By Sean Flinn | Date
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| The sound of success: Saint Etienne (from left: Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs) has crafted a mellow masterpiece with their latest album.
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The seeds of Saint Etienne's existence were sown, remarkably, 30-some years ago in Reigate, Surrey, England. The group's charter members, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley, were 2 and 1 and a half years old, respectively, and they met under decidedly unmusical circumstances: in a butcher shop, with, according to their bio, "the collision of two pushchairs." Schoolmates, ping-pong players and, thankfully, fans of the blissed-out, dreamy pop music germinating in Britain at the time, the two formed a fast friendship that naturally blossomed into a creative partnership.
Oddly enough, that partnership didn't originally manifest itself as a band. Bob and Pete first worked together producing a fanzine, Caff , writing under silly pseudonyms (Pete Surreal and Bobby Teenstar), covering the burgeoning Brit-pop scene. They also released vinyl singles by local indie bands both obscure (Razorcutt) and soon-to-be-huge (Pulp).
The British acid house explosion in the late '80s motivated a career change, catalyzing Pete and Bob's realization of their long-held pop-star fantasies. Drawing inspiration from British chart-toppers the Stone Roses and the Happy Mondays alongside groundbreaking acts like De La Soul and Bomb the Bass, the two began recording as Saint Etienne in 1990, releasing two covers (Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," followed by the Field Mice's "Kiss and Make Up"), then recruiting vocalist Sarah Cracknell for their first self-penned single, "Nothing Can Stop Us." The trio has been together ever since, recording and releasing a stunning 55 singles and albums in the last decade -- among them, special albums recorded exclusively for their fan club.
Summer 2000 finds Saint Etienne releasing The Sound of Water, its second album for indie powerhouse Sub Pop Records, and preparing for a world tour. Water, while layered with the lush arrangements that have become an Etienne trademark, remarkably demonstrates the band's continued willingness to change its sound, this time affected through collaborations with German post-rockers To Rococo Rot and High Llamas mastermind heir Sean O'Hagan (also known as Brian Wilson's doppelganger). We caught up with Pete Wiggs during Etienne's recent U.S. press tour and queried him relentlessly about the recording of The Sound of Water, how the feeble British telecom industry has become a de facto music piracy inhibitor and what's it's been like to look at Bob Stanley's mug every day for the last three decades.
Sean Flinn: Let's talk a little bit about the new album, The Sound of Water. How long has it been in production?
Pete Wiggs: I suppose we started writing the songs at the end of 1998, and then we spent about three weeks in Berlin after that, with [neo-kraut rock band] To Rococo Rot, recording, and then we came back to England and spent about two months on it. So it was all spread out. We finished polishing it around January of this year.
I know that you guys like to try and make each album sound unique and somewhat different from one another. How did you go about achieving this goal on the new album?
Well, going off to Berlin and working with To Rococo Rot, to start with -- that was one of the main differences. I think the songs are sounding a bit different anyway, but we really wanted, with this album, to make it really flow together as one. And we wanted to, I suppose, add a bit more. We heard To Rococo Rot, and we've really liked their sound for years. They were kind of a mixture of electronic stuff and real stuff, which is kind of what we do. So we thought it would be good to work with them.
So you guys are fans of that "Teutonic Boom" sound [a music critics' term for the semi-melodic post-punk revival sound of German bands like To Rococo Rot, Tarwater, Kreidler and others chiefly associated with Britain's Mute Records label]?
[Laughs] Yeah, as long as it's melodic. I don't like stuff that's completely tuneless, although you get some interesting sounds, which you can kind of pinch and work into songs.
While we're on the subject of collaborators, I just heard the new Paul van Dyk single, "Tell Me Why," on which Saint Etienne appears. Did you work on that while you were in Berlin working with To Rococo Rot?
No. Funny enough, it was just after we'd come back that he got in contact with us, and it was totally not connected at all. He didn't even know that we'd been to Berlin. And he said he was a fan -- which really surprised us -- and he'd like us to do something with his backing tracks. So basically, he'd done the backing tracks, and we wrote the tune and the words and stuff. It was kind of an "Ebony and Ivory" type of collaboration. [Laughs.]
Are you happy with the way it turned out?
Yeah, yeah. I think it's pretty good. For someone who's known as a trance DJ, I think it's quite a poppy kind of song.
Do you foresee doing more collaborations of this sort in the future, after working with him and being pleased with the results?
Yeah, I think it's fun, and it's good to do more. And I suppose, in a way, getting remixes done is a similar kind of by-post [i.e., exchanging tapes through the mail] collaboration. But I think it's much easier now that I've got a bit of a setup at home, a studio. It's easier to just get someone round without having to go through the whole legal thing. You just mess around with tapes and see what happens. I'd like to do more things like that.
How does your penchant for doing things differently or having your songs reworked -- I know you guys like having a lot of remixes done and that you appreciate it when DJs or producers can really break something down and completely rework it -- how does that play into your live show? Do you ever find yourselves doing anything differently with the songs while you're touring them, or changing up arrangements from night to night?
Yeah, we do actually. It's funny, because you don't want to annoy the fans by changing too much. I hate it when people change, like, vocal melodies and things like that. It drives me mad. So some songs we really try and do as faithfully as we can, and other ones, we try and make it -- like, with this album, we did our first gigs over the weekend in Spain, and we try and blend in elements that will keep it a good show. You can still dance. It's not going to be all mellow.
You worked with Sean O'Hagan from the High Llamas on this album as well. How did that work out? What motivated you to bring him in?
Well, we met him when we were recording the last album, actually. We were in Sweden, and he was doing a gig [with the Llamas], and we're fans. So we went, just to say hello and [as you normally do in situations like this] said, "Oh, we need to work together at some point." And then with Places to Visit, which we put out on Sub Pop last year, one of the songs on that was essentially a remix by Sean, although it was kind of a testing ground to see what it would be like to work with him. And in a sense, that actually sounded more like High Llamas stuff [than Saint Etienne material], so we were kind of wary. We didn't want to totally do that again, but we wanted to use things like strings, flutes and things like that -- but without it sounding grand. And he knows what we're on about, and we know what he's on about, so rather than get a string arranger that maybe doesn't know what you're talking about, we figured it would be good to work with him. And he's done some great stuff. You can sort of spot what his influence has been. At the beginning of "How We Used to Live," he changed the sound of that quite a lot.
Yeah, that was one song where I could definitely tell he'd left his thumbprint on it. I want to talk a little bit about your fan base, because you've got a pretty dedicated one. There are a number of fan Web sites devoted to your band, and you have an official Saint Etienne fan club. How involved with all of that are you guys?
I suppose being pop fans -- well, I never was actually a member of a fan club when I was young, but I liked the fact you've got things like the Beatles fan club and stuff where they actually made records for the fan club only. And we like to do things like that. We put out a regular fanzine, and we all contribute to that, and we've done two fan-club only albums. Every year, there will be a CD of some form that comes with the membership.
What all goes into those CDs? Are they composed of unreleased tracks, or do you guys actually record new material for them?
There're some things that are specially done. For example, we did a Valentine's Day one, and then others use unreleased things -- stuff that we started but never finished. There's quite a lot of unreleased stuff on those [CDs] that you can't get anywhere else. I think it's a fun thing to do, and it's nice, if people have been loyal to us for 10 years, to give them something.
I know that there is an official Saint Etienne Web site, Saint.Etienne.net, and several fan sites set up around the Net. Have you noticed the size or scope or composition of your fan base changing at all due to your Internet presence?
I don't know how, really. But I know there's a chat group called Avenue that I wasn't really aware of until we started touring in America -- because, I guess, America is really the center of the Internet activity at the moment, although it's spreading -- and it was nice to find that. We had people coming to our gigs who had made friends -- and they'd never met each other before -- through this chat group. That seems to be quite widespread. We have a policy of not looking [in on the chat] because you don't want to feel like you're prying into what everyone's talking about. Although Gerard, our keyboard player, looks at it and passes some information on to us every once in a while, tells us what the general mood is or whatever. And he says that there're fans out in Argentina and all over the place that chat away. So it's quite good.
I've heard David Bowie talk about going into his chat groups and having to check his ego.
[Laughs] Yeah.
He devises an alias and drops in to see what people are saying.
Yeah, you've got to, I suppose, because people are more honest.
And to continue on in the vein of Internet music, how much have things like Napster or My.Mp3.com impacted the music scene in Britain?
Well, I know the labels are worried about it. But at the moment, it's more talk than anything actually happening because people haven't really bought MP3 players much yet because they're very expensive in England. And you still have to pay for logging in, so if you download a track, it's going to cost you as much as buying it, anyway. But I think it will take off, especially if the sound quality gets better, which it probably will.
Do you have any feelings about people trading MP3 files of your music?
It's weird, isn't it? It's a bit the same as taping really. At the end of the day, personally, I might download it, but I'd want to buy it as well if I really liked it. It's nice to have a package or something in your hand. Maybe that's me being old. People might not want to bother [with packaging] any more. I think it's a good way of hearing things. It could be a brilliant way of, you know, if you want to hear an album or hear clips from an album, and then you might want go out and buy. It might change the way people think about music, so that it's no longer really a commercial thing, which could be no good for making money, but it good be a good thing for creating a museum.
Well, it's great for getting out unreleased stuff or getting out-of-print things back out there.
Yeah.
I guess I have just one final question for you: I know you and Bob have been friends most of your lives, correct? I mean, you've been working together for a really long time, right?
Yeah.
How is that relationship played out within the context of the band? Do you guys ever get just sick of seeing and playing with one another day in and day out?
No, strangely. And Sarah's been with us now for nine years, too. But we go out in the week, when we're not doing something with the band, and go bowling or something like that. Yeah, it's weird. We're almost like brothers.
I imagine the lines of communication between you guys must border on the telepathic at this point.
I know. We have these terrible in-jokes that probably no one else gets. [Laughs] You kind of forget about that sometimes.
Note: This article originally appeared on RadioSpy.
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