FEATURE:
Beneath the Sleeve
Saint Etienne – Foxbase Alpha
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ONE of the finest…
IN THIS PHOTO: Saint Etienne in 1991/PHOTO CREDIT: VICE
and most distinct debut albums of the 1990s, I wanted to look inside Saint Etienne’s Foxbase Alpha for this Beneath the Sleeve. Pulling from club music and House sounds of the time, this, blended with 1960s Pop, created this amazing sound. A dreaminess that mixed with a tougher edge. Sarah Cracknell was not an official full-time member of the band at this point. She does not appear on Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Moira Lambert is on vocals). However, there is another reason why I want to explore this album. Saint Etienne announced that they are going to release only one more album. Ending a thirty-five year recording career, the British band announced that International is going to be their last album together. It is out on 5th September. I want to go back to the beginning. I would recommend people to pick up Foxbase Alpha on vinyl if they do not have it already. I am going to come to a couple of retrospective features about the album. End with a couple of reviews for a Deluxe Edition version that was released in 2009. Apologies if I repeat anything in terms of details and bank history. I am starting out with a feature from Albumism. They celebrated thirty years of Foxbase Alpha:
“Beginning with their debut LP Foxbase Alpha, a seminal recording of the era released in October 1991, Saint Etienne convincingly blurred the lines between pop, indie and dance music, while embracing both retro and contemporary inspirations, all of which made for a kaleidoscopic, endlessly addictive sound. And ultimately, while their initial foray is stylish and catchy as all hell, it’s music of sophistication and substance to boot.
Foxbase Alpha—and the rest of Saint Etienne’s dynamic and varied discography, for that matter—is evocative of time, for sure, but also emblematic of place. Namely, London. Indeed, the group’s insatiable affection for their native city permeates their music and cross-media endeavors, as manifested on the silver screen via their multiple collaborations with filmmaker Paul Kelly: Finisterre (2002), What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? (2005), This Is Tomorrow (2007), and How We Used to Live (2014). Along with their most recent Alasdair McLellan orchestrated short film (and corresponding album) I’ve Been Trying To Tell You (2021) which celebrates the expanse of the United Kingdom beyond London, they’re all must-watch material for anyone who has ever been seduced by the seemingly infinite charms of the UK capital. London is, in essence, the fourth member and guiding spirit of the band. And to reference one of Foxbase Alpha’s many standout songs, London most certainly belongs to them.
Though Stanley and Wiggs are the sonic masterminds behind Saint Etienne, both gentlemen have always been content to defer the lion’s share of the immediate spotlight to the more visible third member of the trio, the heavenly-voiced singer-songwriter Sarah Cracknell. While Cracknell has been the group’s lead vocalist for as long as most can remember, ‘twas not always the case.
Originally, Stanley and Wiggs envisioned Saint Etienne as a platform designed for multiple vocalists, a la London dance circuit compatriots Soul II Soul and Bristol sound system stalwarts Massive Attack. On Foxbase Alpha, three different vocalists can be heard: Moira Lambert (formerly of the London-based group Faith Over Reason), Donna Savage (of Auckland-based band Dead Famous People), and Cracknell. While the latter is the most prominent of the three across the entirety of the album and deservedly earned the permanent gig as a result, the three-headed voice heard on Foxbase Alpha certainly makes for an intriguing listen. Particularly so when coupled with its mellifluous, multi-textured mélange of house, disco, dub, folk, and pop influenced flourishes, which Stanley describes as “a scrapbook” and “stylistically all over the place.” Instead of a messy hodgepodge of incongruous elements, however, Foxbase Alpha is a gorgeous, gratifying pastiche of symbiotic sounds and expertly incorporated samples.
Attempting to cover Neil Young is considered an outright act of hubris in many circles. But Saint Etienne’s stirring, Lambert-fronted debut single and album opener “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” which was recorded in all of two hours’ time, manages to stay faithful to the original’s melancholy weight while transforming Young’s minimalist composition into a fresh and thrilling dancefloor-friendly affair.
Propelled by multi-layered dub basslines, house rhythms, piano loops, and pounding drum breaks, the group’s interpolation sounds little like Young’s 1970 single, save for the equally plaintive power of Lambert’s ruminations. While the album version stuns, the various remixes orchestrated by the likes of the late Andrew Weatherall and Masters at Work are worth seeking out as well.
Fueled by a sample of Dusty Springfield’s 1967 track “I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face,” the buoyant throwback soul of third single “Nothing Can Stop Us” is an indisputable highlight, though plenty of other standouts abound. Atop a rolling groove bolstered by Cracknell’s emotive admissions, “Spring” is an endearing ballad framed from the perspective of a friend expressing her support and love for a heartbroken man. With lines such as “I've been watching all your love affairs / Three years now, don't you think I care / How many times have you looked into my eyes / Don't you realise we're two of a kind,” the song evokes and encourages a romantic rebirth of sorts with the coming of the new season. The dense dub basslines resurface on the yearning “Carnt Sleep,” a subdued and relatable ode to infatuation-driven insomnia.
Elsewhere, memorable moments include the soaring house soundscape and hypnotic, repeated refrain of “Carrie’s got a boyfriend” on “Girl VII,” the lush and dreamlike “People Get Real” (the second of the two US-only bonus tracks), and the propulsive instrumental track “Stoned to Say the Least.” The kinetic “She’s the One” examines the deplorable jealousy of “the girl who thinks nothing of breaking up two people in love,” with sampled vocals from The Four Tops’ “In a Different World” (1968) and a nod to The Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” (1963) and “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)” (1962). Finally, with lines like “Close our eyes, breathe out slowly / Today London loves us only,” the aforementioned, downtempo “London Belongs to Me” explores finding bliss in the city one calls home and doubles as the group’s first of many love letters addressed to their beloved London.
“[Foxbase Alpha] had that first album syndrome, which is a good thing in that it was a melting pot,” Cracknell has suggested. “We thought `my god! We’re making an album and we might not get to make another one ever!’ so we really went for it.” And their ambition and musical adventurism paid off, both in the short- and long-term. Foxbase Alpha was shortlisted for the first-ever Mercury Prize back in 1992, but ultimately conceded the honor to another masterpiece of the period, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. No matter though, as in the years since, Saint Etienne have crafted nine wondrously nuanced studio albums and a slew of compilations and mixtape-like collections, not to mention Cracknell’s underrated solo recordings (most recently the sublime Red Kite).
As Foxbase Alpha first made abundantly clear three decades ago, and as each of their subsequent recordings has reminded us time and time again, Saint Etienne are an indisputable class act and will forever remain an (inter)national treasure”.
The next feature I want to source is Louder Than War’s thirtieth anniversary salute of Foxbase Alpha. One of the most extraordinary albums of its time, it is amazing that the band are still recording music thirty-four years after their debut arrived. If you have not heard the album then go and check it out, as it still sounds so phenomenal. Like nothing else in music:
“Saint Etienne is born
Thus Saint Etienne was finally conceived in 1990, the name taken from the French football team, just because, in Bob’s words, they liked the sound of it, nothing more, nothing less. They made their mark quickly with an audacious and magnificently inspired dub-meets-Balearic debut single, a cover of Neil Young’s plaintive 1970 acoustic ballad Only Love Can Break Your Heart, recorded in just hours for the princely sum of a few hundred quid.
The song was an otherworldly delight: a tripped out, hazy, lazy shuffle with some gorgeous filmic atmospherics and a spaghetti western, tumbleweed aura conjured up by the heavily-reverbed production. An eerily distressed honky-tonk piano playing out the catchy motif along with a cavernous dub bass underpinned everything, whilst on top of this floated an almost spectral vocal from guest singer Moira Lambert. It was almost as if King Tubby had hitched a ride on a train bound for Brixton and Clerkenwell rather than his native Jamaica.
A second cover version followed a few months later – this time a faithful rendition of a dance track Let’s Kiss And Make Up by indie pop legends The Field Mice, which further boosted the profiles of both bands (Saint Etienne shared personnel and producer/engineer: Harvey Williams and Ian Catt respectively). A different female singer fronted this song: Donna Savage from venerable Australian indie popsters Dead Famous People.
Sarah Cracknell enters the fray.
After two different singers, the band were divided as to whether or not they would pursue their original intention of having *just* guest vocalists on all future tracks, as they regarded with great admiration the likes of many other acts who featured guests, such as Massive Attack to cite but one example.
Sarah Cracknell was previously in a short lived indie band Prime Time with guitarist Mick Bund, who also later played in Felt (sadly Mick passed in 2017), but she was asked by Bob and Pete to contribute vocals on Nothing Can Stop Us, the first self-penned composition to be released as Saint Etienne’s third single in 1991. It was at this point that their new partnership gelled when they realised that Sarah could sing more than just one track, and they duly recruited her to lend vocals to other tracks on what would become their first album. Thus started a friendship and close collaborative relationship which would last for the next thirty years, and endure to this day. The duo now became a trio. They were ostensibly The Champions – or Randall & Hopkirk/Hopkirk (Deceased) – of pop.
Foxbase Alpha reappraised
Released in mid October 1991, Foxbase Alpha was an audacious debut to say the least. It distils pretty much all of the sounds and influences that Bob and Pete loved over the decades, from their beginnings as infants and teenagers to the present day, with the club scene making such a giant impact on the musical landscape of the UK. Put simply, the 13 tracks serve as a musical travelogue of everything from public information films, to long lost but very much enduring memories of 1960’s Swinging London, Northern Soul, through selected reprisals of 1970s cultural ephemera (the artwork on the inner sleeve for example of ’60s and ’70s stars and sports personalities brings to mind the old schoolyard craze for Panini Stickers and Top Trumps), and then sleek modern dance/pop numbers, which then rub shoulders with dreamy semi-acoustic ballads and ambient/dub.
Eclectic is the word to describe Foxbase Alpha. And deliberately so. The abrupt shifts of style and tone from one track to the next, in some cases interspersed with dialogue, would be a Saint Etienne characteristic for much of the output for the next year or so (culminating in the equally diverse tour de force that was their second album So Tough, released in 1993, which took this approach and refined it further). Samples are taken from all manner of sources and weaved into the structures of – and around – the tracks, creating a kaleidoscopic journey into all weird and wonderful sonic territories.
Side One
The self-namechecking opener This Is Radio Etienne is a brief intro featuring a French Football radio broadcast lifted wholesale from an unknown, undated source, and this serves as a perfect prelude which pre-empts the first song proper – the aforementioned inspired cover of Only Love Can Break Your Heart. When placed in this context it really is stunning: without question one of the greatest – and indeed most uniquely original – cover versions I have heard.
Track three Wilson is another short instrumental diversion, this time featuring some sampled dialogue from an old 1971 decimal currency public information film but then juxtaposing it with sampled exclamations of ‘Come on auntie we’ll miss the bus!’ providing a complete non sequitur (another Saint Etienne trade mark which will be seen time and time again in many subsequent recordings) with which to baffle and amuse the listener. The title Wilson, incidentally, arises from the fact that the repeated sampled organ loop is lifted from a Wilson Picket cover of Hey Jude and not a reference to Brian Wilson (that would come later in their next two albums).
Sarah Cracknell makes her first appearance on the album on track four: Carnt Sleep, a dreamy somnambulant number replete with spidery rim-shots and a dub bassline topped with Sarah’s exquisite sighing vocals which perfectly suit the resigned and almost submissive mood of the track. It’s a beautiful moment of calm reflection which offers some space before the following track returns us to clubland with its big thumping house beats.
Girl VII could be Saint Etienne’s wry nod to Madonna’s Vogue, because it practically sounds like they had consciously cribbed from Ms Ciccone’s evergreen dance classic. Sarah coos her way through the verses in her now distinctive style, only to then come up with a refrain which has caused no end of amusing misinterpretation as to exactly what the words are that are being sung: Is it ‘Plays in her wigwam’? Is it ‘Helen’s had a breakdown’? No, it’s actually ‘Carrie’s got a boyfriend’. Lyrically, Girl VII is intriguing because the spoken bits name-check locations in London offset by random place names all over the world – which is where the nod to Vogue comes from : ‘Primrose Hill, Staten Island, Chalk Farm, Massif Central, Gospel Oak, Sao Paolo, Boston Manor, Costa Rica, Arnos Grove….’
Side Two
She’s The One closes the first half with more sampled refrains (taken from I’m In A Different World by The Four Tops) before we hit the pause button and adjourn for a short break – courtesy of Richard Whiteley and Countdown – only for the second half to commence with more ’90s dance beats heralding the epic tripped out 7.5 minute instrumental odyssey into lysergic atmospherics Stoned To Say The Least.
This is promptly followed by THE hit single Nothing Can Stop Us, another sure fire exemplary pop moment that simply oozes pure 1960s nostalgic heaven, with Sarah in fine sultry form and the refrain cleverly sampling Dusty Springfield’s evergreen classic I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face. Saint Etienne somehow manage to make this sort of thing sound so natural and effortless which is some achievement given their own – then – self-effacing confessions of being aimless amateurs trying to make the greatest pop record they can, despite their own inherent shortcomings as musicians.
A quick diversion with another experimental interlude, Etienne Gonna Die, which samples dialogue from the 1987 film House Of Games, before we return to blissed-out lovers pop territory with the sublime urban romance of London Belongs To Me, side two’s perfect companion piece to the first side’s Spring. Like the latter, this track utterly enraptures in its use of echo and reverb to evoke the most euphoric and ecstatic feelings of optimism and invincibility whilst in an almost dream like reverie: ‘Close my eyes/Breathe out slowly/Today the sunshine loves me only/To the sound of the World Of Twist/You leant over and gave me a kiss’. A beautiful sun-drenched vibe with flutes and harpsichords conjures up the perfect idyll of a blissful summer sojourn experienced through a soft-focus haze.
Enduring legacy
Foxbase Alpha was only the first instalment of Saint Etienne’s enduring legacy of great albums. Bob Stanley strangely now looks back on the record with surprisingly less fondness than he did when it was released, saying that it doesn’t even figure in his top 6 of favourite SE albums as he found it too ‘uneven’ and ‘unfocussed’. Perhaps the shifting sands of time can have that sort of effect on one’s reassessment of their early work, who knows?
What is undoubted though is when this album was first unveiled, it marked a brave new dawn in how so many disparate influences from subcultures and genres past could be fused into one satisfying and truly spellbinding whole. It was in every way as influential and epochal a modern contemporary album released in that new decade as was Nirvana’s Nevermind, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and the magnum ambient/dance opus that was The Orb’s Adventures From The Ultraworld. Truly conceived of – and perfectly encapsulating – its time, its appeal endures to this day.
In fact, it was still so relevant to some people that in 2009, noted remixer and producer Richard X re-configured the entire album in sequential order and released it officially as a new stand-alone album project for Saint Etienne under the revised title of Foxbase Beta”.
There are a couple of reviews for the reissued Deluxe Edition. The Guardian awarded it five stars when they sat down with it. I was very young when Foxbase Alpha came out, but I did hear songs from it in years since. I still go back to it now. Significant to revisit it as Saint Etienne are about to release their final album together:
“Eighteen years old this September, Foxbase Alpha remains one of the most dewy-fresh debut albums ever made. Newly relocated from suburban Croydon to Tufnell Park, north London, schoolfriends Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs set about making what Stanley has called "a time capsule of our lives in that year". Foxbase Alpha (named after a childhood in-joke about a place filled with gorgeous people) is both retro and modern, a love letter and a scrapbook, a compendium of private passions from Dusty Springfield to King Tubby, David Mamet to football, C86 to ambient house, and London, always London. The packaging, with its Jon Savage sleevenotes and Smiths-inspired gallery of 60s icons, is gorgeous, and an eclectic bonus CD of singles, B-sides and offcuts enhances the sense of joyous adventure.
The effect is to invite the listener into a world slightly warmer, brighter and more exciting than the real one. And despite its many American influences, its Swinging London romanticism anticipated Britpop. The balearic reinvention of Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart may be its most celebrated moment but London Belongs to Me's NW1 fantasia is the album's awestruck heart: Sarah Cracknell coos the opening line, "took a tube to Camden Town", like she's Alice passing through the looking glass”.
The last thing I am dropping in is a Pitchfork review of Foxbase Alpha’s 2009 reissue. There is a generation that has not heard of this album. I do think that it is important that as many people as possible listen to Foxbase Alpha. It is such a beguiling and head-spinning listen! One that I keep coming back to. Nothing Can Stop Us is one of my favourite songs ever:
“What about when Saint Etienne was new, maybe even a potential commercial prospect? Listen to this new reissue of the band's debut album, 1991's Foxbase Alpha and you'll hear that, then as now, Saint Etienne made lovely, accessible music. But Foxbase is also far closer to capital-P pop than the band's recent refined blend of exuberance and melancholy. So why didn't I hear Saint Etienne songs like Foxbase's "Nothing Can Stop Us" and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart"-- both Billboard #1s on the dance charts-- burbling from communal boomboxes in eighth grade?
One theory for why Saint Et stiffed in the States is also a big part of the band's draw to many fans: The potentially limiting pleasures of Anglophilia. So yes, Foxbase is littered with odd, musty little samples from odd, musty Olde England, and beats from the highly polished dancefloors of contemporary London. In fact, Pitchfork contributor Tom Ewing once wrote a wonderful essay that suggested Foxbase was best understood as a musical embodiment of the whole vibe of late 20th-century UK living, including, but not limited to, the mix of chic, glossy multi-cultural collisions and grubby, hospitably lived-in neighborhoods that made up London itself. (A brief break to get some conflict of interest stuff out of the way: A) The aforementioned Mr. Ewing contributes an essay to the liner notes of the Foxbase reissue, and B) Saint Etienne member Bob Stanley has contributed to Pitchfork. If either of those things stick in your craw while reading the more-or-less gush that follows, well, sorry.)
Another reason Saint Etienne never hit with a U.S. mass audience? While the likes of Snap! and Crystal Waters made big-budget dance records with an urbane sheen, records that would work in any capital city club around the world, Foxbase Alpha's sonics had a DIY edge, an underground-gone-mainstream bulletin from a very specific milieu. Albeit one that can still be enjoyed by anyone not predisposed to hate the soft, the sunny, the lilting, the laid-back, and the mildly twee. Foxbase is on one level a UK indie pop record with a particularly unique sound and vision-- the joys and pangs of cusp-of-adulthood love and loss, delivered with a clued-in-ingenue mix of wide-eyed enthusiasm and knowing languor by Sarah Cracknell, set to a backing stitched from the gentler side of pop history by studio whizzes Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs. It's just a unique indie pop record that happened to bump to a bright pop pulse.
What's funny about bringing up the always divisive p-word is that I remember some big-name 90s dance producers actually dissing Saint Etienne by calling the band "bubblegum." We can assume those producers meant Saint Etienne erred too much on the indie side, sacrificing dancefloor kick. But much like the Anglophilic fantasy world the band conjures, that split allegiance is another part of Saint Etienne's specific appeal. Foxbase tracks like "Spring" and the cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" do indeed sound like heart-on-sleeve pop kids (in the C86 sense) trying their quite adroit hands at lounge-y hip-house and piano-driven disco.
But several of Foxbase's best tunes move past adding idiosyncratic touches to off-the-rack uptempo 4/4 rhythms, and into something more unique and beguiling. The drowsy, heartsick ballad "Carnt Sleep" sounds like a humid summer spent spinning Sarah Records 7"s back to back with Sade, slick soul secretly slid into an indie-friendly sleeve. Or there's the Cocteau Twins-ian shivers of "London Belongs to Me", with its smitten, multi-tracked Cracknell crooning to herself across a diamond sea of piano chords. Assured but approachable, these club-informed but not quite club-ready songs offered a wholly other kind of "indie dance" from the previous punk-funk generation or the cheap-and-easy preset-punching remixes of the blog-house era, something like careful cursive on pastel paper compared to blurry cut-and-paste photocopies or generic computer typeface."
Foxbase squeezes so many "lighter side of" sounds-- be they from the worlds of rock, dance, soul, whatever-- into one LP that it's a marvel it sounds so unified, mostly owing to Wiggs and Stanley fixing on the platonic house rhythm as the glue to hold their disparate passions together. But the second disc of bonus tracks often feels like two producers still figuring out how to make the raw materials of post-acid house their own. A grab-bag of late 80s/early 90s rave sonics-- only sometimes processed through what we know as the Saint Etienne idiom-- dates much of the material. "Chase HQ" and "Speedwell" are competent but sketchy early UK house singles, full of jittery samples and keyboard stabs. Fun, but ultimately too generic without Cracknell's voice or the sample-choice oddness and studio chops Wiggs and Stanley would bring to the band's later music. Better is the dub playground chant of "Sally Space", Cracknell humming "Iko Iko" through a quiet storm front of classic ambient house textures, the Orb with a dose of girl-pop glee.
Speaking of the p-word (again): Continental, a previously Japan-only odds-and-ends collection reissued in the same batch of Saint Et records as this new Foxbase, works as a sort of mirror image of Too Young to Die, the band's almost absurdly listenable 1995 singles compilation. If the all-hits uniformity of TYTD represents Saint Etienne's final, most obvious stab at Now That's What I Call Pop immortality, then Continental is the beginning of the more wide-ranging (and hit-or-miss) restlessness that's characterized the band's records from 1998's Good Humor onward. Each track is recognizably Saint Etienne-- Cracknell's inimitable winsome-but-grown-and-sexy coo announces that, if nothing else-- but the tracks (frequently darker, often instrumental) go very different places than the uniform, bubbly house-lite of Foxbase's uptempo moments”.
I am not sure which album I am going to cover for the next Beneath the Sleeve. I was motivated to feature Saint Etienne’s debut album as the band are calling time. They might reform in years to come but their next album is their last. The wonderful Foxbase Alpha is…
DIZZYING and divine.