FEATURE:
All Hooked Up
All Saints’ Saints & Sinners at Twenty-Five
__________
THERE is a 25th Anniversary Edition…
IN THIS PHOTO: All Saints in 2000/PHOTO CREDIT: Ellen von Unwerth
of this album available from 10th October on Spotify. A vinyl version was released on 19th Septemeber (“Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Saints & Sinners, All Saints' iconic 2000 album is now available for the first time on vinyl. This special limited edition 2LP Black & Red vinyl edition features the band's signature blend of R&B, pop, and soul, including hit singles like 'Pure Shores' and 'Black Coffee'. To further celebrate, this vinyl edition will include various remixes released over the years such as The Neptunes Remix of Black Coffee, alongside the recent Tourist remix of 'Pure Shores’”). I am including the 2000 version in this feature. I am using this feature to dovetail two big events. First, All Saints second studio album, Saints & Sinner, was released on 16th October, 2000. On 14th October, All Saints member (and chief songwriter) Shaznay Lewis turns fifty. I did not know that her twenty-fifth birthday and the release of Saints & Sinners was just two days apart. That must have been quite a celebration in 2000! One of my favourite albums of the 1990s was All Saints’ eponymous debut. I have featured the group a couple of times recently. I spent some time with Black Coffee. The second single on Saints & Sinners turned twenty-five on 2nd October. Three singles were released from Saints & Sinners. The single release gaps were quite large. Pure Shores arrived on 14th February, 2000; All Hooked Up on 27th January, 20001. Rather than bring out five or six singles, the band (Natalie Appleton, Nicole Appleton, Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt) put out three. Perhaps less well-reviewed and acclaimed as their debut, Saints & Sinners is still a gem. It has a great cover like All Saints does. Pure Shores and Black Coffee perhaps the two best songs All Saints ever released. Saints & Sinners also features great deep cuts like Whoopin' Over You and Surrender. Rather than put out a Shaznay Lewis playlist to mark her fiftieth birthday, I will end by wishing her many happy returns, but I want to focus instead on twenty-five years of Saints & Sinners.
I remember buying All Saints when it came out in 1997. It was one I played a lot. I was a fan of other girl groups like Spice Girls and Destiny’s Child. I think All Saints are the best British girl group (even though Natalie and Nicole Appleton are Canadian). Shorter in length than their debut album, Saints & Sinners was recorded out of multiple studios. Although not packed with other producers and songwriters, perhaps there is not the same quality that was on All Saints. I think many critics in 2000 were needlessly dismissive of Saints & Sinners. Some feeling the four-piece erased a lot of the credibility that their excellent debut offered them. Entering a new decade – and century – with a slightly different sound and perspective, this was the group recording an album after they had achieved success. Their 1997 debut was them pre-success. However, I have a lot of love for Saints & Sinners. It is hard to ignore the impact of Pure Shores and Black Coffee. They do not overshadow the album and the other songs. Instead, it shows that here was a group who still had plenty left in the tank. I wonder how they will mark twenty-five years of Saints & Sinners. Additional tracks are included on the 25th Anniversary Edition. When All Saints was released in 1997, there was a lot of great Pop and R&B around. Girl groups like Spice Girls. It fitted into the scene. Maybe critics felt that All Saints in 2000 were fitting into a Pop scene that was changing. Madonna released her album, Music, in 2000, and she was criticised by some for this reinvention. The same with All Saints. I think that the songwriting is as strong on Saints & Sinners as it is on All Saints. I am going to get to a positive review of the album in a minute.
Saints & Sinners did not original have that title. According to Dot Music in November 1999, All Saints had finished their long-awaited second studio album. One that was slated to come out in the spring of 2000. The fact that it gained a new (and better) title and was pushed back showed that it was not an entirely smooth process:
“All Saints have finally completed the much anticipated follow up to their million selling first album 'Never Ever'. Shaznay, Nicole, Natalie and Mel have finished working on 'I Need The Mic' which is due out in March/April 2000."The album is finished and we are now mastering it," said Shaznay Lewis. "It has great tracks on it. We were even working on the mixing desks. We wanted to get involved with every aspect of the album right down to the final version."
The new album will also feature the title track to the new Leonardo di Capro film 'The Beach'. Other artists who have contributed to the soundtrack include Blur, Moby, New Order, Leftfield, Asian Dub Foundation, Goldie and Faithless.
All Saints had their last hit in December with 'War Of Nerves'. The girls schedule this year has been dominated by acting as Nicole, Natalie and Mel all appear in the feature film 'Honest' which is directed by Eurythmics star Dave Stewart.Meanwhile we can reveal that David Blatt (father of All Saint Melanie Blatt) has been busy chatting to fans in our All Saints discussion area.
Using the alias byebyebenson (a reference to the band's former manager John Benson), Blatt criticised Benson and the US arm of their record company, London Records. A spokesman for London Records declined to discuss the matter but added 'he is free to criticise if he wishes'”.
The Guardian offered a four-star review for Saints & Sinners. If some felt the album was too close in sound to Spice Girls or Madonna’s Ray of Light, the reality was that there are shared elements. But All Saints have always been distinct. Saints & Sinners is distinctly their work and voice. An album that offers up some huge hits and some interesting deeper cuts. A group that released an album that endures to this day. I think that it has not aged. You can hear artists today who have aspects of Saints & Sinners in their work. A modern-sounded album from 2000, I hope there are some positive words written about it closer it its twenty-fifth anniversary on 16th October:
“That's the trouble when a band becomes bigger than their music. The watching world notes that Gomez have released about six albums in the three years since All Saints' 10m-selling debut, and begins to question the Saints' commitment. Because they've been enjoying their success too publicly - turning up to the opening of envelopes with lunkish celebrity beaux - no one cut them any slack as the release of their second album was delayed time and again. It's finally materialised, but too late to retain the sympathy of the very people who originally welcomed them as a streetwise alternative to the Spice Girls.
There's a ratio governing the balance of work and play that goes like this: for every night of Met Bar shenanigans with Liam Gallagher, you need to put in a month of solid studio graft to avoid a reputation as pop tarts. All Saints got the balance wrong. Already the bad reviews are appearing as avenging critics hit them where it hurts. Deep down, the foursome are serious about their music, and to have Saints & Sinners written off as "dull" and "unconvincing" (and that's just Q magazine) must be wrenching.
It's also unfair and inaccurate. Saints & Sinners is sophisticated, quiversome and anything but dull. Gomez are dull, the Beautiful South are dull; this is edible. Compared with the Spice Girls' new stuff, it's the veritable gold standard of commercial pop - the sort of frothiness-with-extra-dance-vitamins that has turned Madonna's career around. Now imagine if Madonna could actually sing...
Singing is Saints & Sinners' core value, the one constant amid a mixed bag of R&B flourishes and William Orbit ambient twiddles. The chemistry of the four voices is potent in a way that has no British equivalent. Only Americans like Destiny's Child have a similar gift for finessing complex arrangements and getting into the heart of a melody. Pure Shores, this year's biggest-selling single, illustrates it perhaps best of all, with sinuous, overlapping vocals that would be haunting even without Orbit's sparse production. Almost uniquely in current UK teen-pop, there's no need to make allowances. Blatt, songwriter Shaznay Lewis and the errant Appleton sisters just have it.
Although the record, like their debut, was produced by men, including old cohort K-Gee and Blatt's bass-playing fiancé Stuart Zender, the result is a confederacy of equals, with the band imposing their personalities on every song (they seem to have only two moods, kittenish and kick-ass, but no matter). So although Orbit may receive most of the kudos for getting Pure Shores and Black Coffee to number one, it's mesdames Saints who lend radiance to his twinkling fairy lights. And while K-Gee will probably end up getting the credit for the stylish R&B of All Hooked Up and Distance, the sassy Saintly input is what makes them work.
Distance, in fact, is their most evocative song ever. Written by Shaznay while the others were off fruitlessly making the film Honest, it exactly captures the feeling of separation and boasts their most beautiful harmonies. Natalie Appleton makes an unexpectedly decent writing debut with the luminous Dreams, which gets the full Orbit spectral-bleeps treatment for a winning result. Melanie Blatt also offers a song of her own with the dreamlike I Feel You, which is dedicated to her daughter but not as yuk as such things usually are. Surrender is this album's hormonal Booty Call, though it's spoiled by an Appleton sounding like a Dawson's Creek airhead: "See, like, I believe when two people meet and express themselves it's really sweet..." Like, really?
They have most fun with R&B/hip hop hybrids such as All Hooked Up and Whoopin' Over You, party-like affairs featuring scratching, rapping and the Saints giving it their west-London best. While it's ludicrous that they've even attempted lines like "I know you want a piece of my ass/ Don't you know a guy like you won't last?", these are just blips on an otherwise cloudless horizon. Even Saints aren't perfect, but they come close enough on this album”.
Perhaps not one of the biggest albums of 2000, it is important recognise twenty-five years of an album from one of the most popular groups of their generation. In 2018, when talking with Classic Pop about their then-new album, Testament, All Saints reflected on some of the struggles of Saints & Sinners. How they have more control of their voice and music now:
“The band’s superb new album Testament distils everything we’ve grown to love about the foursome over the past 20 years, but also pushes their sound forwards.
“The main thing that we wanted to do our way was the new record itself,” explains Shaznay, the Ivor Novello Award-winning chief songwriter in the group. “When we made our albums beforehand, tied to a label, it was all based on sales and being in that environment. I don’t think we made the best albums that we could. I think we’ve made better albums under our own umbrella. We compromised a lot back in the day, but we were young. You’re being asked by the biggest A&R people in the country to come up with hits and that’s all they’re concentrating on.
“By the time we got to our second album [2000’s Saints & Sinners], you don’t actually trust your own ears, and you think they should know better. But that’s not actually how it should be either. An artist should be making the music that they want to make, and if it fails, then it fails. At least it’s made authentically. Having said that, I feel actually that there hasn’t been a lot of things we’ve had to say no to. Because of the music we’ve made, the right things have come along with it.”
“With Testament, we funded it ourselves. Literally, we’ve been left to do exactly what we want to do with it,” Natalie adds”.
I do hope that we get more music from All Saints. It is great we get to celebrate Shaznay Lewis’s fiftieth birthday on 14th October. Two days later, she and her bandmates can look back at twenty-five years of Saints & Sinners. 2000 was a heady and really busy time for All Saints. I wanted to provide some kind words to Saints & Sinners. One that has some incredible tracks on it. If not as cohesive and solid as their 1997 debut, it is still a fantastic album that is rightly getting a twenty-fifth anniversary edition that should appeal to those who heard the album in 2000 and those who are newer to All Saints. In spite of some critical spikiness and dismissiveness, Saints & Sinners is…
MUCH more Heaven than Hell.