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Ed Kuepper.
 Ed
Kuepper, pickaxe and shovel ever by his side, has been digging
up his past in recent interviews. "I guess I go into it with
my eyes open, given that my three most recent releases have
been anthologies," he muses.
For the uninitiated, Kuepper is one of the largely unsung heroes of Australian music. He first came to prominence in Brisbane punk outfit The Saints, whose landmark first single (I'm) Stranded opened the door for independent music in this country. The Saints advanced rapidly over a period of only a few short years (just listen to the amazing Know Your Product), before Kuepper left to form the much-underrated Laughing Clowns. Then, through the '90s, Kuepper became a super-prolific solo artist. If you'd like a more extensive history, you can now pick up multiple-CD anthologies of all three periods of his career: 'All Times Through Paradise' (The Saints), 'Cruel But Fair', (Laughing Clowns) and most recently 'This Is The Magic Mile'.
Kuepper dismisses suggestions this last anthology of his solo output marks an end to his career. "I can understand why some people might see it like that. My solo career goes on. I suppose the anthology kind of looks at things up until the late '90s... I'm not one-hundred percent sure that I see from now on as a new chapter. I see it as a continuation in the same way as I saw the Laughing Clowns being a continuation from The Saints and my solo stuff being a continuation from the Clowns. Everything flows on. I'm not sure whether I've reached some moment of awakening or self-realisation where I say, 'all of that stuff is now in the past, from now on it's a new day dawning.'"
I put to him that his solo career seemed much more of a continuation from the Clowns, than the Clowns from the Saints. Again, my perspective is politely shelved. "I think if you listen to the work that the Saints did at the end, that you'd see a fairly distinct continuation with the Clowns from that. I do, anyway. I think the actual realisation of what we did is audible as well. To me, if you listen to the three Saints albums - which I think illustrate a fairly rapid development - and then listen to the Clowns directly after the third Saints album, I'd be surprised if somebody listening to that didn't see a continuation. It was maybe more of a jump from, say, the second Saints album to the third, but then there was a longer period of time."
I wonder aloud whether this exhaustive anthology process was, for Kuepper, the musical equivalent of writing an autobiography. "I haven't thought of actually writing an autobiography; but yeah, I suppose that's true. It seems logical after the Saints box set for the Clowns to also be addressed, and then it followed that there should be some kind of retrospective of my solo stuff. But yeah, I don't see it as the end or anything. I suppose people do write more than one autobiography..." And people don't write an autobiography after they're dead, either.
Finally, I mention the controversy across the pacific of autobiographers who have manipulated their memoirs to dramatic effect. I suggest that, perhaps, the use of remastering and reordering on these anthologies could be seen as an equivalent distortion of history. Kuepper, finally, agrees.
"That's a really good question, actually. It's something that I thought about a lot. With The Saints there was fairly extensive remastering which, if I were to go back to those tapes now, I might do slightly less to, in a way. I've become a bit more purist than maybe I was a couple of years ago. What we endeavour to do with all of the things that have been remastered is to present them in what we considered to be their best light at the time, and I'm starting to take a more warts-and-all approach to things now. With the Clowns, I suppose the entire compilation was presented as an overall body of work, I didn't present it in chronological order. The other issue with the Clowns, and even talking about chronology, was that often times the songs were written way before they were recorded. For instance, on the Clowns last album, 'Ghost Of An Ideal Life', there were songs that predated the first Saints album. We did, though, include information as to the original releases of those songs so people do have the option to burn their own version."
Ben Revi
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Ed Kuepper & Jeffrey Wegener play at the Famous Spiegeltent on Mon 6 March.
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The latest issue
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