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IT STARTED with a brief reunion - for one glorious song, all 15 minutes of it - in London last year; now The Laughing Clowns play Brisbane again.

Almost 25 years to the day since their last Brisbane show, Ed Kuepper's early '80s band The Laughing Clowns will do a show at the Gallery of Modern Art.

It's fitting the Clowns should re-form for a performance at GoMA, since the band had such a strong artistic aesthetic: Individual and original, pushing the boundaries of what rock music could do.

Critics found it difficult to describe The Laughing Clowns in their time they broke up in 1985 but what's apparent when you hear that blazing performance of Eternally Yours from London last year is that there was very little that sounded like them before and almost nothing since.

They create a huge wave of sound that took inspiration from all kinds of sources, including free jazzers such as Sun Ra, Pharoah Saunders and John Coltrane, with Louise Elliott's sax leading the charge.

The sound of The Laughing Clowns certainly wasn't jazz-rock or even "jazz-punk", as it was sometimes dubbed.

The band formed in Brisbane in 1979. Kuepper returned after the break-up of the original Saints in London and drafted Jeffrey Wegener, whom he had known since high school and who had been an early drummer in The Saints.

Kuepper was keen to explore new paths after the guitar-driven frenzy of the early Saints.

"It was a very definite decision on my part not to rely on the guitar to carry it," Kuepper says.

"I already knew how to do that and so many bands in the UK seemed to adopt that approach. I thought it was easy to appear like a powerful band if you had the guitars doing that kind of thing, and the fun and the challenge had disappeared for me.

"I was a bit underwhelmed with what I'd seen in the UK. I thought what The Saints had been doing was unique and had a certain integrity, and seeing elements of that become flavour of the month put me off it. I've never been that comfortable with the music industry and fashion and fads."

In London, Kuepper started to investigate anything he could get his hands on that wasn't "punk", including the jazz records he was finding in market stalls by the likes of Albert Ayler and Pharoah Saunders.

"The first thing that occurred to me was how powerful it was, and how much I probably would have hated it five or six years earlier," Kuepper says. "It was eye-opening.

"I'm not talking about musical progression. I'm really ambivalent about that because it generally means something I don't aim for. Progression, regression, those are terms I don't use in regard to art, but I needed to do something different.

"There was a jazz influence, certainly in the sense where I wanted things to move rhythmically. It goes way back before punk or anything like that. If you listen to blues and rock 'n' roll from the '40s and '50s, there's a rhythmic approach that's not as straightforward. I wanted the whole thing to open up and be less precise, less mechanical in some ways."

It was a direction suggested by Prehistoric Sounds, the third album by the original Saints, which explored the use of brass in rock.

That album hadn't been released in Australia when The Laughing Clowns hit the stage, causing some confusion among people who turned up hoping to hear The Saints MkII.

"Punk had definitely broken in Australia by this time and there were people who came along to hear (I'm) Stranded and didn't get it," Kuepper recalls.

But the band soon found an audience. In the UK the band toured with The Birthday Party and The Fall and, despite a flurry of line-up changes, was one of the most popular independent bands in Australia in that era.

The band split in acrimony - personal, not musical, Kuepper says - before the release of the final album, Ghosts of an Ideal Wife, in 1985.

"I'm never 100 per cent happy with anything, but there were examples where we nailed it as close as you can nail anything.

"At their best the recordings are great, at their worst I can see why it didn't work. That's the kind of appraisal I'm trying to bring to this reunion. I know where I want to take it if it's going to go anywhere beyond these shows. And it may."

The re-formed band will play the All Tomorrow's Parties festivals in New South Wales and Victoria as well as the Up Late series at GoMA. It will feature original members Kuepper, Wegener and Elliott, double bassist Bif Millar, who joined in 1982, and keyboard player Alister Spence.

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