A Trick Or Two

When Brisbane musician Ed Kuepper was gifted the Grant McLennan Lifetime Achievement Award at the Queensland Music Awards last August, few in attendance would have been able to mount an argument against the honour being wholly justified – for the best part of 40 years now he's been a mainstay of the Australian music scene, first as guitarist with seminal rockers The Saints, then as the creative force behind the more avant-garde Laughing Clowns, and later assembling a fine solo career with a variety of backing bands and musicians. Only a couple of years ago he was drafted into The Bad Seeds on guitar, and things don't get much badder than that. Indeed, on the night in question only the great man himself seemed to have slight reservations about the honour.

“It was a combination of a lot of things – it was very special to me, and kind of a surprise,” Kuepper recalls thoughtfully. “It's also quite ironic in some ways, because Grant was younger than me and I let him sleep on my sofa when The GoBs first went down to Sydney. Then it also kind of hits, like, 'Fuck, lifetime achievement award? That kind of has the ring of death about it!'' he chuckles. “I'm not quite finished just yet. It's funny, I was up on the stage accepting the award but I couldn't really think of anything to say. I hadn't actually tried to work out a speech or anything but sometimes I can improvise, but my mind just flew back to when The Saints came last in the talent competition at Festival Hall in 1975 or something – to go from that to this!”

And Kuepper has runs on the board to back his assertion that he's still got plenty to offer, most vividly his brand new album, Second Winter. A collaboration with his former drummer Mark Dawson – who reunited with Kuepper last year for a month-long run of shows which went so well it morphed into taking up the best part of a year – Second Winter finds Kuepper revisiting songs from his first two solo albums, Electrical Storm (1985) and Rooms Of The Magnificent (1986), but in an entirely new manner more reminiscent of his more recent approach to recording. The bare bones of the songs are stripped-back and sparse but beautifully augmented by subtle ambient noise, resulting in a whole new tone and feel. Kuepper has no reservations about tackling these songs again, even if the albums (particularly Electrical Storm) remain revered parts of his canon.

“Yeah I know, it's just that I've changed now,” he muses. “That album was done a long time ago, and one of the things that I've found with those songs in particular is that I've been playing that stuff live over the years – not at every show, and some of the songs on Second Winter I haven't played live since the '80s – but one of the things that struck me was that I was playing these songs like Electrical Storm and often doing them quite differently, and they were songs that people responded to almost in any way that they were presented. I could play around with different versions onstage, so what I wanted to do with the record was basically capture what we were doing live, but to take it a little bit further with the orchestration and the electronics.

“The field recordings are mostly ambient desert recordings that Julian [Knowles – engineer/co-producer] did – although there's a couple of things that I did. There's sounds like fencing wire being recorded and stuff like that. Julian had some boxes of DATs and I'd constructed some drone material – some of which we'd been using live, it was pre-recorded and triggered at various times – and I played it to him, and he said, 'Wow, that sounds like stuff I was doing long before you mate!' and he played me some of his stuff and there was a real similarity between some of it, so we incorporated that into some of the recordings, on Car Headlights in particular.”

Ed Kuepper will be playing the following shows:

Thursday 17 January - Lizottes, Newcastle NSW
Friday 18 January - Notes Live, Sydney NSW
Saturday 19 January - Clarendon Hotel,