WHAT COMES TO MIND … CHRIS BAILEY WITH ICE CREAM AND BRASS

Bernard Zuel
19 minutes ago
5 min read

You filming me? Chris Bailey mid-show. Photo by Stuart Spence.

Here we have the next instalment in What Comes To Mind, a new occasional series in the Wind Back Wednesday space, based on the work of the brilliant photographer Stuart Spence.

Each time, he will dig out a photo out from his archives going back almost 50 years and challenge me to respond with what comes to mind when I look at that image. It might be serious or ridiculous, personal or historical. It might be short and brutal, long and precise. But it will be inspired by a photo I’ve not seen before, and maybe even unseen by anyone beyond Stuart himself.

This week, Chris Bailey of The Saints, caught live in concert.

________________________

BEFORE PEOPLE PAID ME to do it, before people sought police assistance to block me from doing it. I used to hang around with musicians. A lot. And for some of that time I, at least nominally, was a musician too, in the band – brass band, marching band, concert band – at Patrician Brothers Fairfield.

Though to be fair, mangling Hamlet now, you might legitimately declare that term, “musician”, was more honoured in the breach than the observance. Why? Well, I was a shit musician whose greatest claim to fame and whose final shameful moment happened at the same time: performing on the concert hall stage at the Sydney Opera House in a school band competition and, having realised every note could be heard in the excellent acoustics, freezing, unable to blow a note through my long-suffering euphonium. To anyone in the room that day, you’re welcome.

I quit the band a couple days later, even as bandmaster Brother Mark encouraged me to stay. Not for my musical ability – he was a wonderful human; he wasn’t stupid or deaf – but for the community we had. Which is why I remained within the “organisation” for the year and a half to graduation, still welcome in the band room that had provided a pre-school/lunchtime/post-school home for all of us non-football playing dweebs who also were in the musicals and debating and choir and into the minutiae of album credits … and wanted to stay out of the way of Mr Borg who disliked “pseudo intellectuals” like, well, us.

(If you’re wondering, no, hardly any of us had girlfriends then. Or looked like we might ever have girlfriends. What’s your point? But I’d like to point out here that my first kiss was down to being a musician, or at least musician-adjacent. A trip to perform in Inverell saw one of the locals take pity on me at the post-show dance. Why did her boyfriend let me live when he saw this? Wasn’t he worried I was competition? Mate, I was playing a chunky brass instrument on that tour. Sexy as! He knew he was safe.)

One of the things about many of my friends in the band – beyond how any of us survived playing in summer marches wearing the 100% acrylic, pale blue “ice cream suit” uniform and plastic peaked cap that doubled as alternative cookware for sweaty teenage heads – was just how bloody talented they were and how they parlayed that into life-long involvement, whether it was professionally, part-time or dedicated amateur, because it mattered.

Ice cream double scoop. Bill Gibson and that guitar in that uniform. Photo supplied by Mr Gibson. — Ice cream double scoop. Bill Gibson and *that* guitar in *that* uniform. Photo supplied by Mr Gibson.

To name only a few, there was Bill who once had played euphonium before most of us joined, switched to guitar for the concert band, was surely the coolest kid we 14-year-olds knew when he got himself a double-necked guitar, and went on to be cooler still as a guitarist and then definitive bass player for a long list of rock bands you know, saw and forked out money for. With him was Peter on trumpet and then drums, later occasionally vocals, and for any number of bands since, drums and trumpet and vocals – I still think about his Doctor Who with The Flies.

In my year was Jess who also moved from trumpet to drums, and saxophone and bass at school, before becoming one of the most in demand multi-genre percussionists/drummers/bass players/vocalists and now choristers in the country. Roles he’d play often enough to this day alongside John, whose move from brass to guitar presaged a life as a songwriter and guitarist who can play drums, keys, bass, vibes and that cheap Casio keyboard on the makeshift stand.

And with them was David who had been on tenorhorn, could and still does turn his hand to more including funky bass, and a few years later rocked up to an audition for one of the two brass spots on the tour with Chris Bailey’s Saints, over here from Europe and needing a horn section. Horns had regularly been part of The Saints sound since the latter days of Ed Kuepper’s time in the band, and this was a tour when songs from the All Fools Day album like Just Like Fire Would made brass an assumption from fans anyway.

But trumpet wasn’t Dave’s usual weapon. It was a bold move to go for it. What the hell though, why not when it could take him around the country for a few weeks? What was there to lose?Reader: he got it.

I had never seen the original Saints – though it seemed to me they were as foundational to a lot of the music I was listening to as any of those more celebrated British bands, but more interesting, and certainly more interesting than the band I was supposed to think earth-moving, Radio Birdman – but I had by this stage seen Kuepper maybe once, with the Laughing Clowns, and had my head scrambled.

I did have a tape of Bailey’s Saints’ Casablanca that I’d practically worn out though, and one of A Little Madness To Be Free, which had followed it, and I was more than amenable to soulful rock of an Irish persuasion.

Bailey was that and more. Not always comprehensible, not always exactly on the note, not always cohesive, and definitely an odd gig with what I apparently called in my now lost review, a perfunctory band performance. (Which did not go down well with Mr Bailey I am told. Dave wisely did not reveal any connection to the cursed critic.) But hey, it wasn’t shambolic, it was fluid. It seemed to wash in and out with a tide that was emotional – that is, carried by his fluctuating moods that peaked and rumbled, scattered witticisms and grumbled complaints, almost crashed but recovered.

And it was Chris Bailey, man, Chris fucking Bailey! You can’t always explain why but you know it’s true: some people don’t just feel different to the others around you, they feel out of your orbit.

And up the back of the stage, occasionally breaking his focused expression on the charts to grin, looking like he was made for it and mad for thinking it at the same time, was Dave, the kid I’d known since we were hiding from Sister Gregory in Year 4, killing it.

Yeah, I like hanging around with musicians.