Saint Etienne: "You're in a Bad Way"

3 February 1993

"They should be encouraged in their admirable search for the perfect pop moment."

— Mark "Tall" Frith

I am not much of a musician. My parents made me take band in grade 7 so I chose the trombone and immediately came up with a catchy slogan ("never leave home without your bone!") but I seldom practiced and didn't care. Though I was a moody youth and had only myself to blame for my apathy, my folks could have encouraged me to sign up for band rather than ordering me to do so. Then I took up the bass out of my own accord and liked it but didn't make much progress. How little did I develop? Well, I recall hearing about how I was going to learn about playing chords and it's now thirty-two years since my first bass lesson and I still don't know what a chord is.

I was about to say that my inexperience as a musician keeps me from fully appreciating Saint Etienne until I realised this is utter nonsense. Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs were lifelong pop obsessives who formed with very little technical skill behind them — though I imagine they figured out what a chord is along the way. The former had been a music journalist while the latter was a DJ. Indeed, it was the skills Wiggs learned spinning records that put Saint Etienne into the position of being an outfit that used hip hop-style samples in order to put together pop records. If someone told me tomorrow that the pair never played anything on their recordings and had instead relied entirely on samples of obscure Northern Soul discs and BBC Radiophonic Workshop tapes I wouldn't bat an eye.

So, they're amateurs at heart and I ought to appreciate that. Plenty of people who are much more knowledgeable about music than I am love them (and they also no doubt know what a chord is!) so what's stopping me from fully embracing them? Which brings me to not being much of a music critic. Reviewers are damn near unanimous in their praise for the 'Tienne which must involve Stanley's role as a pretty great writer. I know what it's like to plan out a band in advance: I basically spend the majority of my early teen years working out the musical direction of the group I would one day take to fame and fortune. But having done so

Here I am knocking a group I do like at times in a blog post involving one of their very best records so how's about I get down to why "You're in a Bad Way" is so brilliant. Well, it can't really be the lyrics since they don't exactly read well. Sure, Mark Frith's observation that the line about "crew cuts and trainers" being "out of style again" is funny and does indeed qualify it for Single of the Fortnight Best New Single honours alone. Yet, the narrative is slim and does it really convey deep depression all that accurately? Nevertheless, if your group is lucky enough to have the flinty vocals of Sarah Cracknell then words don't need to be your biggest priority.

Musically it must've sounded fresh to many thirty years ago but old observers with tastes as catholic as Stanley and Wiggs would have known that it was an obvious nod to the sixties. With Madchester and retro dance pop a thing of the past and Britpop still more than a year away from exploding, there wasn't much call at the time for sounding old but this was a Saint Etienne special. Boring old power pop groups like Teenage Fanclub and Sloan could have The Beatles and The Beach Boys and The Byrds, Cracknell, Stanley and Wiggs made the best use of their love for old school Northern Soul and Joe Meek productions and ye-ye pop. (Appropriately for a band named after a legendary French football club, Saint Etienne was always the most Continental English group) One YouTube comment noted that "You're in a Bad Way" is the "Telstar" of the 90s and how can anyone possibly disagree?

This pursuit of the "perfect pop moment" as Frith puts it is a good summation of both why I like a lot of Saint Etienne's music and why I have reservations towards them at the same time. I admire them aspiring to such lofty heights and I recognise that with both "Avenue" and, yes, "You're in a Bad Way" they reached them. Yet, it all feels a little too perfect. While their output isn't wall-to-wall greatness, very little of what they have recorded together feels like a stumble on their part, like they had this vision that they've resolutely stuck to. As I wrote above, I look back at my teenage obsession with planning out the trajectory of my fantasy pop group with fondness but listening to Saint Etienne makes me feel sort of glad that none of it came to pass. Whether or not a band hits it big, there's usually little that can be predicted but it's almost as if Cracknell, Wiggs and Stanley managed to work out the formula for pop success which makes loving them a lot harder than it ought to be.

With the emergence of Bjork, PJ Harvey, Radiohead, Smashing Pumpkins, Suede and Wu-Tang Clan, 1993 is no doubt a year many look back on with fondness. Big names like Nirvana, Sting and U2 released albums while others such as New Order and Paul Weller, who many had written off, were back with respectable releases of their own. Longtime faves of mine Pet Shop Boys and The Wonder Stuff had returned as well. Yet, it was the first time since '87 in which I couldn't have cared less about the music scene. It also happened to be the first time in six years in which I went through a serious Beatles phase. I was glad to be looking back at another era so it's too bad I hadn't yet discovered Saint Etienne to guide me through the past, present and future — especially at a time when I wasn't so jaded and could identify more with a band that planned every step of their progression just as I had. Oh why did I have to age out of that way of thinking?

 

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Also Reviewed This Fortnight

R.E.M.: "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight"

I'm just going to run with writing about every possible single from Automatic for the People because I want to and anyone who follows this space is just going to have to deal with it.. I was initially immune to R.E.M. but a chance listen to Top 20 hit "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight" got me to rethink them. An unexpected choice for converting me over to the Athenians but it was the first record of their's which I was genuinely able to appreciate instead of feeling annoyed by. Frith likes the fact that Stipe laughs at one point but I hope it's just a bit of a crack up in the studio that they chose to keep rather than finding his own lyrics about "a reading from Dr. Seuss" to be for whatever reason amusing. Yet again, I mishear the words differently than you do: I always thought it was "don't even try to wake her up" which is closer to the real thing than that silly "calling Jamaica" shit that others are convinced of. (Bloody hell, I'm not particularly smart but it sure seems like a lot of people are much thicker than me) The second best song about this type of rattlesnake after Lee Morgan's "The Sidewinder" and one of about eleven highlights from R.E.M.'s masterpiece ("New Orleans Instrumental No.1" is the closest thing to a duff track and even it belongs). See you when we get to "Everybody Hurts"; it won't be long.