Jim White - Notes from Pig City

Swinging with Ed Kuepper and Jim White

Music / August 18, 2021 / 4 minutes of reading

Ed Kuepper still remembers the first time he saw Jim White play drums. It was back in the mid-1990s and Kuepper – founder of the Saints, Laughing Clowns and Aints – was headlining the Prince of Wales in Melbourne, supported by a rising instrumental trio called the Dirty Three.

“I know the Dirty Three aren’t strictly speaking a rock band, but they were playing at a rock club – and they were supporting me, the King of Rock & Roll,” Kuepper says, his tone as dry as a desiccated old biscuit. White, joining us on Zoom, hoots with laughter in the background.

“It was an unusually expansive way of playing,” Kuepper says of White’s drumming. “He was playing the rhythm but wasn’t just focused on keeping a strict tempo. That always catches my ear, and you don’t see it happening all that much.”

Forty-five years since the Saints released (I’m) Stranded, Kuepper and White are touring Australia as a duo for the first time, performing songs from Kuepper’s five-decade repertoire.

Kuepper had bookmarked White as a potential collaborator ever since that first encounter at the Prince of Wales, but the Dirty Three relocated overseas soon afterwards. White then became busy with other projects, working with Cat Power and Xylouris White, among others.… Read more..

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When Kurt met Courtney

A few years before Courtney Barnett was known to the wider world, during a period of life where she was, by her own estimation, “kind of unemployed and a bit depressed”, she bought a record on a whim and a recommendation. It was Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring For My Halo, his breakthrough fourth album from 2011. She took a particular shine to the track Peepin’ Tomboy, an odd folk song with dense clusters of fingerpicked guitar.

“I didn’t even know who he was,” she says. “And it was beautiful – it’s still one of the most beautiful-sounding records that I’ve ever heard. There’s something about that album in particular that has a real magic to it, and I’ve followed him ever since. Apart from the sonic level of that album, I really loved his phrasing and lyrics. I felt really akin to it.”

A couple of years later, when Vile was touring Australia pushing the follow-up album Wakin On A Pretty Daze, Barnett found herself supporting Vile at a show in Melbourne, at Abbotsford Convent. Later at a barbecue, the pair briefly connected, and Barnett slipped him a copy of A Sea Of Split Peas, which compiled her first two EPs, including her own breakthrough hit Avant Gardener.… Read more..