The Saints
Eternally Yours

THE REVIEW

After having shaken the already unstable foundations of seventies rock with the unrepeatable "(I'm) Stranded", the Saints from Brisbane, seduced by the call, left their native land of kangaroos to reach the mecca of punk, as well as the true navel of the world during the year-zero 1977. The impact that the London of no future, so far away - physically and otherwise - from the wild and desolate Australian lands had on these crude and naive thugs coming from overseas was traumatic. Their new record label indeed tried to (sold them out by commercially exploiting that stereotype, made of crests and safety pins, created by Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers and introduced in England by the famous swindlers Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, and our Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper wrote, about these commercial ambitions of the new London rock, in "Private Affair":

<< New Uniforms, we all look the same / A new vogue for the new generation / A new profit in the same old game >>

It is no coincidence, therefore, that the London album by the Saints is among the fiercest of '78. While all the punks in London launched slogans and shouted about revolution to the delight of the majors, the Saints, in "Eternally Yours," made a real reaction (in "Prehistoric Sounds," their third discographic chapter, they even quoted the 50s). They accentuated, as if nostalgic towards their beloved and much more genuine Australia, the r'n'b side of their sound as well as the physical approach, typically from a garage band, to rock'n'roll. The baton handed to them by the Missing Links, to which they had already paid tribute in their debut, was carried with even greater pride. The explosive atmosphere of early decade Detroit was evoked, whose socio-musical upheavals were more passionate and spontaneous than those sterile and cloying of seventies London. This extreme citationism, bordering on revival, consumed itself in the initial "Know Your Product", which evoked, with that very noisy brass section, the orgiastic revelry of "Funhouse", and in those guitar lashes, like the testosterone-hard-rock of "No, Your Product", by Ed Kuepper, which cited, for firepower, the Ron Asheton/Fred "Sonic" Smith axis and, for epileptic rhythms, the irrepressible Johnny Ramone. Chris Bailey's voice, on the other hand, resurrected, with its (non-)poses, the ghost of Iggy Stooge, while, in the same year, the then Iggy Pop was reinventing himself as a bizarre chansonnier in the famous "The Idiot". But, if on one hand the merit of this album was to resume a specific way of making rock, on another, the greatness of "Eternally Yours" cannot be attributed neither to the punk orbit, since it contained abrasive tracks like "(I'm) Misunderstood" and "This Perfect Day", among the most beautiful anthems of the year, nor to their typically rural aussie dimension, that of ballads, vaguely of Rolling Stones school, "Memories Are Made of This" and "A Minor Aversion", the only compromise to their amphetamine rock'n'roll.

After giving everything to punk-rock and new life, together with the indomitable Radio Birdman, to Australian rock, the original lineup of the Saints officially disbanded in '79. Ed Kuepper went on to form the Laughing Clowns, an ensemble of avant-garde music put at the service of a sort of decadent cabaret, while Chris Bailey reinvented himself from punk-rocker to melodic but cultured and refined singer, and wrote among the most memorable pop pages of the Eighties. A changing and multiform creature like the best creatures, that of the Saints deserves to be explored in all its declinations. Bob Geldof, now a knight and Nobel prize winner, but in the prime of his youth, fully swept away by these ardors, went so far as to say that the Saints were the most important band of '77. I can only thank these Saints from Australia who came to my ears to renew the liturgy of rock'n'roll.