The last time many music fans saw Ed Kuepper in the flesh, it was in a very different guise to normal. The former Saint, occasional Laughing Clown and current Bad Seed was up onstage recently as a part of the Melbourne Festival, one of many musicians and bands paying tribute to the late, great Rowland S. Howard in the critically acclaimed Pop Crimes show. Although Kuepper did not make it out to the Sydney leg of the show, he was incredibly proud of the Melbourne run.
“I thought they went really well – I thought the show was great,” he says, now back in his native Brisbane. “I really enjoyed what everyone else was doing. I sat side of stage each night to watch the other performers, and I thought they were just wonderful. Rowland would have been amazed at it all, I think. We met around 1977 – he was actually at the very first Saints show. He used to come along to every one that he could.”
Despite counting Howard as a friend and someone he was a fan of, Kuepper is reluctant to identify the former Birthday Party guitarist as a great influence on him. According to Kuepper, the two are not mutually inclusive. “As much as I loved and respected what he did, I can’t say that it influenced me,” he explains. “I think you get to a certain point where it’s a combination of being open-minded to what’s going on and largely establishing your own territory. I think I’ve managed to do that. That’s what I draw upon. I don’t go out of my way to listen to music in order to influence or inspire me. If I’m looking for some inspiration to create, then I’ll go into a completely different zone – I might read a book or watch a film, look at some artwork. Anything that’s away from music, really.”
After a run of by-request shows around the traps in solo mode, Kuepper will return to Sydney next month as a part of Sydney Festival. The show is a collaboration with members of the Sydney Chamber Orchestra, which will see them present works from his canon in a way that will give new life to songs that have more or less become standards to him.
“We got approached to put something together,” says Kuepper. “We wanted to do something that would be really unique and special – something that won’t be repeated. What I wanted to do was introduce instrumentation that I haven’t used much onstage before, which is where the chamber quartet come into it. I wanted to cover a broad range of what I’d done in the past, but I also wanted to look at that material in a completely new way. On one hand it’s a retrospective, but very little of the songs will be performed in the way they originally were. It’s not a nostalgia show, basically.”
Kuepper also warns that it may take the audience a little longer than usual to recognise when he’s playing one of their favourites from earlier in his career. “What I tend to do with older songs, whenever I happen to be playing them, is look at whether that song still has some form of relevance to me as a person today. I look at how I feel actually playing that song. It’s got to reflect what I’m doing now as opposed to what I was doing 20, 30 years ago. Some songs can be changed quite significantly.”
Catc him atSydney Festival 2015atCity Recital Hall Angel PlaceonSaturday January 24, tickets online.
