Saint Etienne - Foxbase Alpha

To hear Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs talk about Foxbase Alpha as a series of happy accidents perpetrated by two fans who didn’t know what they were doing you might expect something slipshod, or charming at best. And of course it is charming there are few albums more so, but what’s amazing listening to it now is how cohesive and bold it sounds. Later in the 90s it became fashionable to sneer at “record collection” music; albums where a band’s love of classics or curios had lured them into lifeless imitation. Nothing like that happens on Foxbase Alpha, though beloved records serve as inspirations, sources and templates throughout. No, this is record collection pop in its truest sense, an entire collection in a single record. House and girl groups and soul and dub; lovers rock and indie-pop and cocktail jazz and soundtracks: all guests at the same party.
Heavenly’s Martin Kelly describes Saint Etienne as very much a product of the acid house world, by which he means it’s DIY spirit, the way dance music and technology let anyone have a go. Acid house tends to be seen now through the prism of the rave and club culture it led to. What’s easily forgotten is that it was a huge, enthusiastically mainstream pop phenomenon too. Records like S’Express and Black Box were colossal hits and suddenly the collage techniques pioneered by Cabaret Voltaire were a viable pop strategy
The band were always open about their influences, what time might have rubbed away for new listeners is their context. 1990 was the summer of “indie-dance”, too often the clumsily-glued name reflected slapdash content, but the best of it suggested that house could transform the rock imagination, reconnecting the pale tribes of the indie nation with the middle of their bodies. And Saint Etienne’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart was the very best; Moira Lambert’s simple, direct vocals a lead into a dubbed-out world where heart met hips. Kiss And Make Up repeated the trick, more slyly. Nothing Can Stop Us served notice that Saint Etienne’s game was to introduce not just indie to dance, but everything to everything else.
Whether by luck or judgement, the working method Saint Etienne hit on was a perfect way to realise their ideas. They gave equal weight to the songs they’d loved for years and the ones they heard on the way to Ian Catt’s studio; the samples and dialogues they threw in might be from films they’d seen the night before. What results is pop that’s referential but never reverent. Foxbase is full of the excitement of discovery, not the complacency of good taste
One of the intriguing things about Foxbase Alpha is that it’s a chance to hear a project turning into a group. Sarah Cracknell may not have had much input into the material on Foxbase, but she’s the glue in its mosaic: Like The Swallow and She’s The One and Spring didn’t have to be sung by the same person, but because they are the album never sounds like a series of experiments. Her particular gifts are a flair for melancholy and for conspiratorial warmth often in the same song, as on Girl VII. These matched and shaped Stanley and Wiggs’ songwriting strengths and let an emotional identity for Saint Etienne emerge. Actually, it’s not just Sarah Cracknell’s voice that pulls the Foxbase scrapbook together. The fragments and sounds Stanley and Wiggs found attractive, the deep pull of dub aside, were often the most evanescent ones: spider-silk guitar picking or the gentlest keyboard washes, mixed into soothing vinyl crackle and held in place by the beat. It’s not so much crate-digging for forgotten records, but for the forgotten bits of records, the filigree touches producers drop in to give their records an indefinable colour. Foxbase takes them all and knocks the centre out, to create an album that nowadays sounds deliciously Balearic, but also owes as much to the committed lightness of indiepop. What those styles have in common is a quest for the texture of emotion, call it “feeling” or “vibe” or whatever you like, capturing in sound the moment when the Mediterranean sun comes up, or when another’s hand enfolds your own. Foxbase Alpha is full of “what it’s like” moments; thinking of a lover in the small hours, a trip to the sweetshop, walking through the city in spring, the fuggy chill of a season on the turn
Since 1991 we’ve heard plenty of records that double as musical pocket universes. Some of them have become classics; DJ Shadow or The Avalanches. I like Foxbase Alpha more than any of ‘em, though. Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner. Foxbase has a reputation as a London album, and when I moved to the city in the mid-90s half the place names triggered Saint Etienne memory-rushes – Archway, Kentish Town, Camden Parkway. The other half triggered Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine ones. But while bands like Carter tried to paint the city as grimy and scrappy and sarky, Saint Etienne had something lovelier in mind. The London you hear on Foxbase Alpha isn’t even trying to be the real one. It’s a dream city, a leafy Anglo-continental metropolis where chic kids meet in caffs before heading to clubs where DJs spin records as deep and sweet as, well, Only Love Can Break Your Heart. Foxbase Alpha’s London is the capital suburban newcomers, like the band, would have wanted to arrive in, but unlike most Saint Etienne did their best to build it as well as imagine it.
Saint Etienne are a famously prolific band, so this reissue of a scrapbook album arrives with a scrapbook of its own, a second disc mixing well-loved singles and B-Sides like Filthy and Speedwell with unreleased curios and tapes found at the back of the studio drawer. Tracks like Sweet Pea, Sally Space and even the videogame squib Chase HQ bear out the acid house connection. Dark, repetitive and metallic, they’re a fascinating direction the band never really took. Listening to the other new tracks you realise how much care this band take over their albums; the gap between an album track and oblivion is often just a matter of positioning, the tiny difference in mood picking that over this would make. What stopped the sad and stately Parliament Hill from making it to record, other than it being hard to imagine quite where it would fit? And if Fake ‘88 had been the album closer as intended, wouldn’t it have utterly changed the feel of the record
So how was all this, put together by two people who couldn’t play a note, received? Martin Kelly compares the band’s DIY spirit to punk rock, but where punk self-consciously erased what had come before, the sampledelia of Saint Etienne relied on it. Pop bricolage wasn’t exactly new, of course, but Stanley and Wiggs approached it in a spirit of affection, not subversion. Ironically, in a press environment where suspicion was second nature, this was the root of the ‘elitist’ tag that dogged the band in their early years
Saint Etienne’s stated goal was to make records that would soundtrack the 90s. How did they do? The Guinness Book suggests they didn’t manage it. But look closer: a thicket of the decade’s touchpoints, the revival of London, the fascination with the sixties, the quest for perfect pop and the joy of collage, can be found in this one album. Filthy and Nothing Can Stop Us, for example, are Britpop as it surely should have been; joyful, diverse and modern. Saint Etienne may not have soundtracked the 90s, but predicting them wasn’t a bad alternative.
Tom Ewing
Saint Etienne - Foxbase Alpha