The ABC news radio announcer’s incredulous tone said it all: “An unknown band from Brisbane, by the name of the Saints, has earned rave reviews in England for a record it made itself.”

It was September 1976 and the words, complete with plummy delivery, were loaded with cultural cringe – all the more so for the fact that the band hailed from the backwoods of Brisbane.

That record, (I’m) Stranded, dubbed the “single of this and every week” in a hyperventilating review in the UK’s Sounds magazine, turns 40 years old this month and it is no exaggeration to say that it changed Brisbane forever, both from within and in terms of its external perception.

And the ABC announcer was right: outside of a small clique, the band was all but unknown in its home town at the time of the song’s release.

The Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster once wrote that punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia for two reasons: we had Joh-Bjelke Petersen, “the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained conservative that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream of railing against”, and we had the Saints, the “musical revolutionaries in the city’s evil heart” that gave a city that usually chased music history its own place in it.

Australia didn’t even have its own national anthem in 1976. (I’m) Stranded was more like an anti-anthem, with its central theme of alienation. The singer, Chris Bailey, with the gritty sneer of a young Van Morrison, is marooned “far from home”. The literal meaning was actually more prosaic, the song’s music coming to guitarist Ed Kuepper on a midnight train home to the Brisbane’s far-flung suburbs.



Then there was the video, which begins with the unintended metaphor of drummer Ivor Hay kicking open a door. The band are playing in an abandoned building on inner city Petrie Terrace, Bailey singing in front of a fireplace with the words “(I’m) Stranded” daubed above in red letters, which would form the backdrop for the cover of the Saints’ debut album of the same name, released in February 1977.

The cover is as much a harbinger of the Blank Generation as the first Ramones album. But there are no uniforms in sight, much less leather jackets. The band stares sullenly back at the camera, a large hole in the floorboards beneath their feet in front of them.

In the ensuing years, countless fans and bands – including Brad Shepherd (then of the Fun Things, later of the Hoodoo Gurus) and Mark Callaghan (the Riptides, then Gang Gajang) – had their own photographs taken in front of that fireplace, until the building’s eventual redevelopment.

The cover of the Saints’ first album, (I’m) Stranded. Photograph: EMI

The Saints were seers. They’d formed in mid 1973, the same year as the release of the first New York Dolls album and Iggy and the Stooges’ Raw Power, and, while they hadn’t beaten the Ramones on to record – the New Yorkers had released their first album four months earlier – they were ahead of all the UK punks (the Damned’s New Rose was released a month later, in October 1976) and Sydney’s Radio Birdman.



But arguably more important than chronology and the Saints’ place in the bigger scheme of things was their determined independence. There were no venues to play in Brisbane, so the band hired out suburban halls. No local record company was interested in what they were doing, so they hired out a local studio, paid for the recording themselves and put out the song on their own label, Fatal Records.

This fact was noted in Jonh (John) Ingham’s review in Sounds: “This Queensland combo had to record and release on their own label; for some reason Australian record companies think the band lack commercial potential. What a bunch of idiots.” EMI in London – partially in an attempt to claw back lost credibility after sacking the Sex Pistols – duly instructed its baffled representatives in Sydney to sign the band.

After the Saints’ inevitable decampment to England in early 1977, a local scene began to take root in Brisbane. There were archetypal punk bands such as the Leftovers and Razar, whose song Task Force was the first in a long line of singles to take aim at the local police state. Then there were the more cerebral Riptides, the Apartments and the Go-Betweens, soon to leave for England themselves.



All had been inspired by the Saints’ willingness to “seize the sea of possibilities” spoken of by another seer, Patti Smith, a couple of years earlier. Brisbane now has a Go Between Bridge, as well as Bee Gees Way on Redcliffe Peninsula, where the Gibb brothers began their performing career. (I’m) Stranded was a foundation stone in Brisbane’s cultural history, for which the Saints deserve similar recognition.

• The Saints play three sold-out shows exclusive to Melbourne in October