The SaintsThe Saints play The Zoo on March 28 and the East Coast Blues & Roots Music Festival on March 29.
Despite being born and bred in Sydney, I truly love Brisbane. And one of the reasons I struggled to work in the local music industry is the ongoing tradition of groundbreaking, gut wrenching, genre and era defining music that has consistently come from the bowels of Bris Vegas. So it bothers me when scensters around the traps bitch and moan about how ‘slack’ Brisbane is. True, we may not have as many venues as our southern counterparts, and our punting public may not have the same army-like numbers as Sydney or Melbourne, but we have had more internationally recognised artists shuffle through our Sunshine State then all the other regions put together. Just to throw some names at you: The Bee Gee’s, The Go-Betweens, The Saints, Powderfinger and Regurgitator. I guarantee that we have a saturation of artists that have had more cultural resonance then most of Australia.
It’s in this light and with that attitude that I had the rather neato experience of chatting with one Chris Bailey, lead singer for seminal proto-punk act The Saints (but the culturally correct purists might call them post-rock or pre-pre-grunge). Their 1976 debut I’m Stranded has been credited as the first true punk offering. Call them ahead of their time, but while I’m Stranded still rings true as a defining point in modern music (whoever said Kurt Cobain was the first true angst writer was out of their gourd), The Saints never lived up to their reputation as punk rocker. Not that they ever were really.
Now living in Amsterdam, Chris Bailey has been through the mill with his own career and own life. But he sounds pretty bloody chipper and rather sophisticated for someone who used to scare Nick Cave circa The Birthday Party with his on stage antics. In fact, his accent has taken on the plummy roundness of the Trans-European traveller, it certainly is a long way from the Petrie Terrace.
“Its quite a surprise actually cause it wasn’t my idea to move here,” Bailey says of his home of the past few years. “It’s a very cosmopolitan place and very arty and I quite like that.”
And before you ask, no, Bailey assures me he is not on some 40-something drug odyssey, his poison of choice these days is red wine, and the thought of being hugged by ‘Some hippy on ecstasy’ fills him with horror.
Given that The Saints (replete with Ed Kuepper and Ivor Hay) are due back in Vegas for a kind of reunion, when was the last time Bailey visited fair Brisbane?
“The last time I was in Brisbane was… Jesus… 1998 actually.” He remembers after a bit of prodding
“The ABC actually flew me out, quite a miracle for the ABC to be able to do that and spend anything on anyone. And they flew me out to chat to an old pal of mine (well known rock journo) Clinton Walker who was doing something for one of their TV series (the quite wonderful Oz-rock docu It’s A Long Way To The Top), so I had a very pleasant afternoon walking up and down Queen Street thinking ‘Gee, not everyone’s dressed in pastel anymore!’ It was weird.”
Bailey even visited his old rehearsal space and flop pad in Spring Hill, now the Letchford Photography studio.
“Can you imagine how bizarre it was for me?” he asks with a trace of the ridiculous. “It was an odd little afternoon out, quite nostalgic ‘cause I actually went to Petrie Terrace and the place I used to live in is now some chi chi advertising or photography centre or something, it was all polished and very upmarket.”
Which leads me to a very Brisbane moment. As anyone who knows Brisbane at all, it’s damn near impossible to meet anyone in Vegas who isn’t connected to other friends of yours. So I managed to examine my connections, and found quite a glaring link with Bailey, via marriage albeit, to my partners family, and I recently found myself debating how cool Bailey is and how important The Saints are with his older brother Michael.
“Well, get out of here!” he enthuses, “It’s a small bloody world, is it not? Oh Michael would have fucking hated that! Mike and I have a very strange relationship, its very civil because of the age difference.”
And as for that handle of being an ‘important’ band, Bailey is straight to the point.
“I’ve always been fairly ambivalent about being called some important rock group, cause for me, I’m just doing what I've done since I was a teenager. I take the work very, very, very seriously, and I feel very fortunate. I mean this has all been like one long primal scream session for me. I’m relatively sane, and I think that’s because I’ve always had an outlet. And, you know, I don’t take show business very seriously, but The Saints… I think they had more baggage twenty years ago. I remember being written off in 1979 by a bunch of losers, and I thought ‘well, I don’t really care’, I mean, we’ve had a kind of funny run.”
Don’t miss out on seeing Brisbane’s first and best exponents of rock when they arrive in sunny Queensland around Easter.
