Ed Kuepper (The Saints)
See also this rocking video of “I’m Stranded”
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in Germany and raised in Brisbane, Australia. Brisbane is a sprawling, county town, its fantastic. Sydney is a big city by any standards, its cosmopolitan, multicultural. But Brisbane is almost exclusively white, very conservative, reactionary. I don’t know if you have anything like it here. In terms of area, its the third biggest city in the world, a massive sprawl.
What sort of music did you grow up with?
My parents listened to a lot of music. We didn’t have a record player, but on the radio there was a lot of country music, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash, Elvis of course, and early sixties pop music. Later of course, when the Beatles came to prominence, there was a vast influx of British music. I recall commercial radio in Australia being very open. Crazy World of Arthur Brown was played on daytime radio quite a lot.
The first band I ever paid to see was the Kinks, and they were great, but they went over abysmally. I loved their songs. This was when Apeman was in the charts.
Was the record shop the first job you had?
Yeah, it was quite exciting for about six months, when I’d nicked everything that was worth nicking. This was ’73 and ’74.
The Saints started in ’73, while we were still at high school, and went on for a couple of years. It was difficult to carry on, Brisbane didn’t have a club scene, we had to book the retired servicemen’s hall, and say we were a 60-40 band, cos they wouldn’t take a rock band. We’d always lose our deposit. That was the only way you could get to play, unless you were a cover band. We did play a lot of covers early on, Ike and Tina Turner, a lot of R’n'B, Wilson Pickett songs, and a lot of 50s novelty songs. Connie Francis was a big favourite of mine. We did a lot of Bo Diddley songs, cos they were easy. We did I Need You, and Where Have All The Good Times Gone? a few Bob Dylan songs. Whatever was around.
It was myself, Chris and Ivor, we always had a hard job getting a fourth member. Ivor tended to go from piano to bass to drums to piano, depending on what was needed. It took until ’75 before we had a solid line-up. We didn’t play very often. There was no pressure to do anything very fast.
What sort of reactions did you get when you started playing out?
Mixed. We got a phenomenally strong reaction from about forty people who would religiously follow us around and carry our gear for us, that sort of thing, and an incredibly hostile reaction from the rest of the population. That was true for a couple of years.
How did you develop that ‘wall of sound’?
That was because we were a three piece, with a very limited pianist, and I had to do the lot, and I wanted a bigger sound, so…
Were you aware of Iggy Pop?
Oh yeah, I got Funhouse when it came out, and I got hold of one side of a double album called Underground, which had Frank Zappa, the Animals, also the Velvet Underground, and that was my exposure to the Velvet Underground. You couldn’t get any of their records then, but I eventually got four albums once Lou Reed made his comeback. The Stooges and the MC5 were locally released, Astor had the first Stooges album, but it was deleted by the time I was working there.
Were all those bands really important then?
It embarrasses me to talk about them now, cos everybody lists those bands, but then, they were really quite unique, inspiring. Funhouse was a magnificent record, and I listen to it now, although I didn’t like much of what they inspired.
What happened after you settled the line-up in ’75?
We improved dramatically when I realised we had to make a record, cos nobody was going to pay attention if we didn’t. We went in to record the first on in ’76. Hearing ourselves back on something better than a small cassette player was really interesting, and the band developed very quickly over the next eighteen months. We recorded the first album in two days. Initially there was a lot of resistance from EMI Australia, who were getting pressure from outside to sign us.
Eight of the songs were demos, which is what we were supposed to be doing in the studio, and when they had them, they said, right, let’s put this out, and record a single. I was quite happy about that, to get out of Brisbane on my own terms. If I had to do it again, perhaps I would have spent more time on it.
By the time we’d finished that record, we’d changed. When we did the second album, the band had developed. All three records are different, I don’t think we could have repeated that record.
In the eighteen months after we left Australia, a lot of bands came up who were influenced by the English music, but we hadn’t been influenced by English rock at all.
On Stranded, there’s a very interesting slide effect on the guitar. What did you record that on?
I tended to overdrive the amp quite a bit, and I tended to use a lot of open strings on my playing, playing high on the fretboard with open strings. It came down to not playing straight chords. You could notate the Stooges songs, and then play them, but there’s something else happening, which is also what I noticed with blues players, there’s something else going on that makes it interesting., The Velvet Underground also did that splendidly. I don’t think many people could play European Son that way.
What happened after you recorded Stranded?
We recorded the single in may ’76 and we had it pressed up by Astor records, and it was out a couple of months later. Five hundred and fifty copies, an exceedingly rare record. It got a bad reaction in Australia, which was good because it seemed to confirm that we shouldn’t be staying there. The first review we got back was from Juke magazine, an abysmal slagging, and three days later we got some of the English press came over, and Sounds had made it single of the week, and then the next week it was single of the week again. It was very exciting. It made the ABC news, that this unknown Australian band had created a stir. The reviews we had in Australia weren’t even sure that we were from Australia, and it took until after we had left that we made any kind of impact there.
There was bits of news filtering through about this new music scene that was developing over in England, but I knew nothing about it.
It must have been very odd, doing what you were doing in isolation, and suddenly finding that it connected with something else.
Yeah. By the time we had got here, we6d worked in the southern states of Australia for a couple of months, and become a stronger identity. When we got here, we didn’t fit in very comfortably. After getting over my initial excitement of being in London, I wasn’t incredibly impressed by the music scene, which was very contrived. We got here in early ’77, by which time the initial spirit had probably already died out, and there were too many people slavishly following after.
I think ’76 must have been good here, in the same way that ’75 and ’76 were good in terms of the personal impact we were having in Australia, even though there wasn’t the mass acceptance that the stuff got here. We felt strong and good about what we were doing, we were rubbing so many people the wrong way.
Did you get attacked at all in Australia?
Yeah, there were a couple of times, not for the reasons that people were being attacked here. We didn’t have spiky hairdo’s. It was people being outraged that we had the audacity to actually be onstage. The they would become provocative, and elicit a response from us. Chris often got himself into trouble which other people had to get him out of.
My favourite record was This Perfect Day, a very nihilistic record. Did you write that when you were still in Australia?
I think I wrote it on Christmas Day at my parents’ place when everybody else had gone to church, on my father’s classical guitar. Chris wrote the lyrics to it, so you’d have to speak to him about that.
We were angry for quite a long time, probably until Eternally Yours, when the anger manifested itself inwardly. By the time we did the second album, the press had turned against us, and the population generally seemed to as well, which was ironic because the band were probably playing better then, all of the energy was still there, and honed, less spontaneous but to me it seemed stronger.
By the time we did Prehistoric Sounds, the band had stopped playing, Chris had left the band, and we were having trouble with EMI. They were talking about bringing over this guy from the states who did sketches of us while we were talking. We didn’t look New Wave.
I managed to persuade Chris not to announce his departure. We did the third album and as soon as it was released, we announced that the band had split. I just wanted the record out. I knew nothing would happen with it. This was July or August, ’78.
So you did three albums in just over a year?
Yeah. It was great. I’d read things about the Rolling Stones coming off the road and recording two albums at once, and that really impressed me, that output.
Do you think that with what was happening, time was telescoped, and you went through a natural cycle much more quickly than you might have done?
I think so. Coming over here certainly made us grow up, turned us into sophisticated international types… I always had the desire to listen to music that not many other people are listening to, so when we got here and everybody was listening to what I’d been listening to, I started listening to jazz and bluegrass, and hear different instruments. My first hearing Archie Shepp made me want to use horns in a different way to the way we’d used them on Eternally Yours. We expanded.
Who were the main punk bands in Australia, after you left?
I missed out on what most people call the heyday, but I saw the photographs and heard the records. There was a band in Brisbane called the Leftovers, who I didn’t like. Nihilistic in a way that I felt was a complete waste of time. There were a lot of small bands, nobody did very much at all. The Young Charlatans in Melbourne had people who went on to do other things, Roland Howard of the Boys Next Door and the Birthday Party. The independent scene matured with the Laughing Clowns and the Go-Betweens, a scene which was creative rather than imitative.
Do you thing there was a kind of nihilism at that time that people had to pass through?
A very brief time. I think its something you can only do when you’re about seventeen. But you make a decision that you want to survive, and do other things with your life.