Saints preserved

The Aussie band that predated The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned is about to tour.

- BY RUSSELL BROWN

It's the peculiar fate of rock musicians that they can pursue long creative careers forever shadowed by the things they did when they were kids.

Ed Kuepper, who turns 70 in December, is about to resume an international tour with a version of The Saints, a band he co-founded in 1973 when he was 17, and left in 1978. And, although he's gone on to make more than 20 albums in his own right, he doesn't mind that.

The Saints, to be clear, were not just any band. They formed in suburban Brisbane, outsider kids far from any sphere of influence, and unexpectedly found themselves hailed as progenitors of punk rock's cultural explosion half a world away in Britain, after hopefully mailing copies of their 1976 debut single (I’m) Stranded - which they'd recorded, pressed and released on their own - to anyone they could think of. That single predated recordings by The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned.

The Ramones, who had formed in 1974 with similar influences, beat them to record by a few months. But while The Ramones pretty much sounded like The Ramones from beginning to end, The Saints expanded over three albums in two years - (I'm) Stranded, Eternally Yours and Prehistoric Sounds - to make music that harnessed their love of soul and R&B into something that was both new and quite out of step with punk rock fashion.

The records, driven by Kuepper's exciting guitar sound and his schoolmate Chris Bailey's vocals, have endured in a way that much of the era's music has not. They still sound magnificent.

Kuepper left the band over differences with Bailey, who carried on touring and recording as The Saints almost until he died in 2022 (a final album, Long March Through The Jazz Age, is set for posthumous release in November).