FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
I am recommending the essential works of a band that some people might not know about. Since they formed in 1990, Saint Etienne have made some of the most original and engaging music you will hear. They are an amazing band whose most-recent studio albums, 2017’s Home Counties, ranks alongside their best. Before getting to the recommendations, here is some biography from AllMusic:
“Like most bands founded by former music journalists, Saint Etienne were a highly conceptual group. The trio's concept was to fuse the British pop sounds of '60s London with the club/dance rhythms and productions that defined the post-acid house England of the early '90s. Led by songwriters Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, and fronted by vocalist Sarah Cracknell, the group managed to carry out their concept, and, in the process, Saint Etienne helped make indie dance a viable genre within the U.K. Throughout the early '90s, Saint Etienne racked up a string of indie hit singles that were driven by deep club beats -- encompassing anything from house and techno to hip-hop and disco -- and layered with light melodies, detailed productions, clever lyrics, and Cracknell's breathy vocals. They revived the sounds of swinging London as well as the concept of the three-minute pop single being a catchy, ephemeral piece of ear candy, in post-acid house Britain, thereby setting the stage for Brit-pop. Though most Brit-pop bands rejected the dance inclinations of Saint Etienne, they nevertheless adopted the trio's aesthetic, which celebrated the sound and style of classic '60s pop.
The origins of Saint Etienne date back to the early '80s, when childhood friends Bob Stanley (born December 25, 1964) and Pete Wiggs (born May 15, 1966) began making party tapes together in their hometown of Croydon, Surrey, England. After completing school, the pair worked various jobs -- most notably, Stanley was a music journalist -- before deciding to concentrate on a musical career in 1988. Adopting the name Saint Etienne from the French football team of the same name, the duo moved to Camden, where they began recording. By the beginning of 1990, the group had signed a record contract with the indie label Heavenly. In the spring of 1990, Saint Etienne released their first single, a house-tinged cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," which featured lead vocals from Moira Lambert of the indie pop band Faith Over Reason.
"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" became an underground hit, receiving a fair amount of airplay in nightclubs across England. Later in the year, Saint Etienne released their second single, a cover of the indie pop group Field Mice's "Let's Kiss and Make Up," which was sung by Donna Savage of the New Zealand band Dead Famous People. Like its predecessor, "Kiss and Make Up" was an underground hit, helping set the stage for "Nothing Can Stop Us." Released in the spring of 1991, "Nothing Can Stop Us" was the first Saint Etienne single sung by Sarah Cracknell (born April 12, 1967), whose girlish vocals became a signature of the group's sound. Cracknell was the main vocalist on the band's debut, Fox Base Alpha, which was released in the fall of 1991. Following that release, Cracknell officially became a member of Saint Etienne; she had previously sung in Prime Time.
"Only Love Can Break Your Heart" was re-released in conjunction with Fox Base Alpha and cracked the lower end of the British pop charts. Saint Etienne were beginning to gain momentum, as the British press generally gave them positive reviews and their records gained them a strong fan base not only in England, but throughout Europe. Throughout 1992, the group released a series of singles -- "Join Our Club," "People Get Real," and "Avenue" -- which maintained their popularity. In addition to writing and recording music for Saint Etienne, Stanley and Wiggs became active producers, songwriters, remixers, and label heads as well. In 1989, Stanley founded Caff Records, which issued limited-edition 7" singles of bands as diverse as Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers, as well as a number of other lesser-known bands like World of Twist. In 1992, Stanley and Wiggs founded Ice Rink, which intended to put out records by pop groups, not rock groups. The label released singles from several artists -- including Oval, Sensurround, Elizabeth City State, and Golden, which featured Stanley's girlfriend Celina -- none of which gained much attention.
Preceded by the single "You're in a Bad Way," Saint Etienne's second album, So Tough, appeared in the spring of 1993 to generally positive reviews and sales. Over the course of 1993, the group released three more singles -- "Who Do You Think You Are," "Hobart Paving," and "I Was Born on Christmas Day" -- which all charted well. In 1994, the trio began to lose momentum, as their third album, Tiger Bay, was greeted with decidedly mixed reviews, even as singles like "Like a Motorway" continued to chart well. After completing a new track, "He's on the Phone," for their 1995 singles compilation Too Young to Die, as well as the French-only single "Reserection," Saint Etienne took an extended break during 1996.
Sarah Cracknell pursued a solo project, releasing a single titled "Anymore" in the fall of the year. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs began a record label for EMI Records, with the intention of releasing music from young developing bands. In the fall of 1996, Saint Etienne released a remix album, Casino Classics; a new studio effort, Good Humour, followed two years later, and the trio returned in 1999 with an EP, Places to Visit. The full-length Sound of Water appeared in mid-2000, featuring guest appearances by Sean O'Hagan (of the High Llamas) and To Rococo Rot. After a successful U.S. tour in support of Sound of Water, the group issued Interlude, a collection of new tracks, instrumentals, and B-sides, in early 2001. A year later, the trio followed up with Finisterre, and Tales from Turnpike House arrived in 2005.
Following a seven-year break during which the bandmembers worked on making films, doing remixes, and various solo projects, musical and otherwise, the band resurfaced in 2012 with Words and Music by Saint Etienne, an album loosely based on the concept of how music can affect and shape lives unexpectedly, both positively and negatively. It would be another five years before they released new music, but, as ever, the bandmembers kept themselves busy with other projects in the meantime. Cracknell signed to Cherry Records, and released the solo album Red Kite in 2015; Stanley's second book, Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Story of Pop Music from Bill Haley to Beyoncé, was published in 2014; and Wiggs contributed the soundtrack to the film Year 7.
After the band played a series of shows in 2016 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Foxbase Alpha, they decided it was time to record some new songs. They selected producer Shawn Lee and began writing songs inspired by the counties in the southeast of England where each of the bandmembers spent their teenage years. Working quickly with Lee and his studio full of vintage instruments, the record, titled Home Counties, was finished in three weeks and released in June of 2017 by Heavenly”.
To celebrate the work of Saint Etienne, here are the four albums that you need to know, the underrated album in addition to the most-recent studio album. Like some artists I feature here, there is no book available. I have searched, but I cannot find a Saint Etienne one. If you need a guide of which Saint Etienne albums are worth snapping up, I think that the below…
HELPS out.
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The Four Essential Albums
Foxbase Alpha
Release Date: 16th September, 1991 (Europe)/January 1992 (U.S.)
Labels: Heavenly/Warner Bros. Records (U.S.)
Producer: Saint Etienne
Standout Tracks: Can’t Sleep/She’s the One/Kiss and Make Up (Sarah Cracknell version; 2009 release)
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/8487
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/3NWRCkCxGD8lf6sBqyChLz?si=iiwlqldjTTueWbsKABV_vg&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Foxbase squeezes so many "lighter side of" sounds-- be they from the worlds of rock, dance, soul, whatever-- into one LP that it's a marvel it sounds so unified, mostly owing to Wiggs and Stanley fixing on the platonic house rhythm as the glue to hold their disparate passions together. But the second disc of bonus tracks often feels like two producers still figuring out how to make the raw materials of post-acid house their own. A grab-bag of late 80s/early 90s rave sonics-- only sometimes processed through what we know as the Saint Etienne idiom-- dates much of the material. "Chase HQ" and "Speedwell" are competent but sketchy early UK house singles, full of jittery samples and keyboard stabs. Fun, but ultimately too generic without Cracknell's voice or the sample-choice oddness and studio chops Wiggs and Stanley would bring to the band's later music. Better is the dub playground chant of "Sally Space", Cracknell humming "Iko Iko" through a quiet storm front of classic ambient house textures, the Orb with a dose of girl-pop glee.
Speaking of the p-word (again): Continental, a previously Japan-only odds-and-ends collection reissued in the same batch of Saint Et records as this new Foxbase, works as a sort of mirror image of Too Young to Die, the band's almost absurdly listenable 1995 singles compilation. If the all-hits uniformity of TYTD represents Saint Etienne's final, most obvious stab at Now That's What I Call Pop immortality, then Continental is the beginning of the more wide-ranging (and hit-or-miss) restlessness that's characterized the band's records from 1998's Good Humor onward. Each track is recognizably Saint Etienne-- Cracknell's inimitable winsome-but-grown-and-sexy coo announces that, if nothing else-- but the tracks (frequently darker, often instrumental) go very different places than the uniform, bubbly house-lite of Foxbase's uptempo moments.
So much so that when legit UK hit "He's on the Phone"-- not coincidentally the only track Continental shares with Too Young to Die-- shimmers into earshot, it's such a glittering throwback to the old Saint Etienne that it nearly skews the vibe of the whole collection. "He's on the Phone" is Saint Et's most deliriously normal single, a go-for-broke attempt at the kind of high-test mainstream house that still appears on comps with "Ibiza" unironically in their titles. The rest of Continental offers another of Saint Etienne's seemingly paradoxical combos. It's far more subdued, even reflective, than Foxbase's unashamedly hooks-first buoyancy. But it's also sonically "big" in a way that makes it seem like a commentary on the mid-90s moment when even chill-out-centric electronic music went stadium-sized” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Only Love Can Break Your Hart
So Tough
Release Date: 22nd February, 1993
Labels: Heavenly (U.K.)/Warners (U.S.)
Producer: Saint Etienne
Standout Tracks: Calico/Avenue/Hobart Paving
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0jthc9ezftxi0w1jyhZfgi?si=A86j1hHCRHaBcG1VtZJKyQ&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Although you've probably never heard it, Saint Etienne's So Tough is visionary pop that ought to be a hit. The CD cover is an old photograph of a little girl – a tomboy – looking sweetly inquisitive. She's on the verge of experience, and that sense of expectancy can be heard in the way vocalist Sarah Cracknell embellishes the bouncy, filigreed tunes with a lovely, clear voice: "Everyone's dreaming of all they've got to live for/Joking around still digging that sound." Digging that sound themselves, keyboardist Pete Wiggs and guitarist Bob Stanley – Saint Etienne's composers – invent a new pop environment based on an affectionate rehash of swinging '60s styles. Bass notes are mixed with rich-sounding computerized chimes, soft piano or sweet violas, making each track a whimsical, Utopian narrative.
Saint Etienne's cast of characters – Dilworth, Hobart, Calico, Conchita – inhabit an impressionistic soundscape ("Avenue"), a fanciful rap ("Calico"), a girl-group pledge ("You're in a Bad Way"), a nostalgic reverie ("Leafhound") and a lovelorn ballad ("Hobart Paving"). Their world (families, clubs, eccentric locals) is what must suffice in a fragmented era in which pop music's legacy is often the only common ground. There's a surprise from track to track, usually announced by a movie sound clip or a record sample like Rush's "Spirit of Radio," testaments to Saint Etienne's big pop ears and their meaningful emulation of hip-hop collage. The diversity recalls the group's debut album, Foxbase Alpha (1992), yet So Tough is entirely different.
It's Blondie without trash, each cut a delightful pop homage bestirring lifelike memories. Among the high points is "Avenue," an elegiac report on an English day that folds and unfolds in choruses of onomatopoeia. Cracknell's bah-da-da-da-da-da-das are split up by a thunder crack, then a harpsichord interlude. The eclectic sense of rhythm that has revitalized British pop through raves, techno and other aural experiments allows Wiggs and Stanley to make "Avenue" one of the most breathtaking set pieces since Roxy Music's "Amazona."
Earlier, "Mario's Cafe," the group's account of daily episodes and wonderment, includes lyrics like "Did you pick Wednesday's fight?/And did you see the KLF last night?" Everything relates to pop for Saint Etienne, which means there's nothing in this arty, charming, particularly English group that American pop fans cannot relate to” – Rolling Stone
Choice Cut: You’re in a Bad Way
Tiger Bay
Release Date: 28th February, 1994
Label: Heavenly
Producer: Saint Etienne
Standout Tracks: Like a Motorway/Pale Movie/Cool Kids of Death
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/saint-etienne/tiger-bay-deluxe
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6CisCNwbSLFprahnoN6xKE?si=Zofd3QkUSraxoRUHCzScag&dl_branch=1
Review:
“After three years (and two albums) of stunning development, Saint Etienne's disco-llision of '60s pop, '70s dance, and '90s club reached the peak by which they still are judged, with an album that is alternately heartwarming, heartbreaking, electrifying, and impossibly captivating. From the dramatic opener "Urban Clearway," to the mysteriously Kraftwerk-ian "Like a Motorway," and on through "Pale Movie" (that could make Valentino weep), Tiger Bay is everything that two generations of post-Beatles wannabes have labored to create, but have always been too in awe to complete: a melding of mood with momentum, emotion with eccentricity, and an endless succession of divine verses sliding into sad and sexy hooks. Tapping veins of nostalgic romance that bring a tear to the eye before you even know what the lyric is (once you do know, you're a goner, no questions asked), the tracks then explode out of rhythms that could make a dead dog dance. Tiger Bay is alternately seductive, silly, and sassy. But it was also constructed with such an eye for sensuous detail that any attempt whatsoever to toy with the track listing can only shatter the crystal. [A U.K. reissue in 1996 added three extra tracks and none of them really fit, while the 1994 U.S. edition did the record an even greater disservice; its own additions forced the removal of two of the album's finest moments: the luxurious drift of "Western Wind" and "Tankerville" -- one an exquisitely haunted Sarah Cracknell vocal, the other a sweeping instrumental with a melancholic edge as dark as the edge of town. To hear "Boy Scouts of America" finally break through at the end of that is to witness sunrise at the end of the bleakest night. However, 2017 saw the release of a two-CD digitally remastered Deluxe Edition of Tiger Bay that restored "Western Wind" and "Tankerville" to the track listing and included bonus B-sides, rarities, and more.]” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Hug My Soul
Tales from Turnpike House
Release Date: 13th June, 2005
Label: Sanctuary
Producers: Ian Catt/Saint Etienne/Xenomania
Standout Tracks: Side Streets/A Good Thing/Milk Bottle Symphony
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/saint-etienne/tales-from-turnpike-house/lp
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5h6bg8Ol9pxoKosTYyZowy?si=JOx14nGdS9CfUvML1SYaSg&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Saint Etienne is something like the musical equivalent of a Hugh Grant romantic comedy—sophisticated, extremely English, somewhat yuppified and materialistic, and with a predilection for prettiness that at times seems like a stronger driving force than substance. But at its best, it's the pinnacle of breezy pop. The band's seventh disc, Tales From Turnpike House, is one of its finest, deploying Sarah Cracknell's warmly personable singing and Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs' deft songwriting and production on a series of linked songs about a day in the life of the ordinary inhabitants of a posh London apartment building. (Released last year in Britain, Turnpike has been remodeled for its stateside release, with its track listing shuffled and three new songs recorded specifically for the U.S. disc.) Concept albums are always chancy, but Turnpike's arrangements are rich and often gorgeous, and the lyrics are filled with subtle mood shifts and telling observations on the daily grind for middle-class, mid-30ish Londoners with midlife crises.
In some ways, Turnpike hearkens back to the postwar British pop of smooth, even suburbanite warblers like Petula Clark and Georgie Fame. Stanley and Wiggs also unlock their inner Brian Wilson on the Beach Boys harmonies of "Side Streets" and "Sun In My Morning." The album's thematic climax, "Teenage Winter," seemingly a modern update of Ralph McTell's achingly sad "Streets Of London," checks in on the characters one last time and finds them full of disappointments and wistful nostalgia. While they aren't the lonely, destroyed people of McTell's song, they struggle with the ordinary anomie of everyday life—the wasted time, the disappearance of youth, the inevitable approach of death. The fact that the band pulls this song off without turning mawkish speaks to the quality of the songcraft on the whole disc. Turnpike is Saint Etienne's strongest record in years, and if the rumors that this may be its final record are true, it would be an excellent swan song” – The A.V. Club
Choice Cut: Stars Above Us
The Underrated Gem
Good Humor
Release Date: 4th May, 1998
Label: Creation
Producer: Tore Johansson
Standout Tracks: Split Screen/Mr. Donut/The Bad Photographer
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/43064
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/35hVWd3uQFdosmj27cQIdZ?si=gxvjAvwhRAGCxyxAeYeChA&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Was there ever a less likely addition to the Sub Pop roster than Saint Etienne? In the late 1990s, the grunge and punk-associated Seattle label was emboldened to expand its purview, and if Sub Pop was going to gamble on any band, why not one of the UK's smartest, most sophisticated connoisseurs? At the time, the band (signed to Creation back home) was reportedly frustrated with its thoroughly continental reputation, and in 1998 the results of that restlessness, Good Humor, made good on threats to try something new.
Following its formative first three records, all self-produced, the band instead decamped to Sweden-- well ahead of the Western embrace of Swedish indie pop-- to work with an outsider, Tore Johansson. Furthermore, while known for its synths, samples, and programming, the band this time chose to embrace traditional rock instruments, including a horn section. And it's not a coincidence that the "humor" in the title drops the "u" from the anglicized version of that word.
At its best Good Humor capably splits the difference between old Etienne and new, embracing the 1960s as fervently as ever on "Split Screen" and "The Bad Photographer" while adopting that era's studio vernacular-- brass, vibes, electric piano. It also maintains the band's trademark melancholy streak with songs like "Mr. Donut", "Postman", and "Lose That Girl". Perhaps inevitably, given the origins of the album, the band even tips its hat to ABBA on "Sylvie". While perhaps not as immediate as the band's earlier output, these songs remain potent, and anyone that caught the group's full-band tour behind the album will attest that they more than held their own against the group's formidable back catalog” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Sylvie
The Latest Album
Home Counties
Release Date: 2nd June, 2017
Label: Heavenly
Producers: Augustus/Carwyn Ellis/Shawn Lee/Nick Moon/Saint Etienne/Pete Wiggs/Richard X
Standout Tracks: Magpie Eyes/Popmaster/Out of My Mind
Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Home-Counties-VINYL-Saint-Etienne/dp/B06XDPX8RK
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1NvtOgvGbr4d71SJbpRCfd?si=Spg9PUJzQki4a9zrDnMrlQ&dl_branch=1
Review:
“Home Counties is a loosely Kinks-ian concept album, revelling in the staid, pastoral surroundings of southern England: the “doughnut of shires that ring the capital", explains Bob Stanley. The arrangements here are crisp and atmospheric, but never imposing. The piano-led Something New, for example, or the whimsical harpsichord at the beginning of Whyteleafe, provide gentle, loping soundtracks that Sarah Cracknell's breathy vocals can glide over, painting beautiful pictures of the bucolic English countryside.
By utilising samples from Radio 2 and 4, a brief snippet of a classified football report and soft orchestral/choral interludes, Saint Etienne create a strong sense of rural Englishness across Home Counties, as well as allowing plenty of breathing space between tracks. Penultimate song, Sweet Arcadia, is peak Etienne as Cracknell lists off the little towns that one might pass on a train journey around the South of England, considering their origins and history with the same specificity as The Clientele or Lemon Jelly, but without their respective appetites for melancholia or surrealism; just a wide-eyed, honest rendering.
Whether musing about 'heading home across the moors' or 'DVDs in the boot sale', the band rarely deviate from their thematic nexus, which helps to tie the album together as it sprawls over nineteen tracks. As they move closer to the middle ground, Saint Etienne are far from re-inventing the wheel, but in writing delectable pop hooks about a place as decidely uncool as the home counties, that was never really the point” – The Skinny
Choice Cut: Dive