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They were the first band outside the US to release a punk single (ahead of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, et al). Bob Geldof has said: "Rock music in the 70s was changed by three bands – the Pistols, Ramones and The Saints." They are lionised in their native Australia and their champions range from Nick Cave to Sonic Youth. Yet perhaps the Brisbane-formed outfit can’t convincingly claim "legendary" status here. This four-CD collection – released a few years back in Aus – aims to rectify that.
Having blazed a trail with their self-financed debut single (I’m) Stranded in September 1976, the band – Chris Bailey (singer), Ed Kuepper (guitarist) and Ivor Hay (drummer) – added bassist Kym Bradshaw and decamped to the UK, to optimise an explosion-of-punk press buzz. EMI promptly signed them to a three-album deal, and this set offers those albums with multiple bonus tracks and out-takes including the One Two Three Four EP plus a recently unearthed Live in London show (recorded at the Hope & Anchor in 77).
The (I’m) Stranded album is early punk in excelsis – buzzsaw guitars, Buzzcocks structures, two minutes of up-yours to The Man, Bailey’s blank snotty tones a gruff cry of disenchantment. 1978’s Eternally Yours, despite the ferocity of unlikely top 40 hit This Perfect Day (covered by The Fall), already sees them defying expectations. They bring in Stax-influenced horns and brass and, in their lyrics, mock the punk ethos, which they believed was rapidly becoming a glib, record-company-guided uniform. Know Your Product is self-explanatory, while Private Affair rants, "A new vogue for the now generation / A new profit in the same old game". They also took an energised pass at River Deep, Mountain High.
By third album Prehistoric Sounds they’d moved miles on, incorporating jazz and blues, covering Otis Redding, and in the mesmerising track which titles this set coming up with something that today sounds like The Stranglers’ Golden Brown if played by Pavement. The Saints were to fall out, Kuepper later enjoying success with Laughing Clowns and as a Bad Seed, but have latterly kissed and made up. They made a righteous noise.
--Chris Roberts
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Product Description
Digitally Remastered 4 CD set containing the complete recordings from 1976-1978 Includind a Live Album with 48 page booklet
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
Epochal stuff. Criminally ignored at the time (and ever since) by the majority of the fashionistas of the UK music press, The Saints landed from Planet Oz in the maelstrom of late 1970's Britpunk, with a 'Sounds' Single of the Week/Year clutched under their collective armpits in the form of 'I'm Stranded' and their own take on the future of rock 'n' roll.
These 3 albums, plus the Hope and Anchor sessions that provide a listen into the live experience that was The Saints in their Kuepper/Bailey/Hay/Bradshaw- Ward/ heyday are essential listening for any aficionados of the punk era. 'I'm Stranded' does it better, harder and faster than any of the UK punk bands, with the possible exception of the early Damned (an obsolete debate), including the Johnny-come-lately, God-awful Clash (a subjective view). 'Nights in Venice' - can anyone really argue with this as the finest piece of white noise of the era? But, The Saints were moving on (note, I resisted the blatantly obvious....)
Kuepper and Bailey quickly left the punk strait-jacket behind and moved into territory that was beyond their image obsessed and mostly musically inept counterparts. 'Eternally Yours' has the previous album as its template - still hard and holding killer punches like 'This Perfect Day', but progressing both musically and lyrically with tracks like 'Know your Product' and simultaneously swiping aside and cocking a snoop at the scene they found themselves adrift in with 'Private Affair' - 'not everyone wants to be the same'. It's the third album 'Prehistoric Sounds' that takes the band into new territory. The single 'All Times Through Paradise', 'Brisbane', and 'The Prisoner' stand out - but take your pick, The Saints were charting unexplored territory - that both Bailey and Kuepper would explore in later incarnations of Saints, Aints, Laughing Clowns, and solo projects.
The UK music press, obsessed with the 'New Thing' - angular post punk or whatever was in vogue, shamefully ignored The Saints. The music was going from strength to strength but on a personal level it wasn't happening. The band fell apart and drifted back to Australia - Bailey to carry on under The Saints banner - Kuepper to re-emerge with the Laughing Clowns and a solo career that lasts until this day.
This package is extremely well presented in booklet format, with the 3 original EMI albums, great liner notes, outtakes , plus the live tracks (including material from the legendary Saints/Radio Birdman gig at Paddington Town Hall, Sydney). All it really needs is the inclusion of early demo material from 'The Most Primitive Band in the World' recordings and there's nothing more you really need - but that's a totally minor gripe for what is a comprehensive document. What more can I say! Get out there and buy the damned thing!!!
These 3 albums, plus the Hope and Anchor sessions that provide a listen into the live experience that was The Saints in their Kuepper/Bailey/Hay/Bradshaw- Ward/ heyday are essential listening for any aficionados of the punk era. 'I'm Stranded' does it better, harder and faster than any of the UK punk bands, with the possible exception of the early Damned (an obsolete debate), including the Johnny-come-lately, God-awful Clash (a subjective view). 'Nights in Venice' - can anyone really argue with this as the finest piece of white noise of the era? But, The Saints were moving on (note, I resisted the blatantly obvious....)
Kuepper and Bailey quickly left the punk strait-jacket behind and moved into territory that was beyond their image obsessed and mostly musically inept counterparts. 'Eternally Yours' has the previous album as its template - still hard and holding killer punches like 'This Perfect Day', but progressing both musically and lyrically with tracks like 'Know your Product' and simultaneously swiping aside and cocking a snoop at the scene they found themselves adrift in with 'Private Affair' - 'not everyone wants to be the same'. It's the third album 'Prehistoric Sounds' that takes the band into new territory. The single 'All Times Through Paradise', 'Brisbane', and 'The Prisoner' stand out - but take your pick, The Saints were charting unexplored territory - that both Bailey and Kuepper would explore in later incarnations of Saints, Aints, Laughing Clowns, and solo projects.
The UK music press, obsessed with the 'New Thing' - angular post punk or whatever was in vogue, shamefully ignored The Saints. The music was going from strength to strength but on a personal level it wasn't happening. The band fell apart and drifted back to Australia - Bailey to carry on under The Saints banner - Kuepper to re-emerge with the Laughing Clowns and a solo career that lasts until this day.
This package is extremely well presented in booklet format, with the 3 original EMI albums, great liner notes, outtakes , plus the live tracks (including material from the legendary Saints/Radio Birdman gig at Paddington Town Hall, Sydney). All it really needs is the inclusion of early demo material from 'The Most Primitive Band in the World' recordings and there's nothing more you really need - but that's a totally minor gripe for what is a comprehensive document. What more can I say! Get out there and buy the damned thing!!!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Four CD's detailing raw power latterly tinged with soul cynicism and a final dip into MOR tinged maudlin rock. Steering clear of direct politics the Saints delivered a curled lip sneer and leer out the travelling car window at a Ford Escort/Cortina/Capri/Vauxhall Viva world.
Demoliton Girl, This Perfect Day, River Deep Mountain High, Kissing Cousins, Know your Product, Do the Robot turned household electricity into pure volts of humming white molten energy. This surges through the airwaves with the power of their instrumentation blasting through the wind to notch up the changes higher than a thunder cloud blasting its menagerie.
Knocked and shunted at the time due to 70's retro clothing, the photos in the insert depict them as Wishbone Ash throwbacks in style, out of kilter for the new changes being wrought. If only they had learnt to adopt a proto style they would have been huge. Instead they were viewed with suspicion, bandwagon jumpers only making the sounds to extract the cash from the kids. Retrospectively this is clearly not true, at the time paranoia abounded. With good reason as it turned out, the state was apt to co-opt and smash the kids to make them pliable for the machine. In retro-spect it was a paranoid state intent on smashing children.
Now the fashion police have receded back to the Style magazines, the music stands alone as its testimony. This has the full fat sound of the buzz saw electric attack of the Ramones, who they supported, replete with guitar licks of Robert Quine pushed again to a muscular intensity few punks bands could muster let alone capture.
Place this next to "Give Em Enough Rope" to understand the seering dynamics the Saints harnessed. The Clash seem blown out in the middle, a little bit of top a little bit of bottom but nothing to support the ful fat sound. Meanwhile the Saints pulverised audiences with the 1st 2 albums.
The second album "Eternally Yours" is a document on selling the soul to Faustus, an act many corporate rockers would undertake with self satisfied glee. The sound of a band fighting a rear guard action against the huge forces of blandness beiging over the world with their ersatz cheer and back slapping bonhomie, the indelible mark of the 80's pop zeitgeist. It crept along like a cheap form of soul cancer within the musical press; Morley, Penman anything that wrote for the NME championing the next big thing (Haircut 100, Aztec Camera, Josef K, Orange Juice, ABC, Blue Rondo, Wham, Culture Club) as the shift of punk to new wave to kitsch was induced to appear seamless; Spandau Duran, Adamant ablutions, the soft lads all quoted punk heritages.
The Saints were a bastion trying to halt the legion of the wimp from destroying the muscular worlds of the outsider with introverted feyness. The Saints produced the music for flexing the snarl in the shopping mall rather than reading Oscar Wilde poetry in darkened rooms.
This also blasted and pumped brass in broadening the walls of the punk church of multiple sounds which was readily being squeezed towards Discharge and GBH type glue bag rock. Sadly ignored at the time, the brash worlds of pomp took centre stage with the "Blitz." The true sounds of London on fire are however caught smouldering on this record. These are firelighters.
The first two albums are so incendary,when you play them have a fire exinguisher ready to douse the flames. Prehistoric Sounds launched with brash brass but then peters out as the tension waned and the band played safe. It is the fire doused. The Clash meanwhile did this so much better with Combat Rock and London Calling.
The fourth disc, a live album is the Hope and Anchor outtakes from the original live album. I bought this in the late 70's when it originally emerged. It has the Only Ones, X Eay Spex, XTC, Wilko Johnson, Burlesque and Motors. I was always taken aback by the sheer furore and intensity of Demolition Girl pumping out of my weedy hand me down, dad's stereo. It blew everything else on the album with a whirlwind intensity, even X Ray Spex who were the reason I bought it.
Now 30 years later the stereo has changed 1000x and this record has been cleaned up because the original version was deemed a little errr..... "weedy."
It surges through the speakers with a semtex fury, so be warned "do not turn up loud," the buildings insurance will have a special clause about this album being inserted.
A testament to one of the great lost bands of the era, who should be lauded along with the Ramones, Stranglers, Buzzcocks, Generation X, X Ray Spex within the Premiere League of the elitist; a renaissance band caught within a glorious time. We never knew how lucky we were till it went.
Demoliton Girl, This Perfect Day, River Deep Mountain High, Kissing Cousins, Know your Product, Do the Robot turned household electricity into pure volts of humming white molten energy. This surges through the airwaves with the power of their instrumentation blasting through the wind to notch up the changes higher than a thunder cloud blasting its menagerie.
Knocked and shunted at the time due to 70's retro clothing, the photos in the insert depict them as Wishbone Ash throwbacks in style, out of kilter for the new changes being wrought. If only they had learnt to adopt a proto style they would have been huge. Instead they were viewed with suspicion, bandwagon jumpers only making the sounds to extract the cash from the kids. Retrospectively this is clearly not true, at the time paranoia abounded. With good reason as it turned out, the state was apt to co-opt and smash the kids to make them pliable for the machine. In retro-spect it was a paranoid state intent on smashing children.
Now the fashion police have receded back to the Style magazines, the music stands alone as its testimony. This has the full fat sound of the buzz saw electric attack of the Ramones, who they supported, replete with guitar licks of Robert Quine pushed again to a muscular intensity few punks bands could muster let alone capture.
Place this next to "Give Em Enough Rope" to understand the seering dynamics the Saints harnessed. The Clash seem blown out in the middle, a little bit of top a little bit of bottom but nothing to support the ful fat sound. Meanwhile the Saints pulverised audiences with the 1st 2 albums.
The second album "Eternally Yours" is a document on selling the soul to Faustus, an act many corporate rockers would undertake with self satisfied glee. The sound of a band fighting a rear guard action against the huge forces of blandness beiging over the world with their ersatz cheer and back slapping bonhomie, the indelible mark of the 80's pop zeitgeist. It crept along like a cheap form of soul cancer within the musical press; Morley, Penman anything that wrote for the NME championing the next big thing (Haircut 100, Aztec Camera, Josef K, Orange Juice, ABC, Blue Rondo, Wham, Culture Club) as the shift of punk to new wave to kitsch was induced to appear seamless; Spandau Duran, Adamant ablutions, the soft lads all quoted punk heritages.
The Saints were a bastion trying to halt the legion of the wimp from destroying the muscular worlds of the outsider with introverted feyness. The Saints produced the music for flexing the snarl in the shopping mall rather than reading Oscar Wilde poetry in darkened rooms.
This also blasted and pumped brass in broadening the walls of the punk church of multiple sounds which was readily being squeezed towards Discharge and GBH type glue bag rock. Sadly ignored at the time, the brash worlds of pomp took centre stage with the "Blitz." The true sounds of London on fire are however caught smouldering on this record. These are firelighters.
The first two albums are so incendary,when you play them have a fire exinguisher ready to douse the flames. Prehistoric Sounds launched with brash brass but then peters out as the tension waned and the band played safe. It is the fire doused. The Clash meanwhile did this so much better with Combat Rock and London Calling.
The fourth disc, a live album is the Hope and Anchor outtakes from the original live album. I bought this in the late 70's when it originally emerged. It has the Only Ones, X Eay Spex, XTC, Wilko Johnson, Burlesque and Motors. I was always taken aback by the sheer furore and intensity of Demolition Girl pumping out of my weedy hand me down, dad's stereo. It blew everything else on the album with a whirlwind intensity, even X Ray Spex who were the reason I bought it.
Now 30 years later the stereo has changed 1000x and this record has been cleaned up because the original version was deemed a little errr..... "weedy."
It surges through the speakers with a semtex fury, so be warned "do not turn up loud," the buildings insurance will have a special clause about this album being inserted.
A testament to one of the great lost bands of the era, who should be lauded along with the Ramones, Stranglers, Buzzcocks, Generation X, X Ray Spex within the Premiere League of the elitist; a renaissance band caught within a glorious time. We never knew how lucky we were till it went.
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
Fantastic value collection from a fantastic band. It's RnB (old proper meaning): Dr Feelgood mashed with the Stooges (without the subsequent fetish value).
Prehistoric Sounds towers over most other releases of its original period and indeed most other rock or RnB albums. This Perfect Day: few singles finer.They also do the best cover of the best record ever made: River Deep Mountain High.
The live sets are not filler but give a great counterpoint to the studio versions and lets not forget that they rock in way that most bands have forgotten. A joy from beginning to end: feel the love from the other reviews and believe.
Really worth your squids.
Prehistoric Sounds towers over most other releases of its original period and indeed most other rock or RnB albums. This Perfect Day: few singles finer.They also do the best cover of the best record ever made: River Deep Mountain High.
The live sets are not filler but give a great counterpoint to the studio versions and lets not forget that they rock in way that most bands have forgotten. A joy from beginning to end: feel the love from the other reviews and believe.
Really worth your squids.
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