The Saints’ Long March Through The Jazz Age reviewed: the last testament of Chris Bailey

There was Chris Bailey and there is The Saints. These things are not always the same. Consider The Saints and the sound that comes to mind will be the feral rampage of the garage rockers who burst out of Brisbane in 1976. Their dislocated anthem “(I’m) Stranded” exploded a month before The Damned’s “New Rose”, and the Australian outsiders found themselves hailed as musical revolutionaries and pioneers of punk (these things being slightly different).

The punk label was never an exact fit; there was no shortage of raw power, but the sound deepened over the group’s first three albums until they splintered, with guitarist Ed Kuepper going one way along with drummer Ivor Hay, and Bailey the other. Bailey kept the name in the settlement, but the arrangement was never without tension. The singer was not one for laurel-resting. That meant a litany of detours, relocations, solo outings and reboots in a career hampered by legal difficulties.

Peter Wilkinson, the drummer in the final iterations of The Saints, recalls the singer being marketed as a contemporary Jacques Brel, then travelling nomadically through Europe. “He saw a Bolivian pan-pipe band busking in Malmo, and he thought ‘Oh, that’d be a good backing band for my next album.’” Wilkinson cites Bailey’s lyrics for “Just Like Fire Would”, a 1986 song covered by Bruce Springsteen. “The lyric is: ‘One night in a motel room, my eyes cast like steel/I drank the wine they had left on my table, I knew tomorrow was too far.’ The next verse goes, ‘I smoked my last pack of foreign cigarettes/I stayed only to defy,’ and that was Chris Bailey’s motto – defiance.”

When Bailey died in April 2022, the most eloquent tribute was a Red Hand File penned by Nick Cave, which included a photograph of Bailey, exhausted on the stage of a Melbourne club. Caught in the beam of the flash is a youth inspecting the scene like a teenage detective. The callow boy is Cave, who wrote that Bailey represented “some kind of moral purity or essential truth” – that truth being artistic inspiration.

What may be the final Saints album was recorded in 2018, and delayed by contractual wrangling. Engineer Sean Carey expected punk fury and was presented with demos that were softly accented, verging on country. It’s a deep, melodic record, preoccupied – as you might expect from a sixty-something punk troubadour – with dreams, small kindnesses and the end of the world; all of these things feeling suddenly more prominent. There are hints of the Mexican borderlands, and a cowboy silhouetted on the sleeve. The inference is cinematic – the dusty poetry of spaghetti westerns – rather than geographical.

The tone is set by “Empires (Sometimes We Fall”), on which the guitars echo like instructions to an Old West undertaker to get busy making coffins. “A Vision Of Grace” actually has a lonesome cowboy walking into a saloon: “I’ve seen this movie and I think of you,” Bailey sings wearily at the opening of a widescreen exploration of loneliness. The song has some of the mischief you might find in a Peter Perrett lyric, exploring the ground between despair and faith, and – like much of the album – is set in an emotional twilight. “Cinematic dreams aren’t what they seem,” Bailey sings, as night closes in, “a distorted reality.” The melancholy “Vikings” heightens the sense of gloaming to include storms and ominous longships, before dropping a quote from “Alabama Song”. The next whisky bar, Bailey suggests as the mariachi horns sound, is “the end of my world”.

So, yes, there is darkness. “Break Away” is a breeze of Springsteen-style bombast, but beneath the chiming guitars, it is resolutely bleak. When Bailey sings “I am here, but here is nowhere,” the sentiment rings like a lost line from “(I’m) Stranded”. There is a quote from T Rex on the playful “Imaginary Fields Forever”, big twang on “The Key”, and another attempt to stare with bloodshot eyes into the setting sun on “Judas”.

Strangely, thanks to Bailey’s defiant outlook, it’s all rather uplifting. Then there is “Carnivore (Long March Through The Jazz Age)”, with the singer doing his best Jim Morrison as jazzy horns sound ominously. It’s full of frayed religion, a slow procession from The Doors to The Stooges to the place Bailey chiselled for himself in rock history. “Lift me up, don’t bring me down,” he begs, “to sing the blues one more time.” The album closes with the Celtic lament “Will You Still Be There”. It’s a slow dance with sadness, a wallow; a song in which to weep.

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