In the April 1993 issue of Select (a key text in the run-up to Britpop) the first band interviewed in its famous ‘Yanks Go Home’ feature wasn’t its cover stars, Suede. It was Saint Etienne, a trio named after a French football team.
In the piece, they answer some questions about Britishness. Bob Stanley on British pop: “I prefer France, myself”. Pete Wiggs on patriotism: “[it] has been confused with nationalism, racism and xenophobia, which are not OK”. On the same subject, Sarah Cracknell quotes British nurse Edith Cavell who helped both Allied and German soldiers, before being executed in 1915: “Patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred or bitterness towards anyone”.
In a summer that’s seen the St. George’s Cross hung on lampposts and painted on roundabouts around England in a campaign of weaponised nationalism, it’s good to remember the attitude and approach of Britpop’s best foundational band. From day one – in the post-perestroika summer of Italia 90 – their approach to music, lyrics, and films has always crossed borders, been open-minded, and kept time-travelling.
Like magpies, they’ve made new out of artefacts with which they grew up (decimalisation records, lines from obscure British films, quips from TV quiz shows) and the culture that surrounded them as they grew older (funky drummer samples, Berlin techno, quotes from European modernist architects). Right through to recent concept albums like 2021’s I’ve Been Trying To Tell You (warping lesser-known later 90s pop and R&B) and 2024’s The Night (full of cinematic, ambient after-hours meditations), they’ve mined so many aural possibilities of both reflection and rapture.
In early summer, they announced that their final album, International, would be released at the end of it. After that, the group would disband after 35 years (Stanley and Wiggs have done the whole stretch; Cracknell joined for their third single, in early 1991, and never left). Their 13th LP brings the group’s story full circle, featuring samples at the start of each song, like on their 1991 debut, Foxbase Alpha (references to Pete Wiggs talking to Katie Puckrik about Mothra, worse for wear, on the first TV footage of Glastonbury in 1994, and catalogue numbers of Delia Derbyshire records, particularly stand out).
International also features big-name co-writes with Vince Clarke, The Chemical Brothers’ Tom Rowlands, and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital, duets with Nick Heyward and Confidence Man’s Janet Planet, while Xenomania’s Tim Powell, who produced 2012’s gorgeous Words And Music…, delivers its glossy, punchy sound. “Because we knew this was going to be the last, we wanted to go out with a bang,” Cracknell says.
She joins Stanley and Wiggs in a square on my Zoom screen as we attempt to sum up their strange world in 10 artefacts (not just songs: two films also squeeze in). We’re now at a point where their kids are into the 90s: Wiggs’ son adores ‘Yanks Go Home’ cover stars Suede, while Cracknell’s boys have been known to go out wearing Saint Etienne t-shirts. “And I have done that very slightly showing off thing where I go, ‘Yeah, well, I have met Kylie Minogue, you know!” (Minogue covered ‘Nothing Can Stop Us Now’ for the B-side to her 1994 smash hit, ‘Confide In Me’).
The band agrees this is the right time to stop. “There’s nothing that we’ve put out ever that I’m not proud of”, says Cracknell, although Wiggs adds, “we’ll still do some live stuff after September. So it’s a soft exit. Or is that a soft opening?” “You’ll need to see a doctor about that,” replies Stanley.
After the laughs have died down, he adds that right from the beginning, Saint Etienne hasn’t been just about the songs, but “as much about the artwork and having sleeve notes and creating” – about building the worlds around them. Here are 10 entry points into their long-lasting, colourful canon.
‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart (A Mix Of Two Halves)’ – Andrew Weatherall remix, 12” (1990)
Bob Stanley: Pete and I were friends with [Sarah Records band] The Field Mice, who made all their records in Ian Catt’s studio, which was his old bedroom in Mitcham, South London.
Pete Wiggs: We just went in there with him, thinking we had an idea. A cassette to give out at gigs was our fantasy.
BS: We were listening to a lot of Neil Young. Initially we thought of doing something with ‘Ambulance Blues’ off On The Beach, which would have been quite different! Plus Psychic TV, of all people, did a version [in 1989] which was quite cyclical, so we thought that’d probably be a lot easier, plus Moira [Lambert], who sings on it, knew it already, and we literally had about an hour and a half in which to do it. Andrew Weatherall we knew already from clubs – he was so funny, and a great DJ then, but barely doing mixes. I think this was the second or third thing he’d done, and it came out sounding fantastic. Back then, we took that sort of thing for granted.
‘Filthy’, featuring Q-Tee – 12” (1991)
PW: There was a record called ‘Afrika’ by a group called History which had Q-Tee on it, and we just loved her voice – and at that time, rapping with a London accent was kind of relatively rare.
BS: It was a naturally husky voice. It wasn’t put on. It’s such a shame that she never had a real career of her own, because she was fantastic.
Sarah Cracknell: You must say about how you had to go and meet her mum…
PW: Yes!
BS: She was only 15, 16. We had to meet her mum in her council flat in Kidbrooke.
SC: ‘There are these two old guys, um, and they want me to sing this song, ‘Filthy’. Is that OK?’
BS: Then her brother came with her to Mitcham her with a couple of mates, thinking it’d be a fancy recording studio, not a bedroom in someone’s house, so they brought some chips in. Ian was silently fuming about the stink of chips in his bedroom for days.
PW: She’s in some sort of high-powered job now, Q-Tee. She came to the 20th anniversary gig of Foxbase Alpha at Heaven and did ‘Filthy’ with us.
SC: She was brilliant.
‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ from Foxbase Alpha (1991)
SC: I’d heard ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ and ‘Kiss And Make Up’ [the band’s first two singles], and really liked what Bob and Pete were doing. Their reference points were similar to things that I liked, so I was trying not to get too excited when they got me in, initially, just to do this song. Then you got me to do [Foxbase Alpha album track] ‘Carnt Sleep’, if my memory serves me right. Then we just drifted into being!
How did the Dusty Springfield sample come about?
BS: We were literally pulling up outside Ian’s flat when the Dusty Springfield song came on, and we were like, oh, that’d be good. We were literally using it one minute after hearing it. It was such an exciting time, with a lot of hip hop around, and we loved De La Soul, who were using samples from all over the place. They were really inspirational and legitimised what we wanted to do.
‘You’re In Bad Way’, 7” single version (1993)
BS: I remember this being written really quickly – we just thought of it being a B-side that we didn’t really spend much time on. If we’d spent a bit more time on it, we might have made it slightly less comical, and it might not have been a hit. [It reached number 12, the band’s second biggest behind 1995’s ‘He’s On The Phone’, which got to no. 11].
PW: I remember playing it at Glastonbury, which was televised for the first time, the following summer. That was really good fun, but there was a lot of stress on that day about whether we were going to get there on time.
SC: I don’t think I’ve ever had such an euphoric feeling when we finally got on stage – every time we got to a gate, they were racing us through. To then walk out and see 30,000 people all there… I don’t think I could ever recreate what my body was feeling. It was unbelievable.
‘Like A Motorway’ from Tiger Bay (1994)
BS: For Tiger Bay, Pete and I went away to the Forest Of Dean for a couple of weeks with a pile of folk records for a lyric-writing retreat. We thought we’d picked this obscure place, but when we got there, there was a visitor’s book, and the last person who’d stayed there was Bill Drummond.
PW: I used to be scared of folk music. Terrified. I blame [Steeleye Span’s] ‘Gaudete’ every Christmas.
BS: I wanted to create the atmosphere of those late 60s, early 70s, British folk rock records, but mix them with techno production. With ‘Like A Motorway’, I remember someone at the NME going, hang on a minute, you’ve pinched this melody from Joan Baez! And me going, well, she did the famous recording, but it’s traditional [‘Like A Motorway’’s melody is from the English ballad, ‘Silver Dagger’].
SC: As soon as I saw the lyrics to this, I knew it was a Pete song. He tends to write slightly sinister, bleak, descriptive lyrics that might involve a death here or there!
‘Heart Failed (In The Back Of A Taxi)’ from Sound Of Water (2000)
BS: We’d made an album in Sweden [1997’s Good Humor], then one in Germany [2000’s Sound Of Water], for reasons that were largely down to not wanting to be flag-waving. We’d also got to a point where we didn’t have to work at home anymore, and we could work with people whose production sounds we liked, so we did this with To Rococo Rot, who are absolutely lovely and really talented, in an old piano factory in East Berlin.
SC: This is one of my favourites.
BS: There’s a lyric in this about this football chairman who has been weirdly forgotten, who was trying to merge QPR and Fulham – I can’t remember his name, but it was a very big story around the same time Robert Maxwell was trying to merge Oxford and Reading [it was David Bulstrode, who died in September 1988]. Like Maxwell, he just dropped dead of a heart attack. Football in the old days – so that’s about him!
Finisterre,(dir. Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans, 2003)
SC: The idea to actually make a film came from seeing the size of video budgets, and going, ‘bloody hell, we could make a film for that’.
BS: So we said to our label at the time, Mantra, could we make a film with Paul Kelly, who’d made videos for ‘Avenue’ and ‘You’re In A Bad Way’? And they said yes. And of course, Pete’s a proper film buff…
PW: It was good fun, wasn’t it? Going along to watch Paul Kelly doing scenes, and coming up with ideas for shots of London. It was so exciting.
BS: And Sarah knows cinema so well [her father, Derek, who died of cancer a few months before Foxbase Alpha’s release, was assistant director on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, and several Bond films].
SC: The whole idea of it, of being on film sets and watching films being made… sorry, I’m getting a bit emotional. It was something deep inside me, because I remembered it from my upbringing.
‘Snowbound On The South Bank’ from A Glimpse Of Stocking (2015)
SC: It’s Christmas, innit. Christmas is the best.
BS: Obviously, I like Christmas because someone always cooks me a nice dinner on my birthday [which is 25 December].
PW: We’ve always loved making music that evoked that excitement you got as a kid when the Radio Times came out, from [1993 single] ‘I Was Born On Christmas Day’ onwards.
BS: Once the advent calendars are out, I’m gone for the month!
Why do you have so many songs referencing 20th century architecture and art?
The massive transformations, especially after World War One, when people thought, well, we’ve got to find a better way to live – I find that very inspirational. When people started making these amazing things that had no kind of connection, or very little connection, to the past, after some terrible cataclysm… it’s very hard to get your head around that today, when you think everything’s already been done, especially in the terrible times we’re living through. But it was possible then, so it’s possible now.
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – film (dir. Alasdair McLellan, 2021)
BS: We’d been doing an album immediately before lockdown that we then couldn’t finish, so this just came together from us spending a lot of time on our own, separately, inside our own heads. We were all listening to vaporwave at the time, which kind of seemed to go with the…
SC: …strange situation?
PW: We didn’t really have a destination for it, and we didn’t know it was going to be the next album. We were just having fun with this kind of genre, and new ways of playing around with older, unexpected tracks.
SC: Alasdair McLellan had used ‘Nothing Can Stop Us Now’ for a Marc Jacobs campaign, so we approached him to make a film around this idea, and he loved it. He cares so much about every model he uses – he picks people for his work that he thinks are very real-looking and interesting.
PW: And once we saw bits of the film coming, after Covid, I was like, my God. It’s like life again, and sunlight.
‘Brand New Me’ from International (2025)
BS: We’d thought, if we’re making one more record, who would we really like to work with? And I got to take Vince Clarke to a pub and then for a curry as he doesn’t get to do that where he lives in New York.
SC: I got to duet with Nick Heyward! And he sent me an email about how he loves how we put it together, which is so sweet.
BS: And the last time I met Paul Hartnoll was 1990, so that was cool.
SC: This track also feels like a full, book-ending thing for me, a bit like ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ in a way, perhaps because of its structure. And Confidence Man got in touch with us to say they were big fans of what we’ve done, so it was lovely to work with them on this. I also like the sentiment of a “brand new me,” although I don’t know what the brand new me is going to be. I’ve not got a bloody clue, to be honest! But it feels like a good sentiment to go with!
International is released by Heavenly on 5 September
