Long March Through The Jazz Age is the Saints' the last dispatch from the late Chris Bailey. One of Australian rock’s most singular voices, Bailey was a poet-loner whose uncompromising spirit carved a four-decade scar across punk, blues, folk, and everything in between. What emerges here is a moving farewell, a final mosaic assembled from restlessness, wit, bruises, and a barroom philosopher’s clarity.

Recorded in late 2018 at Church Street Studios in Sydney, the sessions reunited Bailey and longtime Saints drummer Pete Wilkinson after years of working abroad. They teamed up with guitarist and engineer Sean Carey, a familiar ally from touring and past recordings, and recruited Davey Lane of You Am I along with a handpicked crew of Sydney’s young guns on horns, strings, and keys. Bailey arrived with rough sketches; what grew from them is a record that feels fleshed out and unguarded. And deeply human. Like the last entry in a long-traveled journal.

The opening track, “Empires (Sometimes We Fall),” welcomes the listener with its dusty western guitars and Bailey’s weary, clear-eyed mantra: “Sometimes we rise, sometimes we fall.” It’s the kind of simple line only Bailey could deliver in way to sound not so simple at all, but resigned, romantic, everything all at once. The album continues with that same duality: swagger that swoons, punk edges wrapped in lush instrumentation, exposed nerves smoothed by melodic grace. “Judas” brings a warm glow against sweeping strings, a melancholy so beautiful it feels suspended in amber. “Gasoline” veers into Stones territory, a country-honk shuffle straight out of Exile On Main St.’s sunburned universe. “Bruises” offers one of the record’s most candid moments, Bailey taking stock of a life lived off the map, tracing how a wandering troubadour winds up exactly where he’s meant to be.

Chris Bailey passed in 2022, but Long March Through The Jazz Age captures him as he always was, curious, stubborn, tender, sharp tongued, allergic to complacency. This is the end of the Saints’ journey, but it’s not an epitaph. It’s a reminder that rule breakers don’t fade away, they echo on forever.