Eternally Ours

The prospect of playing a show where the audience can request on the spot what songs you’re going to tackle would be daunting for any musician, but for iconic Brisbane singer-songwriter Ed Kuepper – whose near four-decade career includes The Saints’ seminal early stanza, his more avant-garde stint fronting The Laughing Clowns and also an exhaustive solo repertoire, along with other detours along the journey – the trepidation of facing such a feat must be verging on seismic.

Or so you’d imagine. The unflappable Kuepper has recently completed a run of similar affairs down south – following a similar tour last year – so is completely unbothered by the impending undertaking, to the point where he even seems genuinely excited about revisiting the concept.

“It went really well,” he recalls of the recently competed ‘Solo And By Request’ foray. “It did what I hoped it would do, which was get the audience involved and instigate a way of looking at songs in a fairly spontaneous way. One of the conditions on the request aspect is that I’m not going to play the recorded versions, I’m going to play the song in a way that seems appropriate for the evening. So they’re always a bit different, and it doesn’t always work as an exercise in nostalgia – it actually makes it like an interactive art experience rather than a nostalgic night down at the RSL club.”

Kuepper hasn’t cribbed by working up new arrangements of his massive repertoire beforehand either; he’s genuinely reinterpreting his own material spontaneously each evening.

“There’s too many songs to have new versions worked out [beforehand],” he smiles. “I’d probably say that I’ve never played the same song twice. There might be some that were a little closer to a version that I might have played a few nights ago to others, but they can vary quite substantially sometimes, not just for the sake of doing it, but for what feels right in the mood of the overall performance. For instance, if I played a song which has gone a particular way and has a particular atmosphere or rhythm or something to it then someone calls out something else, then I might want to extend that mood that had just been established, or I might want to break away entirely and move onto something else because the overall thing has still got to work as a show, so there’s got to be a certain dynamic to the way that songs interact.

“I wanted people to request what they wanted to hear rather than necessarily call out something they thought was the most obscure song, or the most well known song, so the range of requests was pretty phenomenal. It veered from songs that I was impressed that anybody actually knew – things that were maybe B-sides to singles which never ended up on albums, those kind of things – to the reasonably well known songs.”

The tour is in support of Kuepper’s latest release, Return Of The Mail Order Bridegroom, which finds him revisiting songs from his career (plus some choice covers) in acoustic mode, inspired by what fans requested on last year’s run.

“All of the songs that are on the album – with the exception of [The Walker Brothers’] No Regrets – were songs that were requested,” he explains. “I didn’t pick them in terms of what was most requested, they were just ones that stood out to me. The shows were recorded, and I was initially going to release a couple of volumes in my live bootleg series, but I had this idea that it might be better addressed as a more cohesive studio statement, because it is part of a series of albums that I’m in the process of doing – it’s the second in the series, the first one being Second Winter [2012] – and there will be another one maybe at the end of this year, depending on how things go. But I wanted something that was really cohesive as an actual album and presented with a bit more gravity than a live release might have done, showing what I took out of that batch of shows. The arrangements are all pretty different to any version that’s been done before.”

Kuepper has become expert at performing solo in recent times, but does he find it difficult being so evocative up there on his lonesome?

“From my own perspective, I kind of think that bands are good when you’re in high school,” he offers. “I think that if you can make it work on your own you’re doing something quite significant in a way. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a fan of bands – although I’ll qualify that by saying that there’s a lot of bands that I like, but the idea of ‘the gang’ kind of thing I moved on from a long time ago. And I do think that’s a high school thing really, and there’s nothing wrong with that but I’m not in high school anymore.

“I like the flexibility of playing either solo or with a very small ensemble. It’s not like I don’t like playing with other people or won’t ever involve other people in what I do, but there’s just something really direct about it and at the same time I’ve never gone out and made the solo performance really small – the way that I play, the way that I use ambient effects and things like that, makes the experience more orchestral than some guy sitting in a corner playing an acoustic guitar,” he pauses before laughing. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I might do that at some stage too.”