TODAY, we are considering time, memory and nostalgia. It is mid-September 2021, and we are heading towards the fag end of the year. The twentieth century, meanwhile, is fast disappearing in the rear-view mirror and those of us who think the 1990s were just the other day have to face up to the fact that the far edge of that decade is now 30 years away from us.

Saint Etienne know that all too well. Formed in 1990, the band has more than three decades and nine previous albums under their belt before their latest, I’ve Been Trying to Tell You. And they know better than most that when it comes to time, memory and nostalgia, pop music is a currency for all three.

It’s a Friday afternoon and Saint Etienne are not in the building. We are speaking via Zoom. I am in Falkirk, Bob Stanley is in Bradford and Pete Wiggs is in Hove. Sarah Cracknell, meanwhile, is somewhere in Oxfordshire where she is busy putting her son in touch with a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta in Chelmsford.

The past is everywhere around us today. A Volkswagen Jetta is the first car I ever drove I tell Cracknell when she finally joins us. And Saint Etienne’s second album So Tough was the first CD I ever bought.

We’re together to talk about the band’s past and present and their new album which is itself a shimmering vision of the some of our yesterdays. I’ve Been Trying to Tell You may be the ultimate example of the band’s bespoke, hand-crafted take on bricolage.

Ask for a mission statement for the album and Stanley offers something that perfectly ties in with today’s theme. “It’s about trying to retrieve memory in a nutshell and how you can’t. Your memory will be unreliable and the way you remember something is inevitably compromised by passing time.”

The Herald: Pete Wiggs and Bob StanleyPete Wiggs and Bob Stanley

And how is this achieved on the album, you might ask? By sampling albums from a period at the end of the 1990s and the start of the new century, slowing them down and then creating these immersive, beautiful atmospheres out of them.

I mean, guys, I ask Wiggs and Stanley, are they even songs? “Kind of,” Wiggs suggests. “When I’m explaining it to relatives, I say it’s a bit less songy, a bit more experimental. But I still think of them as songs, especially the ones with vocals.

“And they do have structure it’s just not traditional structure, I suppose.”

The back story, Stanley explains, is that they’ve been listening to a lot of stuff that gets labelled “liminal” and “chill wave”.

“It’s been brewing for a good 15 years or so, I think, but it has mutated into this thing where people put stuff up on YouTube; an abandoned soft play area with a slowed down Alexander O’Neal song over the top or whatever, because it’s this weird thing of trying to recapture childhood.

“We thought, ‘how about doing that with a specific period of British history?’

“So, we picked on 1997- 2001, the last time there was a general sense of optimism. People weren’t blindly thinking the future’s going to be great, but there were some grounds for maybe thinking things will be better in the future.”

Read More: Nicky Wire on the retun of Manic Street Preachers

Read More: Tim Burgess on 30 years of The Charlatans

And so, they began to listen to albums from that period, but not the cult indie ones you might expect.

“We wanted the samples to be by mainstream acts,” Stanley explains, “rather than some obscure 10-inch that only came out in Colombia.”

As a result, the likes of Samantha Mumba and the Lighthouse Family have now all been absorbed into Saint Etienne’s soundscape.

“We sampled a Natalie Imbruglia song,” Stanley points out, “but we weren’t going to sample Torn because it would have been too obvious. It would just have been a weird remix, I suppose.”  

The samples  provide the foundation to build something new and distinctive on, eight tracks that sound like what you might imagine is the sound of music dreaming.

Initially the band weren’t sure it would even be an album. They assumed it might be something for their fan club. But these strange and strangely gorgeous sort-of-songs deserved a wider audience.

The Herald: Sarah Cracknell. Photograph Elaine ConstantineSarah Cracknell. Photograph Elaine Constantine

Cracknell has now joined us, just in time for me to ask about her vocals, which, here, are just another texture in the music. Did that feel very different than the previous records?

“A little bit different. Not that much. I’ve always been into the idea of the vocals not necessarily having a narrative and being quite atmospheric. It’s always something I’ve listened to with other singers, other music, and I’ve done a bit of it in the past, so it wasn’t completely unnatural.

“In fact, it was good fun. I felt very free doing it.” She pauses, thinks of what she has just said. “Sounds a bit hippy.”

The story of Saint Etienne has always been, for me, a London story. So often they hymn the love and poison of the capital as much as Suede, albeit in a very different register. But now Stanley, Wiggs and Cracknell have moved out of the city.

“We had our moment of proper London which you feel very fortunate for,” Wiggs suggests, “but it gets to a point where you think, ‘I’ve had enough fun.’”

“Too much fun,” laughs Cracknell.

Their London may have been taking place in the same city as Britpop, but possibly not in the same postcode. They allied themselves more to the city’s dance culture, excited by the emergence of jungle, drum ’n ’bass and UK Garage. They certainly weren’t keen on waving the Union flag. “We’re not particularly nationalistic,” Stanley points out.

“We’re certainly not London uber alles type people,” Wiggs adds. “It just happened to be where we lived near that was better than where we grew up. If we were in Scotland, I’m sure we would have ended up in Glasgow, which is a great city.”

He has to say that being married to a Glaswegian, of course.

Saint Etienne now have a back story stretching back more than 30 years. They have their own history, but they are not defined by it.

“I think we’re lucky that we never had one record that completely overshadows everything else,” Stanley suggests. “We never did Ebeneezer Goode.”

“We did, we just got away with it,” Wiggs counters. “The Fred EP.”

Oh yes, they were one of a number of bands on the Heavenly record label who covered 1990s pop sensations and more recently anti-vaxxers Right Said Fred in 1992.

“Dubious people we have collaborated with,” says Stanley, laughing.

The question I have, I say, is how do you play this new album live? “Exactly,” Wiggs says. “This is the conversation that needs to be had before we do the gigs in November.”

The Herald:

The weird thing about Saint Etienne is they made perfect sense in the 1990s and they make perfect sense now. The ultimate pop archivists, they are a pick-n-mix band who now find themselves in an era when music is itself a big pick-n-mix counter.

“Everything’s in the present. It’s weird, “ Stanley agrees.

“It is funny,” Wiggs chips in. “When we were teenagers, they weren’t playing loads of 1920s music on the radio. But now it seems like kids like to listen to stuff from 50, 60 years ago. Bob is trying to get them back into the twenties stuff.”

Why are Saint Etienne still together in 2021?

“Because we laugh a lot,” Cracknell says. It’s a good reason.

The new album, she says, is the first time both of her sons have told her, “‘Oh my God, this is actually quite good.’ Before all they were interested in was coming around and running around in empty venues and being told off by security …”

“My daughter’s music teacher was telling the class about good bass lines and for some reason did it in video form and showed a video of Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Saint Etienne’s 1990 cover of the Neil Young song) ,” Wiggs tells us. “The teacher didn’t know we were related.

“It was in black and white, it looked like the past.”

It was, Pete, I tell him.

The past and the present. Saint Etienne fit into both. The future too, here’s hoping.

The Herald:

I’ve Been Trying to Tell You is out now. Saint Etienne play St Luke’s, Glasgow, on November 18