ED KUEPPER
Saturday 20th April, 2000
@ the AnnandaleHotel, SydneyI arrived in time to find Nick Fisher on the stage, fiddling with his drum kit. Unfortunately he was taking it apart, having just played with the supporting act (Rebecca Hancock & the Prison Wives), not assembling it in order to play with Ed.
A lengthy wait then ensued, during which I beered up and staked out a spot at the foot of the stage. Kuepper's entrance, when it came, was very low key and he mockingly invited the audience to make more of his arrival, which everyone dutifully did. Then he swung into his big hit, the title track of the surprise breakthrough album "Honey Steel's Gold", after which he could do no wrong.
When that first song was over, a voice in the crowd immediately asked him to "play it again", but he demurred, assuring the supplicant (in a tone at once both derisive and self-depreciating) that "they'll all sound the same tonight". And so, in a way, they did.
One thing about Ed Kuepper is that he's never tried to sound like anyone else, including the bands from his own past. The moment you think you know what to expect, he's off doing something else: expect stripped back punk and he'll add a horn section; expect a string section and he'll go electronic; expect full on rock and he'll go solo acoustic on you.
It was therefore surprising how consistent the whole set sounded; how seamlessly a decade and a half's worth of orthodox songs, adventurous compositions and inspired experiments by one of Australia's most idiosyncratic writer-performers fitted together as if they'd all been written in a period of a few months for one specific project.
Tonight was an evening of full-throated four piece rock action set against an industrial strength ambient background. To call it hypnotic doesn't begin to do it justice. It was a collision of crashing guitar and rolling keyboards over driving rhythms, creating a trancey but tense atmosphere. Instead of degenerating into repetitive techo, the music stayed hard and firmly up at the rock end of the sound spectrum, any emerging grooves being given a new spin each time, toward a sophisticated but austere pop tending toward avant garde blues (which completely bypassed that blind alley known as jazz fusion).
Sometimes raw and chugging like a dilapidated chainsaw in an old growth forest, sometimes polished and purring like an electric carving knife slicing through the family roast, Ed's guitar cut its way through the dense sonic jungle created by the rest of the band. Ed seemed to be inventing the music from note to note as he went along, pulling his inspiration out of the thin air (and occasionally not so thin air, due to a roadie's sporadically over enthusiastic use of the fog machine, which sent some asthma sufferers close to the stage searching anxiously in their bags for their ventolin inhalers).
Although concentrating mainly on the period from "Honey Steel's Gold" to "Character Assassination", most albums in his lengthy solo career got at least a nod (the non-instrumentals anyway), except for "Everybody's Got To" alas, and this despite persistent cries from some sad obsessive in the crowd for "Too Many Clues" (personally I had my hopes up for "Burned My Fingers", but we both came away empty handed).
Coincidentally or not, as the case may be, "Everybody's Got To" was the album on which tonight's support act Rebecca Hancock sang backing vocals, making the exclusion of all of its songs even more mystifying. On the other hand, it wasn't as if he was short of material - in fact it seems there was only room in the set for one song from his most recent album ("Smile... Pacific", now some eighteen months old - for someone who seemed to be releasing about three albums a year at one stage, Ed's been very quiet lately), that being the wonderfully cynical "I Still Call This Failure", which contains more than just a mere nod in the direction of Peter Allen's "I Still Call Australia Home".
From a playful "When She's Down", introduced as something originally intended for his side project of a Sonny & Cher tribute band and performed this evening with a definite tang of "The Beat Goes On" about it, to an aggressive and ominous "Sleepy Head", sounding this time round like someone bravely poking a hibernating bear with a cattle prod, Ed took the band on an eccentric tour of career milestones which included "Sea Air", "King Of Vice", "Real Wild Life", "Horse Under Water", "It's Lunacy" and the mocking "La Di Doh", ultimately delivering us right back to the beginning of his solo career for a little "Electrical Storm" to close the show.
Except of course a show can't end without a couple of encores, so the band dutifully came back for a cheerful "Black Ticket Day" followed by a rousing "The Way I Made You Feel".
Even that was not the end though. As the rhythm section departed (drummer Dave Astin and bassist and Oxley Creek Playboy Alex Compton), Ed and keyboard player John Gauci made no move to leave, although significantly Ed did take off his guitar and put it down. Were we going to get another song, or not? Yes, we were! Standing like some forlorn Las Vegas crooner closing out the late night show to an audience of bleary-eyed gamblers in a seamy theatrette adjoining the Low Rollers Room at one of the less salubrious casinos, Ed took up the microphone in his right hand, cigarette and schooner glass both secure in his left hand, for a soulful rendition of "Everything I've Got Belongs To You".
It was a performance that seemed to wring every possible nuance and ounce of emotion out of the song, while at the same time remaining detached and professional. This was no Wayne Newton superficial show bizz act; this was closer to Frank Sinatra in his prime (although it's unlikely that the chairman of the board would have been standing there with his clothes quite so visibly drenched in sweat as Ed's were...), working some of that old black magic in front of the mesmerized crowd and selling the song as if it was his own. Of course, in this case the song was Ed's own, but he let us all have a lend of it for the time it took to sing it.
I like it when a show ends emphatically; when there's no doubt after the last number that it was the last number. It's even better when you feel that you've had all you could reasonably ask for and then some ("Burned My Fingers" notwithstanding). That was the case tonight. - John McPharlin
