“IF YOU think the name of the label’s bad you should see it … uggh! God [sic] only knows where, what, when or why The Saints came marching in from. I can imagine the Stones doing demos this bad when they’d just left school. The mix [on Stranded] is bad, the playing’s bad, the label’s bad, the name of the band’s bad, but as they say … we all got to start somewhere and for The Saints it is a start, but only just.”
It is a good job, then, that guitarist, songwriter and The Saints co-founder Ed Kuepper brushed off such brickbats (written, incidentally, by onetime music reviewer Jamie Dunn, of Agro fame) or we might have missed out on a musical career of such singular vision and scope.
Punk before punk was even a thing, Brisbane’s The Saints were fully formed by 1974 when the spiky haired, safety-pin wearing UK punk groups arrived in the summer of ’76.
Barely into his twenties, the German-born musician even then had the nous to distance himself from the more manufactured sections of the British scene: “… Only an a******* would have associated himself with that.”
An attendee of Oxley High School and Corinda High School, Kuepper exited The Saints after three albums, formed Laughing Clowns and then went solo in 1985 with debut album Electrical Storm.
Kuepper is now rereleasing his weighty back catalogue, beginning with the reissue of this long-out-of-print, seminal LP and revered masterwork Honey Steel’s Gold (1991).
Both will be out on vinyl from June 9, with CD and streaming offerings available too.
- Kuepper remembers that his creative life around the time of recording Storm felt fragmented and flat.
“I was sort of angry, disappointed, and depressed. The last tour with Laughing Clowns had been absolutely awful,” he said.
“I was contemplating leaving the music industry forever, so my feelings were to just get away from what I had known and to reinvent myself.
“Storms has a starkness to it, it’s a very black and white affair. It’s got a kind of desolate sound, almost like a small-town feel kind of album even though it was recorded in the middle of Sydney.
“I was just setting out as a solo musician and was married with an infant son.
“There might have been ideas of me being a rock’n’roll superstar around this time but I was getting up at 6am and going to bed at 9pm.
“The recording sessions were done in this sort of twilight zone kind of period.
“What struck me while remastering Storm was just how great Nick Fisher’s drums are.
“I didn’t have a drummer at the time, so I basically went into the studio and laid down a vocal and rhythm track and then we layered the bass and the rhythm guitar. “The drums got put on last. And Nick just plays brilliantly, he just locks in.”
Several years later, Kuepper would help to break down the commercial barriers that faced independent music, earning a long stay in the chart (peaking at No. 28) with album Honey Steel’s Gold.
“The idea for this album developed over a number of years and it never got articulated in a way that I could do anything with it, but the basic idea was that it would be the greatest kind of soundtrack to an exploitation movie, like the type of films Quentin Tarantino actually realised with Inglourious Basterds.
“It was about this woman, Honey Steel, and her gold, and how the Nazis were trying to get it off her.
“I was writing singles and B-sides for a Dutch record company that went bust. The album came together organically because I had written enough singles and B-sides for half an album’s worth of songs and then I wrote the rest.
“It was a bit of a gamble because, if it didn’t sell, it could really have hurt us financially.”
Kuepper need not have worried, the album spending 12 weeks in the Australian charts in 1992 and earning an ARIA nomination.
Reviewing the LP in Rolling Stone Australia, John Encarnacao wrote: “Much of this album seems to be about the conjuring of mood rather than unfolding songs in a narrative manner.”
Kuepper said remastering the albums for the extensive reissue campaign had proved a Herculean effort.
“We had to find things that were all sort of all over the place, you know, missing tapes, damaged tapes, missing artwork,” he said.
“It has been quite a job but I feel very happy now that these works exist once again.
“One of the most remarkable things during this whole process, going through all this stuff that had been hidden away for so long, was how we ended up discovering an unreleased album from the mid-’90s, which I’m seriously looking at putting out this year or next maybe.
“Tribune readers have the scoop on this one because I have not told anyone about this exciting news before.
“It will be called Mr Miracle, and it has this whole bunch of songs written in another time and place, ready to be dropped on the world for the very first time.”
Ed Kuepper, September 28, Brisbane, Princess Theatre.