Chris Bailey & H-Burns

STRANGERS
Biography

During the tail end of an alpine summer in 2010, certain forces combined at the Control Studio in Grenoble, France. A meeting of hearts and minds came to pass when Chris Bailey and Renaud Brustlein finally achieved a long-held ambition to record together. The fruit of their labour is a new band, and a debut album entitled Stranger. But more of that later….

For the uninitiated, Chris Bailey is the Irish Kenyan co-founder and singer with the Saints. While still a teenager, he hitchhiked from his adopted home town of Brisbane to Sydney (a considerable distance) to sign a deal that would change the limited course of a young life lived in the conservative provinces of Queensland. The deal was with a seemingly attractive devil called EMI who signed the band for a three album recording contract. They were flown to the UK as the antipodean representatives of punk rock where they went on to record three pioneering records before imploding.

Refusing to fit the square holes in which EMI tried to peg them, The Saints disbanded and an acrimonious legal battle ensued between record companies and publishers which lasted the best part of a decade. Chris Bailey was exiled to the wilderness but continued to write, record and perform throughout, gracing major labels as well as ground breaking independent French labels such as New Rose and Last Call Records and more recently Wildflower Records in the USA (the dots begin to join). The Saints have never gone away, but the line-up has continually shifted in the face of much adversity. Their songs have become something of a religion to a certain core of the disaffected, but that’s the price you pay for telling it like it is.

Renaud Brustlein is the singer and songwriter for French band H-Burns. His origins are about as far from Brisbane as you could want, but his gift for songwriting is closely allied to that of Bailey’s. For a Frenchman, his talent for writing in English is uncanny, while his unique combination of music and lyrics have inspired people to pick up a guitar and learn to play it. He sings like he was born in Canada and plays guitar like an angel. His followers are as dedicated as he is to his craft and the seeds of this project were sown when he supported The Saints on the French leg of a European tour in 2005.

Five years later, the pair have produced the record which began this short story. Together with Saints drummer, Peter Wilkinson, and H-Burns guitarist, Antoine Pinnet, Bailey and Brustlein have concocted an album of finely hued songwriting and musical prowess. Recorded by JP Maillard, Stranger contains songs of love in many forms. Influences glide by throughout the record but never outshine the individual voices of the songwriters. Mournful and merry in equal measure, the record’s title encapsulates a collaboration that may last a lifetime. If music be the food of love, let’s mange.

Peter Wilkinson
Bridport, UK. 2011