All Fools Day by The Saints

All Fools Day, the seventh album by the Saints, arrived on Mushroom Records in 1986, a long way from the Brisbane sharehouse where the band first bashed out its buzzsaw punk. By now Chris Bailey was the last one standing from those days, keeping the name alive with a rotating cast after Ed Kuepper, Ivor Hay and Algy Ward all walked out in the wake of Prehistoric Sounds.

Hugh Jones produced, and the record swaps the old blitzkrieg for something broader and more burnished, Bailey's weathered voice riding big, ringing songs instead of three-chord fury. It paid off. At home it climbed into the Top 30 of the Kent Music Report in April 1986 and threw off a hit in "Just Like Fire Would", and in America it finally pried the door open, with MTV airing the videos for that song and "Temple of the Lord".

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.