. His guitar playing is at the forefront, and it’s beautifully nuanced, often very tender – on a song like “(It’s) Never Too Late”, both the guitar and the melody are disarming in their intimacy. It’s testament to the potency of Kuepper’s writing that the album never drags, or feels samey: this is no washy Lanois-esque bland-out, thankfully. In 2015, he ranked this album as his best, saying that, depending on how you’re counting things, it’s his fiftieth album: “In a way, it signifies the end of an era.” Here’s hoping there’s more solo Kuepper to come, but if not, what a gracious and moving way to bow out.
Ed Kuepper reformed The Aints! – now with exclamation mark – to revisit his songs from the first three albums by The Saints ((I’m) Stranded, Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds). While touring with The Aints!, Kuepper started to introduce unrecorded songs written alongside those albums, and The Church Of Simultaneous Existence is a studio recording of that material, which Kuepper called a “hypothetical fourth Saints album”. He’d grappled with a few of these songs before – “Red Aces” also appears on The Aints’ 1992 album Autocannibalism, and “Winter’s Way” turned up on the Laughing Clowns’ Ghosts Of An Ideal Wife, back in 1985. This line-up of The Aints! is particularly limber, and yet again, it’s a thrill to hear Kuepper fully amplified and roaring from the speaker cabinets. And it captures plenty of the spirit of the second and third Saints albums in particular – churlish slabs of guitar noise butting heads with R&B brass and a brutally effective rhythm section.
If this ‘official live bootleg’ proves anything, it’s that there’s something uniquely thrilling in hearing Ed Kuepper return to the source and reanimate the songs he recorded, and released, with the best (and for some, the only true) line-up of The Saints. That group’s first three albums makes up one of the most perfect runs of garage-rock-meets-R&B you’ll ever hear; with Kuepper at the helm, the songs are reinvigorated with no flashy turns, no unnecessary flab, just the essence of each song, comprehensively nailed. Kuepper’s sensitive to both the historical significance of this music, but he’s not beholden to it; he simply knows that when something’s done right the first time, it often detracts from the material’s core to studiously rework or update. The Aints! breathe new life into this old, yet eternally relevant, material – it’s just such a joy to hear Kuepper fully at one with, and playing the shit out of, these songs.