The tale begins with the collision of two pushchairs in a butcher' shop near Reigate, Surrey, in the late '60s. One contained Bob Stanley, then age 2, the other, 1-year-old Pete Wiggs. The pair wound up going to the same schools, hanging around together on school holidays, playing table tennis, and listening to music. "Bob used to buy records when he was about 11, and he'd make tapes for me," says Pete. "I never had to buy any records for ages." By the late '80s, the pair was collaborating on a fanzine called Caff ("We wrote it under these stupid pseudonyms," explains Bob. "He was Pete Surreal and I was Bobby Teenstar") while Bob put out limited-edition singles by obscure indie bands like the Razorcuts and the soon-to-be humongous Pulp on his own label. The shared fantasy, however, was to form a group. "We had the name Saint Etienne years before we had a band," remembers Bob. "We couldn't play any instruments."
"We did this sort of farting around on cassettes, trying to do electro cut-ups," adds Pete. One such experiment was a heartfelt tribute to former GLC leader and current London mayoral candidate Ken Livingstone. "It was pretty pitiful," says Pete, "but we were trying."
The catalyst that turned Saint Etienne into reality was acid house. As homespun singles by Bomb The Bass and Coldcut made the late '80s charts, and albums like De La Soul's Three Feet High And Rising turned the history of pop into one huge sample library, it suddenly became apparent that anyone with access to a computer and a head full of ideas could make records. "It did seem like if we're going to do anything, this would be the right time to do it," says Bob. "There'd been the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays on the one hand, and S-Express and Bomb The Bass on the other. It seemed like you could mix the two together and if we didn't do it, someone else would, so let's just get on with it. And it was ridiculously easy." Recorded in one night in 1990, with "a friend of Pete's brother who we'd never met before" on vocals, the duo's cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" junked the folk-waltz original in favor of an easy-skanking bassline, Balearic breakbeats and a saucer-eyed vocal. What was once a whiny-voiced attempt to cheer Graham Nash up was now a blissful dub bubble-bath that sounded as perfect booming from the big speakers at 2A.M. as it did wafting through a smoke-filled room, all back to mine the next tired morning.
They followed it up with "Kiss And Make Up," a song snitched from sensitive Croydon indie duo the Field Mice and given a shiny hip-pop makeover and a Pete Heller remix. Then came "Nothing Can Stop Us," Saint Etienne's first self-penned single: a glorious pop song, a Dusty Springfield sample, a talcum-scattering Northern soul backbeat, and a vocal from new recruit Sarah Cracknell. A Windsor resident, Sarah's checkered career included a stint playing guitar pop in New Orleans bars, a grim period being bullied by Bonnie Langford at drama school, a few singles with forgotten dance act Lovecut Db, and "a lot of acting in terrible worthy fringe plays." "I played Eva Braun in a play called Southern Conference," she shudders. "I had to hang around with Nazi soldiers and snog my best mate."
"So we thought she was up for it," explains Pete. "How wrong we were."
September 1991 and Saint Etienne's glorious debut album, Foxbase Alpha (named after "an imaginary place where everybody was good-looking"), drifts from the speakers. A hazy, late-summer concoction of melancholy girl group hues, '70s dub shadings, and ecstatic '90s dance fluorescence, it came wrapped in a sleeve that name-checked reggae warriors the Revolutionaries alongside '60s dolly Adrienne Posta. It was, says Pete, the result of "years of ideas, throwing everything into the pot." Songs like "London Belongs To Me" and "She's The One" imbued North London with a romantic, cinematic sheen and erroneously made Holloway Road sound like a blissful cross between Carnaby Street, Sunset Strip, and Haight-Ashbury. "We were rapt by living in London. We'd just moved there from Croydon and we were quite excited," says Pete. "Compared to Croydon, the Holloway Road was like wonderland." They followed Foxbase Alpha with the delicious, no-irony-intended single "Join Our Club" ("Teen spirit is the '90s scene/Do you believe in magic?" cooed Sarah over Italian house pianos, and took to the stage for the first time.) After a traumatic experience with a malfunctioning DAT player in Liverpool, Bob opted out of live work, but Pete and Sarah continued undaunted, touring around the world, occasionally with some band called Oasis supporting them.
If Foxbase Alpha was a wide-eyed celebration of life in the capital, Saint Etienne's second album, 1992's So Tough, was a more troubled reflection on the same topic. "We'd discovered London was crap," sniggers Pete. The single "Avenue" was an ambitious, spectral suite, the ghost of tragic '60s space-pop producer Joe Meek lurking in the echo chamber; "Hobart Paving" was a stately, heartbreaking ballad. Even at their darkest, however, Saint Etienne had its moment of perky pop perfection: "You're In A Bad Way," perhaps the only Top Twenty love song ever to mention Bruce Forsyth. By now, Bob and Pete were running their own label, Icerink, which brought the world the dulcet tones of both Shampoo and Earl Brutus. And then there was their bizarre cover of Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy," recorded as an AIDS-charity single. A nice idea, but perhaps best forgotten: "The video had us, Flowered Up, and The Rockingbirds on this big revolving stage," shudders Sarah. "It was like a very bad dream."
"I'd like to think that we never repeat ourselves, that we never make the same album twice," says Bob. Tiger Bay in 1994 proves the point: Out went the glittery pop, in came lengthy song-suites, guest appearances from Stephen Duffy, singer with woody indie band the Lilac Time, folk songs, and a curious cover painting that would have been more at home on an early '70s prog-rock album. It was ambitious, adventurous, and widely misunderstood. After releasing Too Young To Die, a collection of their singles, Saint Etienne took a sabbatical. Sarah made a solo album, Lipslide; Bob and Pete briefly embarked on another label venture, EMIdisc, continued remixing "anyone who asks us," and DJ-ing, manning the turntables at the legendary Heavenly Sunday Social, the club in a pub basement that launched the Chemical Brothers, inspired Fatboy Slim, and gave birth to Big Beat. A remix album, Casino Classics, slipped out in 1996 (featuring fellow Heavenly Social regular Jon Carter's mighty demolition of an old B-side, "Filthy"), and after that, two years of silence.
When Saint Etienne returned in 1998, they sounded distinctly different. Lured by the sweet tones of Swedish pop to a studio in Malmo, Saint Etienne assembled a proper band, complete with brass section, in place of their usual sample-heavy approach. The resulting album, Good Humor, was warm and woody, with a pop heart still beating at its core, as proven by the singles "Sylvie" and "The Bad Photographer." Recording in Sweden, however, was not without its drawbacks: "In Sweden, we'd always been really popular, but the reviews of Good Humor were all about what local bars we'd been seen in, which was a bit strange," muses Pete. While Swedish journalists discussed their drinking habits, Saint Etienne engaged itself in a flurry of activity: recording a soundtrack for the Brooke Shields-Parker Posey movie The Misadventures Of Margaret (by all accounts, rather more thrilling than the film itself); following Good Humor with an EP, Places To Visit, released in the U.S. (as was Good Humor), rather bizarrely, on Seattle label Sub Pop; and taking on another successful tour.
Saint Etienne has always attracted some unlikely fans -- they can count grumpy journo Julie Burchill and Generation X author Douglas Coupland among their celebrity supporters. Another mutual admiration, between the band and German post-rock-techno-neu-krautrock-pioneers To Rococo Rot, lies at the heart of the new album, Sound Of Water, a record that manages to sound quite unlike anything Saint Etienne while retaining a charming familiarity. "We made a conscious decision not to include anything that was like, 'Oh, there's the single,ΓÇÖ" explains Bob of the collaboration with TRR. "We just wanted to make the album flow." Other contributions to the album come from Sean O'Hagan (High Llamas/Stereolab), who provides the bittersweet string and woodwind arrangements, and Jez Williams, the man who provides the superb swelling guitars to the DOVES. Expect shiny pop with a motorik pulse, a nine-minute single, "How We Used To Live," named after a late '70s schools-and-colleges series--a concise, thrilling album that balances between the mainstream and more avant-garde concerns. "I always thought we were going to get caught out," whispers Bob of Saint Etienne's lengthy career. "Someone was going to go, 'It's all a sham.'"
A decade on from "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," Sound Of Water proves that's highly unlikely. Saint Etienne still believes in magic.
