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— Mark Frith
For whatever reason, the term indie has come to imply music that is made with a heavy reliance on the guitar-bass-drums dynamic, a trio of instruments that have a much richer heritage with music that is very much not independent. I suppose the idea is that garage rock thrived under these conditions, as did punk and indie was merely a continuation of this trajectory.
The trouble is, D.I.Y. is meant to grow out of what we have around us. When the British skiffle craze took off in the mid-fifties, bands such as The Quarrymen had youngsters on the washboard and tea-chest bass (a European variant on the gutbucket favoured in the American south) but drummers were scarce at the time. (Drum kits being prohibitively expensive would have been one reason for this shortage but you've got to think that issues of space inside tiny English homes would have also factored) By the synthy eighties, casio keyboards were more readily available and drum machines weren't beyond the means of budget-conscious musicians. Then there was the mixing desk, which was an extension of those same turntables that everyone had in their homes. No doubt many a home stereo record player got destroyed by youths who were keen to replicate that distinctive whooshing sound that came from DJ's on hip hop and house records. (Surely I wasn't the only one?)
Thus, Saint Etienne, who happned to be every bit as much a homemade outfit as The Jesus & Mary Chain. If Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs weren't musically gifted then they made up for it by being musically knowledgeable. A lot of eighties' English soul artists could boast of having record collections to die for while seemingly unaware that their pop craft suffered but Stanley and Wiggs were not about to fall into the same trap. They were also savy enough to figure out that the Madchester/baggy acts had been transformed by their producers and/or remixers so why not take on these tasks themsevles. Playing instruments had once been D.I.Y. but now so too was the process of recording and cutting discs.
With a clear understanding of what they liked and what they wanted to avoid ("Carter USM and Jesus Jones were the enemy"), Stanley, Wiggs and permanent vocalist Sarah Cracknell set about piecing together records from pop's vast history. In a way they were the audio equivalent of the brilliant modern German novelist W.G. Sebald, who wrote books — The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz — filled with photos and seemed to place himself as a character in his stories. Are these books actually novels or are they history/biography? What's going on here? Does it even matter in the end? Similarly, while I can be sure that Cracknell is doing the bulk of the singing, what exactly do the two blokes do? Are they such music geeks that they've managed to layer tracks upon tracks of samples from all over the place without really playing anything? Again, does it make any difference either way?
Saint Etienne had already proven to be adept at the list song having done so on "Girl VII" from their magnificent debut Fox Base Alpha and "Fake 88", a cut that had been rejected for the album. But where these tracks present spoken-word segments in which exotic locales and various ills of the eighties are listed off, song titles stretching from the sixties ("Do You Believe in Magic", "I Want to Hold Your Hand") to the present ("Smells Like Teen Spirit", "Justified and Ancient") are integrated more organically into the lyrics. They are the lyrics in fact.
Though littered with references to Stevie Wonder ("Don't You Worry 'Bout a Thing" is one of many highlights from his Innervisions masterpiece; coincidentally, it would be covered in classy if inconsequential style by Incognito soon after), CeCe Peniston and so forth, this is surprisingly not remarked upon by Mark Frith. Given that he must have known at least some of the songs Saint Etienne had name dropped, this must have been deemed either irrelevant to the average Smash Hits reader to bother including or he was perfectly happy to go on about "Join Our Club" as an anthem for the coming summer. As an aside, it's nice to read a critique of Saint Etienne that doesn't focus on how clever they are and instead basks in what a fabulous pop group they've always been.
"Join Our Club" is the group's first truly wonderful pop moment — and how right it is that it became their biggest hit to date. (How it didn't get them a spot on Top of the Pops I'll never know) Their stuff from 1991 is outstanding in its own right but the downside is that much of it sounds like they were still working things out. Cracknell wasn't yet full time and their use of house music could be too overt at times. Not so by the following year, however. They had initially planned on releasing the Foxbase-ish "People Get Real" but their label Heavenly turned it down. It ended up coming out as a double A with "Join Our Club" which gives the record a nice heads or tails quality. "People Get Real" had been their attempt at slamming early-nineties' soul music and it ends up counteracting the positivity of "Join Our Club", a song which luxuriates in their love for pop of all kinds.
As I believe I have said before in this space, I was in a band at about the same time that Saint Etienne started to become critical darlings. Our jam sessions ("meetings" as we self-importantly dubbed them) were typically a fiasco but three of us wrote songs with some regularity. But what we really excelled at was planning Stereotype's path to stardom. We had discographies with titles that never had tunes to go with them but they all managed to be Top 10 hits in the US and UK. We even plotted out our solo careers. Stereotype never managed to live up to the hype we had built up in our minds but it was encouraging that elsewhere there was this trio called Saint Etienne who also seemed like big time music nerds and who also seemed like the types who had a pre-planned pop lifespan worked out but they managed to see it through. Is it too late to join that particular club?
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Also Reviewed This Fortnight
Creedence Clearwater Revival: "Bad Moon Rising"
1992 was proving to be a grim year for the rock 'n' roll cover — the year kicked off with Guns N' Roses' horrible version of "Live and Let Die" and was soon to see ghastly takes on "Mrs Robinson" and "Cat's in the Cradle" by The Lemonheads and Ugly Kid Joe "respectively" — so why not just go with the originals instead? The Temptations' wonderful "My Girl" had already been a big hit so the film of the same name tried to luck out a second time with this jaunty singalong from San Francisco swamp rockers C.C.R. It didn't work out but John Fogarty's band was well on its way to a sweet nineties, er, revival. The downside is that a lyric that a couple people misheard suddenly became one of pop's favourite mondegreens, repeated by many who had never previously got the words all wrong. Honestly, if you seriously think it's "there's a bathroom on the right" then why aren't you also convinced that its title is "Bathroom Rising" as well? Think about it.
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