The late journalist Doug Larson once said, “nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”
As I get older, this statement rings truer by the minute. When I think about being younger, the days seep into my memory as being brighter and simpler. Of course, your mind tends to deceive you when you’re looking for reasons to feel happier and more secure—like almost everyone has over the past year-and-a-half, as we’ve tumbled violently from one crisis to another.
But while I sometimes long for my youth, there are so many things I’ve conveniently forgotten about. I was financially unstable for a long period of time and struggled to make ends meet. I was so much less intelligent and experienced, and I made some decisions I would never make knowing and valuing what I do now. I carelessly threw myself into jobs and relationships that caused long-term emotional damage. I wasted time worrying about minute conflicts and arguments while I missed out on more important conversations that actually mattered. Even the designer clothes I fawned over that fit a once more sturdy and energetic body...let’s just say I once spent a hundred dollars on a pair of jeans that had a ridiculous and, rather risky, padlock on the fly.
‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’ arrives in stores September 10th | Buy
For those of us ‘90s kids who find ourselves occasionally wrestling with our reminiscences, there’s a record for that, courtesy of the trio of masterful tunesmiths known as Saint Etienne. Their tenth studio album I’ve Been Trying To Tell You arrives September 10th—four years after their most recent effort Home Counties (2017) and just six days short of the thirtieth anniversary of the UK release of their acclaimed debut set Foxbase Alpha (1991).
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is an atmospheric bounty, with each of its eight tracks engulfing the listener in a shimmering strata of vocals and keys—its sonic allure unsurprising given that members Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell have made beautiful tunes so consistently over the course of their career together.
And, yes, that is a breath of Natalie Imbruglia’s 2002 single “Beauty On The Fire” you hear recurrently on the lead single “Pond House,” one of a handful of sampled compositions incorporated across the album, including Samantha Mumba’s “Til The Night Becomes The Day” (on “Little K”), Honeyz’ “Love Of A Lifetime” (on “Music Again”), and Lighthouse Family’s “Raincloud” (on “Fonteyn”). Most of the sampled tracks were chosen specifically to represent 1997 through 2001—a period of cultural and political optimism bookended by the installment of the Labour Party in the UK general election and the September 11th attacks on American soil. The Lightning Seeds’ 1989 Cloudcuckooland extract “Joy” (on “Penlop”) and Tasmin Archer’s “Ripped Inside” from 1992’s Great Expectations (on “Broad River”) deviate somewhat from the time period formula, but the desired effect remains intact.
The album is accompanied by a custom-built full-length film by renowned photographer and director Alasdair McLellan, a professed longtime Saint Etienne fan, whose seductive vernal vignettes are a perfect emotive vehicle for the band’s wistful expressions. “The idea was to always make a video about Britain,’ McLellan quips in a recent i-D magazine article about the film’s scenes, which were shot in a myriad of locations around the UK. “I’ve always loved factories, so we filmed in Southampton and Ferrybridge and Scunthorpe and then Grangemouth in Scotland, which is an amazing factory. It almost looks like something out of a science fiction film. I wanted them to look beautiful. So we were relying on nice weather when we shot them. The road trip was a way to link all these places.”
I’ve Been Trying To Tell You is the first album in Saint Etienne’s discography that was fully assembled remotely, a process that seemed to present fewer challenges than one might expect in achieving a cohesive creative vision. And as the album’s arrival approaches, I had the good fortune to sit down (virtually) with Bob Stanley to discuss how the project came together from three distinct locations.
Congratulations on the new album, Bob. After listening to the record and watching Alasdair’s film, I was really moved by the songs and the images, so I applaud all of you for creating something quite beautiful together.
Cheers, thanks. Yeah, with the film, I was seeing bits of it as he was working on it. It wasn’t really until I got to the end that I realized...I thought it was quite moving. It really is. Which I wasn’t expecting, but I don’t know what I was expecting when I saw the whole thing in one sitting. He’s done a great job.
It’s interesting…he was just channeling his youth growing up in Doncaster. And remembering things like when you’re a teenager there’s nowhere to go, you walk around the streets [laughs]. That’s what you do—you walk around the streets with your friends, and sometimes if one of them has got a car, you can drive to a field and play music and dance around.
It’s just cos he’s got these obviously very attractive young models to do the job [laughs]. It’s more like misremembering your youth and kind of glamorizing what it was. And Alasdair’s not a bad looking bloke, but those kids are better looking than all of us, I think.
This was the first time you, Pete, and Sarah made an album without interacting with one another in person. How was that shift for the three of you?
It was actually really straightforward, and I think most of it would’ve been done that way anyway because we all live in different parts of the country now. With Home Counties, we’d all recorded in London together. But with this one, because Pete’s got a studio at home, I was working with a guy called Gus Bousfield in Bradford. And so the only thing I think we’d probably have done differently would be that Sarah would come into the studio to record her vocals. But her son’s a perfectly capable sound engineer now, so that wasn’t a problem, either. I mean, that’s the only thing we’d have done differently, but there really wasn’t much point. Just the nature of the record—it’s based around samples which Pete and Gus played on top of and Sarah sang on top of, and I think Pete and Gus would’ve just recorded in their studios, anyway.
So, it didn’t make much difference. It was based on an idea we’d had before lockdown...sorry, I suppose what I’m saying is that it’s not a lockdown record [laughs]. Initially, we were thinking it might be a fan club record. Obviously, it wasn't as commercial as writing a three-minute pop song. Martin, our manager, when we played him what we were doing said, “that’s the basis of the next album,” rather than the other stuff we were working on. So, yeah, that’s where it came from, and it all came together really quickly.
Was there anything new creatively that revealed itself en route to finishing the record? Something that might change how you make music going forward?
That’s an interesting question. I think we kind of realized that whatever we do now, it’s going to sound like us because we’re used to working together. This didn’t feel like we were really doing anything remotely like what we’d done before [laughs], so it’s quite surprising when people go “I’m glad you’ve gotten back to your old sound!” It’s, like, ‘huh?’
For me, the influences on it are things like chillwave or vaporwave—things from probably like five to ten years ago now. Which I’ve listened to a lot, you know, just online. I’m kind of fascinated by the fact that hardly any of it’s physically available and the people are anonymous. I like that. Those are two main inferences for me.
But actually learning something about working together—apart from the fact that we don’t have to be in the same room at the same time—we learned we work really quickly by not being in the same room at the same time. That was useful.
You did more sampling on this record than you had in a while. I recognized the Natalie Imbruglia song on “Pond House” right away because I’d bought White Lilies Island as soon as it came out in 2001, so that was a nice little surprise. I know you were aiming to represent a specific time to fit the theme of the album, but what was the criteria for choosing those particular songs?
It was just, to be honest, me listening and picking out a lot of mainstream pop from that period. It was going to be kind of like a filtered memory—it couldn’t really be anything obscure or it wouldn’t be a shared memory. It had to be people who were sort of having top-forty hits, but we didn’t want to use top-forty [songs], because that would’ve been too obvious. So, mostly it’s album tracks by Samantha Mumba, Natalie Imbruglia, and The Lightning Seeds, who were very mainstream at the time.
It’s an interesting period for music because I know a lot of people didn’t like it at the time. But I was quite fond of the fact that it was very mellow and also very bubblegum. There was a huge bubblegum revival in Britain. I think coming out of the Spice Girls, and then with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in America, you had all these people like Billie Piper, and B*Witched, and S Club 7. I wouldn’t say all their records were good [laughs], but I’m a pop fan, so I was quite happy about that ahead of whatever else like Britpop and grunge, which really wasn’t for me at all.
Right. Yeah, I listened to a lot of that brand of pop at the time. Even if they weren’t the most poignant or the most complex records, they were rather memorable melodically and had good movement. Sometimes I think that sensibility is missing now in current mainstream pop music.
Yeah, definitely. I think there are people who are genuinely nostalgic for that. There was a big piece in The Guardian the other week about A.G. Cook and Charlie XCX and people who have sort of harkened back to that period and saying that it was really strong on melody and the instrumentation was more varied. Which is interesting to me because I never thought that at the time—it all sounded very processed to me, except there were a lot of acoustic guitars in there, you know [laughs].
With the film component, Alasdair managed to make this really gorgeous vessel for your music. How did that come to fruition?
I met him a few years ago at a photoshoot for Arena maybe? I can’t really remember. And he was the photographer, and he said “oh, I’m slightly embarrassed because I’m a big fan.” We’ve always got on really well, and our musical tastes were very similar. He did a Marc Jacobs advert using “Nothing Can Stop Us” in it. I dropped him a line and said “thanks, that was very kind of you.” It made us a bit of pocket money, which is quite useful [laughs].
But anyway, we met in this town called Shipley—there’s sort of this ‘60s clock tower with a café underneath. We started to work out exactly what he wanted to do, and he said “well, what do you want me to do?” I said “ideally, if you could do something that went with the whole album, that’d be great.” He said “yeah, alright, I’ll do that!” That’s a lot of work to commit to.
He really did lean into it, and the result is stunning.
We were absolutely thrilled. He’s basically made it himself—we didn’t have the funds to do anything like that. It’s incredibly generous of him as well as being an amazing piece of work. I’m glad you said it because I don’t think it could’ve been a better fit. It’s perfect.
Obviously, we talked a bit—we talked about both of us driving up and down the A1 between London and Yorkshire quite a lot because that’s what you’d do for work. A lot of the reference points in the film, the sort of travelogue aspect, is just driving up and down the A1 and what you see along the way—pylons and power stations [laughs]. But, yeah, I think it’s lovely. I’m so happy with what he’s done.
I was really engaged by all of the scenery from around different parts of the UK—especially the shots of Portmeirion in Wales because I’d been there two years ago. It’s a fascinating location because you’re in the middle of all this ancient history and tradition—and then all of a sudden there’s this quaint Italian village that surfaces among all of it. It’s a little like a Welsh Disneyland.
That’s an amazing place, yeah. The architect [Sir Clough Williams-Ellis] was a fascinating character because he was sort of down on homemade architecture if it was someone else doing it. Because that was built about the same time as a lot of home-build holiday places around the country, and there’s a few in Yorkshire and a lot in Essex, which I'm sort of fairly obsessed with. And he was one of the most vocal people against that, but at the same time it was okay if he did it in his own taste, which was quite peculiar [laughs]. I’m really glad it’s there.
You’ve spoken about the idea of “failed memory” as the emotional focus of this album. And as I’ve been writing about many different aspects of music history and the long tails of many artists’ careers, that idea has come up a few times in different ways. You, Pete, and Sarah have been working together for thirty years, so I wonder if you all have moments when one or more of you have differing or conflicting recollections of things across that long period of time?
[Laughs] I find that one of us will remember something and expect the other two of us to remember it—and we don’t. It’s always, like, ‘how can you forget that?!’ And I’m, like, ‘yeah...how did I forget that? It’s an amazing story!’ I can think of one off the top of my head, but yeah, our memories are definitely starting to go. Even if it’s something one of our kids did, and the person who’s the parent has forgotten. But, yeah, there are big chunks of the ‘90s I can’t really remember, which is maybe for the best.
Really what I was thinking about with memory failure on the record was more that you obliterate the bad bits and remember the good ones. It’s kind of a survival tactic, which I’m pretty sure everyone’s been doing the last eighteen months. One of the things that’s interesting, probably not in America but in Britain, is that people just go on about the Second World War. The Blitz spirit just gets referenced constantly. It’s so long ago now, and almost nobody who’s alive now can remember it. But it’s understandable that people talk about how during The Blitz there was this great community spirit now because it’s relatable. It’s probably the only thing that’s happened since that makes it understandable. It is quite strange to have nostalgia for such an incredibly dangerous and upsetting time.
In North America, we don’t talk about the war as much. But I think culturally, that’s what sets us apart from our counterparts overseas—we tend not to have much collective memory of things like that. A lot of us—and there are all sorts of racial, social, religious, and economic nuances and privileges connected to that—don’t often try to preserve history if it paints us unflatteringly or doesn’t fit our desired narrative. Much of that stuff gets erased.
Yeah, that’s interesting. And thinking specifically back to that idea on the album, I do think the ‘90s were an optimistic time that most people would be happy to swap places with now. The period from the Labour [Party] winning the election in 1997 and 9/11, I think the people who were children then—or might not have even been born at the time—could look back at that time and think ‘my God, it must have been an amazing time to be alive.’ And it's, like, ‘well, living through it...there was a lot of other stuff going on.’
You know, it’s exactly the same way as when I grew up and thought about the ‘60s. When I was a teenager, I was obsessed with The Beach Boys and The Kinks, and I had Best of Bee Gees. And, of course, anyone who actually lived through the ‘60s—there’d have been so many horrific things happening. Not just Vietnam and civil rights in America, but in Britain, the downturn of the economy all sort of started then and the country was falling apart, really. So, yeah, it’s just easy for younger people who don’t even remember those times to have rose-colored glasses, I suppose. You have to get to a certain point in your life, I think, before you can realize that it wasn’t like that. It’s kind of anti-nostalgia.
Right. 9/11 seems like yesterday and a hundred years ago for me. I remember that day so vividly, but there’s a part of me—as I’m sure is true for anyone else who recalls it first-hand—that keeps it as a safe distance because it’s really painful and frightening. As you said, that’s nostalgia. But overall, I do remember the ‘90s—especially the latter part of it—as a hopeful and optimistic time. I was young and graduating from college and everything was sort of ‘the world is my oyster.’
Yes, that’s true. There was a lot of good stuff that happened in the ‘90s. And I think it’s interesting that all of the samples on the album are from British acts, as well. It’s funny that once Labour won the election, we started having all of this sort of mellow “breathing out” music—like, ‘what a relief. Thank God that’s over!’ There was much less of an edge to it than there had been the few years before—I think about rave [music] and the early days of Britpop, you know, where people were realizing they could get together and bring down the government. Once the government had gone, it was ‘ah, okay...now we’re going to put our feet up and listen to Natalie Imbruglia’ [laughs]. I found us choosing that song [for the record] was quite interesting!
The new album is coming out during yet another period of unpredictability that’s impacting the industry. How are you feeling about the future right now and how it might affect what you and your bandmates do in the next while?
I’ve sort of tried not to think about it too much. Someone recently asked when we thought we’d come to play a show in France, and I was thinking, you know, at the moment, I don't know how we could. Along with everything else, we’ve got Brexit to deal with as well. I think they’re working toward some kind of way of letting acts tour without these ridiculous fees, or what have you. Probably like a lot of people, I’ve been sort of hunkering down recently and thinking about what I can do rather than what I can’t do, personally.
Yeah, I don’t know. I’m kind of interested, with a little bit of distance, that we’ll be able to look back and see what music people did make during the lockdown and see if it does have any kind of theme. Which, I’m guessing it will. But that’s not really looking to the future—that’s looking back from it [laughs]. I don’t know. I haven’t been thinking about it. We’ve had this tour planned for over a year that’s been postponed twice now that I hope will happen in October. It’s been exactly the same dates the whole time being pushed back six months, being pushed back six months. So, it’d be great to get to those, and once they’re out of the way, maybe we’ll actually think about doing something else. Because it feels like everything’s been on hold in that respect.
Absolutely. And so many musicians are having to make tough decisions. While some are pushing ahead with touring, I’ve seen others who are now delaying their road trips until next year, or even the year after. It must be really hard, but there’s so much risk involved.
Yeah, really. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really feel like it’s the most important thing going on right now. I guess if it’s your livelihood it is, but there are other things in a far worse place and having a much harder time.
Once the album’s out, what are you hoping those who listen will glean from it?
Well, I would say that one of the most interesting things about making records is that once one does go out, you have absolutely no idea what anyone’s going to say. So, the fact that someone says, “good, you’ve gone back to your old sound” [laughs] is so baffling to me. It’s hopefully quite absorbing and quite moving. It’s weird to talk about how you think people are going to react to your own music, but I hope people don’t think it’s boring [laughs]. But I do think it’s engaging.
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