Long March Through The Jazz Age – The Saints (Fire Records)
This deserves your attention and not because it’s posthumous.
The Saints’ 15th studio album, “Long March Through The Jazz Age”, snuck out before the 2025 Christmas-New Year break and, despite best endeavours, appeared to make only a slight dent in public consciousness.
It’s not hard to work out why.
The Saints had been away a long time – the last album, “King Of The Sun”, was released in 2012. Chris Bailey was a private person but the contemporary economics of fronting a band and ill-health probably had a lot to do with that.
A fresh flurry of activity by his former partner in music., Ed Kuepper, and his The Saints ’73-78 touring meant the label had to wait for some clear air. And Bailey wasn’t around to talk up the record as he passed in 2022.
It’s OK to like the Bailey Saints and the Kuepper Not Saints ( aka The Aints and The Saints ’73-78) at the same time. It really is. The original band never split out of spite. It was amicable. They were in London, their management had gone home to Australia and EMI wasn’t being supportive. The principals had moved apart, musically.
I remember being in New York City in 1986 and being perplexed by how some Americans couldn’t reconcile the disparate careers of Bailey and Kuepper. Numerous watery local beers probably didn’t make things any clearer. Bailey's “A Little Madness To Be Free” was a couple of years old, pre-dating Kuepper's “Rooms Of The Magnificent”, and these natives were still "Stranded" on “Prehistoric Sounds”?
The point is Bailey and Kuepper were forging magnificent careers, together and apart. The Bailey Saints now have a dozen studio records to their credit. None of them, save maybe “The Howling”, directly reference Chris’s earliest days, and that's hard for some to unerstand. “Long March Through The Jazz Age” caps his career fittingly and it might be his best, up there with "The Monkey Puzzle".
Recorded in Sydney, the band is Bailey on guitar, bass and vocal, his long-time drummer Pete Wilkinson, guitarist-producer Sean Carey and star guitar recruit Davey Lane. It’s melodic, mid-paced rock and roll, much of it genteel and reflective in tone and coloured throughout by strings and piano. It's nuanced and reflective.
The tentative start of opener “Empires (Sometimes We Fall)” gives way to a steady, confident feel. It’s not Chris Bailey’s first foray into a song about a civilisation sliding down and its depth presages the rest of the record.
“Judas” sounds positively jaunty and the juxtaposition with a lyric about night descending is resolved by a line like “When the moon’s in my eyes, I am floating”. The guitars of Carey and Lane are enchanting.
“Carnivore (Long March Through The Jazz Age)” is a contemplative, lilting ballad peppered by piano, horns and striking lyrics:
Who is My Judas
Who is my whore
Who is waiting to spit the blues out one more time?
“The Key” swipes Dylan’s melody from “Changing of The Guard” and sets it against lyrics about the falling of day that you can’t help feeling are about Bailey staring down mortality. “Vikings” might be a reflection on the fall of a Nordic tribe on the surface, but dig deeper and you might uncover a deeper meaning.
It’s not all contemplative. The psychedelic “Imaginary Fields Forever” and the Kinks-like “Resurrection Day” resonate with the sounds of ‘60s pop. Closer “Will You Still Be There” harks back to “A Little Madness…” and resolves the record nicely.
We carry on along our way
Stumbling blindly from day to day
Till we become just a memory
It’s out on the same British label that’s home to Evan Dando.
