Saint Etienne: Foxbase Alpha". Q. p.139. Fusing '60s girl group pop with cut-ups and samples, their records reimagined Burt Bacharach as a house producer. We’re recording a brand new album at the moment and will be bringing you news on that very soon. We’re also planning a couple of Christmas bashes so stay tuned via all the usual places!! Ware, Gareth (4 March 2013). "OMD: Of All The Thing We've Made: 'Dazzle Ships' At 30". DIY. Archived from the original on 26 January 2016 . Retrieved 21 May 2021. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL ( link)

This compilation ℗ 2009 Saint Etienne Limited under exclusive license to Universal Music Operations Limited. Saint Etienne tease 2021 Christmas single, new album for 2022". Retro Pop. 10 September 2021 . Retrieved 29 December 2021. Archived copy". Archived from the original on 12 September 2007 . Retrieved 19 August 2007. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title ( link) Richards, Sam (16 September 2016). "Was September 1991 the best month ever for albums?". BBC Music . Retrieved 18 September 2016. By 1988 – 1989 (the so-called Second Summer of Love), everybody and their dog was dropping E’s and streaming as one to the empty airfields where huge open air all-night ‘secret’ raves were taking place. It was a truly exciting time to be young – and not so young – as there was a palpable sense of optimism at the imminent passing of the decadent and materialistic 1980s which in turn ushered in a new found optimism for the new decade to come. And in many ways it felt like that, with the first signs of the death throes of Thatcherism happening. The much reviled Prime Minister stepped down in 1990 after the Poll Tax Riots – a mass national revolt of defiance partly instigated by the same clubbing community that acid house raves galvanised into action to resist and challenge authority – effectively brought her tenure to an end.Wiggs’s son is heavily into Suede, he adds – he seems to find this strangely funny – “out of nowhere… but what’s strange is we don’t hear it that much. We normally think of teenage bedrooms with loud music coming out - kids these days are always using their headphones. And they can access so much music so easily, which of course we couldn’t, so they have these very intense, private worlds.” They sense that this way of consuming music – being able to access any period, at any time – has also broken down the generation barrier. Wiggs talks about how his daughter came home from school recently, dying to talk to her dad. “The teacher was showing some examples of good basslines in music and he put on the video for [Saint Etienne’s 1990 single] Only Love Can Break Your Heart and there I was in her classroom! The teacher didn’t know!” How did your daughter feel? He answers shyly, but happily. “She said she was proud.” Foxbase Alpha is the debut studio album by English band Saint Etienne, released on 16 September 1991 by Heavenly Recordings. [13] The band's most recent film is I've Been Trying to Tell You (2021), directed by Alasdair McLellan and set to the music of the album of the same name. Unlike their previous films, it was filmed all around England; its premise was memories of teenage years and the late 1990s. [23] Songs in other films and television [ edit ]

Stanley has said that with hindsight it was "a bit stupid" that the band "didn't release another single for two and a half years". [14] Instead, they released a compilation album, Too Young to Die (1996), [3] contributed a song to the Gary Numan tribute album Random the following year, and then returned in 1998 with Good Humor, which de-emphasized the contemporary dance music influence on their previous work, replacing it with a more traditional sound. Also in 1998 they covered " La, la, la" on A Song for Eurotrash, a compilation of re-imagined past hits from the Eurovision Song Contest. [15] (The song can be found on Fairfax High.) Saint Etienne’s story begins in 1966 outside a butcher’s shop in Croydon, south London. Stanley and Wiggs’ mums, both working-class women moving towards more middle-class lives, were queuing up outside, their young sons in pushchairs. They became lifelong friends and Wiggs grew up in awe of Stanley, who was 18 months older than him: “I was always so excited to see him because he was obsessed with music and would play me records all the time. ‘Hooray! We’re going to see Bobby!’”

Notes

Formed in London in 1990 by fellow music aficionados and journalists Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, Saint Etienne was one of the period’s most intriguing acts, if not one of the era’s most unlikely success stories. Neither Stanley nor Wiggs was a musician by trade, but they founded the group based on their mutual affection for pop music in its various forms and an open minded acceptance of sonic experimentation. “I never thought I’d be in a band,” Stanley recently confided to RTÉ, Ireland’s National Public Radio. “I wasn’t a musician and it was technology that made it all possible because we were all big pop fans and we had fairly large record collections and when sampling came along it was a gift.” In May 2012, following the January release of the single "Tonight", the band released their eighth studio album, Words and Music by Saint Etienne. [17] Saint Etienne's ninth studio album, Home Counties, was released on 2 June 2017. [18] The song was an otherworldly delight: a tripped out, hazy, lazy shuffle with some gorgeous filmic atmospherics and a spaghetti western, tumbleweed aura conjured up by the heavily-reverbed production. An eerily distressed honky-tonk piano playing out the catchy motif along with a cavernous dub bass underpinned everything, whilst on top of this floated an almost spectral vocal from guest singer Moira Lambert. It was almost as if King Tubby had hitched a ride on a train bound for Brixton and Clerkenwell rather than his native Jamaica. I am. But I’d also be disappointed if it was people’s favourite Saint Etienne record, because I don’t think it’s the best one. At the same time, I know as a pop fan that people tend to like the first album by a group most, because it’s the moment of discovery, and the one that captures the band’s youth, so I can understand it. But it’s always sounded like a scrapbook to me. An exclusive one-sided 7” featuring the original, previously unreleased version of ‘Kiss And Make Up’, featuring ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’ singer Moira Lambert.

An exclusive one-sided 7” featuring the original, previously unreleased version of Kiss And Make Up, featuring Only Love Can Break Your Heart singer Moira Lambert. What is undoubted though is when this album was first unveiled, it marked a brave new dawn in how so many disparate influences from subcultures and genres past could be fused into one satisfying and truly spellbinding whole. It was in every way as influential and epochal a modern contemporary album released in that new decade as was Nirvana’s Nevermind, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica and the magnum ambient/dance opus that was The Orb’s Adventures From The Ultraworld. Truly conceived of – and perfectly encapsulating – its time, its appeal endures to this day. She started playing in bands in the 80s, and when her father was working in London, he used to note the details of her gigs on the film production’s call sheet. “7.30 at the Fulham Greyhound! He’d encourage everyone to come along, which was amazing, really.” He never saw her have success in music, as he died of pancreatic cancer, only months after his diagnosis, in May 1991. “The band were a perfect distraction when Dad died,” she says, adding that she’s never been asked about this before. “But it was a split screen of feeling, really; really sad and a bit lost. And [when] we played our first Glastonbury or did our first Top of the Pops, I’d be there thinking, ‘I really wish Dad had seen this’.” Thankfully performances of those songs got easier with time. Since 2009, Saint Etienne have performed Foxbase Alpha in its entirety on different occasions, and thanks to the advancement in technology they've done it with fewer snags. "We did a few Foxbase Alpha shows recently and we had quite a lot of computer bits because there was no other way to do it," she says. "There would be no point because the samples and drum loops are essential. If we recreated them they would sound too different and people would be disappointed." In 1995, the band co-recorded the Reserection EP with French pop singer Étienne Daho; later, they also worked on his album Eden and single "Le Premier Jour".Still: What about when Saint Etienne was new, maybe even a potential commercial prospect? Listen to this new reissue of the band's debut album, 1991's Foxbase Alpha and you'll hear that, then as now, Saint Etienne made lovely, accessible music. But Foxbase is also far closer to capital-P pop than the band's recent refined blend of exuberance and melancholy. So why didn't I hear Saint Etienne songs like Foxbase's "Nothing Can Stop Us" and "Only Love Can Break Your Heart"-- both Billboard #1s on the dance charts-- burbling from communal boomboxes in eighth grade? You made an album with a very clear worldview and aesthetic sense, employing your knowledge to locate the sources of the material you wanted, and with the intelligence to deploy those sources correctly. You could be a 60s-inspired pop group, using 60s sources, and be recognisably stupid, but you weren’t. Mercury Music Prize: Short Listed Albums - photographic image" (JPG). Static.guim.co.uk . Retrieved 11 September 2021. When most people recall British music in the waning years of the 20th century, they immediately conjure visions and sounds of the ephemeral Britpop and post-Britpop movements, fueled in large part by bands such as Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede, The Verve, Radiohead, Stereophonics, and Travis.