This year marks 40 years since its release, and for the upcoming Leaps and Bounds Music Festival, guitarist Ed Kuepper is going to be sitting down with RRR announcer Tony Biggs to chat about the legacy of the album and what the process of piecing it together was.
“It was pretty quick really,” Kuepper admits. “We booked a few hours in the studio, recorded and mixed it and that was it. It was over before we knew it.” Kuepper said.
As one of the first 20 songs added to the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia, it’s the energetic nature and catchy pop sensibilities that keeps people talking about it all these years later. Yet the success that has followed the song and album wasn’t something that Kuepper ever envisaged.
“I don’t think you can ever predict anything. The process we went through to pick the two songs that went out onto the single a year before the full album was released, was through public vote. We had a small following of about 30 people that would come to those early shows and we asked them what we should release out of our repertoire of 20 or 30 songs, Stranded and No Time were the two winners. We went into releasing the single, in rather a naïve way,” he says.
“We didn’t know what it took to distribute records, but at the same time it had the sense of a single. It had to have a pop aesthetic. I always liked the song, but I wouldn’t have necessarily picked it as a single.”
In a time of Skyhooks and Sherbet being at the top of the charts, The Saints ventured into creating something fresh and new and were seen as leaders in the rock scene in the late ‘70s. With no music scene to be a part of in Brisbane, it was the do-it-yourself mentality of the band that helped push the word out there.
“The music scene in Brisbane was generally cover bands and bands that worked through one or two of the major booking agencies. We did our own shows doing original songs that no one else was doing at the time. We were on the outer of what was happening.”
The format for the upcoming Leaps and Bounds show gives fans an opportunity to see Kuepper in a small setting, playing tracks from his extensive back catalogue over a four decade career. “I’m feeling pretty good about this show, the ‘by request’ thing is a fairly different way of performing because it’s very spontaneous and you hand over a lot of control of the show to the audience. It’s like, ‘Ok, what do you want to hear?’
“I throw myself at the mercy of the audience. These shows will be the last for a while, because I’ve got a few other projects that I’m moving onto doing, but it’s an enjoyable, relaxed, interactive experience.”
Alongside 20 solo albums, Kuepper has also had the opportunity to work on some film scores, most recently for the 2015 film Last Cab To Darwin. Usually, the filming is done to temp tracks that the director uses to capture the desired atmosphere, yet this time around things were a little different.
“I suggested to the director Jeremy Sims, that I could do the temp tracks to film around and over the course of one weekend, we actually finished the audio before the film was shot. He had a strong idea in his head and just by talking about it, we got an idea of what was required visually.”
Earlier this year, a local resident in the suburb where Kuepper grew up in Brisbane, started petitioning to have the local park around the corner from Kuepper’s childhood home named after him. With a possible book in the works and The Aints Play The Saints ’73-’78 tour until the end of the year, the legend of Ed Kuepper is sure to live on for many years to come.