Live Review: The Aints!

It’s a rather strange celebration tonight, the release of an album that by nature of its inception summons ghosts of Brisbane past, taking us back 40 years and recasting our now vibrant city as a lethargic, backwards place one once aspired to escape from rather than embrace. Ed Kuepper has cast his eyes back over the earliest material that he’s had lying around wherever he keeps his unfinished songs, and reworked this long-neglected music – which stretches temporally from late-‘60s high school scrawls right through to songs written as his pioneering punk band The Saints was imploding in London in 1978 – for his current outfit The Aints!, whose new album The Church Of Simultaneous Existence aspires to present these songs with the vibrancy and raw power envisioned at their inception.

That original incarnation of The Saints, with Kuepper as the engine room, left behind three revered albums of increasingly sophisticated punk rock, and the idea that in an alternative reality where the band didn’t get ripped apart by internal friction and external apathy these songs could have perhaps… just maybe… constituted the fourth Saints album and already been well-known classics is a head-scratcher of the highest order.

Despite it being advertised that there would be no supports tonight, early attendees to The Triffid are treated to a seemingly impromptu set by Colonel Kramer & The Eamon Dilworth Brass Ensemble. This, as it transpires, is Kuepper in solo mode aided by titular trumpeter Eamon Dilworth, who helped arrange the brass on the new recordings and is part of the horn trio that gives The Aints! their soul music tinge in the live realm. Why? Well, because his solo canon is awesome and he can, so why not?

But it’s The Aints! the crowd are here to see tonight, and it’s a tight-sounding unit they receive from the get-go as the band rip into a rumbling take on Swing For The Crime, which builds slowly to a massive crescendo to set the tone from the outset. This first set is ostensibly structured to revisit and celebrate The Saints' first three albums, and when in the midst of the ensuing This Perfect Day Kuepper spits the refrain “Don’t need no one to tell me what I don’t already know” with genuine venom just before the horns kick in the end result is transcendent, his anger apparent and apparently genuine. 

We saw this incarnation of The Aints!’ very first show together at The Tivoli just over a year ago as part of Brisbane Festival’s celebration to mark the 40-year anniversary of The Saints’ debut (I’m) Stranded, and the quartet – Kuepper joined by bassist Peter Oxley (Sunnyboys), drummer Paul Larsen (The Celibate Rifles, The New Christs) and jazz pianist Alister Spence – have definitely gelled as a unit with intervening tours, a real (and rocking) affinity now readily apparent. A swinging take on Story Of Love leads into a sombre, foreboding reading of The Prisoner, which still showcases Kuepper’s nimble guitar skills, a nuance long existing in his armoury alongside the noise.

The singer explains that this time they’re focussing on The Saints’ third album Prehistoric Sounds – which dropped sometime towards the end of 1978, quite when nobody can agree, but roughly 40 years ago on the nose – and accordingly we’re treated to a tight version of The Chameleon, the relatively jaunty Everything’s Fine and a scabrous Brisbane (Security City), still dripping with the sweaty indolence of its time. Among all of this we’re also treated to some tracks from the second album Eternally Yours (which had landed earlier in 1978) including a riotous Know Your Product – the prescient anthem surely among the top handful of songs to ever emanate from this city, the lyrics still sneeringly relevant to this day – and a poignant take on Memories Are Made Of This. 

Then to complete this initial walk down memory lane they go right back to that elemental first record, the upbeat, catchy Messin’ With The Kid resonating a detached cool that very few can pull off before Spence and the horns depart and the remaining trio scorch through a ferocious take of that elemental first single (I’m) Stranded. Unveiling the incendiary standard does more than bring proceedings to a momentary halt, it triggers an almost primal tribalism that’s been lurking below the surface all night: despite the song’s surface anti-Brisbane sentiments a cursory glance around the grinning, dancing throng and you can basically witness people’s hearts and minds swelling in real time with hometown pride and bonhomie, a glorious place to be for those stinging couple of minutes.

The ensuing break between sets seems somewhat forced but the crowd’s energy remains undiminished as the band returns to the fray, this time to partake in a run-through of The Church Of Simultaneous Existence itself. The album has only been out a few weeks and it’s noticeable immediately that while the songs aren’t as familiar as their forebears they’re just as powerful and connect with the crowd just as readily: maybe the booze is kicking in but there seems just as much love for the propulsive opener Red Aces, the menacing title track and the heartfelt You’ll Always Walk Alone as there was for (nearly) any of the first set’s “classics”. 

These new songs sound like the timeless soul-punk classics they kinda are – or that they definitely could have or should have been – and the band by now is in red-hot form, the horn-heavy You Got The Answer tumbling perfectly into the beautiful balladry of Country Song In G, given extra spice by Spence’s gorgeous cascading keyboard lines. Towards the back-end of the album the way that the raucous S-O-S ’75 segues into the contemplative, almost avant-garde Demo Girl and then back into the primal swagger of Goodnight Ladies (I Hear A Sound Without) is amazing in the flesh, that dismissive final song descending into a massive jam-out through which Kuepper’s siren guitars slice with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. The oddly titled The Rise And Fall Of James Hoopnoch Eefil brings things home with a triumphant sense of joie de vivre, a fine climax to a sensational evening of new vintage rock’n’roll that only seems cooler with the abundant context.

There’s more, of course; nights like these almost demand encores. Kuepper offers a wry, “Are you ready to rock, Brisbane?” before the band muddy the water even further by tearing into a cover of The Laughing Clowns’ titular The Laughing Clowns – this song was famously proposed as a single for The Saints by Kuepper but vetoed by the band’s frontman Chris Bailey as they fell apart, eventually lending its name to Kuepper’s first post-Saints band as well as appearing in its early repertoire – which in essence also brings it into this mooted discussion about the mystical fourth Saints album which never was, the elephant in the room tonight on so many levels.

It’s hard to stop pondering indefinables such as, “What would these songs have sounded like with Bailey on vocals?” as they lift the roof off with the cover of River Deep Mountain High that they made their own decades ago, questions lingering even as they’re coaxed back for a second riotous encore of Nights In Venice that strips back time and momentarily transports us back to a mid-‘70s Brisbane: a stifling place that acted as kindling for creatives who felt walled-in by its conservatism, many soon seeking solace and a home for their expression on far-flung shores.

Essentially tonight we’ve seen the great Ed Kuepper not just showcasing his many and disparate talents but continuing the work he began here over 40 years ago: compiling a body of art which will one day be looked back on as virtually unrivalled in both scope and excellence. We’ve been taken back to a Brisbane from another time, the one seen by many as a cultural backwater, one we’ve (hopefully) long left behind. We looked forwards and backwards at the same time, but ultimately rock’n’roll exists in the here and now and tonight there weren’t many bands on the planet better than The Aints!, something that everyone involved can feel rightfully proud about.