I started Zeptepi shortly after arriving in Australia from England in the 2001. Originally the plan was for it to be a studio project, and I spent the next couple of years at home writing and recording the material that would become the debut album Travelling Through Time.
When I left England I very much had unfinished business with The Debutantes, and that is reflected in the prevalance of Numan-esque synth sounds and guitar sounds heavily influenced by nineties UK acts such as Radiohead and Spiritualized. This began to change around 2004 when I decided to turn Zeptepi into a proper band, bringing in Australian musicians who had vastly different musical influences than myself.
By the time Travelling Through Time came out at the end of 2004 we had begun playing shows around Melbourne with increasing regularity and the sound of the band became a bit more organic as new material was shaped by the different musicians. A few people came and went early on, but by the end of 2005 we had a settled line-up with Bernie Dodd on drums, Frank Packer on bass and Alex Arbuthnott on keyboards.
We recorded a bunch of new songs at the renowned Birdland Studios in Melbourne in mid-2006, which cost a small fortune and meant we couldn’t stop gigging for the next five years as we paid off the loan we had taken out to do so! We mixed these songs in England at Dacoit Studios and the Universality album came out in early 2007. At it’s best on songs like The End and the title track I really like this record, but I felt like I’d lost quite a lot of control over the sound of the band by handing over all but vocal and guitar duties to other people, and overall it’s a bit clean and polished for my liking now.
Just a month after releasing Universality my wife and I were hit by a personal tragedy, and after fulfilling a few live commitments I put the band on hold until the end of the year. During this period I decided I’d had enough of the synthesizer sounds which had been a big part of my music for a decade. Alex left the band I and began to explore a folkier acoustic sound, inspired by bands such as The Waterboys, The Dubliners and Neil Young.
In 2008 I’d started playing less and less electric guitar and more acoustic, and we were joined by Hayley Anderson on violin. Bernie, Frank and Hayley were part of a lineup that laid the basis for the more familiar folk/rock sound that Zeptepi became known for. This sound – while being a lot less contemporary and commercial – actually ended up opening a lot more doors for us in Australia, as we moved away from club gigs and found ourselves playing regularly on the folk festival circuit.
Betwixt 2008-2010 we recorded numerous weekend sessions which eventually became the third album, 2010’s Stormclouds. These tracks included 2009 single The Ballad of John Green, which became something of a signature tune for the band.
Towards the end of this period I met CC Thornley, a local banjo player and a brilliant musician/songwriter who contributed to a few of the later songs for the album. CC had begun experimenting with an electric banjo as well, and in 2010 joined the band full time.
The electric banjo fill the gap left by the electric guitar and gave a us a powerful and unique sound. We played closed to 100 shows with this line-up over the next two years, including some great gigs at festivals such as the National Celtic, Port Fairy, Apollo Bay, Maldon Folk, Yackandandah Folk and more, and we hit the road for interstate shows and festivals in South Australia, Tasmania and Canberra.
We were also doing an increasing number of acoustic shows, as a duo with myself and CC, or as a trio with Hayley. This led to us recording an acoustic EP, but we had so much material that it ended up being our fourth album, Winter In The Blood.
Growing personality clashes in the band between Frank and Hayley on one side and CC on the other led to me firing Frank and Hayley, mainly because they were far more into dressing up than the music, and CC was far more into booking us gigs and working on the songs. We found a couple of youngsters in their early twenties to replace them, Patrick Lyons on bass and Claire Johnstone on fiddle.
Despite their youth, both Patrick and Claire were a huge step up musically, and Claire especially was far more suited to Zeptepi with her background of folk and celtic tunes. The band was now a happy cohesive unit and it showed. I was also on a deep dive into traditional folk songs, and much of the material that I was working on was adaptations of trad songs rather than my own originals – in particular I had a fondness for shanties and other songs of the sea.
Early in 2013 We headed into The Base Studio in South Melbourne and recorded our fifth album Coming Up For Air. Much of this was recorded live in the studio, with vocals and fiddle added later. It’s a polished album, but also very representative of how we sounded at the time.
Not long after recording the album we parted company with drummer Bernie, who had been part of the band for nine years. Unfortunately for Bernie he was unable to play some festival gigs, and his temporary replacement Paul Angas was so good that there was no going back. CC, Claire and myself also headed to the UK for a two week acoustic tour in their summer, where we played some great gigs and also recorded a mini acoustic album, The Ladder Factory Sessions.
We did a 12-date tour of Victoria and South Australia to promote the release of Coming Up For Air in November 2013, and I realised I now had four members in the band who were all trained jazz musicians! Unfortunately that was pretty much it for Paul, who had to up sticks (down sticks?) and leave Victoria. His replacement Brian Caffrey hit the ground running and the sound of the band shifted again – while Brian didn’t have Paul’s jazz chops he was a powerful rock drummer perhaps more inline with my own musical sensibilities.
This line-up was probably the best Zeptepi, and through 2014-2015 we embarked on a long run of festival appearances including a run of four festivals in four different states over a six week period, including a brilliant weekend in ACT at the National Folk Festival. We also returned for a fourth time to the National Celtic Festival which was perhaps our spiritual home, and this time got to play an acoustic show aboard the good ship The Enterprize, perhaps the most fitting venue in Australia for the band at the time. We were so busy that I don’t think we rehearsed at all during this time and the band was razor sharp. This culminated in a weekend at the 2015 Port Fairy Folk Festival where we played perhaps our biggest shows to date. It also transpired to be the last shows we would do…
The band took a break after Port Fairy, and while we never split up, we also never reconvened. CC moved to Hobart shortly after, and Claire and myself worked on The Gathering Tide. A break from Zeptepi after ten years and well over 300 shows was welcome.
In 2017 we released a best-of compilation, After The Rain. I relocated to New Zealand at the end of 2020, and eventually started working through the enormous archives of material that had built up. 2022 saw the release of a live album Sex, Drugs & Sea Shanties, recorded at the 2014 National Celtic Festival. We also released Gold In The Loft, a double album of rarities and previously unreleased material.
In 2024 I remixed and expanded the debut album for a 20th Anniversary edition which was hugely enjoyable. As a result of this I began thinking that it was time for some more shows, and we’re currently planning to get back together for some Australian gigs in 2025. Also on the schedule is a re-release of Stormclouds, which I’ve been remixing in an attempt to iron out all the many things that bugged me about the original release! On top of that, I’ve started working on recording some Zeptepi songs from the last few years of the band that never made it off the stage to a recording studio at the time. Stay tuned for more developments!
