Ed Kuepper: It was a difficult relationship with EMI in Australia, and we ended up signing directly to [EMI subsidiary] Harvest in the UK. They were keen to have us over there, and they paid for it. EMI in Australia didn’t really have a clue what to do with the band.
Chris Bailey: I think there were several buses being chartered and driven at the same time. Chris [Gilbey] was a real careerist, a bit of a wide-boy. When things were going well he was on side. Ed’s a megalomaniac, I’m sure he thought he was in control of everything, but that’s not strictly true. It was quite fragmented, and it started to fragment very quickly.
Following a brief tour to Melbourne, the band played its final gig in Australia with Radio Birdman at the Paddington Town Hall on 3 April 1977. The performances of both bands on that night – the Saints in their sloppy street clothes, Birdman with their uniforms and symbols – have since gone down in history. So has the mutual distrust that bordered on enmity between the two bands: in Vivien Johnson’s biography of Birdman, guitarist Deniz Tek remembers Kuepper’s ‘brooding hostility’, and dismisses Bailey as a ‘drunken Irishman’.7 While the feud has long since passed, it was real enough at the time.
Chris Bailey: It’s pretty overblown, and quite amusing. But there was animosity, and I’m sure they’d say the same thing. I thought it was more from their side, even though I’ve heard the quote ‘They came down like hillbillies, and were really obnoxious and we just welcomed them with open arms!’ Which I think is kind of true.
Filmed by the ABC, the show is the best existing document of the original Saints in full flight. There’s Kuepper, sleeves rolled up, nodding his head with each downstroke on his cherry-red Gibson, dispensing with lead guitar flourish in favour of jagged rhythm, maximum distortion and lightning bursts of feedback. At the back, Hay barely holds down the beat, his face painfully contorted. Bradshaw remains in the background, unobtrusive, perhaps already superfluous to requirements.
At the front is Bailey, his hair a dripping tangle of sweat. Occasionally he shimmies self-consciously, but mostly he remains still, gripping the microphone tightly. His vocals, though, are explosive, each syllable a verbal grenade. Between songs he thanks ‘the local chapter of the Hitler youth’ for the stage props, a reference to Radio Birdman’s quasi-militaristic logo.
As Nights In Venice descends into the abyss, Bailey drops from the stage. He sings the remainder of the song slumped below its lip. As the camera moves in for a close-up, he forgets himself, stares, and swipes. There is a momentary loss of vision. Regaining his feet, he charges; screams; reels back and, in a gesture of the most supreme indifference, actually thumbs his nose at the audience, before plunging headlong into the song’s last verse:
East side, west side it all looks the same now
Don’t need nobody and you don’t care nohow
Don’t need no love and you don’t need no hate
You were screaming so loud but it was much too late
The song finally topples in on itself. The spent singer staggers off into the crowd, offering one final sign-off before tossing his microphone aside:
‘WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF TIME!’
The Saints arrived in England in the last days of May 1977. Punk was already a fashionable contrivance, a prisoner of its three chords. In London, the image – somewhere between the Ramones’ leather jackets and the Pistols’ cut-and-paste juxtapositions – had become a uniform. EMI was making noises about designing a ‘Saints Suit’: lime-green shirts, ripped pants and spiky hair.8 The band blanched at the suggestion. Bailey’s long, tousled mop remained in place.
Outside London, the new music, and its accompanying garb, had yet to take hold.
Ed Kuepper: It hadn’t hit the provinces yet. We did a couple of shows in London and then did a tour around the country, and once you got out of London . . . If the mark of a punk is a particular look, then they didn’t exist outside the capital cities. Maybe there might have been a token punk in the medium-sized towns, but you didn’t see many of them. In fact, our first tour around, people looked pretty much the way people did in Australia.
This dichotomy cut against the Saints both ways. Punk was moving so fast that inside the capital the band found itself scorned by the same British weeklies that had fêted it six months earlier. Elsewhere, they remained unknown. EMI’s patronage, too, was the source of press accusations that the Saints were mere hangers-on. The band’s unwillingness to be corralled into anything that resembled an organised movement would ultimately cruel its prospects.
Ed Kuepper: [After the Sex Pistols] there seemed to be a view that if you were going to be on EMI then you were some kind of class traitor or something. The fact that the Clash were on CBS didn’t seem to offend anybody nearly as much.
Chris Bailey: We weren’t really part of that whole stream. I didn’t really relate to punk rock. I liked the soft aspects of it – the little gothic kids in their funny make-up; I thought that was quite sweet. As far as it being a philosophy, I mean, that’s all bollocks, it was just a marketing exercise.
The Saints’ first London shows were prestigious. Interest in the group post-Stranded was such that Seymour Stein had, via EMI, signed them for the American market to his own Sire Records, home of the Ramones and Talking Heads. Accordingly the band was booked to support their new label-mates at the Roundhouse on 5 and 6 June. What should have been a dream debut turned into a debacle: unused to the big stage, nervous and jetlagged, the band was pitifully off-form, a situation not helped by Kuepper’s amps blowing up on both nights. And, sure enough, the press denounced the Saints as Ramones plagiarists. Kuepper’s earlier fears were swiftly materialising.
After a brief regional tour, the band retreated to the studio. This Perfect Day was among the band’s toughest moments, its serrated riff echoing the Stones’ Paint It, Black; Bailey’s lyrics a series of denials as potent as any penned by John Lydon: ‘I don’t need no one to tell me what I don’t already know!’ It was a relentless track, impossible to assimilate into the more pop-friendly marketing strategy of the new wave. It says much for Britain’s dark humour in the summer of 1977 that, incredibly, the single took off following the band’s appearance on the UK television institution Top Of The Pops.
This Perfect Day sold a staggering 75,000 copies in two weeks, pushing the band to number 34 on the British charts. It would climb no higher: anticipating a smaller return, EMI had run out of stock. How such a blunder was allowed to happen is a mystery, for the label had taken the trouble to issue both 7-inch and 12-inch formats of the single, with the latter containing a bonus track.9 The sleeve’s disclaimer warning that the third song, Do The Robot, had been added ‘due to an administrative error’ was an obvious promotional ruse, but it worked. By the time stores were supplied with additional copies, however, it was too late: the song had already slipped off the radar.
By this time Bradshaw was gone, sacked by Kuepper after the first tour. Bradshaw had remained on the periphery of the initial triumvirate. Suffering from what Kuepper euphemistically describes as ‘personal problems’ and unable to fulfil his bass duties to requirements, he had outstayed his welcome. His replacement, Alasdair Ward, was close at hand.
Ed Kuepper: Alasdair was the brother of a roadie that we had working for us. He was obviously aware of the fact that the situation with Kym wasn’t all that good and took the first opportunity he could to put his brother forward. Alasdair came along, did an audition and he knew all the stuff, he was a much tighter bass player than Kym. So he got the job.
Attempting to regain their momentum, in July the band gathered in AIR studios in London to record a second EP, One Two Three Four. Featuring two covers and superfluous second takes of Demolition Girl and One Way Street, it was plainly a stopgap. The highlight, a thrilling version of River Deep, Mountain High, had been in the band’s set from the early days. But playing standards at a time when history had been cast aside only furthered the impres
sion that the band was out of step.
Ed Kuepper: There weren’t enough new songs around that I can remember. And it just seemed like a really good opportunity to record songs that had worked fantastically live. River Deep, Mountain High was a real standout. If we were trying to align ourselves with the fashion-conscious punk element, then sure, it was a major blunder. But even with that knowledge we would have gone ahead, because one of the things that I certainly rejected was the denial of the past.
There were plenty of new songs by the time the band embarked upon a brief tour to support the EP’s release in October. One month earlier, the band had laid down 11 tracks in Wessex Studios that would form the backbone of their second album, provisionally titled International Robots. With tracks like Lost And Found, Misunderstood and Run Down, along with streamlined new recordings of This Perfect Day and Do The Robot, musically the album didn’t promise to be any great extension of Stranded.10
On 28 October Never Mind The Bollocks was released. The Sex Pistols’ only complete album, it remains the definitive artefact of the punk era. But with lesser bands content to regard Bollocks as a blueprint rather than a full stop, and with the Saints having already made one album the equal of the Pistols in sound and fury anyway, Kuepper recognised the need to start again.
Ed Kuepper: I don’t think you can keep making a record like Stranded. Because it would be like [the Stooges’] LA Blues, you can hear it once but you don’t want to constantly hear it. It has to go somewhere else to retain any sort of validity.
The Saints returned to Wessex at the conclusion of the tour. The extra money and time available to the band, courtesy of EMI’s patronage, would be used to full advantage. Inspired by Otis Redding’s horn-fuelled rearrangement of the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction, Kuepper began experimenting with a punching brass arrangement for a new song, welded to an explosive riff. The result, Know Your Product, would take the Saints in an entirely new direction and provide the necessary focal point for what would become Eternally Yours.
With Kuepper still only 22 and Bailey barely 21, the novelty of being imported rock stars had scarcely worn off.
Ed Kuepper: I wasn’t happy with what we had before we added Know Your Product, and the idea of having a bit more time in the studio was great. Having an EMI car or cab picking us up to go to the studio to do the recording, all that stuff was incredibly exciting and really got me into the whole idea of being a recording band, as opposed to just a band who played live.
Eternally Yours captures the Saints in transition. Know Your Product bridges the unbridled force of Stranded with the driving R&B of Prehistoric Sounds, while the acoustic Memories Are Made Of This, Untitled and A Minor Aversion look ahead to the more considered solo careers of both Kuepper and Bailey. If the overall results are less focused than Stranded, what holds the album together are Bailey’s lyrics, a pinpoint satire on punk’s commercial incorporation.
But EMI was unprepared for such a departure. Ill feeling between band and label (fomented by the latter’s mishandling of This Perfect Day) was already simmering. Audiences were similarly affronted, reacting with bemusement when the group toured with a brass section in January. When Know Your Product went nowhere on its release as a single the next month, the writing was on the wall. The Saints, too young to appreciate that the merits of what they were setting out to accomplish might just be lost on others, were stunned by the injustice of it all.
Chris Bailey: We went to Paris, and nobody turned up. We went to Amsterdam, and nobody turned up. So Ed and I got a bit sulky and didn’t want to tour any more. I think we kind of made the wrong decision, because we probably should have actually slogged it out a little bit longer. But I think we thought we’d already arrived, and that was a mistake.
Convinced the band was going nowhere, Bailey’s girlfriend tried to persuade the singer to retire from music to become a publican in Cornwall. Bailey duly left after the tour, a fact concealed from EMI. But Kuepper, his creative muse ignited by Know Your Product, had already commenced writing material even further away from the band’s roots. Barely a month after Eternally Yours finally crept out in April, the band was back in the studio. It was their last chance.
Ed Kuepper: I just said to Chris, ‘Look, you haven’t made this departure public, come back and do the vocals, write some lyrics.’ So Prehistoric Sounds was a more extended recording session, because he didn’t have much in the way of lyrics initially.
Chris Bailey: It was pretty obvious EMI was going to drop us. I’d decided I was going to scarper because it was just in the too-hard basket. Ed takes credit for this, but Gilbey actually talked me into not going, because I was the voice of the band and if I left I’d be letting everybody down, and I thought yeah, OK, he’s got a point. So I came back to the flock, and the flock disintegrated after the record, which we knew was going to happen.
Released posthumously in November 1978, Prehistoric Sounds was the Saints’ final album in their original incarnation. It may as well have been the work of an entirely different band to that which made Stranded only 18 months previously. The Stax-style horn arrangements prefigured by Know Your Product is given full vent, with the authentic R&B soulfulness of All Times Through Paradise, Swing For The Crime and The Chameleon reinforced by covers of Otis Redding’s Security and Aretha Franklin’s Save Me.
Most crucially, the slower tempos and extra space in the sound freed Bailey, who responded magnificently, in spite of Kuepper’s insistence that he was less than enthusiastic about the new material. But while in Australia Prehistoric Sounds is widely regarded as the Saints’ masterpiece – in Clinton Walker’s words, ‘an extraordinary collision of brass, guitars and attitude’11 – in the UK it was viewed as the work of a band that had lost touch with what made it great in the first place. The album was never released by Sire in America.
Ed Kuepper: I was really focused on Prehistoric Sounds; I really started to feel that I was getting into stride on that record. The more subdued sound is totally intentional; it wasn’t an oversight. Everyone was using distorted guitars in those days, and that was something that I wanted to move away from.
Ironically, given the poor reception of the covers on One Two Three Four, EMI was convinced the album’s best chance lay with the recording of the Otis Redding chestnut, Security. It was indicative of the label’s loss of faith in the band’s direction, and was compounded by A&R changes that are the scourge of any new band.
Chris Bailey: EMI were not pleased. I really thought Swing For The Crime should have been the single, but that wasn’t the case. We got our marching orders – you know, your wages will stop in a month from now. And then it all just fell to pieces.
Ed Kuepper: I kind of didn’t care after we’d done that album. If we were going to end, it was a really good record to end on. I was actually contemplating chucking it in for a short period of time.
Kuepper and Bailey had grown apart. The horns on Prehistoric Sounds – especially the saxophone on Kuepper’s solo composition Brisbane (Security City) – had reflected his fascination with jazz, particularly the work of Archie Shepp and John Coltrane. Lyrically, the song’s subject matter drifted homeward.
Thirteen hot nights in a row
The cops drive past but they move slow
A million people staying low
With mangoes ripe who needs to grow
Bailey was unmoved. A far more traditional writer, he had begun to assert himself with his own solo contribution to Prehistoric Sounds, Take This Heart Of Mine (a song Kuepper would have preferred omitted). Further, Bailey had no intention of returning to Brisbane. And he had already completed demos for what would become his personal triumph, the Paralytic Tonight, Dublin Tomorrow EP.
Chris Bailey: Ed just didn’t want to be in London anymore, and I did. And even though Ed never mentions this, I already had the basis of a new group.
He came down for one rehearsal, sat there with a guitar
in his hand for about 20 minutes, then said, ‘I don’t like this,’ and left.
Kuepper returned to Brisbane, where he would form the Laughing Clowns with Jeffrey Wegener in 1979. Bailey retained the Saints name, making a number of fine records with a floating line-up of very different bands.
The relationship between the two songwriters never recovered.
CHAPTER FOUR
the striped sunlight sound
If the Saints’ working-class origins in Brisbane’s south-west were a factor in the band’s self-described ‘obnoxious demeanour’, then the opposite was the case for Brisbane’s other pre-eminent band of the late 1970s. Forged at the University of Queensland by two former private school teenagers, the Go-Betweens were inspired more by the Saints’ willingness to go against the grain than their sound. Although by no means the first group to emerge from Brisbane in the wake of the Saints’ departure, the Go-Betweens also harboured ambitions beyond what their country was able to provide. By the early ’80s they too would decamp for London.
Robert Forster: I think we all felt a little bit brushed by the Saints’ wings. They certainly made Brisbane seem a bit more like a place where you could do something tangible. Before that, the previous band from here that had put out an album was Railroad Gin, and they were from a whole other era – they were like musos, you know? The fact that these four delinquents from Oxley and Inala had got together and flipped out a city was a huge thing.
Robert Forster grew up in The Gap, a sprawling new suburb situated at the foot of the forested slopes of Mt Nebo. The son of a fitter and turner and a physical education teacher, Forster was educated at Brisbane Boys Grammar in inner-city Spring Hill. Not surprisingly his upbringing was steeped in sport rather than music, and he played in the school’s first XI cricket team, even attending state trials.
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