I missed The Saints the first time around. Bob Geldof once said they basically invented punk rock, which always felt like typical Geldof hyperbole until I saw them at the Electric Ballroom last week. Now I get it.
The Saints were legitimately one of the first punk bands anywhere — first outside the US to release a record, which means they beat every UK band to it, a fact that probably still annoys people in London. Geldof always name-checked three groups as changing everything in the seventies: Sex Pistols, Ramones, and the Saints. Watching them now, that doesn’t sound like exaggeration.
The lineup shouldn’t work on paper. Ed Kuepper and Ivor Hay are the original guys, but Chris Bailey died a couple of years back, so Mark Arm from Mudhoney is singing. That could’ve been a disaster — wrong voice, wrong energy, tribute-band vibes. Instead it just worked. Arm didn’t try to be Bailey, didn’t do some karaoke impression of the old records. He just sang the songs like they mattered, with his own ragged intensity, and somehow that felt more honest than any faithful recreation would’ve been.
Kuepper’s guitar playing was the thing that really struck me. He wasn’t coasting or playing the hits on autopilot — every riff felt like he was still proving something. Hay’s drumming kept everything locked in tight, no wasted motion. When they hit “(I’m) Stranded,” the whole room snapped to attention. “Know Your Product” was bigger and meaner than I expected. “This Perfect Day” had that same nervous energy that made it dangerous forty-something years ago. At the end of the night it was 19 songs that flew past quickly, but left a massive punk rock stamp on London.
Here’s the thing about The Saints: they were never followers, never tried to fit into whatever punk was supposed to be. They just did their thing in Brisbane while everyone else was busy inventing a scene in New York and London. At the Electric Ballroom, they proved they’ve still got it — not in some sad “glory days” way, but because these songs still have teeth.
I walked out wishing I’d caught them decades ago, but also thinking maybe seeing them now, with this lineup, with all that history behind them but none of the baggage, was actually the right time.
