Ed Kuepper & the Kowalski Collective
East Brunswick Club, Melbourne

Ed Kuepper is one of the most willful and infuriating men in music – and hence one of the most dependable. He threw away the rulebook a long time ago, so his output can be relied on to be both ever evolving and fresh. There’s no support act tonight. Or rather, Ed supports himself with a wide ranging trawl through his enviable back catalogue, going as far back as 1984’s ‘Eternally Yours’. It’s a gift for the faithful. The tunes are mostly played as a trio with former Sunnyboy Peter Oxley on bass and Ed’s old Saints/Laughing Clowns cohort Jeff Wegener drumming, at times augmented by cello, keyboards or horns.

There’s a short break before the main event, a song by song run through of Kuepper’s new album, Jean Lee and the Yellow Dog. It’s based on the true story of the last woman to hang in Australia: Lee and her lover Robert Clayton were tried for the 1949 murder of a man in Melbourne. Although she retracted her confession (made to protect Clayton) the pair were hung in February 1951, along with an accomplice. In the opener, ‘Hang Jean Lee’ Ed sketches the outline of her (fairly tawdry) life and events preceding the murder, then follows it up with ‘Miracles’, a love note smuggled from one Pentridge cell to another.

‘Yellow Dog’ is Clayton’s tale. He turned on Lee in an attempt to save his own skin, and the song is bitter and violent, full of bravado but with no honor on show. (“I’m a yellow dog/I turned her for the crime.”) Live, Kuepper summons real bile on the harsher lyrics. He confidently captures different voices while still being recognisably himself. With the full seven-piece band onstage for most of this, the sound is lush, with room for differing textures, though naturally the music returns to guitar time and again. The crowd didn’t need to know the backstory to appreciate that this was something very special.

by Trevor Block