Adrienne has, at various times and accurately, accused me of constructing the following shrines around myself: one to the New Yorker; one to Brian Eno; one to Bob Dylan; one to The Necks; and one to Ed Kuepper. And the Ed Kuepper shrine just got a bit bigger, with the discovery on eMusic (funny how often what you really want to download from eMusic is not the stuff they are trying to sell you) of five volumes of what Ed has rather cheekily entitled the Prince Melon Bootleg Series, comprising four sets of live recordings under Ed's own name (including "Honey Steel's Gold" done for that series of Original Artists Play The Original Albums concerts), and one by the Laughing Clowns comprising the 17-minute "Eternally Yours" recorded at Dingwalls (now there's a name from my late-1970s NME-reading past) and featuring the unexpected reappearance of Louise Elliott into the fold.
I propose writing at some greater length about these recordings in particular, and Ed in general, because I don't think Ed gets anywhere near the credit he deserves. But for now I just wanted to mention a couple of songs that came up sequentially a couple of nights ago on the iPod, both of which were heavy on the Kuepper. First was "Over The Hill", by John Martyn, from "Solid Air", which features, coming at you from the left speaker, a furiously strummed mandolin, something that Ed must surely have heard around the latter years of the Laughing Clowns, given its appearance on songs like "Master of Two Servants" and, later, "When The Sweet Turns Sour". Then came someone even lesser sung than Ed Kuepper, at least in this country, namely Peter Milton Walsh, and his long-running band The Apartments. "End of Some Fear", which hails from the glorious "A Life Full of Farewells", draws on the Laughing Clowns in its structure and instrumentation, and is also notable for the appearance of the word "Fear" in the title, a word that appears once or twice in the Ed Kuepper vernacular.
