Ed Kuepper

Electrical Storm
Hot, 1985

When the bricks and concrete heat up in the inner west the streets get tinted orange and the rooftops cascading down from Annandale burn like the columns of an electric heater. There is no respite on this side of Sydney – no canopies of leaves forming an arch over the streets, no refreshing wind blowing up from the water. Just exhaust fumes and radiating sidewalks. Eventually dusk brings a cool change and there's a moment half-way to night which is the most beautiful hour anywhere in the city. That's the time when you should play Electrical Storm.

Laughing Clowns, the arty post-punk group formed by Jeffrey Wegener and Ed Kuepper after he left The Saints, were a Sydney band. It's hard to imagine their dark blend of jazz and punk existing outside of the Sydney avant-garde scene that fostered the likes of Tactics and Voigt/465 around the start of the 1980s. But after that band broke up, Kuepper returned to his roots for musical inspiration. His first solo album was called Electrical Storm, in dedication to the wild displays of nature during the Brisbane summer.

The stories told both by key tracks are set at night, but they sound as if it's noon on a scorching day. The opening song 'Car Headlights' is dominated by a flickering acoustic guitar that conjures up more electricity than if it had been plugged in – the type of spark that carries in the air before a violent change in the weather – and lyrics about cars heading down a street surrounded by bush. The feeling it evokes is reprised for the title track, which is about being paralysed by heat in the middle of the night.

A few years ago in an issue of literary journal Meanjin – based in Melbourne but named after the Aboriginal word for the area that Brisbane is built on – writer Ross Gibson explored the ideas behind 'Electrical Storm' in an essay called 'Subtropical Rock'. Like Iggy Pop, who had made The Stooges unique by turning the sounds of his own "motorised landscape" into pop music, Kuepper took the electricity in the Brisbane air, the sputtering of refrigerating units and the relentless heat and somehow turned it into a song. "In three minutes or so, the song encapsulated what goes on in your own spirit and in the air when a Queensland storm finally breaks," he wrote. Perfect summer listening.