Beyond Nostalgia: The Third Iteration Of The Aints Is About The Future As Much As The Past

2017 marks 40 years since pioneering Brisbane outfit The Saints took their searing debut album (I’m) Stranded to the world, and founding guitarist and songwriter Ed Kuepper is dusting off another of his former outfits The Aints to celebrate the milestone.

The Aints burned brightly for three albums in the ’90s having started as an ad hoc excuse for Kuepper and some friends to dust off some of the classic songs he wrote for The Saints before that band’s implosion in early 1979 (having already released two more albums in 1978, Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds).

The Aints have always been a slightly conceptual outfit in a lot of ways, so we’re remaining true to that tradition.

Eventually The Aints became a band in their own right, releasing original material of their own, but the fact that he’s put together a new version of the band — featuring the Sunnyboys' Peter Oxley (bass), The Celibate Rifles’ Paul Larson (drums) and keyboardist Alister Spence — to celebrate the anniversary of (I’m) Stranded seems totally apt, essentially exploring the roots of two projects rather than one.

"I guess you could say that there’s been three distinct versions of The Aints," Kuepper muses. "The Aints version one was a tryout, almost just a throwaway kind of thing to do over a weekend. That went really well, so the second version started up and I guess what I was looking for with that second line-up was to try and find that musical space that sort of existed in my head before The Saints started, in a way, or before The Saints sort of recorded.

"And now this new version is sort of taking it closer to the exact period that we’re covering, which is ’73 to ’78, so that means a slightly less psychedelic approach than Aints version two, and slightly more serious that Aints version one: kind of a bit closer to what was actually done in the time period. The Aints have always been a slightly conceptual outfit in a lot of ways, so we’re remaining true to that tradition."

With Kuepper in the midst of a blossoming solo career when The Aints first came onto the scene in the early ’90s, it was almost as if the band served as a pre-internet history lesson for new fans attracted to his recent, sparser material.

"To me it was almost like the other side of the coin to what I was doing [in my solo career]," the singer agrees. "The Aints came along at the same time as I was doing the acoustic stuff on [1990 fourth solo album] Today Wonder, and it just seemed like a nice sort of counter — the ugly sister to the pretty one kind of thing. It felt right at the time I was doing it. And it seemed like I also needed to, every now and then, just make a public point that I guess my history goes beyond whatever I’m doing at a particular point of time."

In the intervening years since Kuepper left The Saints, he’d already started and finished his revered avant-garde post-punk outfit The Laughing Clowns as well as kickstarted his solo career, all while his former bandmate and vocalist Chris Bailey had kept releasing music under The Saints moniker with completely new line-ups (some of which was really good, but none of which resembled in the slightest the incendiary energy of the band’s original line-up).

Even though ... you could sort of look at it as some sort of exercise in nostalgia, it actually sort of goes a bit beyond that.

Nonetheless the earliest version of The Aints — featuring the Rifles’ Kent Steedman on bass and Tim Reeves on drums, augmenting Kuepper on guitar/vocals — wasn’t meant to be anything more than a weekend caper. Their first show at the Harold Park Hotel in Sydney in April 1991 was recorded for posterity on the S.L.S.Q. — Very Live album which followed soon after, and finds them smashing through old Saints tracks at a furious rate of knots and with complete abandon.

"That initial period was really just that weekend, and the reason we played those songs is because that’s what Kent knew and it didn’t take him much in terms of rehearsing it," Kuepper smiles. "I think if you look at [The Aints] T-shirts, we ran two lots of T-shirts — which are a bit hard to find these days — and one refers to The Saints and one refers to The Laughing Clowns, so The Aints were always more of an all-encompassing thing in the early days. But it’s been a long time since The Aints have played now, and this new line-up is something again; even though, on the face of it, you could sort of look at it as some sort of exercise in nostalgia, it actually sort of goes a bit beyond that.

"One of the things that we’re looking at doing apart from me wanting to once again reclaim my own material — because sometimes it does sort of get a little bit confused in the public view, because there’s obviously other acts who tour the world whose name rhymes with The Aints — but the stuff that we’re covering is the stuff that I largely wrote.

"But what we’re also looking at doing — and it could be a bit difficult because the tour isn’t quite as long as I would have liked it to have been — but there’s quite a lot of songs that I wrote in that ’73 to ’78 period that were never recorded by The Saints, and we’re going to include a couple of those. I’ve been going through notes and going through old tapes and there’s probably two albums worth of material that, had The Saints not split up after 1978, might have been recorded. So we’re looking at doing some of that stuff, and we’re looking at — hopefully, if this tour goes well — actually recording it, so at least we’ll have the hypothetical fourth album.

"The thing that strikes me about it is that the only reason this stuff didn’t get done was because we recorded three albums in the space of 18 months, did some touring and then broke up — there just wasn’t enough time to kinda do it. But the material is quite strong: there’s absolutely no way that I’d even talk about doing this unless I felt that the material stands up to the first three Saints albums."

Incredibly, the bulk of this unreleased material has been sitting there virtually untouched for all these years, with only bits and pieces having been cannibalised since for other projects.

"Well that gets complicated, because it’s all my work," Kuepper muses. "There are little bits and pieces of things that have turned up in other things, but most of it hasn’t appeared in any other way. It’s just basically the way I work. Most of The Saints’ second album, for instance, Eternally Yours, had been written before we recorded the first album. So this material is kind of the stuff that was written just before Prehistoric Sounds and simultaneously to, or just slightly after, Prehistoric Sounds, plus a couple of songs that I’m just amazed that we didn’t actually get around to doing, which could have been on the first album or possibly on the second album, or even possibly on the third album.

If this tour goes well, then we’ll definitely look at recording.

"The thing was that, once I think I started to realise that the band was finishing up, I kind of jumped into it — Prehistoric Sounds was largely all new material, written over the Christmas of ’77 and early ’78. That was the first time that I’d ever done that; in the past, I’d always sort of liked to clear the decks and just make sure that things weren’t neglected or left behind unnecessarily.

"So where this [proposed new] album sits chronologically is across the three [existing Saints albums], possibly leaning closer to the second. If this tour goes well, then we’ll definitely look at recording it."

It makes sense that they were moving forward creatively at a rate of knots given the huge sonic gulf between (I’m) Stranded and Prehistoric Sounds, which were only released about 20 months apart. By the time of the latter album they’d been entrenched in London for a while; was the new sound as simple as wanting to distance themselves from the thriving punk scene which The Saints had found vacuous and shallow?

"I think there was probably an element of that in there, but part of it would be that all of the first album was probably a couple of years old by the time we recorded it, which was sort of going back to what I was saying — if I feel confident enough about this stuff, then I sort of like to work chronologically," Kuepper explains. "It’s when I’m not quite sure where to go with something at a particular time — and that’s more of an arrangement thing than an actual compositional thing.

"For instance, one of the songs that will be on this tentative fourth album was written before the first album, but could have been on Prehistoric Sounds in terms of what it was doing musically — in fact there are two songs which could have been on Prehistoric Sounds.

"The first Saints album was like a deliberate honing down — a hard focus — on one aspect of what the band did: even in Brisbane it was sort of a little bit more diverse than what the first album might have indicated. And hence the change into the second and third album didn’t strike me as being quite that radical, even though I know that a lot of people think that we really jumped massively. Part of that is being able to just get into a studio and kind of pull things apart a little bit, learning how to use multi-track as opposed to a cassette deck kind of thing."

Prehistoric Sounds also contained covers of an Otis Redding track (Security) and an Aretha Franklin number (Save Me). They’d always enjoyed reinterpreting classics but was this partly The Saints being contrary at a time when punk was arguing that older music should be rejected and ignored?

"I’ve got to say that those picks were just things that we were mucking around with," Kuepper muses. "I don’t actually like our version of Security — I think we could have done that a lot better — but Save Me is okay. They were really sort of done as B-sides or something, I didn’t think that they necessarily should have ended up on the album but the band was falling apart while that record was going — we had essentially broken up, we just hadn’t announced it, so to kind of get it finished as anything, there needed to be a couple of compromises made. And our record label didn’t think that there was anything on the album — none of the original songs — that had any kind of commercial merit, so they went with Security, which we’d been using basically as a muck around to kind of warm-up. And rather than argue the point and go on with it [we agreed]. I know a lot of people like it, but I just think we could have done a much, much better job on it, actually.

You don’t just disown things that inspire you or that you love just because some music paper decrees that it’s no longer fashionable.

"But as far as an embracing of the past, it’s probably not accurate to say that — it’s probably more accurate to say that there wasn’t a rejection of the past in my case. It wasn’t like I was looking to be a retro-revivalist or anything like that, but it was just one of the things that I though was really fraudulent about the UK punk scene, that ‘this is all year zero’ kind of stuff, when obviously it wasn’t — not the good stuff anyway — so I just didn’t want to have any part of it, personally.

"And no one in the band did particularly; everybody had a connection with music prior to 1976 obviously, and you don’t just disown things that inspire you or that you love just because some music paper decrees that it’s no longer fashionable. So regardless of the tensions and disagreements within the band, I think everybody kind of stayed true to themselves in terms of what got them started.

"And in reality that was all quite different — the stuff that Bailey liked was quite different to what I liked, and I think with Ivor [Hay — drums] I’d be in some way surprised if he liked anything other than The Beatles. We all kind of stayed true to that and just found an area where we could all work together. But it wasn’t sort of a pining for the past or anything like that; you just draw on stuff that inspires you."

And even though Kuepper hadn’t been enamoured with the punk scene that he found in London, that didn’t mean that the city was devoid of inspiration, the singer quickly finding whole new musical realms such as country, bluegrass and avant-jazz to explore.

"Most definitely," he concurs. "I think, going to London, it was really exciting to get there, and then really disappointing in terms of just how, I guess, in a way, parochial and blinkered it seemed to be. At least in terms of the press and then the kind of bandwagon-jumping punk kids who just appeared out of nowhere and were suddenly making demands upon people to sort of adhere to some ridiculous orthodoxy or something.

"But being a city the size it was, I just came across a shitload of new music, or not necessarily new music but new to my ears. It was a real eye-opener, and all that music that I picked up there falls into this time frame that we’re talking about for The Aints.

"So you’ve got the seeds of The Laughing Clowns in that period — it really broadened things — and I think that’s why suddenly it appeared that Prehistoric Sound was this massive leap forward, when it really just reflects what I was listening to over those few months between the second and third album."

Looking back, it still seems staggering that only a few months passed between the release of Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds, but Kuepper explains that this was largely because the former effort failed to gain any traction at all.

"I think we did Eternally Yours in two sessions: we did it initially as an 11-track album, and I thought ‘This is good, but it needs something more,' which is where [the album’s classic second single] Know Your Product came from. That was done in around October and probably finished in November after taking a break for a couple of weeks and just getting focused on what the album sort of needed to become more… more of a magnificent piece of work, I guess," he laughs. "And when Know Your Product was added it was suddenly, like, ‘Well, this is it! How can we fucking fail with this? It’s got This Perfect Day and Know Your Product on it; here we go, kids! Top Of The Pops for us! Again!’

I think the reason I concentrated everything on the new songs was because I knew that Prehistoric Sounds was going to be the last one.

"And then we did the tour to promote it, and of course Know Your Product flopped — it just did nothing — and the tour was pretty disappointing in a lot of places. We took a horn section on tour with us, but it just seemed to be the wrong thing to do in the climate of the day. And I think a lot of things were starting to get fairly tense on the tour: I was getting really fucking pissed off and a bit depressed about it, and I think in those days when I got depressed I got pretty sort of difficult to be around.

"So then Chris quit the group, but because we had another album to do on our contract I asked him to re-join and he did, even though he said later that he didn’t re-join because I asked him, he re-joined because the manager asked him… who the fuck knows, who cares? But he did it, and the bits that he did do I think are really great on Prehistoric Sounds. He doesn’t like the album but that’s okay, I don’t care about that either. But we got it done and it got out. In terms of when we did it, I think the earliest cassette I’ve found is dated April so that’s about five months between working on the two.

"But that material was all written after we’d done Eternally Yours, so that was a really strong writing burst. I think the reason I concentrated everything on the new songs was because I knew that Prehistoric Sounds was going to be the last one, hence there being all of this other stuff that’s left out."

There was so much going on within the band’s ranks — acclimatising to a new culture, label indifference and inter-personal conflict not the least of their concerns — so it’s amazing that the band managed to make so much music so quickly without sacrificing quality.

"The first album was recorded in Brisbane, as you know, in October 1976 and that got released early ’77," Kuepper offers. "We were touring around Australia as much as you could — or as much as a band like us could — which wasn’t all that much. We were here for a couple of months outside of Brisbane, and then went over to the UK.

Once the band got started, I largely stopped doing what a lot of my friends were doing, which was going out and getting pissed on the weekend.

"So when you look at it on a sort of week-by-week basis, we were pretty busy, given that you’ve got to put it in perspective of the fact that the band was not successful. You can kind of say, ‘Well, in that 18-month period The Beatles would have toured America and recorded two albums as well,’ but they were in a slightly different category popularity-wise.

"No, I’m sometimes surprised at how much we did in a relatively short period of time, but part of that was also to do with — contrary to I don’t know who the fuck writes this stuff — the band didn’t form in ’75, it did actually get together in ’73. Songs were being written at that time and we were playing — just not publicly.

"Once the band got started, I largely stopped doing what a lot of my friends were doing, which was going out and getting pissed on the weekend. Chris and I were always of a similar mind, so suddenly everybody was quite enthusiastic about the notion of a band, so we’d actually rehearse on Friday nights and Saturdays and that kind of thing."

That seems like the ultimate sacrifice for somebody that age, until you consider that we’re talking about mid-‘70s Brisbane suburbia.

"Look at the alternative — going out and getting pissed was a real fucking dead end, and that was sort of the only option for a lot of working-class kids in a lot of ways: what else do you do?" Kuepper shrugs. "You’re working through the week, you go out and get drunk and try and pick up a girl or something — and usually fail — so you’d just be pissed.

"The whole thing of playing music was so much more appealing to me. And I think I probably had a fairly persuasive way about me with the other two, although there certainly wasn’t any resistance on their part — they were enthusiastic."

And with this music from his youth still resonating so strongly with new generations of music lovers more than 40 years later, despite initial indifference from the music scene and industry — The Saints infamously having to stage their own guerrilla gigs in Brisbane because no established venue would let them play — does he feel an element of vindication at all?

"The main thing that annoys me is just all the bad business decisions that were made," he admits. "Because I think the one thing that the [industry] resistance made me think was that there was no real commercial future so, ‘Whatever, you just kind of do a thing at a time and if that comes out, great, you’ve got a record out,’ without thinking of it in terms of how in 20 years down the road this music could still be making money for you. So I’ve lost out on all that kind of benefit.

"But from an artistic point of view I think it’s fucking great. I dunno, ‘flattering’ seems too twee a word, but it certainly makes me feel quite good. And the thing is, there’s nothing sort of driving it — there’s nothing fashionable about the music — people either just really love it or they don’t. And the ones who really love it, their kind of enthusiasm is sort of uplifting."

I sort of wonder if had there been a bigger scene if that would have made us stronger? I think it would have attracted a lot more attention from the authorities.

Perhaps the fact that The Saints were forced to be outsiders and not part of any particular time or scene might help their music’s timeless feel?

"I don’t know if having a scene would have helped us," Kuepper posits. "It might have, you know? I read what the situation was like in other parts of the world where we lumped in with — say the early-to-mid-‘70s New York scene, or maybe the pre-commercial punk London scene — they had a lot more people involved, whereas we were totally isolated in a way. I sort of wonder if had there been a bigger scene if that would have made us stronger? I think it would have attracted a lot more attention from the authorities, because largely we were ignored by the cops — they just didn’t have a fucking clue, apart from thinking that we were the worst band that ever existed!

"We got closed down once and my father was waiting outside because we had to use his trailer for our gear and they thought he was an irate local, and said to him, ‘Do you think these fucking cunts make money out of this shit?’ We’d actually lost about 50 bucks that night because we lost the hall hire — some fuckwit had broken a window or something, which kind of always happened, and we just didn’t make enough on the door to cover all those expenses.

"But apart from that, there wasn’t really any direct [police harassment] as you’d read about later, because I wasn’t here. But by then ‘punk’ had become kind of a recognisable ‘tabloid thing’ so the cops were able to respond to that, whereas with us they just didn’t have a clue."

And now the wheel has turned a full circle, his hometown of Brisbane — these days more enamoured with its cultural history — recently announcing that a park near his childhood home in Oxley would be re-named Ed Kuepper Park in his honour.

"I’m flattered that anybody thought to do it," Kuepper concedes. "It’s good that my parents are still alive to see it, sort of thing. And I don’t think [The Saints not being accepted] was unique to Brisbane, I just don’t think that what we were doing was embraced anywhere in Australia, to be honest. It was a pretty small scene here while we were an existing band.

We had a lot of internal tensions but we also had almost non-existent managerial advice … we didn't feel like there was much of a future for anything.

"I think younger people kind of got onto it through seeing clips on shows like Rage and stuff like that, and over time it’s sort of filtered through. Probably there are people who had the records and played them to their younger siblings or something. But I don’t think we received a glowing review in Australia before we left; I mean, there might have been one or two that weren’t just total putdowns, but I don’t recall there being much acceptance.

"There were people — there were individuals and fans and stuff, I’m not saying that; there are photos of the band playing in Melbourne in particular and the room was chockers with aspiring musicians and stuff, but it was just really early, and we split up before being really able to take advantage of it. We had a lot of internal tensions but we also had almost non-existent managerial advice on these things. But by the time Prehistoric Sounds came out we didn’t feel like there was much of a future for anything."

Yet here we are 40 years later and there’s still mass excitement about Kuepper revisiting these songs with this new version of The Aints.

"I’m excited too," the singer smiles. "Like I said, what we’re looking at doing is something I don’t often do, and that is actually stay true to a particular kind of approach. That’s what we’re doing with these: we’re out to recapture a bit of that sound that was happening then."