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In Saint Etienne, it’s normally Bob Stanley who suggests the band’s tightly outlined album ideas. What for those who graft folks melodies to bop song? Make vaporwave about early New Labour? While completing ambient pop album The Night, launched in the dead of night of final wintry weather, Stanley pitched a good starker one for its successor: the top in their band.
“I didn’t think I was saying anything uncomfortable or shocking,” says Stanley, affable and understated, in a park close to his Bradford house. “When you’ve known each other for so long you have a psychic thing anyway. It felt like we would all agree.”
I meet Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell in a London bar, break away Stanley – no falling out, they guarantee me, merely residing as they do throughout Yorkshire, East Sussex and Oxfordshire is a scheduling nightmare. Wiggs couches his ideas about Stanley’s proposition in moderation. “Once I got used to it, I thought it was a great idea. We’ve not split up acrimoniously, and have some control over it.”
International, out in September, would be the ultimate Saint Etienne album. Bringing in combination collaborators together with Nick Heyward, Xenomania, Erol Alkan and the Chemical Brothers – who seem at the fizzing and life-affirming new unmarried Glad – the album is a strictly-bangers leaving birthday celebration for one of the vital singular bands in British indie. Few albums are prone to comprise rave hedonists Confidence Man and critical cult broadcaster Jonathan Meades, who supplies textual content for the album’s sleeve. “I wanted to finish our album journey on a high,” says Cracknell. “Do something really special and stop in our prime.”
Stanley recalls a time in pop when maximum teams did end, powering pop’s ahead movement. He argues that it has slowed, pointing to the last decade it took for the hyperpop song at the PC Music document label – which he adored – to achieve the mainstream on Charli xcx’s Brat final 12 months. That form of underground-to-overground shuttle “used to happen all the time, and it would take 18 months”, says Stanley. Pop is “clearly nowhere near as important as it used to be – we might as well be talking about jazz or modern classical, where there’s great music but it’s not really adding much [to culture]. But music wasn’t that important before the 1920s, either.” Like Saint Etienne themselves, “these things don’t last for ever”.
What concerning the present crop of thrilling feminine pop stars? Stanley praises “the look, the sound, the artwork” of the “properly great” Charli, Lana Del Rey and Sabrina Carpenter. But he maintains that “music’s just not as central to people’s identities” because it used to be. If that appears like a arguable place, he has others. “I hate Glastonbury,” he says. “Can’t stand it. A single setting for all kinds of music feels entirely wrong to me.”
Stanley has at all times been opinionated about song. “I loved Grease,” recalls Wiggs of his early teenagers rising up along Stanley in Croydon. “Even then, Bob was telling me it was nothing on the original 50s stuff.” Later, the pair arrange fanzines Pop Avalanche and Caff, however the indie song they coated turned into “very dreary”, Stanley says. “When house and techno came along it was like, ‘Oh, this is it.’”
Neither of them had been musicians, however radical, sample-heavy singles by means of UK manufacturers Bomb the Bass and S’Express satisfied them they didn’t want to be. Though Wiggs later studied for a movie song stage, Stanley wears his incapability to play an software as “an asset” – if he may just play Chopin, he argues, his instincts as a pop fan would possibly have lowered. Composer and orchestrator David Whitaker, who labored on their 1994 album Tiger Bay, noticed his doable and presented him piano classes. “Lovely bloke,” recalls Stanley, “but I was like, I really actually think I don’t want to learn.” Besides, “nobody ever asks Pet Shop Boys if they can play the piano”.
Learning songwriting at the task supposed that their first unmarried used to be a canopy. Only Love Can Break Your Heart used to be an exhilarating landgrab of Neil Young’s 1970 authentic, directly sooner and slower with brisk space pianos and languid dub reggae. The pair’s plan used to be to have rotating singers, if so indie singer Moira Lambert, and down the pub they casually signed to pal Jeff Barrett’s new Heavenly Recordings, who launched the one in May 1990.
Cracknell heard the one and cherished it. Born to a showbiz Windsor circle of relatives (her mom, Julie Samuel, used to be an Avengers superstar, her father, Derek Cracknell, Kubrick’s habitual first assistant director), teenage Cracknell used to be galvanised by means of indie band Felt’s shambling despair and spent the 1980s “getting close to a record deal” with quite a lot of bands. But she had given up, and used to be enrolled in drama faculty when Stanley’s female friend recommended her for a featured vocal. “I liked that she didn’t sing with an American accent,” says Stanley of his first impressions, “which then was unusual.”
But what attracted Cracknell to them? “They had the 1960s, dance music and melancholy,” she smiles. Stanley and Wiggs requested Cracknell to change into the crowd’s sole, everlasting singer, and the newly minted trio recorded debut Foxbase Alpha within the Mitcham council space of manufacturer Ian Catt’s folks. Using samples from bygone British pop and TV – there have been too many prison demanding situations to US samples on the time – the album used to be powered by means of a rigidity between pop’s previous and provide that might change into an excessively Saint Etienne combine, full of shout-outs to the town they’d simply moved to.
“I was always scared of London, growing up in Croydon,” says Stanley, who recalls marvelling over unique neighbourhood names reminiscent of Shacklewell and Haggerston. “This was when all the districts were very different from each other.” The trio explored London via its Irish pubs and Portuguese cafes, “pie and mash shops, old London things”. That geography used to be far and wide their 1993 masterpiece So Tough, with trip-hop and wide-eyed symphonic pop bathed in vibrant echo – as though recalling a radio display from final night time’s dream.
They argue that they used luck to do what pop enthusiasts, somewhat than what Stanley perspectives as their extra tribal indie friends, would prioritise, like freeing a Christmas unmarried or dressed in gold lamé fits at the television tube. “We were all quite hedonistic,” Cracknell says of the ones years, “but maybe that’s why we stayed together? We used to go out to clubs a lot.” This resulted in remixes by means of Andrew Weatherall and Autechre. “We went to watch Bonfire Night fireworks in Highbury with Aphex Twin,” recalls Stanley, after visiting the elusive manufacturer at his flat to fee a remix.
Despite inviting a nascent Oasis to strengthen them – Stanley had met Noel Gallagher as a roadie, and so they all cherished the band’s Live Forever demo – they have shyed away from being dubbed Britpop, which Stanley lately phrases “nationalistic” and “the absolute antithesis” in their mission. The pounding Eurodance of 1995’s He’s On the Phone protested in opposition to that generation’s guitars, and turned into their largest hit. The manufacturer who combined the observe, Brian Higgins, presented them a demo that they became down: it turned into Believe by means of Cher. “We’d probably be living in solid gold houses now,” says Stanley.
Reinventing for Y2K, they decamped to Berlin with glitchy digital trio To Rococo Rot, who teased them about indulgences reminiscent of converting chords. They dialled down the bleeps and thuds of the town’s membership scene, ensuing of their delicate and slept-on album Sound of Water. Its 2d unmarried, Heart Failed, bitterly surveyed New Labour Britain and its market-driven city regeneration: “Sold the ground to a PLC / Moved the club out to Newbury / Sod the fans and their families.” That flattened tradition used to be explored once more within the 2005 documentary Saint Etienne made with film-maker Paul Kelly about east London’s desolate Lower Lea Valley ahead of it disappeared to Olympic construction.
Throughout their profession, Stanley is proud that Saint Etienne were given “no bigger or smaller” within the measurement of venues they performed, and cites Bob Dylan and Prince as function fashions for staying true to oneself. They all credit score their determination to swear off lengthy excursions as key to longevity. “How the hell do people do this?” Stanley recalls pondering after even a moderately brisk jaunt. “That, and we’ve all got complimentary personalities,” says Wiggs. “No horrific egos,” is of the same opinion Cracknell.
More not too long ago, 2021’s I’ve Been Trying to Tell You used the melancholic vaporwave style to inspect late-90s nostalgia (they had been disenchanted that nobody labored out that its observe names had been all horses that gained at the day of Labour’s 1997 landslide). By the time of The Night, Stanley used to be struggling sleepless nights elevating a small kid whilst Wiggs and Cracknell had been fretting about older youngsters leaving house. The drizzly, downbeat album contained spoken phrase from Cracknell mourning the “energy and belief” in their 20s and used to be provisionally titled Tired Dad. They had been “talking to people of a similar vintage to us, and being honest about it”, says Wiggs.
Recording International used to be low on drama – “because we’re English”, says Stanley – till ultimate music The Last Time, written as a farewell to one another and their unswerving target audience. “I found it very difficult to get through singing it without crying,” says Cracknell, whose confiding and soulful vocals have arguably been Saint Etienne’s biggest asset. “It was the last song we recorded for the album, and the realisation really hit me.”
Outside the mission that has fed on them for 3 a long time, Wiggs is operating on a movie soundtrack, Stanley is writing extra books (he has already written two doorstopping histories of dad song), and the 2 will proceed their celebrated archival pop compilations for reissue label Ace Records. Cracknell winces that she has “not thought past the end of 2025”, which makes her worried. Is there a possibility their finish may not be everlasting? “I don’t think there is,” says Stanley, who’s having a look ahead to assembly his bandmates and their households with out speaking store. Wiggs and Cracknell’s children are, they inform me proudly, “like cousins”.
Cracknell, an best kid, used to be “always collecting siblings” – till Saint Etienne. Asked what she is maximum pleased with, it’s not their 13 albums or Top of the Pops appearances, however their friendship. “That we have such a bond between the three of us,” she says, having a look out now to the bar’s go out. “And that will never go.”
