If you had told me a few weeks ago I’d soon
be enjoying with gusto a new album by The Saints, I would have said something
like, what a strange thing to say or perhaps ‘really? How interesting’ while
thinking, ‘that is exceedingly unlikely, and also, who are you to tell me what
I will and won’t like’. But the fact is a few weeks ago on RRR I heard a song
that I thought was terrific – angular and lyrically strange verse punctuated by
odd bells, followed by a rousing chorus with lush brass orchestration, and I
was most surprised to discover that this was a song from the new Saints album.
It struck me so solidly I actually went to JB and bought the album – with very
little expectation that any of the rest of it would be anywhere near as good as that one
song (I just don't trust old songwriters, you see).
I am not one of those people with that
boring obvious attitude to Chris Bailey’s Saints. I don’t care that Bailey
continued on with the Saints after he and Ed Kuepper ended their creative
partnership. I care as little now, in 2013 as I did in 1979 or whenever Bailey
made that decision, or it was made for him. Kuepper couldn’t have continued the
Saints without Bailey because everyone knew Bailey as the singer. Bailey might
as well have had the band name, especially since no-one else could have it. But
why anyone in the world thinks it’s any of their business now or at any time in
the past 34 years to pass judgment on that arrangement I can’t imagine.
Of course, what a lot of antiBaileysainters
will tell you is that they think Bailey is soppy and derivative and not punk
and Kuepper in the punk Saints tempered that and gave it an edge. I have to
admit I’m very au fait with the first three Saints albums and that after that
(there have been 11 albums) my knowledge is patchy, though I think The Monkey
Puzzle, which was the first real album after Kuepper, is excellent and I would
listen to that anytime. The 80s singles (‘Ghost Ships’ etc) I like well enough,
but I could live without hearing them again for a while longer in fact possibly
the remainder of my life. I have some of those 80s albums in a little box set
that Stewart Anderson gave me because he bought it on spec and was repelled by
its unpunkiness. Didn’t want it in the house! There was another album they did
about seven or eight years ago (OK I checked – 11 years ago) with the nonsense
title Spit the Blues Out, which I also thought
was more than tolerable, but it didn’t really take. I had been pretty oblivious
to the records since then. Now this.
Like the song I heard, the album is called
King of the Sun. The copy I picked up has a picture of a small posh boy from
the century before last on the cover – why, why, why?
Doesn’t matter. The album opens with the
amazing title track. Which itself opens with a piano, then a somewhat plaintive
and very esoteric series of couplets (which sound like a disconnected sequence
of random lines) and into the rousing chorus, then rather than returning to a
vocal verse, just a version of the verse with a solo and so on in it, and what
can I say, then it goes back to the chorus then it ends. You don’t need this
kind of recommendation, building your hopes up and so on, to make you like the
song (you may already have heard it, particularly if you clicked that link) and
it’s ok with me if you don’t anyway, but of course what you really need to do
is happen upon it without knowing it’s this 40 year old band (or at least a
permutation thereof – there’s no-one left of course from the original group
except Bailey) you probably already have an opinion of.
So the other odd part of this story is that
the rest of the record is largely pretty amazing too. I don’t know who the
other members of the band ‘are’ (aside from their names). I don’t know if the
drums are programmed, they sound like they could be but it might just be really
good, precise, well-tuned pop drums. I don’t have a clue if anything on the
record was just bashed out in a more or less in-the-studio, random way;
sometimes it sounds like it may have been (even the great ‘King of the Sun’
sounds like it could have been a lucky studio jam, or at very least an
imprecisely decided/inadequately rehearsed bash-it-out recording then fixed
and/or ‘written’ in ‘post’; I’m thinking for instance of the eccentric way the
drums change going back into the final verse, which do have an element of je ne
sais pas pourquoi about them).
The low points include the occasional
drossy lyric, or more precisely, drossy rhyme. There are bulk lazy non-sequitur
couplets (the one employing the white cliffs of Dover springs to mind). We
don’t need to go into them too deeply, but let’s just say there are more
examples of this towards the second half of the record, which suggests to me
that someone (presumably Bailey) knows when he’s doing it with one hand tied
behind his back (and the hand in question is the one that comes up with the
innovative or at least interesting stuff). There’s nothing that makes me want
to scream, as I go towards the back half of the record, but compared to the five
excellent songs at the front, it is definitely diminishing returns, with the
exception of the quite funny final song.
I remember the time in the mid-80s when
people used to talk about The Saints in the same breath as the Triffids or the
Go-Betweens (or the Wet Taxis in their late phase or Sea Stories or The
Odolites) and indeed that is sort of the space they had come to fill, as lush
pop balladeers. It worked.
Here, I particularly like the ballad
‘Duty’, which, once again, doesn’t always entirely cut it in the lyrics
department and then DOES, with total compunction. If I were a songwriter, and I
wrote two songs as good as ‘Duty’ and ‘King of the Sun’, I would give myself
free reign to fill up the rest of an album with total half-arsed rehashes of
them, or ripoffs of other songs. Bailey doesn’t do that, and even if the
misfires of tawdry lyric or bluesy workout rear up occasionally, that’s
probably less a case of lack of inspiration, and more a case of ‘I’m just a
jobbing musician, don’t take me too seriously, I’m not pretentious like some
people you could name.’ Actually, I’m very, very impressed.
*PS a few days later: The copy I bought also had a second CD in it of what I assume to be old 80s Saints music - I am only guessing because I recognised some of the top 40 hits like the abovementioned 'Ghost Ships'. It was a weird thing to find in there mainly because there was no indication on the sleeve or anywhere else that there was a kind of semi-greatest hits CD in there, so it could hardly be called a selling point. After I wrote & posted the above review I went online - no wait, I already was - and looked at a few other reviews, most of which were appallingly lame, polite and pedestrian, which is fine, I can dig that. But one or two did mention the great hits CD. For what that's worth (not a thing).
