Circumstances conspired against my catching any of the reformation gigs by the most important of eighties Australian bands, The Laughing Clowns. The offer of a ticket to the Mount Buller leg of All Tomorrow's Parties couldn't be taken up on account of my having to be back in Canberra at the very time when my proposed lift would have been driving back down the Hume towards Melbourne. Plans to attend the Basement gig in Sydney a couple of months later (which morphed into a Bad Seeds with Ed Kuepper gig, with Laughing Clowns supporting, to add insult to injury) had to be abandoned on account of a secondary school open day in Canberra that same weekend (and our application was rejected anyway, thank you very much).
So it is a genuine consolation, albeit laced with bitter disappointment at what I could have witnessed first hand, to be able to listen to "Laughing Clowns Live", the latest in the ongoing Prince Melon Bootleg Series (the shades of Dylan in that title not, presumably, being accidental). I have no idea which gig it is taken from, or if it is a hybrid, or even if an entire concert is here (set lists I have seen suggest there are a few songs missing - insert sad-face emoticon here). The editing is extremely sloppy, the sound is serviceable (I would like to be able to hear more of Jeffery Wegener working his magic), and there are a number of fluffed notes. But it's Laughing Clowns Live, circa 2009, and you can't put a price on that.
One listens to this, with one's knowledge of how the Clowns ended so acrimoniously first time around, of Ed's peripatetic but patchy (but, lest this be seen as faint praise, frequently inspired) subsequent solo career, of his ceaseless revisiting and reinventing of his songbook, and of Wegener's addiction and gradual re-emergence, and gets the sense that this is the music that Ed Kuepper was put on this planet to make, and that he has been honing his own skills this past 25 years in the hope that somehow, some day, he, Louise Elliott, and Wegener would once more command the stage.
Which, remarkably but on the other hand unsurprisingly, they do. The set opens with something called "Everything Is Not The Fault Of Minorities" (a very Laughing Clowns title, that), which comprises six minutes of Necks-style abstraction (don't forget that Chris Abrahams plays on their penultimate album, "Law Of Nature"), finally resolving into the briefest fragment of an actual song before abruptly stopping (shades of The Field, and in particular "A Paw In My Face", which turns out, after five or so minutes, to have been a heavily disguised "Hello", by, ahem, Lionel Ritchie).
Then come three shorter numbers, all cornerstones of the Clowns' back catalogue: "Come One, Come All", "Everything That Flies Is Not A Bird" and "Theme From 'Mad Flies Mad Flies'" (and with all three also appearing on "Live To Air 1982", which may yet turn out to be a recording of the only Laughing Clowns gig I ever saw, anyone with a more intimate knowledge of these songs than my own will be in trainspotter heaven). Ed's guitar seems to have thickened up considerably since the early 80s: perhaps that is just a product of technology, but the two live performances, side by side, would seem to confirm that his playing has changed. Single notes have become big chords, and that sinewy, metallic sound is gone. It suits the music. (His voice has thickened quite a bit, too, across the years.) Elliott, of course, is magisterial throughout. Wegener may not be playing quite as frenetically as before (to the extent that you can hear him) but his singular sense of rhythm and texture has lost nothing.
Not to suggest that these three songs are mere potatoes, but what follows is the real meat of the performance: a harrowing, stretched-out rendering of the most desolate, and most emotionally intense, song of the post-punk era, "Collapse Board", and yet another re-working of "Eternally Yours". ("Eternally Yours" appears on each of the Prince Melon Bootleg releases to date: one, in fact, comprises just that song, strung out over 17 minutes, with (I think) just Ed, Elliott and Wegener, somewhere in the UK in 2007, and the way Elliott is introduced makes me suspect that this may have been the first time they shared a stage since the Clowns initially fell apart, and that her appearance was possibly unexpected and/or unrehearsed: in which case, you can only think that those 17 minutes were the fuse that led to the full-blown Clowns rebirth, if that's what it is. You couldn't do what they did there and not be compelled to see what could happen next.)
"Collapse Board" has been pulled in two directions: the already slow instrumental passages are slowed down almost to the point of stasis, while the, for want of a better word, verses have been augmented by some sterling piano work. Kuepper does something almost twangy with the guitar, too, possibly recalling the unlikely but wonderful surf-rock re-working of the song ("Diving Board") that turns up on one of his instrumental albums. The crowd mistakenly thinks it is over after six minutes (Ed very politely tells them, "Wait for us, wait for us"), but Ed knows better, and it would be less than half the song if he had ended it there. Elliott proceeds to blow the living shit out of everybody in the room. Alister Spence, on piano, is clearly thinking, at least tangentially, of Chris Abrahams here, too, while in the quieter moments Wegener can be heard playing all around the song, just like the old days. The song doesn't so much end as run out of places to go.
And then there's "Eternally Yours". If anything on this record is going to run a shiver up your spine, it is this. The song doesn't reveal itself at all until a couple of mostly expressionistic minutes have passed. That sax line kicks in. Does Ed's voice almost break? I find myself welling up, whether just from the thrill of hearing this song being played by this band after this many years, or from a sense of how emotional this moment must surely have been for Ed - assuming, contrary to most impressions, that he is really just an old softy. It lasts for 13 glorious minutes. Elliott, again, leaves one speechless (and herself breathless). Unlike "Collapse Board", it gets faster as it goes on: it ends in what is more like a train wreck than the end of a song. When it ends, and Ed semi-legibly introduces the band and says "Thank you, you've been really fuckin' great", one is left wondering whether he is speaking to the audience or the band. I suspect the latter.
As an encore they do "New Bully In The Town" (one of my favourite late-period Clowns songs), in a spirit of elation. It's that kind of song. Ed's guitar and Wegener's drumming are everything, although the flute solo (!) makes me want to listen to some Jethro Tull (!), and the electric piano builds huge rectangular blocks of sound. I smile. What else can you do? It's only a record, not a physical experience, but still I am emotionally drained at the end. You can't ask for much more than that.
