I couldn’t be in person there but my Meltingpod’s correspondents in Australia sent me their spontaneous reviews and live pics about the All Tomorrow’s parties’ festival 2009 these last days at Mt Buller, Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney with both of my favorite bands : the Saints and Laughing Clowns !!!
 

The Saints at Melbourne January 14th : Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper having fun on stage together again with the horn section in the background

Ed and his Laughing Clowns (Louise, Leslie, Jeffrey) at Mt Buller January 10th : their first show since 1984 ! Alister Spence joined them at the keyboard.
Thanks to Richard Sharman for his agreement to publish here his fabulous pics; check his gallery at Black Shadow Photography for more.

 
 
Ivor Hay with the Saints at Melbourne (pic Froggie) Chris and Archie Larizza at Brisbane (pic Bob Nebe) Laughing Clowns at Sydney : Ed and Jeffrey Wegener then Louise Elliott with Leslie Millar and Jeffrey (pic Papageno)

To imagine the ambience at Sydney with THE SAINTS playing « Know your product », thanks to the fans !!!!!

I will publish later more of their pics to illustrate I hope a podcast soon with interviews and live recordings about these performances: in the waiting I’m editing a still unpublished long interview recorded with Ed in August 2007 about his Saints’ period at Brisbane and at London : yes it’s a shame but I never found the good moment ! so from now stay in touch !
Here the live reports from :
Froggie who was at the Saints’ Melbourne’s show January 14th,
Bob who was at the Brisbane show January 15th where the Saints created a scandal because they didn’t play their famous song « I’m stranded », a kind of ironic story !! check his blog That Striped Sunlight Sound for more,
Papageno who was at the Sydney show January 17th with Laughing Clowns and the Saints !!
Malcolm who was at Mt Buller completly seduced by the Laughing Clowns !! It’s very funny because at my request for a review he proposed to me to publish the spontaneous private message he sent to her friend in N.Y. !!
I hope you will appreciate their enthusiasm and sincerity.

Froggie after the Melbourne show :
« hey there!
it was a great performance…
but there were sound problems. i dont know why they decided to play at that venue cause something always goes wrong!. ed’s guitar kept on cutting out and the brass section as well. some people were yelling at the band to get it fixed but chris could hear or understand us – he just thought we were cheering!
the performance was great though. looks like ed and chris might have kissed and made cause they were smiling at eachother and at one point chris pretended to give ed a kiss! he was his usual clowning self, swigging from his bottle and saying stupid things between songs. pity they live on opposite ends of the earth cause they should start making music together again
i took some photos – if you pass me your email address, i can send some up to you! »

Bob about the Brisbane show and answering to me after I read ferocious reviews about that performance on the internet; I asked him an objective report :
« Annie, its hard for me to be entirely objective about
this Ive been a saints fan 25 years, Ive seen chris’s
saints play so many times. Sometimes brilliant other times
less so, Ive seen Ed more than any other artist and Im
not really ever disappointed with Ed.
Chris can appear to many as a bit rude sometimes, I
think its just his humour myself, but it rubs some
people up the wrong way.
I think they played way better on thursday night than at
pig city. Ivor has improved at a lot and I preferred
Archie on bass. Both Ed and Chris do what they do very
well and I think they put in an excellent performance.
It was far to short at 45 mins and they probably were
going to do stranded as an encore but got the out of time
signal.I’m sure the fact they didnt play the album as
advertised, stranded, the prisoner or Know your product,
has pissed off many.
I dont believe ivor is past it and couldnt keep up,
and Chris was not rude in the slightest.
There wasn’t any tension on stage and archie is a great
bass player, so its all about what songs they didnt do.
Id be interested why they didn’t play stranded as an album
maybe the whole thing wasnt something they agreed to.
So I was a little disappointed the album thing didn’t
happen and it was so short but the performance as a
whole was fantastic anyway.
You can quote me on any of that
ciao bob »

Michaela (Papageno) after the Sydney show :
« Hi Annie,
I’m back from ATP, and I’ve put the pics up on my page under… pics! Didn’t get so many of the Saints, and the ones I did tended to be a bit blurry, unfortunately. But I had a wonderful time and the Clowns and Saints were brilliant, just brilliant. They seemed to have a few sound issues but it hardly mattered. Chris Bailey seemed to be having the time of his life. Ed played like a demon of course, and I can watch him play all day. Jeff too. And hearing Eternally Yours with its sexy new groove PLUS Louise Elliott’s saxophone was mind-blowing.
Alas! During the Saints performance there was an idiotic security guy with an over-inflated sense of self-importance who was making a nuisance of himself, so someone threw a beer at him. That person was somewhere just behind me, so I kept having to move aside while surges of security people went after him – then, vingt-deux, voilà les flics! the security guy went into complete search & destroy mode over a plastic cupful of beer. It was ridiculous.
But anyway… it was wonderful.
Cheers,
Michaela »

Malcolm after the Mt Buller show :
Hi Annie,
I wrote this to my friend Paula in NY. Can use if you want

Hey Paula , I had to write to you to tell you abt seeing the Laughing Clowns on Mt Buller at ATP. It was totally incredible after 20 years. They played their arses off – just as hot hot hot as they were at their peak. The virtuosity of jeff wegner, bif miller, louise elliot and Edmund is something to behold. They had another guy on keyboards and he did the other horn lines with the sax. The songs are so great – I knew every note back in some part of my brain. Their set was way too short. It was fantastic to hear some wacky jazz bits (bowed bass/ honking sax) up on that big stage. Loved it! Their sliding around harmonies, tempo builds and shift and gorgeous melodies were so completely alien in a 2009 rock festival setting. It was 20 times as musically rich than anything else. Sounded of no particular time,just sounded like real music; and also sounded very Australian for some reason….. Everything else was bland after that. I was smiling my head off, digging it and looked around and beside me were robyn mcllelland and dave last from that same era. Was a most wonderful time trip.
malcolm hill