Lead singer with the Saints, who galvanised the punk movement
CHRIS BAILEY, who has died of natural causes aged 65, was the singer with the Saints, the Australian band who distilled the essence of the 1970s punk revolution.
While bigger names like the Sex Pistols and the Clash were apt to come across as striking a pose – angry youths with no future but lashings of hair gel – the Saints seemed genuinely to care about very little. When Bailey, with his scruffy curls and shabby clothes, fag in hand, snarled “I don’t need nothing, nothing at all” in This Perfect Day, he looked like he meant it.
But he was not a fan of the punk scene. “Most aspects of the ‘movement’ that I encountered were a tad too careerist for my simple country tastes,” he recalled in 1999. “I know we were signed to EMI and all, and had taken the capitalist dollar, but I still had a few teenage delusions left.”
Christopher James Mannix Bailey was born to Northern Irish parents on November 29 1956 in Nanyuki, Kenya, where his father was serving in the Army. He grew up in Belfast until he was seven, when the family moved to Brisbane.
At high school he met the guitarist Ed Kuepper and drummer Ivor Hay, and in 1973, with Jeffrey Wegener on bass, they formed a band, Kid Galahad and the Eternals, a name they soon changed to the Saints.
Their first UK hit took British punk by storm.
(I’m) Stranded made little initial impression in Australia when it was released in September 1976 (a month before the Damned’s New Rose, supposedly the first punk single, came out in Britain, and two months before
Anarchy in the UK). But it was championed by the London music weekly
Sounds, whose editor John Ingham declared it “the single of this and any week”.
The Saints signed a three-album deal with EMI and in February 1977 released their debut LP, also called (I’m) Stranded – “very obnoxious and very badly recorded, but very sincere,” said Bailey – followed three months later by the single
This Perfect Day, a gruff, spitting paean to a life devoid of meaning. It threatened to break into the Top 30 but foundered on EMI’S failure to press enough copies.
After three quick-fire albums Ed Kuepper quit in 1978 over the traditional “musical differences”, and over the next few years the band developed a less rough-hewn sound.
Back home in Australia, meanwhile, punk had initially failed to grip most of the nation, but in Brisbane, where the far-right leanings of Queensland’s premier Joh Bjelke-petersen held sway against a backdrop of high unemployment and mounting disaffection, the Saints kicked up a storm which spread across the country.
“They were kind of god-like to me and my colleagues,” said Nick Cave. “They were just always so much better than everybody else. It was extraordinary to go and see a band that was so anarchic and violent.”
Over the years Bailey periodically reconvened the Saints with shifting line-ups while pursuing a successful solo career; many of his songs were a million melancholy miles from the punk eruptions of his youth, covering subjects as diverse and seemingly unlikely as Marie Antoinette and Edgar Allan Poe. Bruce Springsteen covered Bailey’s 1986 Saints song Just Like Fire Would on his album High Hopes (2014).
When the Mushroom Music record label celebrated its 25th anniversary in 1998, Bailey was one of the musicians who performed at the Melbourne Cricket Ground to around 100,000 people. In 2003 he sang on the chorus of Bring It On on the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds LP Nocturama; he then toured America with the band and performed with them on Late Show with David Letterman.
In 1998 he moved to Haarlem in the Netherlands, living there for the rest of his life. He is survived by his wife, Elisabet Corlin.
Chris Bailey, born November 29 1956, died April 9 2022