Ed Kuepper recovers a lost era of music from The Saints and brings it to the stage for The Gum Ball at Dashville this year.
With his new band The Aints!, which also features a three-piece brass section, Ed will be performing songs he wrote specifically between the years 1973 and 1978.
Having already played the solo version of the show at The Gum Ball, Ed says he's looking forward to presenting the full band set-up this year. “I've played The Gum Ball once before and it was fantastic, that was a solo show I did down there so this will be completely different,” Ed says.
“We're bringing the full band with the three-piece horn section, so it will be a full-on festival extravaganza. It'll be the first festival we've played; we did a tour around Australia last year where we debuted the band, but this is the first and last show for a while that we're doing.”
In their first incarnation, The Saints released the irrepressible hit '(I'm) Stranded' in 1976, largely pre-empting the coming of UK punk bands such as Sex Pistols and The Clash.
Over the next 18 months, they would record and release another two albums, 'Eternally Yours' (1978) and 'Prehistoric Sounds' (1978), in whirlwind succession before imploding in early 1979.
For Ed, The Aints! is about capturing the period of 1973-'78 in which a lot of material was written, though never saw the light of day after a new version of The Saints were formed without Ed.
“We've specified the time because there was a different version of The Saints that continued on afterwards and this is to distinguish that we're only looking at what the original band did, the band that I put together in high school.”
Joining Ed in The Aints! is Peter Oxley on bass, Paul Larsen on drums and Alister Spence on keyboards. “The band is really, really good and I'm saying that as objectively as I can,” Ed chuckles, “but if you have a little bit of knowledge of our back-history then there's possibly elements you might enjoy even more so.
“We're doing some of the material from the first three Saints albums, the stuff that I wrote, and we're doing material that I wrote in that time and even a little before that when I started writing songs in primary school.
"We're doing it because it's good enough to come to show; the material just got put aside because the band was doing a lot of work; we did 3 albums in about 18 months then we split up.”
The most important thing for Ed in reviving these songs as The Aints! is that he and the band remain true to the spirit of the original Saints, while resisting becoming a nostalgia act. “I basically wanted to do two things,” Ed states.
“One; I wanted to do the stuff true to the way it was done originally; I've changed things over the years tonnes of times but I wanted this to be true, with no changes.
“The other thing I wanted to do was take it out of the realm of total nostalgia by adding in stuff that most people that were fans of the band have never heard before.
"People who are coming to the band as of now won't know the stuff anyway but there are people that have followed The Saints and my stuff since back then and so I thought it'd be really nice to introduce a few things.”
The Aints! perform two sets at Marrickville Bowls Club (Sydney) 27 April as well as at The Gum Ball (Hunter Valley) 28 April.
