I'm listening to an MP3 of The Saints' album Live At Pig City. It's the one recorded back when Ed Kuepper and Chris Bailey getting back together - to celebrate the launch of a book, even! Wow, didn't know the press could still excite such emotion - a couple of years ago, replete with a hard-nosed brass section clearly schooled by Kuepper to cut shapes of oblong and trapezoid in the balmy night air.
Man, it rocks hard: and the advantage of not being able to see Bailey camping it up and gurning like a pissed 15-year-old is considerable. His introductions work - obnoxious and arrogant and pretentious as they certainly are, they increase the sense of portent, the sense that this was an event happening separate to all other events, a one-off (hence disproved by time), something special. You can really imagine grown men weeping as the band blast bad-ass into '(I'm) Stranded' after Bailey's extended, pseudo-religious intro.
I have this album back-to-back with a Who live outing (supposedly at a time when they were 'the greatest' 'in the world') and whereas the latter is flabby, indulgent, saturated with the sort of guitar sound you wouldn't even wish on Billy Corgan apologists, the former is keen, keening, keened - honed past the point of extinction. It mattered, the time and place and the fact Brisbane were welcoming back a band with open arms that had previously been reviled, spat upon and shat upon. It mattered so muchly that all the musicians present were able to play out of their skins, flay those flabby skins alive. Fuck, this album rocks.
Still. What do I know? I still like Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds.
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