#SAINT ETIENNE FOXBASE ALPHA ZIP TV#
When ‘You’re in a Bad Way’ – still my favourite ever Saint Etienne moment – and the So Tough LP landed in early ’93, I was into my last year in Surrey, still squeezing in social and unsocial hours alongside a Royal Mail day-job but planning ahead to a North West move, Sarah’s festive duet with Tim Booth on ‘I Was Born on Christmas Day’ playing as I carried the next alphabetical third of my record collection into my better half’s Victorian terrace home as she realised I might actually be moving in after four and half years of 500-mile round-trips.Īnd as the Saints went Europop with ‘He’s on the Phone’ just after my 28 th birthday, I’d not long since ditched a fairly miserable stop-gap building society job for uni, setting off into journalism, book and TV manuscripts to one side for a while, a new phase underway.
I always admired where they were at culturally, sonically and visually, and when I hear ‘Only Love Can Break your Heart’, the Moira Lambert-fronted Neil Young cover that launched them, I’m transported back to the summer of Italia ’90, a timeframe in which I introduced my beloved to Cornwall and worked as far afield as the Isle of Wight to earn enough for world travels, while remaining ensconced on the London and South-East music scene.īy the time they re-issued ‘Nothing Can Stop Us’ off the back of debut LP, Foxbase Alpha, my backpacking adventures were done but the wanderlust remained, saving up for my next trip, a holiday in Tolon, Greece, serving as a stopgap amid sorting office work-shifts and weekend UK trips visits, with plenty more live engagements but my music fanzine by then replaced by another engineered around frequent home and away Woking FC terrace engagements. Photo: Elaine Constantineĭespite there never being more than a seven-year gap between Saint Etienne LPs over their 31-year existence, when I think about this London-rooted outfit – built predominantly around Sarah Cracknell and co-founders Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs – the years 1990 to 1995 spring to mind first, treading my own path to their soundtrack. It's by no means a failure, but with historical hindsight and the weight of a fine back catalogue to lean on FBA now seems like a faltering first step from the running, jumping creature that the band was about to blossom into.Telling Tales: Sarah Cracknell, 30 years beyond Foxbase Alpha with Saint Etienne. Elsewhere there are traces of dub (Carnt Sleep) and, in Nothing Can Stop Us, a hefty slice of 60s pop in the shape of a Dusty sample. As a result the biggest hit on offer here Neil Young's Only Love Can Break Your Heart is sung, rather flatly, by Moira Lambert. One of the reasons for this was the fact that the band had still to find its focus in lead singer Sarah Cracknell, who was yet to become a full-time member. Still to really find their feet as arch pop stylists, easy in their ability to nick the choicest obscurities and seamlessly meld them with their own knowing songcraft, FBA sees the band taking the contemporary tropes of house music and emerging with a hybrid that promised a little more than it delivered. The tentative verdict arises from such tentative material on offer. But does Foxbase Alpha stand such scrutiny.
On the verge of recreating this, their 1991 debut, live on stage, Saint Etienne find Universal giving their earliest works the 'deluxe' treatment: all bells, whistles and extra tracks, demos, dvds and what have you.
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