The Suburban Renewal of Saint Etienne
The British Library is thick with undergraduates and teenagers who have come here to finish dissertations and revise for exams — more of them, in fact, than desk space will allow. As a consequence, the overspill is making the most of the Easter sunshine. Textbooks and laptops are spread across the tables that surround the forecourt cafe. Among them, the three members of Saint Etienne look slightly incongruous. Save for a sparse scattering of wiry grey-haired academics, they’re the oldest people in view. Bob Stanley stirs half a sachet of sugar into his latte, and places his change on the table, a shiny £2 coin. Sporting full beard these days, Pete Wiggs picks up the coin and reveals that, for no good reason, he found himself reading the Wikipedia entry for the £2 coin. “Guess how long these have been around?” he asks.
“Ooh, good question,” says Bob, “It’s bound to be longer than I think it is, because it always is. I’m going to say 12 years. Is it 2005? Whaaat?! 1998?! NO WAY!”
It’s at this precise point that the remaining member of Saint Etienne arrives. Sarah Cracknell is holding a cup of mixed berry tea — or, as she calls it, “hot squash”. She reminds Pete and Bob about a game they used to play on tour in the early days of Saint Etienne: £1 Newsagent, where they had to go to a random newsagent and see what was the best combination of items they could buy with £1. “If we played it now, I think it would have to be £2 Newsagent,” she suggests.
It’s not inappropriate to be meeting Saint Etienne next to a building which houses countless national treasures. After all, that’s exactly what they’ve become in the 25 years since their debut album Foxbase Alpha catapulted them into the post-grunge, post-baggy bombsite of early 90s British chartpop. If Saint Etienne had kindred spirits back in 1992, they were few and far between Possibly Pet Shop Boys, for the way they co-opted their influences — and occasionally cameos from their heroes — into a sound that never wished itself back to a bygone era. Other spiritual fellow travellers included Pulp, World Of Twist and Denim. Like Saint Etienne, these groups were part pop stars, part outsider artists working to a rigid list of dos and don’ts, spending almost as much time getting their sleeve art right as their music. And like Saint Etienne, these artists understood that a non-musician who talks a good record will always make better art than a musician who equates virtuosity with honest-to-goodness authenticity. That early roll call of hits bears extraordinary testament to that approach: their lugubrious dance floor dub reconfiguration of Only Love Can Break Your Heart; Avenue, which recast their love of French baroque pop amid the unearthly magic hour stillness more commonly found on records by dream pop contemporaries AR Kane and Disco Inferno; Like A Motorway, an old folk melody delivered with statuesque sadness by Sarah over an irresistible disco-concrete instrumental; and, of course, He’s On The Phone, their biggest hit, and still a flawless slice of surging yet melancholy Europop.
Ironically, they’re still here because, at any given time, they always held something back. Each Saint Etienne record sounds like a bridge to the next one, rather than the culmination of the previous ones, be it 2000’s The Sound Of Water — which saw them go to Berlin and work with electronic post-rock trio To Rococo Rot — or 2011’s Words & Music, an album about how the music soundtracks your life and, in doing so, explains your life to you. Its opening song Over The Border talked about the obsessive behaviour that the love of records can drive you to: “I didn’t go to church/I didn’t need to/Green and yellow Harvests/pink Pyes, silver Bells/And the strange and important sound of the synthesiser.” Its poignant air of finality led many people to suppose that this would be the final Saint Etienne record. “I think we wondered that ourselves,” says Bob, who became a father for the first time last year. “In a way, a band is a funny thing to keep going beyond your early 20s, because it happens at a time in your life when you’re no longer living at home but you’ve yet to settle down and start a family. In that time, a band sort of fills that vacuum. And during those early years, Pete and I were actually living together.”
“Those were your Men Behaving Badly years!” suggests Sarah, clearly amused by the idea.
Pete parries the question over to Bob. “Except we didn’t behave very badly, did we?”
“We had a party once, didn’t we? Do you remember?” replies Bob. “And Mark Hollis from Talk Talk turned up. This was in the mid-90s, when no-one had seen him for years, and there were all sorts of rumours going around about what sort of state he was in. One of the guests brought him along — I had no idea she knew him — and I involuntarily exclaimed, ‘You’re Mark Hollis!’ And he left almost immediately. I really blew it there, didn’t I?”
Back in those early years, Saint Etienne was an expression of an interior world Bob and Pete shared long before they actually lived in the same house, before even asking Sarah to join the group, following her vocal turn for Nothing Can Stop Us. They were best friends from infant school in Reigate. Bob read The Dandy, while Pete favoured its racier Southern rival Whoopee! Pete would always go to Bob’s every Thursday to watch Top Of The Pops. One of their fondest memories concerns the week in 1982 that Culture Club first appeared on the show. “My dad came in and saw Boy George looking the way he did and asked if that was a boy or a girl. Obviously, Pete and I found this hilarious, which merely served to rattle him further — at which point he said, ‘Well, I you wouldn’t be laughing if I came in looking like that, would you?’ We almost exploded at that point!”
As it happens, 1983, was also the year Bob began to plan his pop dream in earnest. Aged 17, he was “blown away” by OMD’s Dazzle Ships album and saved up to buy a Korg MS10. “Years later, I read that Juan Atkins had also bought a Korg MS10 round about the same time as I did — he was out shopping with his mum, saw it in the window and persuaded her to buy it for him. He went on to invent techno, whereas all I used it for was to make wind noises.” Even now, his favoured songwriting method is to hum tunes into his phone or bring a record into the studio and enlist the help of the producer in pursuit of replicating a particular sound. For the longest time, this was also the method favoured by Pete — but after composing the BFI-commissioned soundtrack for How We Used To Live — the 2015 visual love letter to post-war London they made with long-time collaborator Paul Kelly, he has enrolled to do a degree course in professional composition and orchestration. Asked how it’s going, he says, “It’s amazing how you can get by on so little sleep.” He does most of his composition work before dawn, in his kitchen in Brighton, sometimes as early as 4am, before his son and daughter wake up. “I rather like it actually,” he says, “You feel virtuous when you’re working alone and it’s still dark outside. I get to pretend I’m the man on the sleeve of Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly.”
To these ears, Saint Etienne’s new album Home Counties is their most uniformly satisfying set since 1993’s So Tough — and, like that record, it’s an immersive experience, in which industrially adhesive pop songs — Out Of My Mind, Heather, Take It All In — are linked by evocatively-named mood pieces such as Church Pew Furniture Restorer, Sport Report and Popmaster. The latter title sees a guesting Ken Bruce hosting a special version of his eponymous Radio 2 quiz slot, in which the contestant js asked to name three top ten hits by Hatfield & The North (there aren’t any, by the way). “That was the most exciting day of the sessions wasn’t it?” says Sarah. Bob’s expression, however, is somewhat pained. “I love Ken Bruce,” he explains, “But we committed a slight faux pas. He recorded his bit really quickly, like the pro he is, and then he sort of said something which sounded like he was suggesting we might all go to the pub together. But I wasn’t quite sure that’s what he meant — and then he hesitated and backtracked. I’d *love* to have gone for a drink with Ken Bruce. I listen to Popmaster every day.”
As befits an album inspired by the commuter belt conurbations orbiting London, Saint Etienne approached Home Counties method style, strictly nine to five, completing all the songs over a six week period at the end of 2016. For all of that, they had no idea what the album would be about when they commenced the sessions. On a songwriting roll after finishing her feted 2015 solo album Red Kite, Sarah presented Bob and Pete with two of the album’s standout songs at the beginning of the sessions: the hammock-swinging languor of Take It All In and the Casiotone Latin hustle of Dive. “For some reason, both songs got me thinking of that Metroland world you see speeding by when you’re on a train heading out of London,” says Bob. In turn, that prompted Bob to come up with another of the album’s highlights, written partly in tribute to the late Nick Sanderson from Earl Brutus, who finally realised his childhood dream of becoming a train driver once the group disbanded. “He used to go through Whyteleafe actually,” says Bob, picking up the story, “I once told him you could see Whyteleafe’s football ground from the line and he said, ‘I can’t look, Bob. I can’t take my eyes off the track. I’m just petrified the whole time.’ He’d heard stories of people dropping things from bridges and throwing themselves on the track. It wasn’t anything like the one-hand-on-the-wheel, admiring-the-view idyll that he had hoped.”
The tidal push and pull between London and the commuter belt has always been the object of fascination for Saint Etienne. You’ll remember the Billy Liar sample at the beginning of You’re In A Bad Way, in which our daydreaming hero is warned by his boss Mr Shadrach that “a man could lose himself in London.” So, in a way, it’s perhaps surprising that it’s taken until now for Saint Etienne to devote an entire album to the “sweet municipal dream” of leafy English settlements such as Breakneck Hill and Woodhatch From its exquisite harpsichord intro, Whyteleafe billows softly out into a pensive rumination, loosely based on one of Bob’s old school friends, who never ventured beyond the square mile where he grew up. The penultimate song on the record, Sweet Arcadia, is the breathtaking culmination of everything preceding it. An eight-minute rolling-stock elegy to the myriad versions of England that act as co-ordinates on the mainline routes to the satellite towns of London. You suspect that, in time, it might serve as the basis of a future Saint Etienne film, a commuter belt counterweight to How We Used To Live. “I can imagine that,” concurs Bob, “I think we all enjoy hearing ideas from people about what would constitute a Saint Etienne project.”
For all of that, Saint Etienne, is no longer the full-time occupation than it used to be. Sarah has already started work on her next solo album, and then, of course, there’s the business of being a mum to two young QPR fans. When he’s not walking young Leonard around North London in the Baby Bjorn, Bob is hard at work following up his acclaimed 700 page history of pop Yeah Yeah Yeah. And, of course, Pete, the Brighton Nightfly has symphonies in his sights. For all of that though, Saint Etienne is still their default, the thing that most feels like home. On the next table Pete’s children have been fixed on their iPads, waiting for their dad to finish here, before heading off on a trip to the Tate Modern. Bob is heading into the British Library to continue work on his book. Sarah has go home and pack for her holiday. Before parting ways, there’s just enough time for a quick round of £2 Newsagent. Bob’s having the latest Non-League Paper and, his chocolate of choice, a Twirl. Pete’s given up sugar, so it’ll have to be a bag of cashews. Sarah goes for her sweet treat of choice, which is condensed milk, “preferably a tube, so I can stick it straight in my gob. Sometimes I even keep one in my handbag!”
“There you go,” suggests Bob. “That’s a proper pop star for you. Condensed milk in her carrier bag. They don’t make them like that any more.” And do you know what? They really don’t. How wonderful to have them back.
An abridged version of this feature was published in Electronic Sound magazine in June 2017