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Publicerat 2009-06-13 14:10 (This has been translated)

Saint Etienne read up on pop history

Saint Etienne took its name from the French football club of the same name. Here's what they looked like in 1998: Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell.

LONDON Saint Etienne has been blurring the line between indie pop and dance music for nearly twenty years. Now the London group's Bob Stanley thinks it's high time to summarize - both Saint Etienne's history on record and his own view of the entire history of pop in a book.

It seems obvious that Bob Stanley wants to be seen at Maison Bertaux.

Greek Street's French cafe, right in the heart of London's Soho, is all pink, oozes carefree and is generally a bit like being hit over the head with a rainbow. It is therefore like the pure mirror image of Saint Etienne's pop music.

- Well, we've probably always been the very antithesis of the Tom Waits man, says Bob Stanley when we've settled down on the cafe's puttenutty upper floor. I've always loathed the male suffering artist who makes a career out of hitting the streets at the slightest setback in life and recording songs about how he cries in his beer. I think it feels dishonest. I want to spread happiness.

It is a sweet Monday morning in May.

Bob Stanley has just woken up from a weekend of partying as Saint Etienne celebrated the eighteenth anniversary of their classic debut 'Foxbase Alpha' with two sold-out nights at London's Bloomsbury Ballroom.

I ask him why they are celebrating the debut with these shows, why they are releasing all their records in remastered deluxe editions and why they are collecting all their singles in the box "London conversations" now instead of in two years when it is the twentieth anniversary.

- In two years, I don't think there will be any records sold, predicts Bob Stanley. So I see it a bit like the last chance to give it all out now.

You are known to hate nostalgia. How has it been to wade through your and Saint Etienne's history yourself?

- It's true. I don't like it when people get stuck in a time or a moment that will never come again. Maybe that's why I'm a little embarrassed when I have to admit how much fun it's been to go through all the material again. It's really like reading an old diary and remembering every second of what it was like back then. Sure, there's a line of text here and there that makes me shudder with discomfort. But there's still nothing here that I regret like it was an old girlfriend's name I tattooed on my arm or something.

Still, it's not so much for Saint Etienne as for Bob Stanley's upcoming book that I meet him at this French cafe in London.

Those of you who read his two glowing texts about soft rock and Eurodisco in the Swedish magazine Pop during the nineties know what to expect.

The book, which bears the somewhat pretentious title "The History of Pop", will be a parallel and highly personal historiography of pop music from the Second World War to the present day.

Bob Stanley tells us that he spent a lot of time at the British Library.

There he claims to have read and listened to everything from how the very first discotheques were started by the French in Nazi-occupied Paris to how incredibly dreary and conservative British popular music sounded throughout the post-war period up to the Beatles.

Stanley, who alongside Saint Etienne has written about music for Britain's biggest morning newspapers, is known for always being as well-read as he is deeply entertaining in writing.

He never fails to mention in an aside something unimportant but funny like, say, that the son of the disproportionately large soft rock man in Japan Roger Nichols today owns one of America's top dairies.

- My book is perhaps not as relevant today as it was ten or fifteen years ago, he says, referring to the fact that the best music blogs these days offset a little of the disdain he feels for adult British rock magazines and their historiography.

- I cannot understand how the view of these newspapers can still be so accepted, both here and outside the world. This that pop started with the Beatles and died somewhere around 1995 with Britpop. It's as if nothing happened in between. They have no idea about disco, techno or house. And if they write about, say, Serge Gainsbourg - which I've only seen happen once - he gets a paltry half page.

What is it, more specifically, that you dislike so much about this rockist historiography?

- The male chauvinist. It's a bit like when we were going to produce the young girl duo Shampoo in the mid-nineties and a guy who was there, I don't remember his name or what he worked on, said that "girls don't belong in studios".

Before and after Saint Etienne's double London shows this weekend, members of Gothenburg's Air France and The Embassy have been invited to play records.

Bob Stanley says he likes the two Swedish pop bands incredibly much - despite the fact that they are as nervous as they are extremely inebriated and therefore do not manage to mix two songs together during the entire Saturday night without there being a couple of seconds of silence.

- But they don't take pop history forward, he objects and goes on to say that he hasn't been involved with any new music that was 100 percent original since he heard jungle in the mid-nineties.

He admits his disappointment with the way modern pop music sounds today compared to how he dreamed it would sound after the turn of the millennium when he grew up in sixties Horsham in southern England.

It is therefore easy to see the book binding of "The History of Pop" as a sign that he now thinks we are at the end of pop history.

- I would not like to say that we are at the end, he defends himself. But I can feel something is lost with the file sharing. When everything became available, everything new also became more perishable. I think it's a bit sad that the classic records only get more classic now that the new albums are so free and so easily accessible from the very first second. It is becoming increasingly difficult to create a magical glow around new music.

He leans back and asks if he's babbling.

No not at all.

- I don't mean that all new bands after the year 2000 should sound and look like Kraftwerk. I just want there to be a bigger aspiration for the future and to be surprised. But what do I have to offer? We in Saint Etienne have always created our music with the help of samples of old songs.

Marcus Jones

Published 2009-06-13 14:10