These Dreams Are Not Your Own Anymore

The Saints : A Minor Aversion

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In May of 1978, The Saints released their second album, Eternally Yours. Swept up in the punk rock craze, The Saints found themselves quickly disillusioned by the London scene. They added brassy horns and played acoustic guitars on this brilliant album. I was lucky enough to find the cassette in the cut out bin at a Woolworths in Reno, a reminder that great albums don't always sell. 

Selected as one of the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die, the writer notes Chris Bailey's lyrics sounds like the "rantings of a cranky hippie". Never more so than on the deep cut "A Minor Aversion" where Bailey sings "I've taken all I can I'm not gonna stand here /And be walked on no more/ 'Cause I don't need you/ These days your facts/ They don't mean a thing, no".

Robert Christgau didn't care for the album, giving Eternally Yours a C+ and writing:

"Private Affair" is the perfect punk-cum-early-Kinks song, "International Robots" invents a Jonathan Richman clone, and Chris Bailey should dub in the vocals on Seymour Stein's Wild in the Streets remake. But the lyrics are received protest, the tempos have slackened, and if those horns are somebody's idea of a joke I am not amused. The very idea.

Smooth Talking, Brain Washing

The Saints : Know Your Product

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On February 3, 1978 The Saints introduced a truly revolutionary sound on the single "Know Your Product", punk with a horn section. The clever lyrics target the advertising industry with lines like "Our new soap that's peachy keen/ saves your soul and keeps you clean "/It's recommended, used by the Queen./Gonna improve your IQ, help in everything you do/It's economic, don't cost too much."

While The Guardian claimed the song"confused pretty much everyone: what the hell was a brass section doing on a punk record? The punchy horns are the perfect counterpart to Bailey’s drawled vocals and Kuepper’s buzzsaw guitar," there are many who believe it is one of the greatest Australian singles ever recorded. On YouTube you can find videos of Hunters and Collectors with Midnight Oil's Peter Garrett performing the song onstage as well as Courtney Barnett, King Khan and the Shrines and You And I .

It also made a list Kurt Cobain scrawled out of his favorite 50 recordings. Both "Know Your Product" and the B side "Run Down" would appear on the forthcoming Eternally Yours.