It’s coincidental that Cupples is feeling slightly shady himself when we speak over the phone the night after one of his shows. “Oh my goodness, I’m a bit raspy and coughy,” he says good naturedly. “I do have a ridiculously loud voice, and I really try to look after my voice.” Cupples’ voice is certainly loud, but also totally soaring in a way that makes you immediately think of Robert Plant. But more epic, if that’s possible. Fresh off of the hit free-to-air show The Voice, 46-year-old Cupples says that the fundraiser he will be singing at to help Support Act wasn’t something he sought out to do, but when he heard about it he knew it was an important cause.
“The way that this one came about was a bit different,” he explains. “When I came off doing The Voice, there were companies getting me some work, and I couldn’t believe the way they were telling me to price myself. So I spent all this time saying, ‘no, no, no’ to everybody [for various shows]. And then Steve [Iorio, of The Vagrants] contacted me on Facebook, and I liked the sound of what he was saying. I thought, ‘I’ll just do it. It’s a good thing’.” The fundraiser is being held on Halloween at The Hi-Fi, and features a number of other acts including The Vagrants, Nat Allison and Neon & Venom. Also, it’s a costume party. “I will dress up, but I [haven’t decided] what to wear,” Cupples laughs.
“My mum and dad were singers and would get me up on stage when I was a kid,” he says of his background. “I was 15 or something and I met this guy, and he loved Led Zeppelin. I come from classical training: Mum and Dad were really into getting me to sing properly. Not that they sang particularly correctly but they wanted me to be better than them. And then I turned up with this screaming music, and they didn’t like it very much.” Still, the salient connection it made with Cupples’ own style meant it wasn’t long before he was ripping venues a new one with his amazing range and technique. “I had to pay to get in to my first gig. We turned up, I had my mic and a guitar, and they still charged me to get in. It was at the Sunshine Army Base,” he laughs. “We walked in, got up on stage and played Stairway To Heaven. The crowd went crazy, and I said, ‘Thanks very much. I can’t believe we had to pay to get in to our own gig, it’s not a good start to a music career.’ Mind you it was only like two dollars each, but [it’s the principle].”
From there, Cupples has enjoyed a long livelihood in the industry and speaks passionately about the method of evolution for a singer. “It’s like art I suppose. An artist paints a painting and has their own particular style but then it’ll change through the years. And that’s what Robert Plant did. When you hear Plant’s voice on the first [Zeppelin] album, it was really raunchy, husky and this screaming, screaming sound. Then later on [Led Zeppelin’s 1975 album] Physical Graffiti it was very clean and pure, it almost sounded like a little kid at times, it was so high and pure. Really interesting. He was one singer who I thought always changed and evolved; an exciting singer. That’s what I wanted to be. A guy who is almost ready to fall off the edge and stuff it all up.
“When you [sing like Plant], you do feel like some crazy, crazy woman who’s just escaped from an asylum,” he laughs.
Cupples recognises that his genre is one which is often judged strongly, despite the correspondingly enormous amount of effort which goes in to its execution. “Rock is the most exhausting stuff to perform, but it [can also be] the hardest to sell,” he says. “I’m lucky that I was on stage since I was a little kid. I just feel comfortable there. I’m an extremely shy person actually, but from when I [was a teenager] the only place that I wasn’t shy was on stage. It’s still this place that I need to be.”
BY ZOË RADAS
