Sarah & The Chemical Brothers

"Pieces of me: Sarah Cracknell, singer" The Guardian 27.10.08

A photo of Sarah Cracknell as a child, taken by her father.

1 I was a well-documented child. My father was always taking pictures of me, but I would only pose if Bunny was photographed too.

2 These lovely Biba shoes belonged to my auntie Michelle. She and my mum were snappy dressers. I love vintage stuff.

3 This Wurlitzer Butterfly Grand opens up as if it's got wings. I fell in love with it. It sounds beautiful and adds such warmth to music.

4 My father was a first assistant director [to Stanley Kubrick] and was often abroad on location. He came back with jewellery for my mum from exotic places. Sometimes he'd take the family, and trade his first-class seat for three economies.

5 I love gimmicky fancy packaging on music. I was introduced to Public Image Ltd's Metal Box when I lived in a flat on the Kings Road with three friends. I had my 18th birthday there, which was crashed by people from a pub. I was terrified and hid in the broom cupboard.

6 When I got married four years ago, my sister-in-law decorated the room with these. I used to collect snowstorms. My husband, Martin, is the manager of our group and we were friends for a long time. It's nice to go into a relationship with someone you know and really trust.

7 Spencer is six and Sam is four. The elder one is studious and sensitive and the little one's always running around with the wrong types. I'm very lucky being able to juggle work and family. It's healthy as it scratches both itches.

8 In my bedroom I have a pink chair and this poster. They make me feel glamorous.

9 I used to gad about the countryside in this beautiful vintage Porsche when I was single.

10 Every girl should have a feather boa. I've been buying them in John Lewis on Oxford Street since 92. They're useful to fiddle with when nervous, a gift for the crowd, and glamorous.

11 When I first got more disposable income than I ever dreamed of, I bought this handbag. It was £200 and I used it and used it. My music career had started by chance - in a pub, aged 15. I then went to drama school, never expecting to go back into it, then met Bob [Stanley] and Pete [Wiggs], fortuitously.

12 Our chickens, Patty and Selma, are named after Marge Simpson's chain-smoking sisters. I've always had a fondness for chickens.

13 I see guitars as a piece of art. My husband has an obsession with them and bought me this gorgeous 1960s Eko gold-spangled guitar.

14 He was a Flash Harry, my dad. He wore cowboy boots and these Ray-Bans. He'd been really supportive of my musical endeavours so it's a shame he never saw them come to fruition. He died in 1991.

15 This is a memory of my first trip to Japan in 92. We'd never been on tour so far from home. We'd finish by 9pm, then run around town. It was a dream come true.

• Sarah Cracknell was born in 1967 in Essex and grew up in Windsor. She has been Saint Etienne's lead vocalist since singing on their debut album Foxbase Alpha. She also released a solo album, Lipslide, in 1997. She is married to Martin Kelly, joint MD of Heavenly Recordings, and they have two children. London Conversations: The Best of Saint Etienne is out now.

Interview by Anita Sethi. Photos by Sam Frost.

"I stuff all my money in my mattress." Popjustice interview

Sarah Cracknell discusses secret collaborations and her security deficient savings scheme...

Sarah Cracknell of Saint Etienne fame has sung over the music from the Lloyds Bank advert and, with a bit of help from a man called Mark Brown, is releasing it as a single, 'The Journey Continues', on February 4. Or maybe he made the song and then roped her in to do the warbling at a later stage. It's not clear.

The single's alright and everything but to be honest we were more interested with what else she might have in the pipeline when we spoke to her recently...


Hello, Sarah Cracknell. Are you working with Richard X on a huge pop comeback?
Where did you hear that? It's meant to be a big secret – or so I'm told. Who knows if we are planning a pop comeback, heaven only knows.

What impresses you right now about modern pop music?
Things are definitely on the up, there was a phase where everyone was so disinterested in what was going on in pop music but that has changed. There's a real thing about female singers with interesting voices going on and I really like Duffy. I like what she's got going on – maybe it's a blonde 60s kitsch thing...

Do you think you will ever record another big gay disco anthem along the lines of 'He's On The Phone' or 'Sylvie' again?
I am sure that will happen. We've got such a loyal fanbase in the gay community and they're always really fun when we do gigs. They're the ones who bother to get up, dance and have a good time.

Might there be some reswizzling of older tunes on the horizon?
I was thinking about this the other day, and there is a track that could benefit from a certain something but mainly because it never came out properly. It's a track called 'Burnt Out Car' which we recorded with Brian Higgins of Xenomania fame. It's just really good and should have been a single and given more of a chance in life.

What plans do you have for the rest of the year?
Saint Etienne have a best of album coming out...

ANOTHER ONE?
Another, yes, we're just picking up where we left off and then re-issuing and re-packaging - which is the really exciting part - our back catalogue with proper albums and a second CD of b-sides and other bits and bobs – not to mention the unmentionable collaboration.

Who do you bank with?
Use a bank? I'd rather die!

You can't say that, you're a cog in the Lloyds corporate wheel.
I am NOT a cog in the Lloyds corporate wheel, I've never even spoken to anyone from Lloyds bank. I am nothing to do with them at all, I think they're just very pleased and see the single as a free advert.

So what do you look for in a bank? Are you a saver or a borrower?
I don't use any bank. I stuff all my money in my mattress.

Let's hope there aren't any robbers reading. Thank you very much, Sarah Cracknell.

Saint Etienne pålästa på pophistoria

Saint Etienne tog sitt namn efter den franska fotbollsklubben med samma namn. Så här såg de ut 1998: Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs och Sarah Cracknell.

LONDONSaint Etienne har suddat ut gränsen mellan indiepop och dansmusik i snart tjugo år. Nu tycker Londongruppens Bob Stanley att det är hög tid att sammanfatta – såväl Saint Etiennes historia på skiva som hans egen syn på hela pophistorien i en bok.

Det ter sig som en självklarhet att Bob Stanley vill ses på Maison Bertaux.

Greek Streets franska fik, mitt i hjärtat av Londons Soho, är helt inrett i rosa, spritter av bekymmerslöshet och är över huvud taget lite som att bli slagen i huvudet med en regnbåge. Det är därmed som den rena spegelbilden av Saint Etiennes popmusik.

– Well, vi har nog bara alltid varit själva antitesen till Tom Waits-mannen, säger Bob Stanley när vi har slagit oss ner på kaféets puttenuttiga övervåning. Jag har alltid avskytt den manliga lidande konstnären som gör en karriär på att vid minsta motgång i livet sticka ut på vägarna och spela in sånger om hur han gråter i ölen. Jag tycker att det känns oärligt. Jag vill sprida lycka.

Det är en ljuv måndagsförmiddag i maj.

Bob Stanley har just vaknat upp efter en festhelg när Saint Etienne firat artonårsdagen av sin klassiska debut ”Foxbase Alpha” med två utsålda konsertkvällar på Londons Bloomsbury Ballroom.

Jag frågar honom varför de firar debuten med de här spelningarna, varför de ger ut alla sina skivor i remastrade deluxe-utgåvor samt varför de samlar ihop alla sina singlar i boxen ”London conversations” just nu i stället för om två år när det är tjugoårsjubileum.

– Om två år tror jag inte att det kommer att säljas några som helst skivor, spår Bob Stanley. Så jag ser det lite som sista chansen att ge ut allt nu.

Du är känd för att hata nostalgi. Hur har det varit att nu själv få vada omkring i din och Saint Etiennes historia?

– Det är sant. Jag gillar inte när människor fastnar i en tid eller ett ögonblick som aldrig kommer att komma åter. Det är kanske därför jag skäms lite när jag nu måste erkänna hur roligt det har varit att gå igenom allt material igen. Det är verkligen som att läsa en gammal dagbok och m innas varenda sekund av hur det var då. Visst är det en textrad här och där som får mig att rysa av obehag. Men det finns ändå ingenting här som jag ångrar som om det vore en gammal flickväns namn jag tatuerat på armen eller så.

Det är ändå inte så mycket för Saint Etienne som för Bob Stanleys kommande bok som jag träffar honom på det här franska fiket i London.

Ni som läste hans två glödande texter om soft rock och eurodisco i svenska tidningen Pop under nittiotalet vet vad som väntar.

Boken, som bär den något anspråksfulla titeln ”The History of Pop”, ska bli en parallell och högst personlig historieskrivning om popmusiken från andra världskriget till i dag.

Bob Stanley berättar att han spenderat en hel del tid på the British Library.

Där säger han sig ha läst och lyssnat på alltifrån hur de allra första diskoteken startades av fransmännen i det nazistockuperade Paris till hur otroligt trist och konservativ brittisk populärmusik lät under hela efterkrigstiden fram till the Beatles.

Stanley, som vid sidan av Saint Etienne hela tiden skrivit om musik för Storbritanniens största morgontidningar, är känd för att alltid vara lika påläst som han är djupt underhållande i skrift.

Han missar aldrig att i en bisats nämna något oväsentligt men roligt som, säg, att sonen till den i Japan oproportionerligt stora soft rock-mannen Roger Nichols i dag äger ett av USA:s främsta mejerier.

– Min bok är kanske inte lika relevant i dag som den hade varit för tio eller femton år sedan, säger han och syftar på att de bästa musikbloggarna nu för tiden väger upp en smula av det förakt han känner inför vuxna brittiska rockmagasin och deras historieskrivning.

– Jag kan inte förstå hur de här tidningarnas syn fortfarande kan vara så accepterad, såväl här som ute i världen. Det här att popen startade med Beatles och dog någonstans runt 1995 med britpopen. Det är ju som om inget hände däremellan. De har ingen aning om vare sig disco, techno eller house. Och om de skriver om, säg, Serge Gainsbourg – vilket jag bara sett hända en enda gång – så får han en ynka halvsida.

Vad är det, lite mer specifikt, som du tycker så illa om med den här rockistiska historieskrivningen?

– Det manschauvinistiska. Det är lite som när vi skulle producera den unga tjejduon Shampoo i mitten av nittiotalet och en kille som var där, jag minns inte hans namn eller vad han jobbade med, sa att ”tjejer inte hör hemma i studior”.

Innan och efter Saint Etiennes dubbla Londonuppträdanden den här helgen har medlemmar ur göteborgska Air France och The Embassy bjudits in för att spela skivor.

Bob Stanley säger sig tycka otroligt mycket om de båda svenska popbanden – trots att de är lika nervösa som de är extremt onyktra och därför inte under hela lördagskvällen lyckas mixa samman två låtar utan att det blir ett par sekunders tystnad.

– Men de tar inte pophistorien framåt, invänder han och berättar vidare att han inte varit med om någon ny musik som varit hundra procent originell sedan han hörde jungle i mitten av nittiotalet.

Han erkänner sin besvikelse över hur den moderna popmusiken låter i dag mot hur han drömde att den skulle låta efter millennieskiftet när han växte upp i sextiotalets Horsham i södra England.

Det är därför lätt att se bokbindningen av ”The History of Pop” som ett tecken på att han nu tycker att vi är framme vid slutet av pophi­storien.

– Jag skulle inte vilja säga att vi är framme vid slutet, försvarar han sig. Men jag kan känna att något gått förlorat med fildelningen. När allt blev tillgängligt så blev allt nytt också mer förgängligt. Jag tycker att det är lite trist att de klassiska skivorna bara blir än mer klassiska nu när de nya albumen är så gratis och så lättillgängliga redan från allra första sekund. Det blir allt svårare att skapa en magisk lyster runt ny musik.

Han lutar sig tillbaka och frågar om han svamlar.

Nej, inte alls.

– Jag menar inte att alla nya band efter år 2000 ska låta och se ut som Kraftwerk. Jag vill bara att det ska finnas en större framtidssträvan och att jag ska bli överraskad. Men vad har jag att komma med? Vi i Saint Etienne har ju alltid skapat vår musik med hjälp av samplingar av gamla sånger.

Marcus Joons

Publicerat 2009-06-13 14:10

"Turntable Cafe"

"Saint Etienne perform Foxbase Alpha" 2009 advert

Loaded Magazine "Most Wanted"

"Vision On" NME Xmas Edition 1992

"So Tough" Magazine advert

"Shrink Rap" Melody Maker 1997

NME Interview 11.05.91

Melody Maker Interview 25.04.92

THE PRODUCT

"We want to write songs and then deconstruct them," says Bob Stanley. "We want to get weirder and more album oriented. It would be easy to do stuff that's weird that people would find hard to get into, but it would be really brilliant if we could combine both the pop instantness and the weirdness."

Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne's critically-acclaimed debut album, was undoubtedly the most deliciously disorientating suite of sound produced last year, and now it looks as though Stanley and his partner, Pete Wiggs, want to expand on the ambient weirdness found on the second side of the LP.

Ironically, their new single, ‘Join Our Club’, is probably the least idiosyncratic thing Saint Etienne have done (it's an all-out bid for a chart hit), but other completed tracks for the new album indicate a more exploratory approach. A track called ‘Calico’, for instance (which features an eerie rap by Q-Tee), is psychedelic, dub-crazed film music, a James Bond theme from an alternative universe, pure kitschadelia.

"The new stuff we've been doing is even weirder," Stanley explains. "Some of it's a bit scary. We spent six weeks in the studio and ended up with two songs and loads and loads of scary bits of songs."

THE EMPIRE FIGHTS BACK

Saint Etienne are diversifying, not just because it's sound business practice, but because one moniker isn't enough to contain all their ideas and impulses. In a couple of weeks, they'll be releasing the first singles for Ice Rink, "a beautiful pop label specialising in maverick genius", funded by Creation. Pete and Bob's sonic empire consists of Oval ("a South East London group, friends of ours, they use real guitars and have two girl singers"), Elizabeth City State ("a bit soulful, lots of string arrangements, their first single's gonna be called 'V-Neck'"), Golden (three girls singing sombre, sepia-tinted Sixties folk harmonies over a House groove) and Sensurround (featuring John Robb, music journalist and ex-Membrane). He and Pete are already planning the Ice Rink compilation, which they hope will consist "entirely of Top Ten hits, but we'll do it whatever happens."

"We're not Svengalis," says Bob. "We might produce the groups, but they're writing all the songs and have their own sounds already."

Not that Saint Etienne have a problem with the Spector tradition of producer megalomania and conveyor belt brilliance. Pete and Bob have no truck with the trade rock belief that ‘manufactured’ pop is ‘shallow’ and ‘unauthentic’.

"We like pop because it's fast, instant, and glamorous", says Bob. "Rock groups like The Doors lack humour and suffer delusions of Messiah-like grandeur".

The B-side of ‘Join Our Club’, ‘People Get Real’, is a mellifluous diatribe against people who venerate ‘real soul’ and condemn House music as ‘unauthentic’. "It's about Kenny Thomas," Bob adds, "and the impending jazz-funk revival. Jazz funk, Kiss FM, it's miles more offensive than any heavy metal."

POP FOR POP'S SAKE

Sometimes it seems like Saint Etienne songs are born of Pete and Bob's rarefied, pop-for-pop's-sake aesthetic, rather than being examples of heart-felt, thorn-from-personal-experience communication. Pop as object (‘What a fab single!’) as opposed to pop as subjective outpouring (‘That really moves me’).

"We're somewhere between the two," says Bob. "Neither of us have really suffered enough to write anything really heartfelt. But the songs aren't totally vacuous. We like disposable pop, but we also like music that's enduring and high art. I'll still be listening to Tim Buckley or Laura Nyro in ten years, but I doubt if I'll be listening to disposable Stock Aitken Waterman-type pop in a year, it's just good for its moment."

Are they motivated to make pop by anything apart from a love of pop?

"Not really," Bob replies. "We definitely want to do something that's not been done before. I've never wanted to be in a group unless there was at least a chance of being as good as my favourite groups. During C86, a lot of my friends were in groups doing really shit music, and they kept asking if I wanted to be involved, and my argument was that unless I could get string arrangements on my records I never wanted to make one. So now we have, by default, using samplers. I won't be happy until we've written songs that can make people burst into tears, something that terrifyingly beautiful. I want to change the way people record, to create sounds that are widely imitated. Some of our next LP is getting there, a lot of it sounds frightening. Some of it sounds like the Far East. It could be brilliant, but it could be our downfall."

HOW DO THEY DO IT?

A Saint Etienne song starts with the pair humming melodic ideas into a tape recorder. Then they gather a few records with beats or sounds that they want to sample, and go into the studio. Messing around on the mixing desk, Pete and Bob recreate the complex arrangements they hear in their heads.

"It's all production and arrangement," Pete explains. "Production in getting other people to do stuff. Our engineer, Ian [Catt], helps us realise our ideas. We just record the basic track and then play with it until it sounds like we want it to sound. It's an advantage that we're not musicians, we just have sounds in our heads, and no preconceptions about their feasibility or what sounds right. Anyone could go in and make a record, but not everybody can make a good record."

HEROES AND VILLAINS

So who, in their opinion, are the all-time most pernicious forces in pop since the beginning? Who's had the most malign influence? Pete says The Doors. Singer Sarah Cracknell says Tina Turner. Bob says Eric Clapton and Cream. Pete, warming to the theme, adds Frank Zappa. And let's not forget Phil Collins.

"The worst thing about people like Phil Collins," grimaces Bob, "is that his records have taken on the status of classics for people like Capital Radio. They're the songs people will remember the Eighties for. They've become bonded to the time and, historically, will suppress what ever else came out at the time that's more deserving.

"Then there's James Brown," Bob continues. "We don't like funk. We don't like slap-bass. I can't get into Parliament and Funkadelic at all, it's too prog, too muso."

And how about heroes, the artists who should have changed the face of pop?

"David Essex," they reply. "The production on 'Rock On' doesn't sound like any record ever made, and his first couple of albums were totally weird. Cockney Rebel were weird, too. Early Fall doesn't sound like any records ever made. There was hardly a wasted B-side back then. The Fall should have given up in the early Eighties. No one's ever picked up on the deliberately badly recorded approach of a track like 'Spector Vs Rector'. Erm, who else? TV Personalities, of course."

"I really admire people who can sit down and write reams of hit singles," says Bob. "I don't just mean Lennon/McCartney or Goffin & King. Martin and Coulter were amazing – they wrote 'Back Home' for the England World Cup Squad in Mexico in 1970, then they wrote 'Sugar Baby Love' for the Rubettes in '74, which is total genius, just one of the most perfect songs ever written, and then they wrote a brilliant disco hit of few years later called 'Automatic Lover' by Dee D Jackson. What talented blokes! Any old style, Martin and Coulter could write a song to order."

Saint Etienne don't like anything that's overwrought (Robert Plant), and are totally opposed to over-emoting. Sarah's vocals are very cool and contained, a stand against what she calls "the arrogance of passion. That kind of thing's about taking yourself too seriously."

CURATOR VERSUS CREATOR

"We were talking to a friend about our record cos our friends never really say what they think about it," says Bob. "And he said it couldn't possibly be the future of music because it used loads of things that had been and gone, and stuck them together. And I said: same as Primal Scream and Massive Attack."

It seems that the state of the art is ‘record collection rock’, pop based around the elaboration of your own idiosyncratic hierarchy of taste. The only scope for new frissons comes when hitherto outlawed, neglected or denigrated sound-sources are introduced to the canon of admissible influences. Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque, Foxbase Alpha – this meta-pop can be glorious, but are there limits to it?

"I don't think there are any limits to it at all," says Bob. "It's a lot more limiting when you get someone forming a band who's only heard music from the last two years, and thinks Jesus Jones are better than The Beatles. If someone's got a large record collection, there are so many loose ends in pop history that nobody's ever followed up that there's limitless work to be done reinterpreting the past. It's never gonna be a dead end."

Obviously, pop's always worked like this. Even The Rolling Stones began as obsessive collectors of blues records. The difference between then and now, though, is that the Stones went on to create, inadvertently, the soundtrack to their era. Today's record collection rock has drifted off into its own self-referential universe, with little connection to life as she is lived.

"I can appreciated the Manics and Fabulous trying to agitate against that, saying that E has turned an entire generation into brain-dead idiots. There is so little energy about in music. I suppose somebody who's connected with the outside world would be into The Prodigy. Techno's the pulse of Young Britain, it's so exciting that you probably don't need Fabulous or the Manics if you're young."

With this new breed of rock scholars like Bobby Gillespie, Norman Blake and Stanley & Wiggs, sooner or later one has to deal with the word ‘trainspotter’. When Bob tells me he's desperately searching for the one and only album by New Musik (early Eighties New Wave abominations) I can't help admiring the sheer sickness of his obsession, but I also wonder whether he's really a suitable role model for a generation.

Wiggs and Stanley aren't candidates for shaman-hood, that's for sure, but they do mourn the disappearance of freaks, aliens and mad prophets in pop (the Kevin Rowlands, Adam Ants and Gary Numans). They know they just don't have it in them to be that stellar, that egomaniacal. They belong in a different category – the great British eccentric.

Here's Bob on Pete: "Peter often has trouble communicating with people. It's weird, but he's a completely different person on the phone. There was one time he was in Paris, and he was ringing me every two hours. He rang just to ask if he should buy this doughnut he'd seen in a bakery. He was ringing his family all the time, too. By the time he got home he'd spent over a hundred quid in calls."

Here's Pete on Bob: "Bob is fascinated by lasers, he visits the London Laserium at least twice a week, and even has a low wattage laser installed in his bedroom. When he dies he wants his coffin to travel through a laser tunnel projected down the aisle of the crematorium."

And Pete on Pete: "The reason I am in a band is that I do whatever the decade dictates: in the Eighties, I was a top businessman; in the Seventies, I was a kung-fu expert; and, in the Sixties, I was a child."

"Too Young To Die" Melody Maker Review

1993 Tour Guardian Review

Profile - Melody Maker 1993