(I’m) Stranded is just fantastic. It’s a perfect storm of Ed Kuepper’s buzzsaw guitar and Chris Bailey’s sneering vocal, anchored by the whirlwind of Kym Bradshaw on bass and Ivor Hay’s drums.

It’s without doubt one of the top ten punk singles. And it’s essentially the first – coming out before singles by The Pistols, The Ramones, The Damned and The Clash.

Astonishingly, The Saints had been sounding like this ever since they formed in Brisbane in 1973. Perhaps punk began in Australia.

According to Kuepper, the reason they played so fast was purely down to their nervousness in front of an audience. The faster and louder they played, the less chance there was that they would look up and see a lack of interest.

The Aussie music industry shared that lack of interest. Their early gigs were often broken up by the police – they had unwisely chosen to rehearse in the front room of a rented house opposite the police headquarters in Brisbane.

So they started their own venue (Hay’s home becoming The 76 Club), their own label (Fatal Records), and their own marketing company (Eternal Promotions), to record it, press 500 copies, and send the single to radio stations and music magazines.

In the UK, a copy reached Jonh Ingham, an expat Aussie on Sounds, where I would soon start writing. He called it “The single of this and every week.”

The Saints moved to Sydney, and then to London, and I think I first saw them bottom of the bill supporting Talking Heads (then a semi-acoustic trio) and The Ramones at The Roundhouse.

I saw them many more times, though they rightly resented being lumped in with the punk groups who had come along in their wake.

As Kuepper put it: “The band was a full thing by 1974. Two and a half years later, this incredibly fashionable movement comes along – only an arsehole would have associated himself with that.”