Ed Kuepper is all about The Aints and no longer about The Saints

When Ed Kuepper agreed to a reunion with The Saints with Chris Bailey a decade ago he wasn’t expecting it to be a shemozzle.

Bailey and Kuepper reunited at the request of Mick Harvey for All Tomorrows Parties in 2009 and a limited run of shows in 2010 in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

So will it ever happen again? “No, I don’t think so,” Ed Kuepper tells Noise11.com. “I think that that has finished. For this stuff to work there has to be a mutual respect and enthusiasm, plus a willingness to do something special with it. I didn’t really get that feeling. I would rather work with people who were enthusiastic about what they do”.

Kuepper says everything was a drama with Bailey on tour. “It was an upheld battle to try and get anything done,” he says. “It wasn’t like it fell into place easily. Everything was an obstacle. There is a chapter in a book about it that I haven’t written yet. It wasn’t a cruising, coasting sort of thing. It was a struggle to get it done. It was an expenditure of energy that would have been better spent on something being creative and rather than fighting over the most basic things. I am passed that”.

Instead of The Saints, Ed has his own band, the cleverly titled The Aints about to do on tour. “What I’d like to do is make each show a memorable experience. We change the set around a fair bit. We do different things. A two-set night will be different to a one set night, not that one will be better than the other. It’s done differently. We play differently. We present the full range of the sort of show you might have seen in the old days. Numerous sets, kind of shows”.

The tour will feature either one, two or three sets by The Aints each night. “The first set for the three set shows is myself and Eamon, my trumpeter,” Ed says. “We do an introductory performance, musically more restrained than The Aints. It’s like having a baroque folk duo before the rock band. We can’t do that in Canberra because of timing commitments. That limits how long the show can be”.