Home Counties Tour Adverts 2017

Saint Etienne - The Quay Sessions BBC Scotland 29-06-2017

Epic finish to the current series with the band in top form live at the BBC in Glasgow.

Nothing Can Stop Us
Who Do You Think You Are?
Take It All In
Dive
Sylvie

The Times - Pop review by Will Hodgkinson: Saint Etienne: Home Counties

Bob Stanley, left, Sarah Cracknell and Pete Wiggs combine sunny, Sixties-tinged pop with new-town dreaming

★★★★☆

An album about life in the home counties doesn’t sound like the most appealing idea, Sunday roasts and mock-Tudor semis not having the same romance as, say, juke joints and shotgun shacks. However, the London band Saint Etienne always had sympathy for suburbia and combining sunny, Sixties-tinged pop with new-town dreaming has an unassuming appeal. Whyteleafe imagines David Bowie as an office worker, thinking of “the Paris of the Sixties, the Berlin of the Seventies” while stuck on a rail replacement bus service in Crawley. Heather tells of the Enfield poltergeist, which tormented two girls in a council house between 1977 and 1979. The singer Sarah Cracknell’s breathy tones keep it light and St Etienne’s way with a breezy melody makes the album zip by pleasantly. (Heavenly)

June 2 2017

Saint Etienne celebrate the sound of the suburbs by bringing the Home Counties to Common People - Oxford Times 11-05-2017

By Tim Hughes

Saint Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell tells Tim Hughes why the band are finding inspiration from a place they all know intimately: the Home Counties

The Home Counties – the swathe of commuter country embracing London – has a mixed reputation. What is seen as comfortable, affluent and sedate to some, is dismissed as boring, suburban and culturally dead to others.

It’s a place of tidy semi-detached homes, neatly-kept gardens, golf courses, tennis courts, bowling greens, pony clubs and patches of unthreatening countryside broken up by sprawling housing estates.

At the heart of the English psyche, it’s also the land immortalised by John Major as that “country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and... old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist’.”

It’s a place close to the heart of the band Saint Etienne, all of whom grew up there – and it has inspired their new album called, reasonably enough Home Counties.

“It’s like a dirty word,” smiles singer Sarah Cracknell, who grew up in Berkshire and now lives near Oxford.

“People think of it as middle class and right wing, but I’ve had enough distance from my upbringing to start to appreciate what it’s all about.

“I grew up in Old Windsor, but went to London as soon as I could – I couldn’t get away fast enough. I now I live in Oxfordshire which, may be in the Home Counties, depending on your definition – and it’s not dissimilar to where I grew up.

“I have retreated to a place very similar to where I am originally from, albeit more rural.”

She adds: “One of the good things about growing up where I did is that it was terribly boring and out of boredom comes creativity. So many musicians, artists, DJs and people in the fashion world began doing what they did because there was nothing else to do. Especially when I grew up, with no internet and no more than four channels on TV.”

It is 27 years since Saint Etienne got together, founded by friends and music writers Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs.

With a name borrowed from a French football club, the group began life as a vehicle for Stanley and Wiggs’s music and featured a floating roster of vocalists, though settled on Sarah after her contribution to the dreamy dance-pop classic Nothing Can Stop Us Now.

“Bob and Pete had a master plan, but I joined later,” says Sarah, who lives with husband, Heavenly Records supremo Martin Kelly, and their children Spencer and Sam.

Taking their cue from 60s pop and soul, 70s rock and 80s dance music, they went on to release dance-pop classic Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and such engaging hits as You’re in a Bad Way, Join Our Club, and He’s on the Phone (itself based on French singer Etienne Daho’s Week-end à Rome), I Was Born On Christmas Day (alongside The Charlatan’s Tim Burgess), and 7 Ways to Love (released under the moniker Cola Boy).

After a series of high-profile collaborations, they moved more heavily into intelligent electronica and film, culminating in 2012’s critically acclaimed synth-pop masterpiece Words and Music by Saint Etienne.

Home Counties is their ninth album. Sarah admits to being a little surprised that they have kept the wagon rolling.

“When we made that first album we certainly didn’t think we’d go on this long,” she says. “But it is also to do with us getting on incredibly well.

“To start with, we just wanted to get an album out – and it was all the ideas we’d ever had since we were 14 or 15, all crammed into one record in case we never got another out.”

Their latest is a collection of 16 songs about life in commuter country, which veers away from the stereotypes and delves beneath the veneer of middle class respectability.

So we have Something New, which has a teenage girl creeping through the front door after staying out all night; the spirit of a suburban poltergeist on Heather, the self-explanatory Train Drivers in Eyeliner, and, in Whyteleaf, a whimsical dream of what might have happened if David Bowie had stayed plain old David Jones and chosen a desk job in Bromley.

The album was produced by Shawn Lee of Young Gun Silver Fox, and features the talents of Dorchester’s Robin Bennett – co-frontman The Dreaming Spires and co-founder of Truck and Wood festival.

The live band features Robin’s brother Joe Bennett, from Steventon, and the legendary Mike Monaghan – who has also wielded the drum sticks for Gaz Coombes, Little Fish, Ralfe Band, Fionn Regan and Willie J Healey, and who lives in Carterton.

Also involved are Augustus (Kero Kero Bonito), Carwyn Ellis (Colorama, Edwyn Collins), Richard X (Girls On Top and Black Melody) and long-time collaborator Gerard Johnson (Denim, Yes). It was recorded in London over the course of six weeks.

So why the Home Counties? “When we decide to start a new album, the mood happens to take us all at the same time. This time lots of things connected. Bob has been writing books, Pete is doing a qualification in film scoring and I have a solo album. But suddenly we started to get a bit twitchy and wanted to work in a studio and write songs together. We just drift along until it happens.

“Bob came up with the idea,” she says. “We often try to come up with a theme. It’s helpful as plucking ideas out of the air is hard.”She goes on: “We all look back fondly on where we grew up. It’s the small things – the sense of community, the beauty, and sometimes the lack of beauty. After all, some high streets are pretty grotty and dated. And, like I said, out of boredom comes creativity!”

The music gets an airing at Oxford’s Common People Festival, on May 27. After that they take it to Primavera Festival in Spain and London’s Royal Festival Hall, before a full UK tour.

While every inch still the blonde bombshell pin-up girl whose image adorned many an indie fan’s bedroom wall in the 90s, Sarah remains level-headed.

“I was very grounded when it all started,” she says. “I realised early on that fans probably only liked me because I was in a band. Some people in bands never realise that and think everyone loves them – which they don’t.

“I didn’t get carried away, and we have always surrounded ourselves with people we really like. It’s like a big extended family, especially in Oxfordshire where many of the band come from. Everybody is talented and nice.”

And she is looking forward to playing Oxford’s second Common People. “I might be slightly nervous though,” she laughs. “There will be people from the school or the pub who have never seen me on stage before and don’t even really know what I do. They’ll be thinking ‘Oh my God!’

“We are not too shocking though, and it is a brilliant festival. We went last year and it was really good!”

Home Counties - Bang On PR Campaign

For every Eton, there’s a Slough. For every Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, a Gemma Collins. The home counties of Saint Etienne’s ninth album are those that don’t get hymned by the stockbroker belt Conservatives.They are the places of forgotten bands like Soul Family Sensation and the Onlookers, of new towns and railway stations, of motorways and industrial estates. It’s the heart of Britain, unpopular as that view might be.

What’s remarkable about Home Counties (and its predecessor, Words and Music) is that Saint Etienne, in what might have been expected to be their dotage, are making the best music of their quarter-century career. Freed from the pressures of worrying their single might stall at No 41, they record now only when they have something to say – like AC/DC, Saint Etienne make an album every five or six years, and if you want to hear it, you have to wait.

All three of Saint Etienne are home counties natives. Stanley and Pete Wiggs hail from Reigate in Surrey, singer Sarah Cracknell from Old Windsor. “Growing up in Reigate, we were on a slightly different wavelength to most people, and people that we felt connected with over the years say they felt the same,” Wiggs says.

“Pretty much everyone we grew up with was drawn to London,” Cracknell adds. “It was like a magnet. Because we were close enough it wasn't difficult to go up every weekend, which is what I did, or to move to London.”

“London is basically socialist, but you have this ring around it that is definitely not socialist, which is also probably the bit that runs the country,” explains Bob Stanley. “The country isn’t run by Londoners at all; it’s run by people in the home counties. That’s a negative. But there’s also a huge amount of modernist architecture in the home counties, more than there is anywhere else in the country. And new towns. There are a lot of things that are quite adventurous, but the rest of the country hates the home counties, understandably – it hates them more than it hates London. If it knows what they are. You’d probably still get called a cockney if you were from Berkshire or Essex.”

Saint Etienne's home counties was one in which a less regulated society meant it was possible to do things you could never get away with now. “My friends used to go the pub from school and get changed out of their school uniforms in the toilets into their civvies and then go and get a drink,” Cracknell says. “Imagine doing that today! It did lead to a group of quite creative people. People who ended up in bands, who performed in the pubs, people who got into fashion and DJing and the dance music scene when it started. So it did create this bubble of interesting people.”

Both Wiggs and Cracknell have moved out of London, following parenthood, and have decided to, in Wiggs’s words, “reclaim the home counties”.

And the songs they have written are glorious things. If the last album, Words and Music by Saint Etienne, had been the group effortlessly proving that state-of-the-art pop was something they could
provide without breaking sweat, Home Counties is a relaxed record, skipping through the styles, with sonic inserts – it opens with an introduction marking this as a Radio 4 kind of record (in March, Wiggs and Stanley also appeared on Radio 3, as part of Hull’s City of Culture celebrations, meaning they have now had a wholly natural place on all four of the main BBC radio networks – them and the Beatles, then).

Underneath, though, is a very understated kind of subversion. Train Drivers in Eyeliner becomes the first Saint Etienne song to make reference to Whitesnake’s Fool For Your Loving, as it details the musical tastes of senior members of the rail union. How do you find out the musical tastes of senior members of Aslef? “By hanging around with people who know them,” Stanley says, gnomically.
Whyteleafe is one of the album’s centrepieces, named for a suburb of Croydon, the town that was Stanley and Wiggs’s metropolis as teenagers, in the days when they would get a bus to a pub just inside the London postcode zones, just so they could say they’d been for a drink in London. It’s based on the story of someone who ended up staying in suburbia, working in the kind of job millions of people end up doing, who had a flash of realisation in June 2016 that maybe he made the wrong choices with his life when he discovered he was the only person in his office to have voted remain in the EU referendum. Yet, Stanley insists, it’s lighthearted – as is Heather, written by Wiggs, which became “loosely” about the Enfield Poltergeist halfway through writing. “No one was called Heather in the original incident,” Stanley observes. “But it’s a realistic name for a suburban ghost.”

Having growing children has revitalised Saint Etienne’s relationship not just with geography, but with pop music. “I’m revisiting it through my children,” Cracknell says. “At the moment I really like a station in Oxfordshire called Jack 2, which is all electronic music and grime, and I really love it. I sit there in the car with the kids and listen to it, and I’m really reengaging with chart pop. So much chart pop is reengaged with the early 90s. I went off pop for a bit, but I love it again.”

They’ve noticed something different, though – that their kids don’t need to feel ownership of the music, physically or spiritually, the way they all did as teenagers. “Music is just a thing you have on,” Wiggs says. “My son doesn’t need to know all the details behind it.”
“They aren’t bothered by what the artists stand for, what they believe in,” Cracknell adds. “That kind of thing has gone slightly, which is a shame."

Saint Etienne still believe in pop, though, and Home Counties is delicious restatement of core values – if anything, it’s a more accomplished return to the sound and working methods of the Saint Etienne so many people fell in love with in he early 1990s, aided by producer Shawn Lee (Young Gun Silver Fox). “It’s a return to the way we used to write stuff,” Wiggs says, “singing stuff back to him and asking if he could recreate it. Which he could.”

For some years now, when Saint Etienne go into the studio, one or other member will fear it is for the last time, that they won’t be back. The record gets finished, and the three members – still, after all this time, quite evidently friends in a way that groups who ruthlessly pursue success are not – drift apart, come together again for the occasional show and tour, drift apart again. And then five years have passed … “and we get itchy feet”, as Cracknell puts it.

Thank heaven for those itchy feet. And welcome back to suburbia, Saint Etienne.

Taken from http://www.bangonpr.com/campaigns/artist/saint-etienne