Chris Bailey & the General Dog
Chris Bailey Timeline 1974 Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper form the Saints in Brisbane…
Chris Bailey Timeline
1974 Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper form the Saints in Brisbane.
1976 (I'm) Stranded/ No Time an instant classic in UK music press, accidentally kick-starts Aussie punk underground.
1977 Debut album (I'm) Stranded, recorded in two days. Saints relocate to London, This Perfect Day hits UK Top 40
1978 Eternally Yours LP confuses punks with brash, brassy R'n'B stylings.
1979 Prehistoric Sounds LP signals third wilful style change. First Saints incarnation splits.
1980 Live EP Paralytic Tonight Dublin Tomorrow.
1981 Saints Mk II release Monkey Puzzle LP.
1982 Casablanca (released as Out In The Jungle overseas)
1984 A Little Madness to Be Free includes classic Ghost Ships Debut Chris Bailey solo album What We Did On Our Holidays
1985 European live album, Live In a Mud Hut.
1986 All Fools Day marks commercial peak with hit Just Like Fire Would.
1987 Saints play prestigious Australian Made tour with INXS, Jimmy Barnes, Triffids, etc.
1988 Prodigal Son album.
1991 Epic solo album Demons recorded in Memphis.
1992 New Saints album, Permanent Revolution Third solo album, Savage Entertainment.
1993 Chris tours and records with Concrete Blonde's Johnette Napolitano
1994 Fourth solo album 54 Days... at Sea.
1997 First Saints album in five years, Howling
1999 10th Saints studio LP, Everybody Knows the Monkey.
2001 11th is Spit the Blues Out. 2003 Chris records and tours with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. 2004 Four-CD box set All Times Through Paradise compiles complete Saints recordings from '76 to '78
2005 Chris is guest of Queensland Poetry Festival Bone Box album on Liberation Blue Acoustic label.
2006 12th Saints album Nothing Is Straight In My House due on Liberation.
"The most exciting thing about this is that it's my first record for a long, long time that's built around the voice. We'd start with the voice and strummed guitar and take it from there, so there's a really spontaneous kind of momentum to the whole exercise."
The Saints' foothold in music history is, of course, somewhere near the top of the punk pyramid of the '70s. But the band's mainstay, Chris Bailey, always drew from a deeper source, namely the potent minimalism of early blues: a lone voice, an acoustic guitar and a wellspring of emotion.
Hence Bone Box, a raw, predominantly acoustic reinterpretation of the Saints' legacy from '76 to '88 (and then some). Recorded fast and loose in Amsterdam with the General Dog - Caspar Wijnberg, Peter Wilkinson and Adam Bar-Pereg - it cuts through the Saints' radically evolving styles of that era to place their songs in a timeless context.
"For a lot of the tracks, I just banged out the tunes," Chris says. "I didn't use headphones or a vocal booth, didn't use monitoring, I just sat down with a guitar and a microphone above my head and tried to be primitive in a funny sort of way."
In that sense, there's a clear connection between the crisp new versions of Stranded, No Time and Know Your Product and the uncompromising brashness of the originals, though there's more world weary melancholy than bile in the former, and more John Lee Hooker than R'n'B in the latter.
'80s classics Ghost Ships, Casablanca and Just Like Fire Would are familiar enough, albeit reinvigorated with the power of Chris's maturing voice. Elsewhere the frailty of memory played an important part in the act of reinvention.
"I didn't have a copy of Eternally Yours kicking around," says Chris, "so I somehow remembered Missunderstood as the electric boogie it never was." From the same hallowed album, Perfect Day is recast as a mournful, nylon-stringed lament from the Spanish mountains.
Most exotic of all is Nights In Venice, utterly transformed from the excoriating electricity of the early Saints into something far darker, via the Arabic strings of Sahand Sahebdivani. "To me, it's one of the songs that works best in the acoustic format," says Chris. "It's more melancholic but to my ear, it captures the same teenage angst of the original.
"I've always maintained there's a thousand ways to play every song but it's not often you get the opportunity to revisit them like this. The whole mindset was that we were a bunch of teens and this was the first time we'd ever made a record. I don't mean to pun, but it was a very liberating experience."
$19.95