'i Never Thought The Saints Were Punk. The Saints Were Around Before Punk'

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 10, 2009

Ed Kuepper talks to John Birmingham

FORTY years of chopping away at guitars will give a man a superhero handshake and Ed Kuepper's grip is truly heroic - the sort of bone crusher that should give shady rock journos and indie music historians pause for thought before they do something ill-advised and possibly dangerous. Because as shady rock journos and indie music historians will assure you, His Edness, former axeman for Brisbane's legendary rock band the Saints and a giant of Planet Rock in his own right, also has a reputation for being . . . well, difficult.

How you get a reputation as being difficult in an industry overrun with violent prima donnas, ego-monsters and sociopaths is something of a mystery, despite the painful cracking of every bone in my hand.

We meet on the sun-dappled veranda of an old colonial-era bungalow turned charming little cafe in Brisbane's Botanic Gardens. It has been raining and as the sun comes out, steam rises from the dense tangle of tropical garden beds. Kuepper, 53, glides through it all with that strange, serene cool that is seemingly the preserve of ancient martial arts masters and grown-up rock gods. He looks supremely fit, smiles easily and is not at all difficult. Even a mandatory early question about his time with the Saints and their position in the punk pantheon elicits just a soft smile and elegiac tone.

"I never thought the Saints were punk," he says. "Nowadays it's not something I can be bothered arguing about but I used to make the point more strongly, because the Saints were around before punk. We didn't want to be appropriated by this movement, which was essentially a UK phenomenon. We weren't from there . . . [and] by the time we got there, punk had become a very marketable commodity, it was just a fashion thing."

The supposedly difficult and bloody-minded Kuepper even amuses himself momentarily, recalling the stylist their record label sent in to punk up the band.

"It was just hilarious, all the costumes, and we rejected it entirely. I wish I'd kept the drawings, though," he laughs, stirring his coffee. Unfortunately for Kuepper and legions of believers, some powerful industry figures stopped paying attention. The Saints' refusal to get with the program and their shift away from the crude, raw guitar-driven music of their debut alienated their label, commercial radio programmers and some influential rock writers.

If a war banner were to fly from Castle Kuepper it would surely feature rampant Fenders. Kuepper's artistry and power with a guitar always set him apart from his peers. A master of incredible chord patterns that effortlessly carry the melodies of his self-written tunes, in his early days he was said to have used an amp so enormous that it was a PA system in itself.

But to think of him as just a guitarist from a seminal punk band, as some do, is to completely misunderstand his place in Australian rock history.

"Ed is recognised as a great guitar player but for me he is a very special songwriter," argues Mick Harvey, Nick Cave's long-time co-conspirator in the Bad Seeds.

"You can play all the weird and unique sounds in the world on an instrument but if they sit on top of an insubstantial, meaningless song, what's the point?"

The paths walked by the Bad Seeds and Kuepper have crossed so many times that he was a natural pick for them when they were asked to put together the first Australian outing for All Tomorrow's Parties, an impossibly hip, intimate, sponsorship-free English festival that emerged as a reaction against massive corporate gigs like the Big Day Out. The ATPs, as they are known, are "curated", often by artists. The Simpsons' Matt Groening put one together in the US in 2003, while Cave, Harvey and the Bad Seeds will be making a list and checking it twice for the inaugural Australian event this month at Cockatoo Island.

"We'd always admired him over the years," Harvey says, "and had toured off and on with him in various forms. We were on the bus with him and Jeffrey Wegener when ATP came up. The Clowns had played in support of us years ago and when we asked Ed what he'd like to do, that was it. His work with the Saints and his solo period are revered. But he felt the Laughing Clowns had been a bit overlooked. That's what he wanted to do, even though in many ways it was probably the difficult option."

The Laughing Clowns. For punters of a certain vintage, that name will bring back powerful memories of early-'80s gigs in pumping uni refectories or subterranean inner-city caverns, or a giant squat in Surry Hills, as the Clowns ripped out some of the most inventive, genre-smashing tunes in local history. Some critics labelled them jazz-punk, a description that Kuepper railed against from the get-go. There may be no handy label with which to tag the Laughing Clowns, as one critic noted they "sound like no other band, period".

Explaining them to the Britney Generation would be almost impossible - perhaps epic power-funk monsters with pre-emo lyrical concerns, a soul-inspired feeling for the punch of a good brass section and, yes, some free-wheeling moments that do recall the high, soaring anarchy of a Charlie "Bird" Parker run wild. For all the occasionally confronting, deliberately off-key melodies in a Clowns single such as Holy Joe, however, there are amazing journeys through achingly beautiful songs like Eternally Yours, which just builds and builds like a force of nature.

The Clowns were exactly the sort of uncompromising and challenging artists you would nowadays expect to find at All Tomorrow's Parties but the invitation from the godfather of Australian's alternative music scene was not Kuepper's first encounter of the ATP experience. "Jeffrey and I were invited over to the UK last year to do the festival there [curated by the Dirty Three] at a Butlins Holiday Camp. That was great," he recalls with a wry smile and a hint of some surprise, even a year later. His surprise is understandable. It is not the sort of place you'd expect to find one of the world's hippest music festivals.

"I'd never stayed at a Butlins before," Kuepper smiles.

"They look like a concentration camp mixed with a children's playground but it was good. It's a very different festival to things like Big Day Out and so on. It's much more eclectic and artistically oriented so you get a lot of interesting stuff."

Kuepper will need his fitness because he'll be appearing on both days with the Saints as a headliner, about two hours after he takes the stage with the Laughing Clowns.

Why has it taken so long for them to be unearthed? Perhaps because they weren't just buried but actively disappeared from history like an "unperson" from Orwell's 1984. For Kuepper, the lack of attention paid to his second great band - the Laughing Clowns were infamously absent from a couple of "definitive" rock histories, including the ABC's Long Way To The Top - was a combination of being both forgotten and consciously ignored.

"It almost seemed like a wilful writing us out of history," he says. "I think also, the fact that the band broke up under fairly hostile circumstances didn't help. When I started my solo stuff I ignored the Clowns for a while.

"I was really pissed off with everybody in the band, so I made no effort to keep it going. Jeff, for one reason or another, ended up in jail. And because we were an independent band, you couldn't get Clowns CDs until recently. There was a long period of time when there was nobody actively focusing on the band."

Added to that, they were no Australian Crawl or Cold Chisel. The Clowns wrote complicated, difficult music at times, not at all the sort of beer barn favourites likely to stir up drunken karaoke among the air guitar set down the pub after footy training.

Clinton Walker, arguably the country's best post-punk rock writer, is enthused by the Clowns' reunion, despite having had his differences with Kuepper. He's hoping that ATP might even resurrect a new audience.

"It's true that the Saints are the phase of Ed's career that seems to get the attention these days but that doesn't mean the Laughing Clowns aren't legendary, too. Why else would they be on this ATP tour?" says Walker.

"I spent a lot of ink back in the day trying to suggest that maybe Farnsey and Barnsey weren't the be-all-end-all and that maybe people might give a listen to acts like the Clowns and also Cave and the Go-Betweens, but really no one wanted to know."

The money shot of a big-paying string of FM-friendly hits always eluded Kuepper. Or perhaps he eluded them.

"The Clowns," Harvey says, "were trying to be different and I'm interested in difference. I'd much rather hear something new and challenging than some predictable, acceptable, generic thing. They were unique and the style and atmosphere they brought to their music really appealed to me."

And now they're back, with Kuepper looking dangerously fit and rested, standing on the brink of something new. Touring and recording lie in his immediate future, which means something special could lie in ours.

Ed Kuepper plays with the Saints and the Laughing Clowns at All Tomorrow's Parties on January 17-18.