I was trembling with excitement. I knew I was privy to the birth of a whole new future for rock & roll . . . In possession of this secret knowledge, I felt an absolute certainty that eventually the hippy world would be overturned, that all the squares and naysayers would be shown up for what they were and real rock & roll would prevail.2
Whether the birth of ‘a whole new future’ or not, it is true that these rehearsals took place before the release of the New York Dolls’ debut in July. The band’s aesthetic and sound was already taking shape, along with prototypes of many of the songs that would later appear on their first album. The first two songs the band wrote were its most elaborate: Messin’ With The Kid was a traditional, Stones-styled ballad, while the far more daring Nights In Venice was built around a jagged machine-gun riff that dissolved into a maelstrom of white noise.
The band’s line-up was still unsettled. Abandoning the piano, Hay initially moved to bass as the Eternals tried out a succession of drummers. One of them, Bruce Anthon, would soon make his own mark on Brisbane’s music scene as a member of the Survivors; another, Jeffrey Wegener, later built a reputation as one of the country’s best drummers in Kuepper’s post-Saints outfit, the Laughing Clowns. But Wegener had yet to develop his signature style, and his casual approach ensured his tenure in the Saints was brief.
Ed Kuepper: I kicked Jeff out of the band. He was just too unreliable, he wasn’t turning up to rehearsals, wasn’t treating it seriously. Of course, he denies all this, but it’s true! He just wasn’t turning up, and when he did he was pissed.
With the band thinking it would be easier to acquire a bassist than a drummer, Ivor Hay decided to settle back behind the kit.
The band’s first official gig was at the Chelmer Hall. With next to no chance of getting a gig in conventional venues, the band was forced to play in the few Brisbane locations potentially open to new sounds and ideas. Suburban halls were to become the newly christened Saints’ salvation, and they began to book their own shows under the name of Eternal Promotions. The venues were cheap to hire, and there were fewer questions to be answered – at least until the morning after the show, as the Saints pursued the musical equivalent of a scorched-earth policy.
A show at the University of Queensland, organised courtesy of Margaret Bailey’s leftist connections, cemented the Saints’ reputation as local enfants terribles. By this time, the group had attracted a tiny but devoted following, consisting almost entirely of high school friends and friends of friends. Some, like Walker, gravitated mainly towards the music; others interpreted the wildness of the band’s sound as a cue for another kind of auto-destruction. Triple Zed was keen to demonstrate its support for local music, but found itself thoroughly unprepared for the musical and personal hurricane it encountered.
John Stanwell: The Saints, particularly Chris Bailey, just had this real thing about them. They were angry. Now, that anger may well have been totally genuine, but for people who had to deal with them, it was difficult. They set out to make themselves unpopular.
Ed Kuepper: Our relationship with Triple Zed was pretty bumpy. I think the Saints were maybe just a little too extreme for them. They were touting themselves as supporters of the local industry, and looking back on it now I can see things from a slightly different perspective, but at the time they struck me as being fairly gutless and unsupportive, really. But I’d qualify all that – the Saints were a pretty anarchic band.
John Stanwell: Basically what happened in those days was people would go and smash up toilets; that was the kind of thing they did. So the venues would just chuck the bands out, and the bands had nowhere to go. A fair bit of damage was done to the room, which we were held responsible for, and that led to a lot of ill feeling.
Chris Bailey: They were panicking about their funding, and we were a little bit too outré for their tastes. Because they were a little bit Jackson Browne, West Coast, touchy-feely if memory serves me correctly, and we weren’t considered to be musically kosher. Also, we weren’t on campus, we weren’t university students, so [therefore] we were just scumbag troublemakers from the wrong side of the tracks interested in their women. Which of course we were!
At the junction of Milton Road and Petrie Terrace, on the north-west edge of the city centre, is a small house that is now home to a photographic studio. Situated at the top of Paddington, originally a poor area that would later become one of the first inner-city suburbs to fall to the creep of gentrification, the building looks directly across to a foreboding brick building that was once the city’s police headquarters. Four hundred metres further down Milton Road is the Castlemaine Perkins brewery, its crimson neon XXXX logo visible for miles around.
In early 1976 Chris Bailey moved into the house that was then being rented by Margaret. When she moved out shortly afterwards, Ivor Hay moved in, and the band continued rehearsals in the long front room – this time with the addition of a permanent bass player, Kym Bradshaw. It was a strictly pragmatic choice.
Chris Bailey: [Kym] had a job; he had money. I think we might have used his credit to buy a van. I think he got marginalised fairly early on. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I think he was just being used, actually.
But the addition of Bradshaw to the line-up supplied the necessary gravity to the Saints’ high-octane sound. Ivor Hay had developed a unique style on the drums that was almost bottomless: with little use of the kick drum for backbeat, Hay instead provided an instinctive, manic whirl of snare and cymbals that at times – most notably on Nights In Venice – pushed the band’s sound to the brink of derailment. In short, Hay played to the guitar rather than the bass.
The band’s dedication was beginning to pay off.
Bill Riner: I used to live in Paddington, and I’d hear them on the way home on my bicycle. I’d stop there and I’d hear them, thrashing and bashing and making the most awful noise. But boy, they practised hard. And often. They got good in a short space of time.
Few others were so appreciative of the group’s development. When a plate-glass window at the building’s front required boarding up after being smashed by a disgruntled neighbour, it was Kuepper who suggested daubing the words ‘Club 76’ over the top and using the house as a venue, albeit one with neither a bar nor an admission fee.
The Saints’ now legendary performances at Club 76 – described by Clinton Walker as ‘a humbling, thundering thing to experience’3 – were essentially band rehearsals or parties at which the band would play: up to three sets a night, including roaring, hyper-extended covers of Ike and Tina Turner’s River Deep, Mountain High and Del Shannon’s Runaway. But the ‘venue’ was short-lived. The noise inevitably drew the attention of the constabulary on the other side of Petrie Terrace. So did the crowd that spilled into the busy street between sets. And many of the band’s fans would make their own fun that often had very little to do with the music.
Ed Kuepper: It started off with maybe a dozen people coming along and ended up with literally a full house in a fairly short period of time. So the police and the health department closed us down, because for starters we didn’t have a licence, and secondly there weren’t adequate fire exits and toilets, that sort of thing.
There wasn’t much to do in Brisbane, so we got a pretty wide cross-section of people. I didn’t witness it, but I heard that on the last night a girl was raped there. We were starting to get some fairly violent people; people that we really didn’t want to have anything to do with.
Just as the band’s sound was coming into focus, there appeared an album by a New York group whose short, bullet-point songs and street-gang image was uncomfortably close to the Saints’. Released in May 1976, the Ramones had effectively beaten the Saints to the punch. Kuepper was crushed.
Ed Kuepper: I was immensely depressed by that. Up until that point, really we had no contemporary musical parallels. We started around the same time as the New York Dolls, but they’d broken up, and [at the time] th
ere wasn’t anything else around anywhere to my knowledge that was vaguely like what we were doing. I just thought, fuck, this is not going to do us any good, because obviously every man and his donkey is going to see these provincial kids from Brisbane as being the copyists here.
Ed Kuepper had been lucky since leaving school at the end of 1974. He’d landed a job in the warehouse of the now defunct Astor Records, where he furthered his musical education, helping himself to an extensive back catalogue of ’60s pop and sundry deleted records that would otherwise have been destroyed. He was appointed the sales representative for north Queensland, a role he didn’t treat with a great deal of enthusiasm.
He also had the task of looking after custom pressings of records. Kuepper found he would commonly receive tapes from people, often truckers in outback Queensland who played a little country and western in their spare time and wanted their songs pressed up as singles for use in local juke joints. Kuepper would send the tapes to Melbourne and later be astounded to receive a box full of records back, which he would then return to the songs’ creators.
Ed Kuepper: I’d actually left Astor before it dawned on me that it was an incredibly easy thing to do to have a tape and turn it into a record. So while the Saints are credited for putting out the first independent record, there were a lot of hobbyists that were doing it beforehand. It’s always happened; it just hadn’t really been done by a rock & roll band at that point in time. Of course, a very short period of time after that, everybody was doing it. But for a long time beforehand we were playing and there would be this acknowledgment, ‘Yes, here we are making this sound’, and then you’d look at your record collection and see these objects, and everything in between would be a bit of a mystery.
Encouraged, in June the Saints booked themselves two hours in Bruce Window’s 16-track studios at West End, on the south side of the Brisbane River, with the intention of making a single. Mark Moffatt was billed as producer. The studio, later known as Sunshine and now based in Fortitude Valley, was (and still is) primarily used for recording jingles. Kuepper estimates the cost of the session at around $200.
Now with over a dozen songs to choose from, the band conducted a straw poll of friends to determine a likely hit single. With its anthemic, rallying chorus, (I’m) Stranded emerged the clear winner. Certainly, if alienation and escape are key rock & roll themes, (I’m) Stranded remains as emblematic as any song of its era.
Kuepper’s sheet-metal guitar sets the breakneck tempo, pushed all the way by Hay. There is no solo, just Bailey howling into the gale. The recording quality is raw (the distinctive chink heard at the song’s conclusion is the sound of Hay knocking over a bottle4) but captures perfectly the sound of a band on the cusp of greatness.
With no label or distributor to call on, 500 copies of the single were pressed on the Saints’ own Fatal Records imprint. There was no picture sleeve, no frills. Even the name Fatal was a misnomer: Kuepper had originally suggested Fay-Tel, a pun on the cheap K-Tel label. It didn’t matter. ‘By the time I got the record, I just played it about a hundred times,’ Kuepper says. ‘I was pretty happy with it.’
A few copies were dropped off at Rocking Horse and Discreet Records in the city. Most of the remainder were shipped around the country and overseas, to record companies and journalists, with Kuepper listing his parents’ home in Oxley as a mailing address. The band even shot a primitive but charged video for the single in a disused house on Petrie Terrace, spraying the words ‘(I’m) Stranded’ over the top of the fireplace. The video begins with the obvious if unintended metaphor of Hay kicking the door open.
It was now September 1976. The same month, in London, the 100 Club held a festival featuring a colourful assortment of new bands, all playing variations on a new kind of amphetamine-fuelled rock, as vaudevillian as it was vitriolic. These new groups – the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, the Banshees and more – were channelling their own anger into a new kind of musical energy.
SOUNDS SINGLE OF THIS AND EVERY WEEK
THE SAINTS: (I’m) Stranded (Fatal). There’s a tendency to blabber mindlessly about this single, it’s so bloody incredible. This Queensland combo had to record and release on their own label; for some reason Australian record companies think the band lack commercial potential. What a bunch of idiots.
You like Quo or the Ramones? This pounds them into the dirt. Hear it once and you’ll never forget it. The singing’s flat and disinterested, the guitars are on full stun. There’s no such thing as a middle eight. It’s fabulous.
The flip, No Time, isn’t quite as cataclysmic, but the guitars are great, a manic grind that winds up faster and faster until it blows your head off. Made to play REAL LOUD. Until some record company gets wise to the best single this year you’ll have to send 90p for the first one and 60p for each additional copy to: Eternal Productions, 20 Lawson St, Oxley 4075, Queensland, Australia.
Do it today.5
Even the ABC radio newsreader sounded surprised by what he was reading. ‘An unknown band from Brisbane, by the name of the Saints, has earned rave reviews in England for a record it made itself,’ he intoned.6 For most Brisbane listeners, it was the first they had heard of the band. While Jonh Ingham’s review for British weekly Sounds virtually assured the Saints’ status from the outset – as decisive a prediction of rock & roll future as Jon Landau’s famous 1974 assessment of Bruce Springsteen – its significance went largely unrecognised at the time.
Chris Bailey: I was actually listening to the radio at the time and I thought, ‘That’s odd. I’m in that group. I don’t recall becoming instantly famous in the UK.’ And then Ed called up and said, ‘Have you heard the news?’ and I said, ‘Yes, it sounds a bit weird. What’s going on?’ And then a telegram came, probably the Power Exchange offering us a deal. And then lots of telegrams started to arrive. And then ultimately after the telegrams arrived we were sent a copy of the magazine. By that stage we had the impression that something was up, because even EMI here had been in touch.
The short-lived Power Exchange label’s enthusiasm won them the licence to reissue the single locally in England. By the time of its eventual release in December, punk had reached a crescendo of public hysteria. The Sex Pistols had already been sacked from EMI in the wake of their expletive-flecked confrontation with Bill Grundy on the Today show. Slammed for caving into a tabloid-led moral panic, the label was desperate to claw back lost credibility. Seduced by Ingham’s endorsement, EMI instructed its baffled representatives in Sydney to sign the Saints.
Thus Sydney artist & repertoire manager Chris Barnes along with EMI house producer Rod Coe were packed off to Brisbane to meet the band. With an album being demanded by their bosses in London, they had little choice. More time – this time an entire weekend – was booked at Window Studios. Rod Coe, who had made his mark working with Slim Dusty, found he didn’t have a great deal to do. His lasting contribution was to let the band go: the Saints’ inexperience in the studio didn’t translate to an ignorance of what they were trying to achieve. ‘Musically,’ Kuepper insists, ‘we knew exactly what we were doing.’
Rod Coe: It was incredibly raw, and that was confronting, because my natural instinct was to smooth it over. But they were really strong, they had their own chemistry going, they had their sound and their energy. It wasn’t like you had to pick the songs apart and rearrange them and present them in studio form – it was very much a garage-type situation. I just had to get it while it was hot.
Ed Kuepper: Rod came along and sat there with a bemused look on his face for a couple of days. I don’t think he had much of a clue what we were doing, but he was a really nice guy, and he let us do what we wanted to do. The other thing I really liked about Rod – still do – was that he became kind of an ally at EMI. He was a friendly face there, whereas a lot of people weren’t.
Rod Coe: It pisses me off sometimes when people say that the producer just sat there and did nothing, becau
se sometimes that’s the very best thing to do! But I did feel at the time I was contributing nothing, other than making sure the job got done.
Regardless of the extent of his musical contribution, the rocket-fuelled intensity of the eight new tracks Coe recorded for (I’m) Stranded outstripped even the two single cuts, which were redeployed to open each side of the album. More disciplined than Damned Damned Damned, as nihilistic as Never Mind The Bollocks, Stranded’s raw fury was nevertheless closer in spirit to the English bands than anything to come out of New York.
Ed Kuepper: Well, the Saints were a working-class band. The New York bands, as much as I liked them, were all well-off kids working in a very safe environment. I mean, they could play CBGBs and play to 50 people and it would all be very cool. Whereas we might play the Sherwood RSL and risk getting our heads bashed in. Anything goes in New York, whereas here, not very much goes.
The pole position of the two single sides notwithstanding, Stranded revolves around the band’s first two compositions. A slow, chugging hymn to adolescent frustration, Messin’ With The Kid is raised to towering proportions by Kuepper’s long outro solo. But Nights In Venice is the tour de force, propelled by a blinding performance from the untutored Hay. Hay’s jousting with Kuepper provided the key to the album’s rapier cut-and-thrust sound, a musical relationship that Kuepper would extend further with Jeffrey Wegener in the jazz-inspired Laughing Clowns.
Ed Kuepper: Nights In Venice was a distilled version of what a lot of the live sets at various times consisted of. The instrumental section with Bailey ad-libbing over it was something we did in a few songs, but it only got put onto record with that one. There were a couple of others that had a similar kind of feel. Messin’ With The Kid was there to counter the total expressionism of Nights In Venice.
In early 1977 EMI assigned the Saints their first manager, a budding music entrepreneur called Chris Gilbey. The band was already being pulled in different directions. With zero commercial interest in what either the Saints or their Sydney counterparts, Radio Birdman, were doing in Australia, a move was inevitable. England was the obvious place for both bands to go.
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