Live Review: Ed Kuepper & Band

27 January 2015 | 12:05 pm | Ross Clelland

Ed Kuepper delivered something special to Sydney.

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The string quartet is in place. There are too many gongs and such to call that guy just a drummer – he’d be a percussionist then. Add a grand piano and sometime flugelhorn player. Oh, and that’s the bass player from the The Sunnyboys. In rather formal sit-down surrounds, this is obviously not your average Ed Kuepper gig.

For the purposes of the Sydney Festival, Edmund has been encouraged to rifle through his back catalogue(s) and set some of his better-known – and indeed, a few lesser-known ones – tunes with textures different from his usual minimalist mode, as provided by members of the well-regarded Sydney Chamber Orchestra.  

Sitting himself among his typical nest of guitars, knobs and buttons – and a couple of glasses of good single malt – an atmospheric Horse Under Water eases us into the event. Backdropped with projections of wife Judi Dransfield’s sometimes Rorschach-like linocuts and splashes of watercolour, familiar songs become bigger, get different feelings. The strings are a bed for Kuepper’s familiar guitar churn, but then an outbreak of pizzicato plucking or something approaching gypsy fiddle takes Honey Steel’s Gold somewhere else.

All Of These Things is a thing of longing and beauty, Kuepper diffusing the sentimentality with dry observations about “the poor promotion” of most of his albums. Perhaps unexpected highlights are a couple of songs from the more recent Jean Lee concept album-cum-opera, Miracles in particular given added drama and dynamics in this ensemble form. Electrical Storm ebbs and flows between the elements while, from another era, The Laughing Clowns’ Collapse Board – “voted the most depressing song of the 1980s” according to its author – is given melancholy edge with outbreaks of that aforementioned flugelhorn.

The final Eternally Yours soars and swirls almost hypnotically, and you realise you’ve seen something special.