It was the unvarnished disdain that shocked me. Bands flogging singles were all satin pants and pearly whites in 1977. They might look angsty in performance but come interview time, their job was to bow and scrape and please.
So who was this kid? Sloppy, pimply, slouched, dull eyes under bad hair. Flicking ash with one hand, the other in his pocket, grunting monosyllables. Ray Burgess, mega-dimpled host of after-school TV pop show Flashez, was clearly appalled by Chris Bailey – co-founder and frontman of the Saints, who died on April 9 at the age of 65 – and there in my polite suburban loungeroom, so was I.
Chris Bailey from The Saints performing at Homebake in 2005.Credit: Domino Postiglione
This was punk, apparently. The sneery garage slam of The Saints’ single, (I’m) Stranded, loosely fit the new sound we’d heard trickling from London. But the galvanising thing was what this wasn’t.
Chris Bailey wasn’t nice. He wasn’t pandering. This wasn’t the toothless game that rock’n’roll had become in its glittering third decade.
Who knew that was allowed?
I was too young for gigs, but “of any live band I saw, they certainly had the biggest effect,” Nick Cave told me much later. “They were the ones who could actually play, who had a sound they at least seemed to have developed out of nowhere. Even though the punk thing was taking off they were utterly unique and hugely influential.”
Bailey, for his part, was always amused by the punk marketing. “There was a lot of hype by the time we got to London cause the punky rock thing had taken off, but back in Oz we wouldn’t have been pissed on if we were on fire,” he recalled.
EMI London actually tried to make them wear snot-green uniforms, which they laughed off as the new wave boy band nonsense it was. In a rapid run of early albums, the Saints left that straitjacket to rot.
By the time I met him in the early ’90s, Bailey was three albums deep into a parallel solo singer-songwriter career. Born in Kenya, raised in Belfast – hence the outsider perspective shared with fellow Brisbane blow-in Ed Kuepper – he held forth in his plummy British accent with matching eloquence as we sat up drinking in a dingy Perth hotel room.
With one of many post-Kuepper iterations of the Saints, he’d recently had minor radio success with Just Like Fire Would, to be covered decades later by Bruce Springsteen. On that night, I remember him being philosophically amused about the relative hit potential of his new album, with its songs about Marie Antoinette and Edgar Allen Poe.
Bailey during the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Sydney in 2009. Credit: Getty Images
“We’ve never been the most popular group,” he told me one time with a notable lack of anxiety. “We go up and down the barge pole in terms of perceived importance, which over the length of time I’ve been making records would be understandable.”
When the original Saints reformed in 2009, at the curatorial behest of the Bad Seeds for the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival at Mount Buller in Victoria, Bailey seemed to enjoy his Byron-esque elder statesman image, swishing about at all hours, greeting starstruck strangers in a long camel-hair coat.
The last time I saw him perform was six years ago at The Gaso in Collingwood, fronting yet another line-up of what he continued to call the Saints, despite old punk purists muttering darkly. Guitarist Davey Lane told me Bailey worked them hard, but the only pressure he felt was from the staff of the rehearsal studio, who remembered the original versions as sacrosanct. “Of course,” said Lane, “Chris has been up against that for years.”
The gig careened from sublime to shambles. There were late ’70s Brisbane slammers and later classics Know Your Product, Always, Always, Ghost Ships and Fire Would, but also a tedious impromptu Dylan pastiche about Pauline Hanson. Bailey slowly sank a full jug of gin and tonic as he lambasted Australia’s backwater culture with rising vitriol.
Again with the unvarnished disdain.
Around 20 years ago, as an early Saints box set hit the market, I remembered to ask him about that appearance on Flashez that launched the very notion of punk in my tiny suburban Australian brain.
“I suppose being young and surly and dissolute and disrespectful, yes. I suppose you’re right. It was punkish behaviour,” Bailey allowed. “I’m sure Eddie and I thought we were being really cool, man. Back then, I guess I was thinking, ‘I don’t wanna sell out, I don’t wanna be a pop star, I’m an artist’. Or some bollocks like that.”
But “on a musical level,” he added, “I think the Saints are just a part of the greater evolution of something I care very deeply about, which is rock’n’roll music. That’s gratification enough, really.”
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