London, England · indie pop · dance-pop

Saint Etienne

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Thirty-five years of pop about London — house records, sixties girl-group melody and a fan's archive habit, all in the same song.

Saint Etienne formed in 1990 around Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, childhood friends from Croydon who had run a fanzine called Caff that grew into a small record label. Sarah Cracknell joined as singer shortly afterward, becoming the group's permanent voice after recording "Nothing Can Stop Us." The band's name comes from the French football club AS Saint-Etienne.

Their first single was a house-inflected cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart." The debut album, Foxbase Alpha, set the template that followed: sixties pop melody and girl-group harmony carried over dance production and samples, shaped by club culture and by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's Dazzle Ships.

So Tough and Tiger Bay extended that approach through the early nineties, and the gold-certified compilation Too Young to Die: Singles 1990-1995 gathered the era's singles. "He's on the Phone," made with Etienne Daho, became the band's highest-charting single.

Good Humor was recorded on entirely analogue equipment in Sweden, while Sound of Water, made in Berlin with To Rococo Rot, pushed the group toward ambient textures. Finisterre and Tales from Turnpike House returned to earlier ground, London, British cinema and popular culture supplying the subject matter, an interest the band has extended into documentary filmmaking.

Later records kept moving: Words and Music by Saint Etienne involved former Xenomania writers Tim Powell and Nick Coler alongside Rob Davis, Home Counties was co-produced by Shawn Lee, and I've Been Trying to Tell You used vaporwave-style samples to become their highest-charting album since 1994. Stanley writes about music alongside the band's own records, which carry a collector's attention to pop history throughout.

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indie popdance-pop