Songfacts®:

• This howl of rage against boredom and oppression was the first song released by the pioneering Australian punk rock band The Saints. Issued in September 1976, it predated debut singles by better-known punk acts such as the Sex Pistols, The Damned and The Clash.
• The Saints were from Brisbane, the capital of Queensland. This song was inspired by the corrupt government and police force that ran the band's state at the time. Saints front man Chris Bailey said: "When you're 16 or 17 there's heaps of things that you get angry about – your parents, school, job if you've got it, police. You are at an age where you want to be doing a whole range of things that are restricted because of your age. Especially in Brisbane at the time there were active harassment from the police force. There was a political agenda at that stage too if you were in the least bit left-leaning and the Saints were quite blatantly left-leaning."
• Copies of the self-financed single were sent to UK music newspapers. Sounds magazine's reviewer, Jonh Ingham, declared it was the "Single of this and every week."
• The Saints were signed in November 1976 to a three-album deal by EMI in the UK on the strength of the single.
• According to Chris Bailey this has been wrongly labelled as a punk rock classic. "It's basically an Eddie Cochran riff," he told Uncut in 2014, "but because we were young and a bit rebellious, we played it a bit faster."