A visual history of Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell... collectively known as the popular beat combo Saint Etienne. "Yeah... I think I've seen it..." Bob Stanley 2014
Friday, 8 January 2010
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Sarah Cracknell: Living the good life (The Independent, Wednesday, 5 November 2008)
Moving to the country means that singer Sarah Cracknell can raise her children – and her chickens – in style
The day my husband and I completed the deal on this house was September 11, 2001. We had no idea what was going on in New York, while we were doing a maniacal victory dance around the trees in the garden in rural Oxfordshire. It wasn't until we got back to our car and found messages on our phones that we found out. That kind of took the fun out of the day. Even though we bought the place seven years ago, we couldn't move in properly until 2005. The house was in a state of utter ruin, so for four years, we'd spend weekdays at our one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill, and the majority of weekends here doing up this little wreck.
The day my husband and I completed the deal on this house was September 11, 2001. We had no idea what was going on in New York, while we were doing a maniacal victory dance around the trees in the garden in rural Oxfordshire. It wasn't until we got back to our car and found messages on our phones that we found out. That kind of took the fun out of the day. Even though we bought the place seven years ago, we couldn't move in properly until 2005. The house was in a state of utter ruin, so for four years, we'd spend weekdays at our one-bedroom flat in Notting Hill, and the majority of weekends here doing up this little wreck.
When we found it, there was a horrible Eighties-style extension, which we promptly knocked down and replaced with floor-to-ceiling glass. We don't want the house to have too much of one thing, but the basic structure is rather mix-and-match, so we use different furniture and fabric accordingly to break it up. But neither Martin nor I are very daring when it comes to colour. Parts of the house are still cosy and dark, so we fill those bits with contemporary furniture to stop it looking too chintzy. In the new, lighter areas we use bigger, darker pieces, so there is quite a mixed feel to the place.
There is the distinct danger of us not getting much done in a hurry. Our friends joke that when we have an idea for the house, they can expect it to be implemented three years later. We just had the wet room finished – finally – after two years of "umm-ing" and "ahh-ing" about fittings and tiles. But still we're yet to choose a door, which means the whole thing is currently useless. It's not that we can't be bothered; it's just that we both have our own ideas about things. We can't agree on what pictures we want in the house either. I'll say "oh, look, that's nice!" and he'll say: "no, that's terrible!" He's really fussy about art and I haven't a clue. At the moment, we have lots of old photos of Twiggy and Edie Sedgwick and Pete Townsend. But I'd like to get some real pieces.
The place we have now is very different to anywhere I've ever lived before. You might call it a cottage, but really it was more of a smallholding. Parts of the building date back to the seventeenth century, but we can't be exactly sure. It's been like a detective game figuring out exactly what was built and when. We removed the floorboards not long after we moved in and found the remains of brickwork with the wear-and-tear that must have come from an old door. It has been suggested that there was someone living around an old inglenook fireplace at some point. There are also things like an owl hole in the bedroom, which make me believe this might have once been a grain store.
Some people are better at living in the countryside than others. I just love it. In fact, I'm slowly turning in to Barbara Good – I got myself a set of chickens just the other day. Both my husband and I grew up in small villages. I lived in Old Windsor until I was 17, before moving to the city. London had a magnetic pull for me at that age, and I'd spent every weekend catching the train there since I was 13. It was incredibly jammy that I found a little flat on the Kings Road just as I left school. I snapped it up immediately and had a fabulous time living there, except for one bad experience: when I was 18 I decided to have a house-party, which went really well until one of my friends invited everyone from the pub next door. I hid in the broom-cupboard under the stairs. When I finally left that flat, my now-husband, Martin, and I found a place with a communal garden on Ladbroke Grove, west London, which is where we stayed until we found this little place.
These days it's wonderful having friends here to stay. It gives us quality time together. You can sit up all night and then have breakfast together in the morning, rather than sharing a quick meal and then dashing home. The main reason for moving to the countryside was to give the children somewhere to run around. But they've spent so long in front of the TV and video games over they years that they don't know what to do outside. After ten minutes of being outside "playing", they'll come back in and ask me what they should do next. Sometimes I wonder if they need me to show them how to build a camp!
Interview By Charlotte Philby
Sarah Cracknell is the lead singer of Saint Etienne. She lives in rural Oxfordshire with her husband, Martin, and their two children, Spencer, 6, and Sam, 4. St Etienne's latest album London Conversations will be released in January 2009.
Wednesday, 6 January 2010
Places To Visit [joint review with Position Normal, Stop Your Nonsense] Village Voice, July 28-August 3, 1999 by Simon Reynolds
....Position Normal's fondness for "found sound" interludes, like the patter of Cockney stallholders in a fruit'n'veg market, reminds me of Saint Etienne's penchant for punctuating their early albums with movie dialogue and cafeteria chat eavesdropped onto a dictaphone. The trio started out as part of that superior early phase of Britpop that included World Of Twist, Denim, and pre-megastardom Pulp. Instead of later Britpop's loutish laddism, the sensibility was mod—fervently English, but cosmopolitan, as open to 1960s French girl-pop, '90s Italo-house, and A.R. Kane's halcyon dub-noise as it was to Motown and Dusty Springfield. Trouble was, the trio's futile fixation on scoring a UK Top Ten hit persuaded them to gradually iron out all their experimentalist excrescences. Reconvening in 1998 after a four-year sabbatical, Saint Etienne got sleeker and slicker still on Good Humour, abandoning sampling altogether for Swedish session-musicianship and a clean, crisp sound inspired by "Lovefool" Cardigans and Vince Guaraldi's lite-jazz Charlie Brown music.
A pleasant surprise, then, to report that Saint Etienne's six-track EP Places to Visit is an unexpected reversion to...everything that was ever any good about them. "Ivyhouse" is angel's breath ethereal like they've not been since their debut album's dubtastic "London Belongs To Me." Produced by Sean O'Hagan of avant-MOR outfit The High Llamas, "52 Pilot" features sparkling vibes, an elastic heartstring bassline out of "Wichita Lineman," and radical stereo separation (don't try this one on headphones). And "Artieripp" is a tantalizing tone-and-texture poem as subtly daubed as anything by Mouse On Mars.
Drawing on diverse talents like O'Hagan and Chicago avant-gardist-for-hire Jim O'Rourke, Places resituates Saint Etienne among the sound-sculptor ranks. (Their next project is apparently a collaboration with German art-techno outfit To Rococo Rot). They're aesthetes in love with the Pop Song not for its expressive power but for the sheerly formal contours of its loveliness. Hopefully, Places to Visit will work like Music for the Amorphous Body Study Centre did for Stereolab: as a rejuvenating sideline, a detour that parodoxically sets them back on a truer course.
A pleasant surprise, then, to report that Saint Etienne's six-track EP Places to Visit is an unexpected reversion to...everything that was ever any good about them. "Ivyhouse" is angel's breath ethereal like they've not been since their debut album's dubtastic "London Belongs To Me." Produced by Sean O'Hagan of avant-MOR outfit The High Llamas, "52 Pilot" features sparkling vibes, an elastic heartstring bassline out of "Wichita Lineman," and radical stereo separation (don't try this one on headphones). And "Artieripp" is a tantalizing tone-and-texture poem as subtly daubed as anything by Mouse On Mars.
Drawing on diverse talents like O'Hagan and Chicago avant-gardist-for-hire Jim O'Rourke, Places resituates Saint Etienne among the sound-sculptor ranks. (Their next project is apparently a collaboration with German art-techno outfit To Rococo Rot). They're aesthetes in love with the Pop Song not for its expressive power but for the sheerly formal contours of its loveliness. Hopefully, Places to Visit will work like Music for the Amorphous Body Study Centre did for Stereolab: as a rejuvenating sideline, a detour that parodoxically sets them back on a truer course.
SAINT ETIENNE Presents Finisterre: A Film About London Directed by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans Village Voice, November 30th, 2005 by Simon Reynolds
“Finisterre”, the title track of Saint Etienne’s 2002 album, was an aesthetic manifesto that among other things imagined leaping straight from the Regency Era
to Bauhaus-style modernism, in the process skipping almost the entire 19th Century. In a way, that’s what this DVD--an enchanting meander through London that’s less a documentary than a visual poem--does too. You get little sense of the city as Dickens would have understood it: the hustle-bustle of a place somewhere people work and produce. Finisterre’s first images are a suburban train heading into London at the crack of dawn, before the commuter crush, and the only sense of commotion and congestion come much later with footage shot at various gigs and bars.
There’s a sense in which the city could only be made beautiful by minimizing the presence of its inhabitants, who are either absent or typically appear on the edge of shot. Directors Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans strip away the hubbub to reveal a secret city of silence and stillness, reverie rather than revelry. The film is literally composed largely of stills--buildings, graffiti, faded posters, half-deserted cafes, store fronts. People, when they appear, are rarely in motion. The gaze of this flaneur-camera aestheticizes everything: a homeless man becomes a compositional figure (mmmm, look at the curvature of spine) and a neglected playground generates attractive patterns of rust-mottled metal and stained brickwork.
It would have been heavy-handed to use such images as signifiers of urban decay and dysfunction, but a teensy dose of Ken Loach wouldn’t have gone amiss. A different Ken (Livingstone, the Mayor of London) gives his thumbs-up in the DVD booklet, and no wonder: it’ll trigger a tourism micro-boom by luring Saint Etienne’s already Anglophile fanbase abroad. Watching Finisterre made this London-born expatriate yearn to hop on the next flight home, too. But I suspect this is actually the last word in a certain way of looking at, and living with, a city that’s unmanageably vast and often pretty grim. File it next to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic walking tours or the greasy spoon memory-work of Adrian Maddox’s Classic Cafes-- forms of mourning for a city that’s always dying. Finisterre is a beautiful film about London. But beauty is only half the story, because cities are always rebirthing themselves too, and birth ain’t a pretty sight.
to Bauhaus-style modernism, in the process skipping almost the entire 19th Century. In a way, that’s what this DVD--an enchanting meander through London that’s less a documentary than a visual poem--does too. You get little sense of the city as Dickens would have understood it: the hustle-bustle of a place somewhere people work and produce. Finisterre’s first images are a suburban train heading into London at the crack of dawn, before the commuter crush, and the only sense of commotion and congestion come much later with footage shot at various gigs and bars.
There’s a sense in which the city could only be made beautiful by minimizing the presence of its inhabitants, who are either absent or typically appear on the edge of shot. Directors Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans strip away the hubbub to reveal a secret city of silence and stillness, reverie rather than revelry. The film is literally composed largely of stills--buildings, graffiti, faded posters, half-deserted cafes, store fronts. People, when they appear, are rarely in motion. The gaze of this flaneur-camera aestheticizes everything: a homeless man becomes a compositional figure (mmmm, look at the curvature of spine) and a neglected playground generates attractive patterns of rust-mottled metal and stained brickwork.
It would have been heavy-handed to use such images as signifiers of urban decay and dysfunction, but a teensy dose of Ken Loach wouldn’t have gone amiss. A different Ken (Livingstone, the Mayor of London) gives his thumbs-up in the DVD booklet, and no wonder: it’ll trigger a tourism micro-boom by luring Saint Etienne’s already Anglophile fanbase abroad. Watching Finisterre made this London-born expatriate yearn to hop on the next flight home, too. But I suspect this is actually the last word in a certain way of looking at, and living with, a city that’s unmanageably vast and often pretty grim. File it next to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic walking tours or the greasy spoon memory-work of Adrian Maddox’s Classic Cafes-- forms of mourning for a city that’s always dying. Finisterre is a beautiful film about London. But beauty is only half the story, because cities are always rebirthing themselves too, and birth ain’t a pretty sight.
PROFILE - The Observer, 20th October 1991 by Simon Reynolds
On their delightful debut album, Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne mix contemporary house rhythms with the string-swept melodrama of Sixties pop. Amazingly, the creators of this exquisitely crafted sound, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, are musical illiterates, who can't play any instruments except for rudimentary keyboard.
Instead, they hum melodic ideas into a tape recorder, gather a few records with beats or sounds that they want to sample, then go into the studio. Messing around on the mixing desk, Saint Etienne recreate the complex arrangements they hear in their heads.
Friends since the age of two, the duo had long fantasised about making pop music. "But because we lacked the patience to learn to play instruments we never thought we'd do it," says Wiggs. But when groups such as S'Express got to the top of the charts with sampler-based records that sounded lavish yet cost only a few hundred pounds to record, Wiggs and Stanley decided to take the plunge.
Their first single, a version of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', took two hours and £80 to make. Thanks to pop journalist Stanley's contacts in the music industry, the track reached clubland's top DJs as a pre-release single. Before they knew what was happening, the song was a dance-floor smash, and Saint Etienne had a career on their hands. Recently revamped as their fourth single, 'Only Love' dented the Top 40.
Stanley has now put his writing on hold, in order to concentrate on Saint Etienne and the duo's burgeoning sideline career as producers presiding over a mini-empire of protegés. There's Golden, a female trio on the verge of signing to a major label, while the duo Cola Boy has already signed to Arista. The latter scored the Top Ten 10 hit with the Saint Etienne-penned '7 Ways To Love', an insidiously catchy mix of schlocky Italian disco and Sixties Muzak.
Saint Etienne aim to renovate the grand tradition of stage-managed pop as exemplified by Phil Spector, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Stock Aitken Waterman — brilliant producers with a stable of interchangeable, photogenic vocalists that they manipulated like puppets. "We like that approach simply because a lot of the time it's produced such brilliant records," says Stanley.
Saint Etienne have no time for the traditional rock belief that such 'manufactured' pop is 'shallow' and 'inauthentic'. "We like pop because it's fast, instant, and glamorous," says Stanley. "Rock groups like The Doors lack humour and suffer delusions of Messiah-like grandeur." The new Saint Etienne single 'People Get Real', due out in January, is a riposte to snobs who "venerate ‘real soul’ and condemn house music as inauthentic."
With their fondness for kitsch and camp, you might expect Foxbase Alpha to be a collection of tacky, disposable singles. In fact, it's an accomplished album whose span ranges from classically-concise pop to eerie instrumentals and grandiose production epics that recall Ennio Morricone; its diverse influences include dub reggae, the noisy dream-pop of AR Kane, Scott Walker's orchestral ballads, and Joe Meek. "Meek was the only interesting British pop figure before the Beatles. On records like ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and ‘Telstar’ he pioneered multi-tracking, echo and over-dub."
Saint Etienne's music has a distinctly English aura, something that's brought to the fore on songs such as 'Girl VII', with its litany of Tube stations, or 'London Belongs To Me', an idyllic reverie of summer in the metropolis. Saint Etienne's never-never pop is imbued with nostalgia for a lost swinging England, for the days when musicians wore groovy gear and knew how to behave like stars. "If we're successful, we'll get all our clothes tailor-made," daydreams Stanley. "We've already had gold lamé suits made for us. Next on the agenda are some bespoke velvet trousers."
Instead, they hum melodic ideas into a tape recorder, gather a few records with beats or sounds that they want to sample, then go into the studio. Messing around on the mixing desk, Saint Etienne recreate the complex arrangements they hear in their heads.
Friends since the age of two, the duo had long fantasised about making pop music. "But because we lacked the patience to learn to play instruments we never thought we'd do it," says Wiggs. But when groups such as S'Express got to the top of the charts with sampler-based records that sounded lavish yet cost only a few hundred pounds to record, Wiggs and Stanley decided to take the plunge.
Their first single, a version of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', took two hours and £80 to make. Thanks to pop journalist Stanley's contacts in the music industry, the track reached clubland's top DJs as a pre-release single. Before they knew what was happening, the song was a dance-floor smash, and Saint Etienne had a career on their hands. Recently revamped as their fourth single, 'Only Love' dented the Top 40.
Stanley has now put his writing on hold, in order to concentrate on Saint Etienne and the duo's burgeoning sideline career as producers presiding over a mini-empire of protegés. There's Golden, a female trio on the verge of signing to a major label, while the duo Cola Boy has already signed to Arista. The latter scored the Top Ten 10 hit with the Saint Etienne-penned '7 Ways To Love', an insidiously catchy mix of schlocky Italian disco and Sixties Muzak.
Saint Etienne aim to renovate the grand tradition of stage-managed pop as exemplified by Phil Spector, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Stock Aitken Waterman — brilliant producers with a stable of interchangeable, photogenic vocalists that they manipulated like puppets. "We like that approach simply because a lot of the time it's produced such brilliant records," says Stanley.
Saint Etienne have no time for the traditional rock belief that such 'manufactured' pop is 'shallow' and 'inauthentic'. "We like pop because it's fast, instant, and glamorous," says Stanley. "Rock groups like The Doors lack humour and suffer delusions of Messiah-like grandeur." The new Saint Etienne single 'People Get Real', due out in January, is a riposte to snobs who "venerate ‘real soul’ and condemn house music as inauthentic."
With their fondness for kitsch and camp, you might expect Foxbase Alpha to be a collection of tacky, disposable singles. In fact, it's an accomplished album whose span ranges from classically-concise pop to eerie instrumentals and grandiose production epics that recall Ennio Morricone; its diverse influences include dub reggae, the noisy dream-pop of AR Kane, Scott Walker's orchestral ballads, and Joe Meek. "Meek was the only interesting British pop figure before the Beatles. On records like ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and ‘Telstar’ he pioneered multi-tracking, echo and over-dub."
Saint Etienne's music has a distinctly English aura, something that's brought to the fore on songs such as 'Girl VII', with its litany of Tube stations, or 'London Belongs To Me', an idyllic reverie of summer in the metropolis. Saint Etienne's never-never pop is imbued with nostalgia for a lost swinging England, for the days when musicians wore groovy gear and knew how to behave like stars. "If we're successful, we'll get all our clothes tailor-made," daydreams Stanley. "We've already had gold lamé suits made for us. Next on the agenda are some bespoke velvet trousers."
Foxbase Alpha LP Review - Melody Maker, 1991
by Simon Reynolds
"Never let a rock critic near a guitar", I once decreed, convinced that the sheer knowingness intrinsic to the rockcrit sensibility was deleterious to intuition, instinct and the semi-conscious pursuit of the sublime. Now I could probably extricate myself on a technicality (Bob Stanley mostly grapples with synths and samplers, not guitars), butthe fact is "Foxbase Alpha" forces me to eat my own edict.
Saint Etienne show that a certain kind of learned eclecticism doesn't have to lead to weak-ass whimsicalpick'n'mix. For this pop-about-pop approach to transcend its inherent limitations, your record collection has to be pretty weird. Stanley & Wiggs' taste is as idiosyncratic as it gets. For the life of me I can't fathom what the thread is that connects Phil Spector, lover's rock, Northern Soul,psychedelia, Neil Young's courtly love side, Sixties girl-pop and A.R. Kanish dub-noise, as part of a single, seamless aesthetic continuum. It ought to be a mess, but for the duration of this album, it works like a dream.
Foxbase Alpha is never-never pop, the soundtrack to an alternative universe, swinging England where World Of Twist are Number One and pop stars still wear gold lame. It's a record that charms you into a gooey stupor, rather than burns your eye with visionary vastness. Saint Etienne offer delight instead of rapture; their love songs are about tenderness rather than desire, lingering gazes and holding hands rather than gonad-motion. Saint Etienne's soul is rooted in the anorak-clad innocence of 1986 (hence their cover of "Kiss and Make Up" by cutie fundamentalists The Field Mice).
Much of Foxbase Alpha is C86 'perfect pop' on a post- house footing. "Carn't Sleep" combines the prosaic purity of Sixties girl-pop with pseudo-orchestral muzak, heart-pang bass and prickly rhythm guitar. "Girl VII" cuts between nonchalant reverie, an upward-spiralling chorus of rapturous strings and heart-in-mouth vox, and a peculiar litany of London tube stations and cosmoplitan cities: Tufnell Park, San Paolo, Dollis Hill, Bratislava.... The best of this side of Saint Etienne remains "Nothing Can Stop Us Now". The love-as-fortitude lyrics turn my stomach ("you smooth out all the rough edges/with love and devotion... just the touch of your hand/and I know we're gonna make it" -yeuuch!), and Sarah Cracknell's voice is just a little too creamy, but the flute-piping euphoria is irresistible.
But if Foxbase Alpha was all in this vein, it would be merely an exceedingly pleasant record. (Indeed, "Spring" and "She's The One" edge dangerously close to Mari Wilson/white Sade blandness). What makes it so relentlessly listenable are the weird experimental touches: "Wilson", a sound-collage of ridiculously antiquated English voices from a late Sixties decimal currency training record, looped over a flanged and reverbed beat as psychedelic as Dudley Moore's "Bedazzled", or the creepy, 23 Skidoo-ish tribal mantra of "Etienne Gonna Die", complete with acrimonious poker player movie dialogue.
Foxbase Alpha really comes alive on side two. "Stoned To Say The Least" starts as a foreboding trance-dance pulse, over which backwards guitar uncoils as beautifully as Stone Roses' "Don't Stop" and angelic synths hover; then the track escalates into an astral turmoil of feedback refractions and amp-hum. "London Belongs To Me" is staggering. Imagine a collision between the aesthetics of Talulah Gosh and A.R. Kane, twee and torrential, camp and sublime. The song begins as one of those idyllic interludes in a Sixties movie, a light-headed, walking-on-air shimmer of harpsichords, vibes, flutes and mellotrons. But at the chorus, everything goes topsy-turvy: gravity absconds in a mist of dub-reverbed percussion; Wiggs & Stanley's arrangement cascades stardust and moonbeam, a downfall of precious gems. "Like The Swallow" is possibly even more stupendous and accomplished. Starting as a symphonic samplescape midway between Scott Walker and Brian Eno, dizzy with detail, it mutates into an Ennio Morricone-esque epic, gongs chiming portentously, then abruptly disappears beneath phalanxes of drones like harmonised sonic booms, and the massively amplified sound of a solitary acoustic guitar, plucking an eerie melody. One of the most pleasurably perplexing things I've heard this year.
I can't figure the Saint Etienne aesthetic out, and that's the fun of it. This the name of the game in 1991: constructing your own alternative pop universe, hallucinating the hybrid styles that should have but never did happen. As such, Foxbase Alpha is the perfect companion to Screamadelica: both albums are examples of pop scholars transcending their record collections. No single element on either album is "new", but the coagulated composite of all that warped taste sounds breathtakingly fresh and unforeseen.
Thursday, 18 June 2009
"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.
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
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."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)