I had no point of comparison. We were fourteen and had no idea about The Stooges or The MC5 or even The Kinks. And it was too early that year (1976) to think of calling it punk. The closest I could get was some of the harder '60s stuff I was getting into like 19th Nervous Breakdown, Get Off of My Cloud, or My Generation. It seemed to have just been born there and then. And they were from Brisbane, in our state. No one was from Brisbane, no one we wanted to be.
I needed to get my guitar to sound like that. My guitar at the time was a nylon string given me by my sister. I tuned it to E minor to allow for a quick change between major and minor on the G string. I got the chords ok (with that tuning the easiest way with that riff was to barre the fifth and seventh frets) but it never sounded right. I put a piece of folded paper under the strings at the bridge and it buzzed feebly but along the right path. I didn't know how you got distortion with pedals or amps. And what was layering? That would change by the end of the year, as well.
That left the voice. No harmonies though I could imagine them on the chorus. It was just that solid snarl and growl, nothing like Shirley Stachan or Robert Plant whose soaring screams were at the apex of my musical firmament. But this was making that difficult to hear. You could imagine him talking that way, mumbling sneering, not caring if you got every or any of the words, and hard to please. The closest I could think of was Mick Jagger in things like Satisfaction or Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby... But even that mix of noise and fight didn't make it to this vocal. That's what I wanted to sound like. I wanted to walk around like that, snarling with a piledriving rock band behind me.
I couldn't find the song in any of the Townsville record shops and didn't know about ordering records. I have never had a copy of the 45. They didn't have an album and wouldn't until the following year. The only way to find out about them was in local magazines like RAM or Juke. I started buying both. Nada. It was sometimes on the radio and on ABC tv music shows. If they played outside of Brisbane it surely wouldn't be in Townsville. Before the globe was buzzing with its digital neurones that would be that.
But the stories and interviews did come through and the LP did appear. It was everything it should have been. Brash, tough and melodic. Snarling man could carry a tune forging the notes into a kind of solid tar. And the stories started appearing. His name was Chris Bailey and he was five years older than me which might as well have been fifty from my teen perspective. He was articulate and wry and, however less famous than many others in the pages of Juke, seemed to be in charge of every interview he gave.
The band moved to Sydney and then to London. By then people who heard them were calling them punk. They took over the studio in what had to be a real live performance on the mime and clip show Countdown to the extent that no one who saw it remembered anything else about the show. The London crowd rejected them for not adopting the look. That dropped the penny for me. By then, the uniform appeared: spiky hair, safety pins in nostrils and leather jackets. The only concession I ever made was the jacket (which Mum bought me for my birthday!) but, looking at Chris with his shaggy mop and op shop suits, and complete ownership of himself, drove me away from the punque aesthetic. Wear what you want as long as it's you. Sound the way you want as long as it means something to you.
In '78, Know Your Product came out with a posterised clip on Flashez. It gripped harder than Stranded and had a horn section that suddenly sounded like the perfect extension of Ed's buzzsaw guitar. Who'd have thought? Was it punk? By that stage I didn't care and wasn't even using the term punk much anymore. It had been adopted by its detractors and had long faded from relevance. All the best culture at the time seemed to be thriving in the margins, outside the big oversweetened blancmange that was the mainstream. Whether it was hard rock, the big mysterious spaces of dub, electronic exploration, proto-sampling or anything someone tried that worked, the mood was dark and curious and suited me.
I got to Brisbane far too late to see The Saints live but their legacy was strong and audible. The post-punk of 1980 onwards there made going out exciting because you didn't know what you were going to get. I'll never forget turning up to the Griffith Uni refec during O-week and seeing Ed Kuepper's new band The Laughing Clowns for FREE! And then there was The Monkey Puzzle which was supposedly by The Saints but didn't sound much like even the more sophisticated Prehistoric Sounds album before the original line-up crumbled. The voice was still there, centre stage, I found out that he'd just taken the name, wrote new songs and hired the band members. It took me a long while to reconcile with this, weren't The Saints inviolate? Weren't they the big driving force that survived their own widening musical pallet? This just sounded soft to me. Actually, I think I'd forgotten that the main reason for the magnetism I felt toward them was the persistence of that voice, the growl that called through the buzsaw maelstrom and then the brass and the jazzier moments of the second and third albums and now reached out from music that sounded a lot friendlier. Well, everyone has to change, me included. When Ghost Ships appeared I was back on board.
And then this morning, trying to ignore the pain of a direct hit on my knee on concrete, I rolled over, checked my phone, and saw the news. April 9, 2022, Chris Bailey had died. News like this is always a few days late for various reasons. The very famous or the heads of state are declared the same day but singers and songwriters who influenced other singers and songwriters whose famed eclipsed their inspirations can go unnoticed for days. Chris Bailey, the voice at the birth of punk that didn't care but wanted you to know it didn't care, was part of that set. Did he care that he never got as famous as those others? I don't know. I didn't know him outside of his records and never even saw the band in any of their iterations. I will guess that if his ears were good he would have known the reach of his endeavour. Check that photo above. Chris has hit the floor during one of The Saints' high velocity sets. The boy in the denim jacket, directly above Bailey's head is taking some serious mental notes. It's Nick Cave.
He was special to me for all those things, for deconstructing punk by throwing away its uniform in a Brisbane dominated by uniformed violence and a London given to a consumerist uniformity. He stood in a frilled shirt for a photo shoot attached to an interview where he said he'd rather be aristrocratic than bourgeoise, a curly lock falling into one dark brown Irish eye above a well-earned smirk. He could've wielded a cutlass in that shirt and you'd still have to agree that he was an aristocrat. When Ed brought him a Ramones record and was worried they might be accused to ripping their sound off (same buzzsaw guitar) Chris sniffed and said he thought they sounded more like The Archies. That still makes me smile (and I was welling up, earlier), and I'd rather smile than mope at the passing of this titan as his matter decays and redistributes and the man is long gone. What to do now? Listen.
Wait until tomorrow and then we'll see.
You know, I don't know about tomorrow.....
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