Foxbase Alpha (1991)

A kaleidoscopic collage of booming reggae samples, cut-and-pasted clips from old film and kids’ TV and house tracks named after old Donovan lyrics, Foxbase Alpha is one of the best and most important DIY albums ever made, and one that is an absolute joy to revisit. That charm was a direct product of its creators’ minds – the album’s mixtape feel is derived from Stanley and Wiggs’ childhoods, mis-spent religiously watching ‘Top of the Pops’ and taping hits off the radio, and its sense of innocent and peculiarly English imagination comes from their distinctively Home Counties upbringing.

Knowing how the rest of the decade played out, Saint Etienne’s debut, along with other cross-genre totems like Screamadelica, stands as a reminder for what Britpop could and should have been about. Wouldn’t it have been so much better if the great and good of Britpop had taken their cue from Foxbase Alpha’s joyful, all-inclusive and retro-futuristic aesthetic, instead of lapsing into the reverential regurgitation of stale, male and pale rock classics that characterised so much of post-Morning Glory British music?

As an alternative vision for pop music, Foxbase Alpha is extraordinarily compelling. It has the committed lightness of indie-pop, but also the emotional heft that characterised some of the Nineties’ best dance music. Evanescent elements such as wispy guitar licks and washes of keyboards act as the glue to hold these disparate elements together – take mid-album highlight ‘Spring’, which evokes the sound of the season itself, the freshness in the air and the feeling of warmer sunlight hitting your face as you walk around the city, and is one of Sarah Cracknell’s best early performances. ‘Carnt Sleep’ and ‘Stoned To Say The Least’ are slightly more minimalistic, reliant on cavernous dub and ambience to make their impression, while ‘She’s The One’ feels like an off-cut from Pet Sounds, if Brian Wilson had a sampler and was working at the start of the Nineties.

The breakbeats and jazz samples of ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’, their first single as a permanent trio, brought a sense of nostalgic sophistication to Nineties clubland. Listing London Underground stations alongside global cities in ‘Girl VII’, reinforcing the idea of the English capital as ‘the World City’, was a clever encapsulation of the embracing internationalism and melting-pot aesthetics of optimistic Cool Britannia.

With its immortal hit singles – including non-album cut ‘People Get Real’ located on the bonus tracks of the 2009 deluxe reissue – and an array of compelling tracks assembled in the same manner, Foxbase Alpha is a joyous head-rush of a record, and remains an idiosyncratic classic more than a quarter of a century later. The sense of it being like a musical pocket universe has informed subsequent classics by DJ Shadow and The Avalanches, and a 2009 remix album by pop producer Richard X, titled Foxbase Beta, is testament to these songs’ versatility. Essential ownership for any musical aesthete. (9/10) (LISTEN)

So Tough (1993)

Having almost accidentally stumbled across a winning formula, Saint Etienne wisely approached their second album thinking ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Their second album So Tough continued the sharp sampling and casual atmosphere of Foxbase Alpha, but with a more concerted effort to fit the tracks into an overarching, pre-conceived narrative. Using ‘linking dialogue’ between tracks in the same way as The Who Sell Out, the whole package was gloriously in thrall to ‘60s British beat, so typical of musically literate fanatics like Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs, and loosely told the story of a journey starting in North London and going around the world.

Beginning in Kentish Town with the spring-time freshness of the airy opener ‘Mario’s Café’ (a real place) and ending in that same café with the spoken-word skit ‘Chicken Soup’, So Tough takes in an array of global sounds. This is in evidence particularly in the second half, where ‘Clock Milk’ brings the Far East to mind, the Rush-sampling ‘Conchita Martinez’ reminiscent of Spain, and ‘Junk The Morgue’ inspired by Detroit techno. In the middle of all that, we get the Lynch-ian strangeness of ‘No Rainbows For Me’, a slice of narcotic dream-pop, and the drowsy hip-hop feel of ‘Calico’.

Despite the global undercurrents, So Tough is commonly regarded as a quintessentially ‘London album’. Saint Etienne have always been masters of music as synaesthesia, of associating musical notes with mental images, and on this album they positively bombard the listener with suggestions to give the impression of London in the spring-time, particularly during the first half of the record. ‘Railway Jam’ begins with the sound of an underground train leaving a station; ‘Avenue’ is a piece of gorgeous, spectral chamber-pop, while ‘Hobart Paving’ is the sound of rain starting to fall in the late afternoon blown up to cinematic proportions. Among those show-stopping moments, there’s the character study of lead single ‘You’re In A Bad Way’, full of ‘60s power-pop strut and unabashed girl-group attitude.

In terms of vision, execution and sheer melodic nous, pop music rarely gets better than So Tough. The huge majority of Saint Etienne fans will argue endlessly whether this record, or its predecessor Foxbase Alpha, is the band’s best album, but there’s vanishingly few of them who won’t name either one as their personal favourite. (9/10) (LISTEN)

Tiger Bay (1994)

Following the multi-faceted pop glories of Foxbase Alpha and So Tough was always going to be a tall order, but Stanley, Wiggs and Cracknell did the right thing by trying to push themselves forwards rather than re-treading old ground. Following just 15 months on from their sophomore effort, Tiger Bay still often gets a bad rap from critics and fans alike – very unfairly, in our view, as their third album contains some of their most interesting musical hybrids, combining pastoral folk with chic electronica. Furthermore, it extended their dazzling run of form in the singles department.

Bob Stanley described Tiger Bay as “an album of modern folk songs done in twentieth century styles”, but later qualified that by saying in the expanded 2010 re-issue that it could have done with “a couple more punchy pop songs”. This, in a nutshell, is the reason for its status as an under-appreciated gem – it took rather a lot more work to really love Tiger Bay.

The real ‘Tiger Bay’ is a 19^th-century Welsh port that had been re-branded as a commercial and leisure centre in Cardiff – a fitting title for a record that explores the confluence of the traditional and the modern. After the surging, Kraftwerk-esque instrumental opener ‘Urban Clearway’, we get the suburban melodrama of the pulsating, Moroder-esque single ‘Like A Motorway’. Flamenco flamboyance collides with Euro-disco on ‘Pale Movie’, while the ambient, spacious dub of ‘Cool Kids Of Death’ makes for one of Saint Etienne’s best deep-cuts. The amazing chamber-pop and dance hybridisation of ‘Hug My Soul’ is one of the group’s greatest ever singles, revisiting the peaks of their early albums with its Swinging Sixties sensibility, while the hazy ‘Marble Lions’ is the sound of yearning set to music.

Rubbing up against these modernist cuts are examples of bucolic English folk, evoking windswept walks and summery meadows. ‘Grovely Road’ is reminiscent of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd; the acoustic ballad ‘Former Lover’; the dub-meets-folk of the lonely ‘On The Shore’ and the two-part track ‘Western Wind / Tankerville’, all of which make for a compelling split personality to Tiger Bay. On expanded re-issues, we get other brilliant acoustic-based moments like ‘Hate Your Drug’ and ‘I Buy American Records’, and also the quite spectacularly kitsch Euro-pop of ‘He’s On The Phone’, originally released as a stand-alone single the following year and which became Saint Etienne’s highest-charting single (no.11).

If Foxbase Alpha and So Tough had been the sound of a journey from the city centre out into the suburbs, then Tiger Bay was the English countryside – the point where the houses become less and less frequent and fields dominate the landscape. As a piece of synaesthesia, it’s at least as effective as those first two albums, but what Saint Etienne were trying to evoke was just a little different this time around. Crucially, it was also worlds apart from the concurrent Britpop scene – one which they themselves had helped to inspire three years before, but which was now increasingly full of Union Jack-waving phony nostalgia, descending into lad culture with little invention. (8/10) (LISTEN)

Good Humor (1998)

Having made their name with Heavenly, Saint Etienne made the move between British independent labels to a new home with Creation, which in many ways had always been their spiritual resting place and was now freshly minted off the back of Oasis’ multi-platinum success. This was both a good and a bad decision – although it had been completed by the summer of 1997, their fourth album Good Humor was pushed back by the best part of a year due to the all-hands-to-the-deck promotional effort going into Be Here Now. When it finally emerged in May 1998, Saint Etienne had not released a single in almost three years. Their profile had diminished, and the zeitgeist had drifted away from them.

Furthermore, it was a very different Saint Etienne that emerged compared to the one that fans had gotten to know and love. Fed up with their ‘quintessentially English’ media tag, Stanley, Wiggs and Cracknell wanted to change the public’s perception of them, decamping to Sweden to work with an outside producer, Tore Johansson, for the first time. Their decision to Americanise the album’s title by dropping the ‘u’ from ‘Humour’ was just the most superficial signs of that frustration – Good Humor added many more orchestral and acoustic elements into the mix, and was also focussed a lot more around rock-orientated songcraft rather than studio wizardry and ephemeral electronic elements.

As such, it’s the first sign of the mature, worldlier Saint Etienne that we still hear 20 years later. The chilled, trip-hop/jazz hybrid of ‘Woodcabin’ is a masterful sign-post to the future, while ‘Split Screen’ is the sound of the first light of the morning peeking over the horizon. Saint Etienne’s trademark melancholy streak is still present around the album, as well, in the cancelled third single ‘Lose That Girl’, a slice of gorgeous and restrained pop chic, and the likes of ‘Mr. Donut’ and ‘Postman’. The clean-cut, ‘60s pop of ‘The Bad Photographer’ made it an obvious single, as did the magnificent ‘Sylvie’, which embraced the same decade’s aesthetics and mixed it up with South American and Balearic flavours.

For all its understated charm, however, Good Humor was the first major disappointment in Saint Etienne’s catalogue. The trio have always done ‘arch’ and ‘detached’ brilliantly, but too many of its tracks are just a little too studied and nonchalant to really make an impact. It’s the sound of a band trying to move onto the next phase of their career, attempting to balance maturity with their established pop sensibilities, and falling just a bit short.

Good Humor was still stellar in comparison to most of their rivals, though, as stood out like a sore thumb in the context of British music at the close of the 20^th century – Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs only ever sound bad in comparison to themselves. (6/10) (LISTEN)

Sound Of Water (2000)

Recorded nearly a decade after their first couple of albums, Sound Of Water is the sound of adulthood encroaching upon the optimism of Saint Etienne’s youth. It’s a notably darker record than anything they had made before, retaining the song-orientated focus of Good Humor but also trying to recapture the sonic cutting-edge that they had had on their first three records, this time by moving into more avant-garde territory and continuing the work of their 1999 American-only EP Places To Visit. Its ambient electronic sounds, moody atmosphere and trip-hop inflections are a glossy new aesthetic sheen for Saint Etienne’s sound, but they do not replace or really affect the core. It’s very different, but recognisably them.

Recorded in Berlin with the help of Sean O’Hagan and To Rococo Rot, and with a curious yet distinctive artwork from artist Julian Opie, Sound Of Water represents the first significant break from Saint Etienne’s past. ‘Late Morning’ and ‘Sycamore’ exemplify the change perfectly, both acting as pastoral tone poems dedicated to suburban and rural living. The beeps, clunks and strange whirs of tracks like ‘Don’t Back Down’ can’t hide the inherent melodic beauty of the band, even if the cuddlier, swooning ambience of their early records has now been stripped away. There’s an indefinable sadness at the heart of tracks like ‘Downey, CA’, as if the weight of responsibility that comes with getting older has infused the soul with a sense of loss.

But not everything is so drastically removed from previous Saint Etienne work, however. The detached and archly English ‘Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi)’ could have come from the pen of Luke Haines – dark and cold where previous singles had been hedonistic. The atmospheric, robotic guitar riff powering ‘Boy Is Crying’ is another delight, set to a sleek techno-pop beat. The breathtaking nine-minute centrepiece ‘How We Used To Live’, a multi-segmented beauty that moves from ambient acoustics to restrained house to chillout, is like a wistful reminiscence on the same relationships from So Tough – friends who have drifted apart, places that have changed beyond recognition.

While it contains no knockout singles – a noticeable and normally crucial absence from any Saint Etienne album, after all – Sound Of Water is an artistic success, diverse in range and reach. The group’s capacity for commercial penetration had largely vanished by this point (of this album’s three singles, only ‘Boy Is Crying’ reached the UK Top 40, and that at a lowly no.34) but the turn of the millennium elicited the correct response from Saint Etienne, and transported them successfully into the next phase of their career. (8/10) (LISTEN)

Finisterre (2002)

Having disappointed and even alienated parts of their fanbase with Good Humor and Sound Of Water, both of which had a distinctly more mature poise and sonic focus about them, Saint Etienne decided to make a slight return to their early days on their sixth full-length record. The parallels with those first two albums was explicit from the start: having been on the continent for their last two outings, Finisterre was recorded in London, now a city in flux and undergoing rapid modernisation, and it also saw the return of the clever spoken-word segues between tracks.

It has some of the disjointed, urbane charm of Foxbase Alpha, but retains the crisp, cool sounds of their newly-found maturity with Sound Of Water. One gets the sense that it’s the sound of those same café-hopping people, but who have now grown up and moved to the suburbs, leaving the kids with a babysitter and hitting the capital they used to inhabit and know so well for a rare night out.

What the listener gets with Finisterre is a grab-bag of sounds and styles, ranging from the angular electronics of tracks like ‘Action’ and ‘B92’, or ‘Amateur’ which hints at the then-fashionable electroclash scene of the early Noughties, and the shimmering, textured and sensual tracks ‘Shower Scene’ and ‘New Thing’. Rubbing up against this is the whirring, modern electronica of ‘The Way We Live Now’ (a thematic sequel to Sound Of Water’s ‘How We Used To Live’) and the deep ambience of songs like ‘Language Lab’ and ‘Summerisle’. We get the precise songcraft of Good Humor on tracks like ‘Stop And Think It Over’, and female rapper Wildflower delivers a cutesy rap on the breezy single ‘Soft Like Me’, which ties the album together with a radiant, expressive core.

While there’s all sorts of ideas zipping around Finisterre, those diverse tracks are all anchored and given coherence their expression by the overwhelming sense that this is a masterful and experienced pop band that are six albums in, and know exactly what they’re doing by now. Saint Etienne have done better than Finisterre, but few other bands could ever pull something as purely likeable as this. (7/10) (LISTEN)

Tales From Turnpike House (2005)

After the best part of a decade adjusting and re-calibrating their sound after their initial flush of success, Saint Etienne delivered the third masterpiece of their career in the middle of the Noughties. In the context of a scene that was obsessed with stale post-Libertines revivalism, Tales From Turnpike House was cruelly overlooked at the time, but it quickly garnered a cult following and is now quietly regarded as one of the band’s finest efforts. It’s certainly their most organic work since the deliberate musical re-ordering they underwent with Good Humor, but also boasts the flair and thematic coherence of So Tough.

A concept record about a set of characters who live and interact in a block of flats over the course of a day (Turnpike House is a real place in Zone 1, located among ex-council blocks on Goswell Road between Clerkenwell and Upper Street), in some ways, TFTH is the quintessential Saint Etienne album. The narratives and characters are layered, and their intricacies are easy to miss on a first listen, but the full picture painted by the band reveals itself to you quickly.

Within this story arc, we get an envious array of musical diversity. After thematic overture ‘Milk Bottle Symphony’ introduces you to all the characters, Stanley and Wiggs dip into their full repertoire. They come up with everything from chic ‘handbag house’-influenced dance like ‘A Good Thing’, the spring-time lilt of ‘Side Streets’, shiny dance-pop on ‘Stars Above Us’ and dark-pop electro ‘Lightning Strikes Twice’ to the rocky ‘Last Orders For Gary Stead’. Meanwhile, Sarah Cracknell’s voice had never sounded better, retaining its evocative and melodic power but now taking on a brilliant storytelling aspect as she speak/sings tracks like the ruminative ‘Teenage Winter’ and ‘Relocate’, the latter of which featured former pop icon David Essex as the male half of a middle-class couple arguing about whether to move to the countryside.

As well as having genuine affection for its cast of characters, ranging from football fans and record collectors to married couples, Tales From Turnpike House is an absolute embarrassment of riches delivered by one of Britain’s finest pop-culture establishments. It’s also the third of three Saint Etienne albums that absolutely nail their sense of time and place, harking back to their earliest glories. (9/10) (LISTEN)

Words And Music By Saint Etienne (2012)

Although they spent the time promoting a brilliant best of compilation, 2009’s London Conversations, this seven-year gap is the longest wait between Saint Etienne albums so far, but it was worth it for what eventually arrived. Now entering their third decade together, the group collectively dipped into their own past – much of Words And Music…’s theme concerns memory and nostalgia, for music, pop culture, people, locations and times.

This is made explicit in the album’s very first track ‘Over The Border’, in which Stanley, Wiggs and Cracknell seem to drift into a collective reverie remembering teenage parties, buying records, watching ‘Top of the Pops’, taping the singles charts and being jealous of older siblings going to gigs. It’s most definitely a ‘meta’ Saint Etienne moment, in which they basically lay down the band’s entire raison-d’etre, but it’s also a terrifically poised and sensual moment. That theme is never stated as explicitly throughout the rest of the album, but is always bubbling underneath in tracks like ‘Twenty Five Years’ and the ‘60s groove of closer ‘Haunted Jukebox’.

What we do get are plenty of sophisticated nuggets of impeccably observed disco-pop, which manage to sound both timeless and contemporary. ‘Tonight’ and ‘DJ’ are both nostalgic hymns to clubbing; the sleek ‘I’ve Got Your Music’ has the feel of a classic Kylie Minogue single, but also sounding absolutely up to date for EDM-dominated 2012 while steering well clear of that lurid genre’s pitfalls. Perhaps more than any other Saint Etienne album going back to their debut, it was also the most overtly dancefloor-orientated outing yet.

Both musically and lyrically accomplished, Words And Music By Saint Etienne followed a trend at the start of the 2010s of fantastic albums being released by veteran acts in the third decades of their careers. It retained their unique identity, yet perfectly updated it for the new decade. (8/10) (LISTEN)

Home Counties (2017)

From The Kinks and XTC to Suede and Blur, the suburbs have consistently been a source inspiration for British pop and art-rock bands. This had always been the case for Saint Etienne, themselves products of those sleepy dormitory towns surrounding London, but with their ninth and most recent studio album, Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell return to those spaces, looking back and seeing a new sense of appeal from the perspective of adult maturity, but still remembering their downsides.

An ageless marvel, Cracknell’s vocals are as understated and cool as ever, containing a hint of salacious gossip that makes her perfectly suited for the subject matter on Home Counties – what’s really going on behind those suburban doors and hiding behind their occupants’ routines and lifestyles, documenting the boredom and conservative attitudes therein. It might be tempting to describe it as a ‘Brexit album’, but Saint Etienne swerve the patronising attitudes by keeping their tone merely observational, not bitter or angry, retaining respect for their subjects amid the tongue-in-cheek subversion.

The shimmying, disco house-party vibe of ‘Dive’ is a stand-out moment, Cracknell’s voice like a breeze on a stifling summer’s afternoon. The smoothly mechanised disco-pop of ‘Out Of My Mind’ shows the kind of mood Saint Etienne are in throughout – happy to sit in cruise control for a lot of the record and allow Cracknell’s conversational lyrics and sultry voice to be the focus. Interspersed are quintessential sights and sounds of suburban life, like snippets of Ken Bruce’s ‘Popmaster’ and drive-time announcements of local football results, a nod to the pop-art sampling of the band’s early career. Best of all is the psycho-geographical spaces of a commute out of a London laid out in the eight-minute ‘Sweet Arcadia’, which is a marshalling ground for all of the record’s themes.

While there are no bad tracks on Home Counties – remarkably, for a 19-track record – the only, very minor criticism that can be levelled at Saint Etienne here is that a lot of it shares the same vibe and atmosphere, meaning that it all seems to blend into one at times. Consequently, it never at any point threatens to break into the highest echelons of this fabulous band’s catalogue.

Home Counties does, however, boast more vision and invention than many bands just a fraction of their age. They may never have really re-captured the rare magic of their earliest years, but Saint Etienne have spent the best part of two decades falling only just short, and doing do entertainingly, all the while consistently re-proving their credentials even as pop music has evolved at an ever faster pace. A British indie institution that must be cherished. (7/10) (LISTEN)