The First Cuts Are The Deepest: Ed Kuepper

The Singer/ Songwriter Talks About Early Influences

By Toby Creswell

So, I’m watching Daisy Jones which is a kind of sappy soap about a rock band and the soundtrack is so laid back its a surprise it didn’t knock over the furniture. Suddenly just before the end, Daisy flips out, goes crazy and pops on the radio where out blasts the Saints “This Perfect Day” a switchblade screams down the guitar strings and finally we can feel something. This music just roars out of the speakers. Watching Elvis Presley’s granddaughter (Riley Keough) dance maniacally to the Saints is an exquisite moment in the history of rock & roll. One only wishes for aa segue into the Saints version of “Kissing Cousins”.

One of the highlights of my peripatetic career was helping to present and arts festival called Sedition. The whole thing was capped by the Aints screaming through “Nights In Venice”. This is a mad, intense electrical storm where the relentlessly swinging drums buffett waves of magnificent, violent guitar chords. The notes smash and shatter in this tempest. It’s rock at its most pure and most rare. Ed Kuepper doesn’t strum these power chords, he punches them out almost percussive, throwing those chords out like the Marx brothers jamming wood into the steam train furnace in Go West – burning everything down to the core, desperately reaching forthe sweet notes of the chorus before diving back and on it rolls until the instrumental break where the dog of war are slipping and sliding. This is the sound of total madness, rage, bewilderment and a general bad temper but elegiac in its chaos.

Nights in Venice originally appeared at the conclusion of (I’m) Stranded, the first Saints LP, in 1977 when anything longer that 2.56 was considered uncool. People bandy around adjectives such as “Unique” “Original” thoughtlessly but Ed Kuepper is one of the half dozen truly original and uncompromising voices to come from Australia. His career ranges from the hard rocking Saints through to the jazz infected Laughing Clowns and then an eclectic range from solo work, soundtracks, the Aints of course and recently in duo with Jim White and as a member of  Asteroid Ekosystem.

Ed has recently reissued on vinyl his early 80s solo records Electrical Storm and Honey Steels Gold. He is touring solo. We spoke about formative influences and a few other things…

“Love Me Do” – The Beatles

When I was 8 I heard “Love Me Do”. It was absolutely mesmerising. I still have a vivid recollection of when I first heard it. We didn’t have a TV so the amount of music I was exposed to was limited. That harmonica and the melody has a bluesiness or something that you didn’t hear on the radio in those days. It was a  blast to hear it and from that moment on I wanted to get a guitar and be in a band. I had dreams of the Beatles adopting me as their younger brother and letting me join. I combed my hair like John did. I became obsessive.

“Hey Joe” – the Jimi Hendrix Experience

I hear stuff late. I heard that on a  record in 1969. This guy who lived down the road heard me playing [my guitar] one day. He was 7 or 8 years older than me and he looked like somebody who was in a band –  a band like the Velvet Underground. He said I’m moving out. I’m going into stereo so I’ll give you all these records. He gave me a shoebox of singles and a copy of Highway 61 Revisited and Axis: Bold As Love. Records at that stage were really expensive. I didn’t own any records at all. Except for an Elvis single that mum gave me. I think she liked it more than I did. In this box of singles was an EP that did not have a  cover but it had “Hey Joe” and “The Wind Cries Mary”. “Hey Joe” when I first heard that – that was another of those moments. That introduction and those incredibly subtle but beautiful backing vocals. It was another of those uplifting kind of songs that also had a minor bluesy kind of structure to it, a bit like “Love Me Do” Maybe I only like songs that sound like “Love Me Do”.

Your guitar playing is quite idiosyncratic I wonder how you got to where you are now?

Well one thing I didn’t try to do at all was learn other peoples guitar parts. A year or two later when I met other people at school or wherever and they were also playing guitar they were all very focussed on learning how Ritchie Blackmore )of Deep Purple) did something and sounding very shitty in the process. I never did that. I didn’t separate the parts enough in my mind to do that. I had a mono record player. I wanted to sound like my favourite records without copying them. Because I didn’t have a band, the guitar took over all the roles. There was a slightly odd rhythm thing. It came over a period of time. The only conscious thing was that I didn’t want to sound like the other people who were around. The other thing I wanted to do was to write my own material.

You’re not big on the guitar hero guitar solo.

Oftentimes I get bored if solos go on too long. That’s when I’m listening to someone else.When im doing that kind of thing there’s a serious risk of doing that as well. I like to keep the guitar solos brief.

My first ever guitar solos was at the instigation of the engineer who recorded “(I’m) Stranded”. The B-side was a song called “No Time.” There was this period of eight bars so he said you should put a guitar solo there and so I just played one note and said that’s it. He was rather bemused by our different concepts.

“Desolation Row” – Bob Dylan

I could have picked almost any track of the album Highway 61 Revisited. The Saints played “Ballad of A Thin Man” in the early days, we also did “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue”. “DesolationRow”, that’s a Marty Robbins almost that Spanish kind of thing. As soon as I heard the guitar introduction it sounded like something Mum might have listened to, and then the opening lyric ‘they’re selling postcards of the hanging’ was so fuccked up. I had never been exposed to that kind of poetry before. I was never a very prolific lyric writer, It took awhile to get a  flow on,. It wasn’t something that came easily.

Sometimes your lyrics are willfully obscure, poetic, suggestive and then at other times brutally direct.

There was a change that happened after the Laughing Clowns broke up. With the Clowns I was focussed on writing in a particular way but then it did get stripped back and so did the music for a while. It became a little less arranged Electrical Storm is without doubt my starkest sounding record with the exception of the first Saints record and that is a different sort of intensity.

I felt after Laughing Clowns that I wanted to go solo after thinking about retiring for a  couple of weeks. I think I even did some interviews at the time where I announced my retirement but I changed my mind a week later. I’m glad I changed my mind. The world needs less secondhand booksellers.

I got to the point where I was about to turn 30. I was a father and I had a 2 ½ year old son. I thought I just don’t need the aggravation of having a  band where you have this obligation  to each other. And often people don’t live up to their obligations but they expect others to do so and all the other shit that goes with having a band. With the Saints when it was all functioning everyone was really good friends. We had our differences but we were really close and I don’t think we would have  gotten that far without the bond between us but once we got to the UK and the reality off the naive assumption I had fell away.

There was an initial hostility to the Clowns which we overcame.

Generally we tried to run an independent record label , booking our own shows. You can do that if everyone is in on it. The Clowns were a great band but the various pressures on the group that last tour that we did in 1984 I didn’t get on with anyone. I was happy to move on from bands so if i was going to continue I would have to do it differently.If something isn’t good I don’t have to keep it going just for the sake of a band or something

Electrical Storm I recorded it mostly by myself and  we added the drums and the piano on at the end. Tip of the hat to Nick Fisher who played drums cause I didn’t use a click track.

What it did let me do was write more freely. With the Clowns you’re writing for the Clowns. You’d have horns in mind … the way Jeffrey played the drums – all the aspects were things I would include. Once or twice I proposed that we just use one or two instruments on a song that never went over well. Everybody wanted to play on everything.

“Paranoid” – Black Sabbath

Paranoid is something I heard on the radio must have been 1970. I didn’t have a record player and one afternoon “Paranoid” came on. The first thing that struck me was how much it reminded me of “Sorry” by the Easybeats. The Easybeats overtook the Beatles for me. “Paranoid has a similarity to it”. I loved the guitar sound and I loved the voice the whole thing. As soon as school finished, I got a job at Huttons meatworks which was a local employer. I was underc age but they didn’t check. I got a job in the cannery just packing cans of ham. I got my pay and spent it on a  few records – Paranoid, Get Yer ya Yas Out )Rolling Stones) and The Who Sell Out, The Best of the Who and A Quick One I got three Who albums for the  price of one full album because they were second hand. So, those were the first records I bought with my own money.

 

“1970” – The Stooges

I found Funhouse (the Stooges) by accident. Go-Set magazine had a review of Funhouse and it said basically this is far too raw and that people these days are too sophisticated to be listening to this sort of stuff. He finished off by saying this is a fifth-rate Pretty Things. So I thought Wow!. I hadn’t heard the Pretty Things but I had seen a photograph and I really liked the name. In those days you could look at a band and decide if they were worth listening to. The world was a simpler place. It was the comment about the Pretty Things that made me think I was starting to get tired of where progressive rock was going. I liked progressive rock but by the end of 1971, not very much good came after that. This is an important historical observation and people in the future can refer back to this and see what I meant. After a very short period iof time your perspective broadened.

Kraftwerk – “Trans Europe Express”

I first  heard Krafterwek through “Autobahn” which you heard a little bit on Brisbane radio. When the Saints moved to London we went into the record company where there were friendly receptionists and boxes full of promo albums and Kraftwerk was one of those. I fell in love with the record and made me reappraise what I thought a song should be doing in a way.

“Ole” by  John Coltrabe

Moving to London was a real eye opener. There was so much available to people, so much stuff going on. You could walk down a street and find some little place that had a load of records you’ve never seen before. Camden market wasn’t far from where we lived and there would be stalls that had tons and tons of Impulse-era jazz records, these really impressive covers. Ole isn’t on impulse but I bought a bunch of that stuff – Coltrane, Pharoh Sanders’ “Jewels of Thought,” Archie Shepp’s “Fire Music”. It wa a new experience which I had had an inkling of via groups like Nucleus or King Crimson and then Steve McKay on “1970” takes it to another level. That was the wildest sax playing that I’d heard. I wasn’t that crazy about horns but the thing with Coltrane was that it was melodic, it was powerful, it had that Eastern Moorish melodic thing happening, That is to me a perfect recording.

 

The Exploding Universe of Ed Kuepper plays the City Recital Hall in Sydney on September 21