REAL GONE
Stranded Man
Chris Bailey, frontman of Brisbane anti-heroes The Saints, left us on April 9.
Far from home: the sainted Chris Bailey.
Bleddyn Butcher
THE LEGACY
The Album: The Saints Eternally Yours (Harvest, 1978)
The Sound: The follow-up to (I’m) Stranded delivers buzzsaw thrills with heightened songwriting savvy and, on Know Your Product and Orstralia, a gritty horn section straight outta Stax. Few singers have evinced alienation with more poetic verve than Bailey’s pleading “21 years is a long long time to be in this prison where there ain’t no crime.”
SHORTLY AFTER Chris Bailey’s death, Nick Cave posted a tribute in his Red Hand Files, with a photograph of The Saints’ singer sat crumpled on the edge of the low stage of a small Melbourne club in early 1977 At the front of the crowd stood an awestruck 19-year-old stonewash denim-clad Nick Cave. “You can almost see the thought bubble forming above my head: ‘This is what I want to do and this is who I want to be,’” Cave wrote. “In my opinion, The Saints were Australia’s greatest band and Chris Bailey was my favourite singer.”
As well as capturing the beginning of the rest of Cave’s life, no less instructive was the picture’s representation of Bailey, his back turned to the audience. Born in Kenya to Irish parents in 1956, Chris Bailey lived in Belfast prior to his family emigrating to Queensland, settling in the western suburbs of Brisbane, an ultra-conservative environment he later termed “the Deep North of Australia”. At 14, Bailey met Ed Kuepper – “during detention at Oxley Product a High School,” according to the latter Orstralia, horn sect – and the pair formed Kid Galahad outta Sta And The Eternals with drummer Ivor singers h Hay. Adding bassist Kym Bradshaw, alienation the band became The Saints, and in poetic ve Bailey’s p September 1976, after two years years is a struggling to get gigs in Queensland while stoking their outsider prison wh time to b angst with cheap whisky and ain’t no c records left by US troops on furlough from Vietnam, the quartet self-released (I’m) Stranded, a startlingly antagonistic thrash driven by Bailey’s desperate moan.
“Chris Bailey was my favourite singer.”
NICK CA VE
In contrast to antipathy at home, The Saints’ debut single landed with uncanny timing in a UK stirring to punk, whose pivotal groups had yet to release a record. “Single of this and every week,” declared Jonh Ingham in Sounds. The band were signed by EMI and released the (I’m) Stranded album in February 1977. Now relocated to London, the super-aggro This Perfect Day saw The w Your d grittyn straight Few e evinced ith more e than ading “21 ng long n this re there e.”
Saints appear on the same July 14 edition of Top Of The Pops as the Sex Pistols. Yet Bailey was already disenchanted with punk and the industry’s machinations. 1978’s Know Your Product single was a piledriving union of the Motor City’s rock and soul traditions, but Bailey’s growing estrangement from Kuepper saw the band split late that year after a third album, Prehistoric Sounds.
Over subsequent decades, Bailey contentedly subsisted as a nomadic troubadour, feted in France, resident in Sweden and Holland, releasing solo records and a further 10 Saints albums with ever-changing line-ups. The original Saints finally reconciled in 2001 for induction to the Australian Recording Industry Association Hall of Fame, and in 2009 played a festival tour curated by Mick Harvey.