Put the needle on the record.

This is Words And Music By Saint Etienne. Track 11, title: When I was Seventeen. Cue the singer: "When I was 17," Sarah Cracknell says, "I lived on the King's Road in London, and apart from being completely penniless I had the most brilliant time.

"I remember having just left home and being in a really exciting part of London. I was just having a ball but had no money at all. I was sharing a flat with three friends. We used to walk along the King's Road looking in the gutter. It's amazing if you keep your eyes pinned on the floor how much money you can find."

This is a story about being young or maybe remembering how that once felt. This is a story about being in the gutter and looking at the stars. This is a story about random plays.

Track nine: 25 Years. Saint Etienne have a new album out. It's their first since 2005 and their eighth in total. They formed not quite 25 years ago in 1990. Cracknell, our guide today, would join childhood friends Pete Stanley and Bob Wiggs a year or two later and the pattern was set – pop archivism bolted to contemporary beats fronted by Cracknell's boa-feathered glamour and pale English voice.

The pattern hasn't changed so much over the years as evolved. They've done electronic folk on Tiger Bay and an English version of Air's blissed out space music on Sound of Water (their masterpiece, but that's only me talking). This time around they're talking about pop past using the language of pop present.

"We've been working with Richard X on this record and we've been working with Tim Powell and Nick Coler who worked with Xenomania. They did all the Girls Aloud and Sugababes singles. We've got people around us who are very tuned in to the world of pop." Ah yes, this is, first and foremost, a story about pop music.

Cracknell grew up in Windsor. Her dad worked with Stanley Kubrick until he walked off the set of A Clockwork Orange. She met the director when she was very little. She fell in love with pop early. "When I was very young," she says. "We were lucky because we had Top Of The Pops. The bands had a very definite style thing going on. They almost had a uniform. Sweet and Mud and bands like that. As a kid that was fascinating really.

"I was into David Essex and Rock On. It's one of the bizarrest sounding records ever. It still sound strange." When family friends bought her a David Cassidy record for Christmas she was not happy. "I was so cheesed off. The wrong David!"

Track 13: Haunted Jukebox. "There was this bloke I went out with when I was 14, 15. In fact I started my first band with him. And he was really into Adam and the Ants. He once showed me a picture of himself that his sister had taken. And it was him in his bedroom and he'd put a white stripe across his nose. I look back and think, what on earth did I see in him."

When Cracknell met Wiggs and Stanley they bonded over movies and music. "The timing was very fortuitous because I'd given up on being in bands at that point and then they came along."

Soon Saint Etienne were music press favourites, they were on Top Of The Pops ("a programme I'd aspired to being on since I was tiny") and Cracknell's blondeness had her labelled (by Select Magazine, remember that?) as an "ironic dolly bird".

It was the Britpop era. Sexism was on the rise. It just had quotation marks around it. "I was talking about this with a friend of Louise Wener the other day. When she was in Sleeper every question would be directed at the rest of the band. But she wrote the songs. I did have a bit of an issue with the way I was written about. Or not written about. As if I didn't exist on a certain level. And I also had a particular problem with female journalists, who shall remain nameless, who kind of put the boot in a bit.

"I felt really angry about why they should be doing that when what they should be doing is championing women in music at that time when it was a particularly male-dominated environment. I don't think it's like that now."

That was then. Saint Etienne are elder statesmen and women of the pop game now. They are a bespoke handcrafted alternative to the megadome ubiquitousness of Gaga and Riri. They believe in pop music.

Cracknell remembers the thrill of being on Top Of The Pops singing I Was Born On Christmas Day alongside Tim Burgess with her now husband miming drums at the back. The joy of that still warms her.

Time's nearly up. One last spin of the iPod wheel. Track five: Tonight. The lyric goes: "This could be my life. This could save my life." Cracknell believes that even now.

Words And Music By Saint Etienne is out now. The band play Oran Mor in Glasgow on Wednesday.