How We Used Saint Etienne to Live by Ramzy Alwakeel

Author:Ramzy Alwakeel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781914420832
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2022-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pete: With Foxbase Alpha we were like kids. We’d just moved to London. We were having such a laugh generally — I’d given up a job to be in the band. It was like a dream, what was happening to us, but I suppose that’s a bit inward and just thinking about yourself.

Saint Etienne recorded their follow-up, So Tough, in 1992, releasing it the following year. Tonally, it wasn’t all that different from its predecessor but in its representation of London it possessed a level of realist detail not really apparent on Foxbase. You can hear it on a track like “Mario’s Cafe” and in the field recordings of bars and cafes that spring up at different moments of the album. There was something slightly timeless about the glimpses of London on Foxbase; So Tough felt more in the action and of the moment.

By now in their late twenties, Saint Etienne must have known they were in the midst of something whose days were numbered — perhaps not Mario’s Cafe itself,1 which is in fact still operational at the time of writing, but certainly the group of people who meet there in the song’s lyrics. The references loaded into “Mario’s Cafe” (Eubank wins the fight, and did you see the KLF last night?) scribble down Saint Etienne’s surroundings that year as though they are going out of fashion, which in a way they are because never again will they meet in quite the same way at the same table for the same conversations over the same newspapers and toast. “Mario’s Cafe” and the tracks “Memo to Pricey” and “Chicken Soup” on So Tough form a scrappy triptych of the Saints’ social lives, records and recordings of two cafes and a bar, whose details would otherwise have been forgotten: things like the grain of Simon Price’s voice as he talks, the Chanel ad that plays in the background, the contents of the Racing Post, if not the general recollection that these were places and people and things Saint Etienne knew well. Nor would anyone else have remembered in quite so much detail the scenes photographed in the CD booklet of kids coming home from school, smoking and laughing and hanging around phone boxes, probably not yet knowing they are making a record, if indeed they ever found out.

Once they’d got it on tape, 1992 ended. So did the love affair. There was a brief thematic relocation to Tiger Bay, then a European period that took them into the new millennium, and all told the Etienne weren’t really back in London until a decade had passed.

The slightly revisionist title of their 2009 best-of London Conversations tried to obscure the fact that half their songs had nothing to do with London, but then maybe the conversations themselves had never stopped. Maybe Saint Etienne had never stopped reassessing their memories, their understanding of their place in London and what lay beyond its edges.

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