James Chance and the Contortions - Melody Maker - March 23 1991

 

SAINT ETIENNE, Foxbase Alpha Melody Maker, 1991 by Simon Reynolds "Never let a rock critic near a guitar", I once decreed, convinced that the sheer knowingness intrinsic to the rockcrit sensibility was deleterious to intuition, instinct and the semi-conscious pursuit of the sublime. Now I could probably extricate myself on a technicality (Bob Stanley mostly grapples with synths and samplers, not guitars), butthe fact is "Foxbase Alpha" forces me to eat my own edict. Saint Etienne show that a certain kind of learned eclecticism doesn't have to lead to weak-ass whimsicalpick'n'mix. For this pop-about-pop approach to transcend its inherent limitations, your record collection has to be pretty weird. Stanley & Wiggs' taste is as idiosyncratic as it gets. For the life of me I can't fathom what the thread is that connects Phil Spector, lover's rock, Northern Soul,psychedelia, Neil Young's courtly love side, Sixties girl-pop and A.R. Kanish dub-noise, as part of a single, seamless aesthetic continuum. It ought to be a mess, but for the duration of this album, it works like a dream. Foxbase Alpha is never-never pop, the soundtrack to an alternative universe, swinging England where World Of Twist are Number One and pop stars still wear gold lame. It's a record that charms you into a gooey stupor, rather than burns your eye with visionary vastness. Saint Etienne offer delight instead of rapture; their love songs are about tenderness rather than desire, lingering gazes and holding hands rather than gonad-motion. Saint Etienne's soul is rooted in the anorak-clad innocence of 1986 (hence their cover of "Kiss and Make Up" by cutie fundamentalists The Field Mice). Much of Foxbase Alpha is C86 'perfect pop' on a post- house footing. "Carn't Sleep" combines the prosaic purity of Sixties girl-pop with pseudo-orchestral muzak, heart-pang bass and prickly rhythm guitar. "Girl VII" cuts between nonchalant reverie, an upward-spiralling chorus of rapturous strings and heart-in-mouth vox, and a peculiar litany of London tube stations and cosmoplitan cities: Tufnell Park, San Paolo, Dollis Hill, Bratislava.... The best of this side of Saint Etienne remains "Nothing Can Stop Us Now". The love-as-fortitude lyrics turn my stomach ("you smooth out all the rough edges/with love and devotion... just the touch of your hand/and I know we're gonna make it" -yeuuch!), and Sarah Cracknell's voice is just a little too creamy, but the flute-piping euphoria is irresistible. But if Foxbase Alpha was all in this vein, it would be merely an exceedingly pleasant record. (Indeed, "Spring" and "She's The One" edge dangerously close to Mari Wilson/white Sade blandness). What makes it so relentlessly listenable are the weird experimental touches: "Wilson", a sound-collage of ridiculously antiquated English voices from a late Sixties decimal currency training record, looped over a flanged and reverbed beat as psychedelic as Dudley Moore's "Bedazzled", or the creepy, 23 Skidoo-ish tribal mantra of "Etienne Gonna Die", complete with acrimonious poker player movie dialogue. Foxbase Alpha really comes alive on side two. "Stoned To Say The Least" starts as a foreboding trance-dance pulse, over which backwards guitar uncoils as beautifully as Stone Roses' "Don't Stop" and angelic synths hover; then the track escalates into an astral turmoil of feedback refractions and amp-hum. "London Belongs To Me" is staggering. Imagine a collision between the aesthetics of Talulah Gosh and A.R. Kane, twee and torrential, camp and sublime. The song begins as one of those idyllic interludes in a Sixties movie, a light-headed, walking-on-air shimmer of harpsichords, vibes, flutes and mellotrons. But at the chorus, everything goes topsy-turvy: gravity absconds in a mist of dub-reverbed percussion; Wiggs & Stanley's arrangement cascades stardust and moonbeam, a downfall of precious gems. "Like The Swallow" is possibly even more stupendous and accomplished. Starting as a symphonic samplescape midway between Scott Walker and Brian Eno, dizzy with detail, it mutates into an Ennio Morricone-esque epic, gongs chiming portentously, then abruptly disappears beneath phalanxes of drones like harmonised sonic booms, and the massively amplified sound of a solitary acoustic guitar, plucking an eerie melody. One of the most pleasurably perplexing things I've heard this year. I can't figure the Saint Etienne aesthetic out, and that's the fun of it. This the name of the game in 1991: constructing your own alternative pop universe, hallucinating the hybrid styles that should have but never did happen. As such, Foxbase Alpha is the perfect companion to Screamadelica: both albums are examples of pop scholars transcending their record collections. No single element on either album is "new", but the coagulated composite of all that warped taste sounds breathtakingly fresh and unforeseen.

  SAINT ETIENNE, PROFILE The Observer, 20th October 1991 by Simon Reynolds On their delightful debut album, Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne mix contemporary house rhythms with the string-swept melodrama of Sixties pop. Amazingly, the creators of this exquisitely crafted sound, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, are musical illiterates, who can't play any instruments except for rudimentary keyboard. Instead, they hum melodic ideas into a tape recorder, gather a few records with beats or sounds that they want to sample, then go into the studio. Messing around on the mixing desk, Saint Etienne recreate the complex arrangements they hear in their heads. Friends since the age of two, the duo had long fantasised about making pop music. "But because we lacked the patience to learn to play instruments we never thought we'd do it," says Wiggs. But when groups such as S'Express got to the top of the charts with sampler-based records that sounded lavish yet cost only a few hundred pounds to record, Wiggs and Stanley decided to take the plunge. Their first single, a version of Neil Young's 'Only Love Can Break Your Heart', took two hours and £80 to make. Thanks to pop journalist Stanley's contacts in the music industry, the track reached clubland's top DJs as a pre-release single. Before they knew what was happening, the song was a dance-floor smash, and Saint Etienne had a career on their hands. Recently revamped as their fourth single, 'Only Love' dented the Top 40. Stanley has now put his writing on hold, in order to concentrate on Saint Etienne and the duo's burgeoning sideline career as producers presiding over a mini-empire of protegés. There's Golden, a female trio on the verge of signing to a major label, while the duo Cola Boy has already signed to Arista. The latter scored the Top Ten 10 hit with the Saint Etienne-penned '7 Ways To Love', an insidiously catchy mix of schlocky Italian disco and Sixties Muzak. Saint Etienne aim to renovate the grand tradition of stage-managed pop as exemplified by Phil Spector, Holland-Dozier-Holland, and Stock Aitken Waterman — brilliant producers with a stable of interchangeable, photogenic vocalists that they manipulated like puppets. "We like that approach simply because a lot of the time it's produced such brilliant records," says Stanley. Saint Etienne have no time for the traditional rock belief that such 'manufactured' pop is 'shallow' and 'inauthentic'. "We like pop because it's fast, instant, and glamorous," says Stanley. "Rock groups like The Doors lack humour and suffer delusions of Messiah-like grandeur." The new Saint Etienne single 'People Get Real', due out in January, is a riposte to snobs who "venerate ‘real soul’ and condemn house music as inauthentic." With their fondness for kitsch and camp, you might expect Foxbase Alpha to be a collection of tacky, disposable singles. In fact, it's an accomplished album whose span ranges from classically-concise pop to eerie instrumentals and grandiose production epics that recall Ennio Morricone; its diverse influences include dub reggae, the noisy dream-pop of AR Kane, Scott Walker's orchestral ballads, and Joe Meek. "Meek was the only interesting British pop figure before the Beatles. On records like ‘Johnny Remember Me’ and ‘Telstar’ he pioneered multi-tracking, echo and over-dub." Saint Etienne's music has a distinctly English aura, something that's brought to the fore on songs such as 'Girl VII', with its litany of Tube stations, or 'London Belongs To Me', an idyllic reverie of summer in the metropolis. Saint Etienne's never-never pop is imbued with nostalgia for a lost swinging England, for the days when musicians wore groovy gear and knew how to behave like stars. "If we're successful, we'll get all our clothes tailor-made," daydreams Stanley. "We've already had gold lamé suits made for us. Next on the agenda are some bespoke velvet trousers." SAINT ETIENNE, interview Melody Maker, 25 April 1992 by Simon Reynolds THE PRODUCT "We want to write songs and then deconstruct them," says Bob Stanley. "We want to get weirder and more album oriented. It would be easy to do stuff that's weird that people would find hard to get into, but it would be really brilliant if we could combine both the pop instantness and the weirdness." Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne's critically-acclaimed debut album, was undoubtedly the most deliciously disorientating suite of sound produced last year, and now it looks as though Stanley and his partner, Pete Wiggs, want to expand on the ambient weirdness found on the second side of the LP. Ironically, their new single, ‘Join Our Club’, is probably the least idiosyncratic thing Saint Etienne have done (it's an all-out bid for a chart hit), but other completed tracks for the new album indicate a more exploratory approach. A track called ‘Calico’, for instance (which features an eerie rap by Q-Tee), is psychedelic, dub-crazed film music, a James Bond theme from an alternative universe, pure kitschadelia. "The new stuff we've been doing is even weirder," Stanley explains. "Some of it's a bit scary. We spent six weeks in the studio and ended up with two songs and loads and loads of scary bits of songs." THE EMPIRE FIGHTS BACK Saint Etienne are diversifying, not just because it's sound business practice, but because one moniker isn't enough to contain all their ideas and impulses. In a couple of weeks, they'll be releasing the first singles for Ice Rink, "a beautiful pop label specialising in maverick genius", funded by Creation. Pete and Bob's sonic empire consists of Oval ("a South East London group, friends of ours, they use real guitars and have two girl singers"), Elizabeth City State ("a bit soulful, lots of string arrangements, their first single's gonna be called 'V-Neck'"), Golden (three girls singing sombre, sepia-tinted Sixties folk harmonies over a House groove) and Sensurround (featuring John Robb, music journalist and ex-Membrane). He and Pete are already planning the Ice Rink compilation, which they hope will consist "entirely of Top Ten hits, but we'll do it whatever happens." "We're not Svengalis," says Bob. "We might produce the groups, but they're writing all the songs and have their own sounds already." Not that Saint Etienne have a problem with the Spector tradition of producer megalomania and conveyor belt brilliance. Pete and Bob have no truck with the trade rock belief that ‘manufactured’ pop is ‘shallow’ and ‘unauthentic’. "We like pop because it's fast, instant, and glamorous", says Bob. "Rock groups like The Doors lack humour and suffer delusions of Messiah-like grandeur". The B-side of ‘Join Our Club’, ‘People Get Real’, is a mellifluous diatribe against people who venerate ‘real soul’ and condemn House music as ‘unauthentic’. "It's about Kenny Thomas," Bob adds, "and the impending jazz-funk revival. Jazz funk, Kiss FM, it's miles more offensive than any heavy metal." POP FOR POP'S SAKE Sometimes it seems like Saint Etienne songs are born of Pete and Bob's rarefied, pop-for-pop's-sake aesthetic, rather than being examples of heart-felt, thorn-from-personal-experience communication. Pop as object (‘What a fab single!’) as opposed to pop as subjective outpouring (‘That really moves me’). "We're somewhere between the two," says Bob. "Neither of us have really suffered enough to write anything really heartfelt. But the songs aren't totally vacuous. We like disposable pop, but we also like music that's enduring and high art. I'll still be listening to Tim Buckley or Laura Nyro in ten years, but I doubt if I'll be listening to disposable Stock Aitken Waterman-type pop in a year, it's just good for its moment." Are they motivated to make pop by anything apart from a love of pop? "Not really," Bob replies. "We definitely want to do something that's not been done before. I've never wanted to be in a group unless there was at least a chance of being as good as my favourite groups. During C86, a lot of my friends were in groups doing really shit music, and they kept asking if I wanted to be involved, and my argument was that unless I could get string arrangements on my records I never wanted to make one. So now we have, by default, using samplers. I won't be happy until we've written songs that can make people burst into tears, something that terrifyingly beautiful. I want to change the way people record, to create sounds that are widely imitated. Some of our next LP is getting there, a lot of it sounds frightening. Some of it sounds like the Far East. It could be brilliant, but it could be our downfall." HOW DO THEY DO IT? A Saint Etienne song starts with the pair humming melodic ideas into a tape recorder. Then they gather a few records with beats or sounds that they want to sample, and go into the studio. Messing around on the mixing desk, Pete and Bob recreate the complex arrangements they hear in their heads. "It's all production and arrangement," Pete explains. "Production in getting other people to do stuff. Our engineer, Ian [Catt], helps us realise our ideas. We just record the basic track and then play with it until it sounds like we want it to sound. It's an advantage that we're not musicians, we just have sounds in our heads, and no preconceptions about their feasibility or what sounds right. Anyone could go in and make a record, but not everybody can make a good record." HEROES AND VILLAINS So who, in their opinion, are the all-time most pernicious forces in pop since the beginning? Who's had the most malign influence? Pete says The Doors. Singer Sarah Cracknell says Tina Turner. Bob says Eric Clapton and Cream. Pete, warming to the theme, adds Frank Zappa. And let's not forget Phil Collins. "The worst thing about people like Phil Collins," grimaces Bob, "is that his records have taken on the status of classics for people like Capital Radio. They're the songs people will remember the Eighties for. They've become bonded to the time and, historically, will suppress what ever else came out at the time that's more deserving. "Then there's James Brown," Bob continues. "We don't like funk. We don't like slap-bass. I can't get into Parliament and Funkadelic at all, it's too prog, too muso." And how about heroes, the artists who should have changed the face of pop? "David Essex," they reply. "The production on 'Rock On' doesn't sound like any record ever made, and his first couple of albums were totally weird. Cockney Rebel were weird, too. Early Fall doesn't sound like any records ever made. There was hardly a wasted B-side back then. The Fall should have given up in the early Eighties. No one's ever picked up on the deliberately badly recorded approach of a track like 'Spector Vs Rector'. Erm, who else? TV Personalities, of course." "I really admire people who can sit down and write reams of hit singles," says Bob. "I don't just mean Lennon/McCartney or Goffin & King. Martin and Coulter were amazing – they wrote 'Back Home' for the England World Cup Squad in Mexico in 1970, then they wrote 'Sugar Baby Love' for the Rubettes in '74, which is total genius, just one of the most perfect songs ever written, and then they wrote a brilliant disco hit of few years later called 'Automatic Lover' by Dee D Jackson. What talented blokes! Any old style, Martin and Coulter could write a song to order." Saint Etienne don't like anything that's overwrought (Robert Plant), and are totally opposed to over-emoting. Sarah's vocals are very cool and contained, a stand against what she calls "the arrogance of passion. That kind of thing's about taking yourself too seriously." CURATOR VERSUS CREATOR "We were talking to a friend about our record cos our friends never really say what they think about it," says Bob. "And he said it couldn't possibly be the future of music because it used loads of things that had been and gone, and stuck them together. And I said: same as Primal Scream and Massive Attack." It seems that the state of the art is ‘record collection rock’, pop based around the elaboration of your own idiosyncratic hierarchy of taste. The only scope for new frissons comes when hitherto outlawed, neglected or denigrated sound-sources are introduced to the canon of admissible influences. Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque, Foxbase Alpha – this meta-pop can be glorious, but are there limits to it? "I don't think there are any limits to it at all," says Bob. "It's a lot more limiting when you get someone forming a band who's only heard music from the last two years, and thinks Jesus Jones are better than The Beatles. If someone's got a large record collection, there are so many loose ends in pop history that nobody's ever followed up that there's limitless work to be done reinterpreting the past. It's never gonna be a dead end." Obviously, pop's always worked like this. Even The Rolling Stones began as obsessive collectors of blues records. The difference between then and now, though, is that the Stones went on to create, inadvertently, the soundtrack to their era. Today's record collection rock has drifted off into its own self-referential universe, with little connection to life as she is lived. "I can appreciated the Manics and Fabulous trying to agitate against that, saying that E has turned an entire generation into brain-dead idiots. There is so little energy about in music. I suppose somebody who's connected with the outside world would be into The Prodigy. Techno's the pulse of Young Britain, it's so exciting that you probably don't need Fabulous or the Manics if you're young." With this new breed of rock scholars like Bobby Gillespie, Norman Blake and Stanley & Wiggs, sooner or later one has to deal with the word ‘trainspotter’. When Bob tells me he's desperately searching for the one and only album by New Musik (early Eighties New Wave abominations) I can't help admiring the sheer sickness of his obsession, but I also wonder whether he's really a suitable role model for a generation. Wiggs and Stanley aren't candidates for shaman-hood, that's for sure, but they do mourn the disappearance of freaks, aliens and mad prophets in pop (the Kevin Rowlands, Adam Ants and Gary Numans). They know they just don't have it in them to be that stellar, that egomaniacal. They belong in a different category – the great British eccentric. Here's Bob on Pete: "Peter often has trouble communicating with people. It's weird, but he's a completely different person on the phone. There was one time he was in Paris, and he was ringing me every two hours. He rang just to ask if he should buy this doughnut he'd seen in a bakery. He was ringing his family all the time, too. By the time he got home he'd spent over a hundred quid in calls." Here's Pete on Bob: "Bob is fascinated by lasers, he visits the London Laserium at least twice a week, and even has a low wattage laser installed in his bedroom. When he dies he wants his coffin to travel through a laser tunnel projected down the aisle of the crematorium." And Pete on Pete: "The reason I am in a band is that I do whatever the decade dictates: in the Eighties, I was a top businessman; in the Seventies, I was a kung-fu expert; and, in the Sixties, I was a child." SAINT ETIENNE, Places To Visit [joint review with Position Normal, Stop Your Nonsense] Village Voice, July 28-August 3, 1999 by Simon Reynolds ....Position Normal's fondness for "found sound" interludes, like the patter of Cockney stallholders in a fruit'n'veg market, reminds me of Saint Etienne's penchant for punctuating their early albums with movie dialogue and cafeteria chat eavesdropped onto a dictaphone. The trio started out as part of that superior early phase of Britpop that included World Of Twist, Denim, and pre-megastardom Pulp. Instead of later Britpop's loutish laddism, the sensibility was mod—fervently English, but cosmopolitan, as open to 1960s French girl-pop, '90s Italo-house, and A.R. Kane's halcyon dub-noise as it was to Motown and Dusty Springfield. Trouble was, the trio's futile fixation on scoring a UK Top Ten hit persuaded them to gradually iron out all their experimentalist excrescences. Reconvening in 1998 after a four-year sabbatical, Saint Etienne got sleeker and slicker still on Good Humour, abandoning sampling altogether for Swedish session-musicianship and a clean, crisp sound inspired by "Lovefool" Cardigans and Vince Guaraldi's lite-jazz Charlie Brown music. A pleasant surprise, then, to report that Saint Etienne's six-track EP Places to Visit is an unexpected reversion to...everything that was ever any good about them. "Ivyhouse" is angel's breath ethereal like they've not been since their debut album's dubtastic "London Belongs To Me." Produced by Sean O'Hagan of avant-MOR outfit The High Llamas, "52 Pilot" features sparkling vibes, an elastic heartstring bassline out of "Wichita Lineman," and radical stereo separation (don't try this one on headphones). And "Artieripp" is a tantalizing tone-and-texture poem as subtly daubed as anything by Mouse On Mars. Drawing on diverse talents like O'Hagan and Chicago avant-gardist-for-hire Jim O'Rourke, Places resituates Saint Etienne among the sound-sculptor ranks. (Their next project is apparently a collaboration with German art-techno outfit To Rococo Rot). They're aesthetes in love with the Pop Song not for its expressive power but for the sheerly formal contours of its loveliness. Hopefully, Places to Visit will work like Music for the Amorphous Body Study Centre did for Stereolab: as a rejuvenating sideline, a detour that parodoxically sets them back on a truer course. SAINT ETIENNE, Sound of Water from Faves of 2000 by Simon Reynolds This one seems to have disappointed the fans; I reckon it their best since So Tough, integrating the two sides of their collective personality (pure pop enchantment versus studio-as-instrument sorcery) as never before. A soft soundclash of digital programming (with help from German post-rock unit To Rococo Rot) and lushly arranged acoustica (courtesy of detail-freak Sean O'Hagan from High Llamas/Stereolab), Sound of Water glistens and ripples with exquisite nuances. It's beyond headphone-friendly: wearing a pair is virtually de rigeur, just to catch all the scintillating near-subliminal subtleties--like the Pierre Henry/Jean-Jacques Perrey analog blarps and pnoots peeking out from the crannies of "Sycamore"'s lush harpsichord-and-harmony arrangement. Like their other albums, Sound of Water offers a cornucopia of pop equations (Petula Clark + [Mouse On Mars X Angelo Badalamenti] = "Downey CA") and alternative-history scenarios ("Late Morning" is from the parallel universe where Burt Bacharach teamed up with Steve Reich to become a two-man hit-factory). Two tracks stand out for me. The twinkling snowscape production of "Just A Little Overcome" enfolds what might just be the groop's most accomplished and beautifully poised piece of songwriting and singing yet---"adult", but in a good way. "How We Used To Live"'s triptych structure shifting elegantly from orchestrated/observational pop (Montague Terrace in Yellow, Scott Walker minus the existensialist paperbacks and Ingmar Bergman movies) through Orbital-gone-Eurovision shimmy to Rotary Connection-style cosmik jazz. Saint Etienne have grown-up gracefully. SAINT ETIENNE, Smash the System: Singles and More Uncut, 2001 by Simon Reynolds Listening to this double-CD anthology, your first reaction is: Saint Etienne were cheated. They should have spanned the Nineties with a string of Number Ones, yet despite strenuous efforts, they never even cracked the Top Ten. Cheated, then, but what can you do? Pop is a cruel mistress, and anybody touting a vision of "perfect pop" is cruising for a bruising. See, pop aesthetes are never really affirming the totality of everything that sells (the only real definition of pop: hit for hit, Iron Maiden and Dire Straits are two of our biggest "pop" acts ever) but instead hone in on those precious few sublime flashes amid the crass and the crud. Their distilled and eternalized vision of "pure pop" inevitably gets more and more out-of-step with marketplace realities as time goes by. This doesn't invalidate the notion of never-never pop---some of the best music ever has come about through being dreamed against the times. But any discussion of this Saint Etienne career retrospective ought to address their "failure": the fact that they never really connected with the populace as yer actual bought-by-kids-at-Woolies chart fodder. Their singles typically lingered in the chart somewhere between two and five weeks, suggesting a compact, tautly defined fan-base. Saint Etienne simply lack the common touch (could a song called "Hobart Paving" ever really become an "our song" for some everyday couple?). Even when they later adopted a "competitive" sound (modelled on the Europop that dominated mid-Nineties charts), some sort of subconsciously self-sabotaging impulse, their pop aesthete's integrity, ensured that the lyrics remained too-damn-smart. Another quality that made Saint Etienne jar with the Nineties chartpop scheme is the romantic chasteness of their love songs. Saint Etienne were the missing link between two quintessentially English moments, C86 and Britpop (they were part of that superior prequel for the latter that included World of Twist, Denim, and Pulp). Their lovely second single "Kiss and Make Up" was a Field Mice cover, and a trademark C86 cutie-pop sexlessness runs through the discography. Sarah Cracknell's gritless, un-sultry voice---sometimes divinely fragrant and airy, sometimes too sweet 'n' creamy, like sipping condensed milk---has as much in common with Amelia Fletcher from Talulah Gosh/Heavenly as with Northern soul or Petula Clark-style Palladium pop. Contrasted with today's rampant, sexually explicit R&B, it's striking how demure and above-the-waist Saint Etienne songs are--all about TLC not carnal ecstasy, devotion rather than desire. There's even a sort of running theme about holding hands: "It's too hot to even hold hands/But that won't stop us from making plans" coos "London Belongs To Me" ( a heinous omission from this comp), "just the touch of your hand... and I know we're gonna make it" purrs "Nothing Can Stop Us Now," while "Join Our Club" features the classic Cracknell listener come-on "I know you want to hold my hand/I know you're gonna love my band". And they expected this sort of virginal stuff to play with today's kids?! Any Saint Etienne best-of missing "London Belongs To Me"' and So Tough gems like "Leafhound," "Calico", and the Rush-sampling "Conchita Martinez", has got some problems. But there's more than enough included to remind you why Saint Etienne warrant worship. "Carnt Sleep" recalls A.R. Kane's own doomed pop move "i": a lovely wistful skank, all reverbed rimshots, prickles of rhythm guitar, and plaintive piano. Featuring nymphet rapper Q-Tee, "Filthy" anticipates the Chemical Brothers with its looped break, stinging wah-wah riff, and deep rolling bass. "Mario's Cafe" is delightful English observational pop with Dury/Squeeze-style references to the Racing Post and bacon rind, and delicious early Nineties pop allusions (the girl who dreams of an evening with PM Dawn's Prince B., people talking about the KLF on TOTP the night before). And then there's "Avenue", one of the all-time great lost should-a-been Number Ones. Commercially suicidal at almost eight minutes, it's a mad mash-up of Dollar, Kate Bush, "Good Vibrations", and "Papua New Guinea", with a lyric as indecipherable (thanks partly to Cracknell's ultra-breathy, soaringly celestial singing) and enigmatic as an Alan Resnais movie. A special mention for engineer/programmer/unoffical fourth member Ian Catt, who clearly earned his "Avenue" songwriting credit. When "Avenue" stalled at Number 40 in October '92, it was an indictment of the modern world, not Saint Etienne. The group should have turned their back on chartpop, gone weird; instead, they did the opposite. Towards the end of the first disc, this compilation turns into a document of Saint Etienne's misguided quest to score that elusive Top Ten hit, involving the gradual ironing-out of all the experimentalist lumps in their sound (the dub-wise cascades, the found sound interludes, the strange codas like the trippy Magical Mystery Tour bit that ends "Avenue"). "Who Do You Think You Are" is typically perverse: a blatant chart bid, but surely pop scholars Wiggs & Stanley must have known that the bubblegum original didn't even make the Top 20 in 1974? "Pale Movie," a "Fernando"-meets-Paul Van Dyk shimmer is lovely, but others from the Euro phase ("He's On The Phone", "Angel", "Burnt Out Car") sound facelessly efficient, all chugging sequenced basslines and trance-lite beats. Saint Etienne then took a four year sabbatical and returned in 1998 with Good Humor, replacing their synths and samples with a more organic sound (Swedish session musicians, influences from The Cardigans and Vince 'Charlie Brown' Guaraldi). The clutch of tracks here from this phase seem oddly chastened-sounding, modest in ambition. With last year's Sound of Water, though, Saint Etienne seem to be trying to carve out a post-pop identity--discreetly experimental, "adult". Songs like "Just A Little Overcome" (not included) are as good as anything they've ever done. So hopefully this compilation is just greatest hits-and-misses so far, a first instalment of towering "pop" genius. SAINT ETIENNE, Travel Edition 1990-2005 / PSAPP, Tiger My Friend Tracks, 2005 by Simon Reynolds When it comes to female vocalists, England’s true forte isn’t divas--all those brassy, belting Aretha-wannabes like Annie Lennox and Joss Stone. No, it’s the demure singer. In mainstream terms, think Dido. But there's also an indie lineage of small-voiced singers that started with Alison Statton (of Young Marble Giants and Weekend) and Tracy Thorn (of Everything But the Girl), and that's where Psapp’s Galia Durant belongs. She projects a subdued, self-contained sensuality, an attractive blend of aloofness and vulnerability. Tiger, My Friend resembles a contemporary update of the sort of stuff Tracy Thorn and partner Ben Watt did in the Eighties: achingly melodic almost-pop that’s ultimately too introverted to barge its way into the charts. It’s the sound of the English “bedsit”, those cramped apartments (bedroom and sitting room combined) where students and just-out-of-college kids live and fall in and out of love. This being 2004, though, bedsit doesn’t mean Thorn & Watt’s lightly jazzy acoustic guitars, but the sort of chirruping electronica spun by Durant’s partner Carim Clasmann out of quirky samples of cat’s miaows and glitchy drums that skitter like an egg-whisk on cellophane. Saint Etienne specialize in a different sort of almost-pop and vocalist Sarah Cracknell is the queen of another kind of demure Englishness, rooted in Petula Clark rather than Astrud Gilberto. Her voice can be wonderfully fresh and fragrant, but also a tiny bit cloying at times, like sipping melted ice cream. This handy if somewhat compressed anthology follows Saint Etienne’s 15 year journey from lovely homespun dance pop (like their soft reggae cover of Neil Young “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”) through the experimental majesty of “Avenue” (Kate Bush meets Abba) to their mid-Nineties struggle to score a UK Top Ten hit. That fruitless period ironed out a lot of the group’s charming quirks, replacing them them with a rather characterless Europop sound of chugging sequenced basslines and trance beats, and then gave way in turn to an even more wan phase of trying to imitate The Cardigans. Thankfully, 2000’s Sound of Water saw Saint Etienne return to form with a mature sound that discreetly secreted avant-garde touches inside intricately layered pop, like the 8 minute long song-suite “"How We Used To Live." 2002’s Finisterre, represented here by its haunting title track, suggests a continued second wind for this great British group, whose singles all reach #1 in a parallel pop universe far superior to our own. SAINT ETIENNE Presents Finisterre: A Film About London Directed by Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans Village Voice, November 30th, 2005 by Simon Reynolds “Finisterre”, the title track of Saint Etienne’s 2002 album, was an aesthetic manifesto that among other things imagined leaping straight from the Regency Era to Bauhaus-style modernism, in the process skipping almost the entire 19th Century. In a way, that’s what this DVD--an enchanting meander through London that’s less a documentary than a visual poem--does too. You get little sense of the city as Dickens would have understood it: the hustle-bustle of a place somewhere people work and produce. Finisterre’s first images are a suburban train heading into London at the crack of dawn, before the commuter crush, and the only sense of commotion and congestion come much later with footage shot at various gigs and bars. There’s a sense in which the city could only be made beautiful by minimizing the presence of its inhabitants, who are either absent or typically appear on the edge of shot. Directors Paul Kelly and Kieran Evans strip away the hubbub to reveal a secret city of silence and stillness, reverie rather than revelry. The film is literally composed largely of stills--buildings, graffiti, faded posters, half-deserted cafes, store fronts. People, when they appear, are rarely in motion. The gaze of this flaneur-camera aestheticizes everything: a homeless man becomes a compositional figure (mmmm, look at the curvature of spine) and a neglected playground generates attractive patterns of rust-mottled metal and stained brickwork. It would have been heavy-handed to use such images as signifiers of urban decay and dysfunction, but a teensy dose of Ken Loach wouldn’t have gone amiss. A different Ken (Livingstone, the Mayor of London) gives his thumbs-up in the DVD booklet, and no wonder: it’ll trigger a tourism micro-boom by luring Saint Etienne’s already Anglophile fanbase abroad. Watching Finisterre made this London-born expatriate yearn to hop on the next flight home, too. But I suspect this is actually the last word in a certain way of looking at, and living with, a city that’s unmanageably vast and often pretty grim. File it next to Iain Sinclair’s psychogeographic walking tours or the greasy spoon memory-work of Adrian Maddox’s Classic Cafes-- forms of mourning for a city that’s always dying. Finisterre is a beautiful film about London. But beauty is only half the story, because cities are always rebirthing themselves too, and birth ain’t a pretty sight. [These reissues dedicated to Sally Shapiro and Johan Agebjorn, makers of the wondrous Disco Romance]

looking back at 1994 - Xmas issue commentaries - Melody Maker - December 24-31 1994

 

Freaky cover isn't it? 

The whole issue readable at Nothing Else On

Ibiza-ification of pop

The Ibiza-ification of pop

Guardian blog, 2011

by Simon Reynolds

The other day we were driving in the car, listening to one of Los Angeles's  Top 40 stations, and I turned to my wife and asked, "How come everything on the radio sounds like a peak-hour tune from Ibiza?"

All these smash hits have the AutoTuned big-chorus tune bolted on top. But underneath, the riffs and vamps, the pulses and pounding beats, the glistening synthetic textures and the overall banging boshing feel: it's like it's been beamed straight in from Gatecrasher or The Love Parade circa 1999.

This week The Quietus published a piece that pinpoints a particularly bludgeoning and tyrannical aspect of the now-pop, what writer Daniel Barrow calls "the Soar": the wooshing, upwards-ascending, hands-in-the-air chorus, which has been divorced from its original context (Nineties underground dance-and-drug culture) and repurposed as the trigger for a kind of release-without-release.

Barrow's references to steroids ("the steroided architecture of these tracks", etc) captures the unsettling "stacked" quality of these recordings. Like the images you find in bodybuilding magazines, the now-pop can often be at once grotesque and mesmerising.

Strangely Barrow makes no mention of the tune that seems like the now-pop's defining anthem and blueprint, a song that is still omnipresent many months after it first hit big: "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz. His name, with its odd unplaceable quality (it sounds like some kind of Asian-Hispanic hybrid) suits the Esperanto-like qualities of  the now-pop. Although  often described by hostile critics as Eurohouse, it is simply and purely international, post-geographical, panglobal.

(How apt that the video for "Dynamite" is preceded here by a commercial for Las Vegas tourism, since that city is both Mecca and model for a certain idea of "a really good time"  that is celebrated by so many of these in-the-club anthems).

I started out loathing "Dynamite". The "ay-o" bit in particular always made me think of "day-o" as in Harry Belafonte's "Banana-Boat Song." 

Gradually I succumbed--or perhaps I should say,  "submitted"--and started to think of "Dynamite" as possessing a certain dumb genius. Especially the line that goes "I'm wearing all my favourite brands brands brands brands".

But looking from the vantage point of my forthcoming book Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction To Its Own Past,  what's most striking and unsettling about the now-pop is its not-so-now-ness: the fact that in the year 2011, mainstream pop sounds like the late Nineties.

The Black Eyed Peas pioneered all this of course, creating a sort of 21st Century update of all that European "hip house" from even earlier in the 90s (Snap, Technotronic, et al) and working in some Eighties-retro flavours here and there.

"The Time (Dirty Bit)" also qualifies, abundantly, for the category of "dumb genius".  And as with "Dynamite", there's that forced insistence that everyone's "having the time of their lives". So much of the now-pop has this vaguely coercive undercurrent. As Barrow notes, the producers know how to work your reflexes, they've got pop pleasure down to a science, they target those euphoria-centers of the brain as ruthlessly as soft drinks stoked with high-fructose corn syrup.

Kids love this kind of stuff, of course. At the Nickelodeon TV channel's  Kids' Choice Awards show in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, The Black Eyed Peas performed "The Time": what with the dazzling lights and deafening volume, it really was like a rave for children.  We were there with our own kids: five-year-old Eli in particular is totally into the now-pop.  Recently, driving in the car and flicking back and forth between pop stations and classic rock stations, he opined that Katy Perry was "rock'n'roll"  but was quite adamant that The Stones's "It's Only Rock'n'Roll" was "not rock'n'roll".   He wouldn't be budged.

Perhaps Eli is correct, in spirit.  The substance of the now-pop has absolutely  nothing in common with rock'n'roll or indeed any form of live-band music.  But perhaps its blaring bombast is the true modern sound of teenage (and pre-teenage) rampage.  Maybe all this steroid-maxed uber-pop is just as artfully mindless and cunningly vacant as the records made by The Sweet with Chinn & Chapman,  the production team who were the Seventies equivalents to Dr. Luke and Will.i.am: expert programmers of  artificial excitement, architects of crescendo and  explosion.  Eli's a big Sweet fan too.

 

Let's Do The Time Warp Again (the Guardian, October 13th 1990)

 

Startled to be reminded just how long now - and how far back - I have been gnashing my teeth about retro-paralysis! 

And in fact there's a riff using the "re" that I would later use in Retromania - not recycling, though, I don't think - it just re-occurred to me. 

(And in fact someone else got there earlier, which I didn't know in 1990, or in 2010). 

(I guess reinventing the wheel would be no small achievement, if you never even saw a wheel in the first place). 

Routes and futures

 

Various Artists

Routes from the Jungle: Escape Velocity Volume 1

Melody Maker, 1995

by Simon Reynolds 

the trap decade

[alternate ending to this 2010s-surveying piece on the Trap Internationale for The Face]

At the moment, trap – indisputably the sonic vanguard of mainstream pop – is locked in a vicious cycle: the desire of the underclass to become overlords. MCs could hardly be more explicit in their declaration of this deadly intent. In her #1 single “Bodak Yellow”, Cardi B talks about leaving behind stripping for rapping just like her spouse Offset talks about leaving behind trapping for rapping: “I don't gotta dance, I make money move… I'm a boss, you a worker, bitch, I make bloody moves.”

Listening to trap is paradoxical: immense creativity, flair, flamboyance, life-force, slamming right up against a deadening set of thematic constraints, somehow magically rewriting and re-rewriting the stale script into inexhaustible freshness. An absolute wealth of brilliance, an utter poverty of imagination.  Rae Sremmurd may rap about being  “Black Beatles”, but we’re a million miles from “All You Need Is Love” and “Imagine.” 

The politics of trap revealed themselves, unfortunately, on the earlier Sremmurd single “Up Like Trump”, released in 2015. Swae Lee raps about reading Forbes like the Bible, Slim Jxmmi describes himself as a “money fiend,” and in the video, a Donald mask-wearing figure parties with the duo on the open top of a bus riding through Times Square. Speaking to Complex magazine at the time, Lee declared, “Donald Trump is cool…. I’m like, ‘That’s a cool motherfucker.’ He’s rich as fuck.”  In a Guardian profile after their role model was elected, the duo defined Trumpism as “owning businesses, being bossed up” and seemed to have no regrets about making the song. 

Rejecting party politics for apolitical partying, Jxmmi said that “young people wanna rage”. Sremmurd and their fans are about “living lit” and banging “our heads against the wall”. It’s a fitting cap to the trap decade: a President whose taste runs to nouveau riche glitz, who runs the White House like a Mafioso.

Umbrellas in the Sun (Disques du Crepuscule / Factory Benelux DVD)

VARIOUS ARTISTS

UMBRELLAS IN THE SUN: A CREPUSCULE/FACTORY BENELUX DVD 1979-1987

(LTM )

The Wire, long ago

by Simon Reynolds

 Founded in Brussels at the dawn of the Eighties, Les Disques Du Crepuscule was operated by a clutch of Belgian aesthetes suffering from an unhealthy infatuation with Factory Records. They swiftly formed an alliance with their Manchester idols and jointly released records by the likes of A Certain Ratio in the Low Countries (hence Factory Benelux).  Now the equally Fac-obsessed reissue label LTM-- not content with echoing the Belgian imprint in its very name, an acronym for Les Temps Modernes--is paying tribute with this splendid DVD of promos and live footage of Crepuscule/Benelux acts. 

Vintage videos can be embarrassingly dated, but the bulk of the material on Umbrellas gives off a sense of “limited means, effectively used.” ACR’s “Back To The Start” is a case in point, juxtaposing murky hand-held film of the band shaking their stuff in a field after nightfall with scenes of children dancing on the edge of an indoor swimming pool. The sallow lighting, oddly angled shots, and strange bodily geometries perfectly suit the group’s dislocated disco, its parched percussion draped with the bled-like-veal vocal pallor of Martha Tilson. 

Josef K--like ACR, Northern punk-funkers with cropped hair and very clean ears--appear here performing “Sorry For Laughing” on a television pop show. The simple but clever twist is that the TV footage intermittently appears projected, bluescreen-style, onto a lump of Gak nestling on a girl’s bare stomach. Manipulating the goo, she distends the images of the band as they bob on her belly.  

On a purely sonic level, Umbrellas’ highlight is  Cabaret Voltaire’s “Sluggin’ For Jesus,” the lead track off 1981’s Three Crepuscule Tracks EP (arguably the group’s peak). Laced with American televangelist prattle, the entrancing Karoli-funk groove is accompanied by light-flickered images of the guys fondling their synths and, in Richard Kirk’s case, scritching away at a violin.  

Close behind “Sluggin’” is the exquisitely plangent threnody for Ian Curtis that is The Durutti Column’s “Never Known” (although, for mystifying reasons, the track is here titled “Marie Louise Gardens”). With Vini Reilly generating such agonizing beauty of sound, all that’s required is the sparest of visuals, and that's what we get:  the “missing boy” alone in a deserted public park at twilight, caressing the guitar strings with his finger-tips.  

In scarcity terms, though, the gems here comprise the fabulous monochrome footage of Malaria! onstage performing “White Sky, White Sea”   Tuxedomoon’s “Litebulb Overkill,” also live, but juxtaposed with Eurail travelogue footage (what looks like France seen from a moving train); and the 23 minute long film of a performance by Belgian funkateers Marine live juxtaposed with arty, kaleidoscopic visuals. Most known for the existensialist Chic of “Life In Reverse”, Marine’s entire aesthetic was based on the debut Benelux release, ACR’s emaciated cover of “Shack Up”. 

This DVD sags somewhat near its end as we enter the undistinguished and rudderless mid-80s phase of Factory output (the sub-Sade café bleu-isms of Kalima, anybody? I didn’t think so). But overall Umbrellas In the Sun is a wonderful document that conveys Crepuscule’s ultra-refined Euro-vision while also capturing captures a lost moment of art-into-pop infusion.

ohmylord, this period of Anthony H. Wislon A&Ring is quite something innit 

Devo - Hardcore Devo - December 15 1990

 

Vermorel / Westwood

 (for Artforum)

Fred Vermorel achieved both renown and notoriety for his unorthodox approach to pop biography and as a theorist of fame and fandom. But 1996’s Vivienne Westwood: Fashion, Perversity and the Sixties Laid Bare was his most eccentric statement yet.  For a start, the book was as much about Westwood’s partner Malcolm McLaren as the legendary designer herself.  Her story was ably chronicled in an imaginary interview weaved together from magazine quotes and half-remembered ancedotes stemming from Vermorel’s long association with the punk couture duo and the Sex Pistols milieu. But the book really came alive with the central section: Vermorel’s memoir of Sixties London, when he and McLaren were art-school accomplices. The longest and most vivid part of the book, it’s packed with fascinating digressions on topics such as the semiotics of cigarette smoking and the atmosphere of all-night art cinema houses. Among Vermorel’s several provocative assertions is the claim that pop music back then simply wasn’t as important as made out by subsequent false memorials to the Sixties, but was regarded as unserious, a mere backdrop to other bohemian or artistic activities.  Posing as a profile of a fashion icon, Vivienne Westwood presents the reader with an outlandish blend of cultural etiology (it doubles as an autopsy on the Sixties’s impossible dreams and analysis of its perverse psychology) and  triangular love story. Vermorel and Westwood emerge as both still besotted with the incorrigible McLaren, despite having each “broken up” with him long ago.    

-          Simon Reynolds

me and Stereolab / me and Stereolab spoofed

My first proper sit-down in-person interview with Stereolab 

(more readable text only version here)

Expertly lampooned in Melody Maker by a reader a few weeks later (or possibly a colleague pretending to be a reader? David Bennun did the letters page that week).

Other early Stereolab enthusiasm - mini-interview from a 1993 spread on Ambient as buzzword of '93, where they sat alongside Main and Seefeel and the Telepathic Fish crew.

And Single of the Week #2 also in late '93

Also wrote about this mini-LP in Spin that year

STEREOLAB 

The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music 

Spin, 1993 

Stereolab is one of the more intriguing groups to emerge from Britain's now-kaput dreampop scene. And this mini-LP is the group's most artful gambit yet. The title and packaging is a sly parody-homage to the "exotica" genre of the '50s, when tropical-scented, easy-listening albums by Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, etc, were designed so that the modern bachelor could (a) show off the stereophonic range of his state-of-the-art hi-fi, and (b) get his date "in the mood" before making his move. 

It's a good joke, and a logical evolution for dreampop, since My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive et al. always made for a consummate seduction soundtrack. Stereolab knows its musical history (it titled a recent single "John Cage Bubblegum") and on this album it explores the secret links between trance rock, ambient and Muzak. The result could be dubbed "kitschadelic": at once tacky and celestial, synthetic and sublime. On the opener, "Avant Garde M.O.R.", Laetitita Saider's serene and listeless vocals (midway between Nico and Astrud Gilberto) float through a fragrant mist of acoustic guitars, marimbas, and mood synths. "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Mellow)" could be the sort of jaunty, piped music you'd hear in a carpet store, but instead of being below the threshold of audibility, it's at full volume, so that its weirdness is in-your-face. The sequel, "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Foamy)" sounds like a Muzak vent that's fallen into a swimming pool. 

The pace picks up on Side Two (New Wave), with "We're Not Adult Orientated". At first, the song's reedy Farfisa and staccato beat really do sound Noo Wave, but the track develops into something that's less like the Cars and more like the motorik style of the German band Neu!, a brimming, tingling, exultant onrush of sound that simulates the sensation of gliding down the Autobahn. 

At times, Stereolab's parody of blandness is very nearly merely bland. But at its best, Stereolab is making the Muzak of the spheres.

I also wrote up the whole Melody Maker interview as a Q and A for my friends's independent magazine The Lizard (someone should digitize the whole six issue run of that, it was a much superior branching off a monthly full-colour publication called Lime Lizard, that itself had a lot of good stuff in it)

Stereolab

The Lizard

1994 

SIMON REYNOLDS quizzes TIM GANE and LAETITIA SADIER about muzak, minimalism, motorik, Marxism and their fab new LP "Mars Audiac Quintet".

All the stuff that you were rehabilitating last year with "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music" and tracks like "Avant-Garde MOR" --muzak, mood and moog music, stereo-testing LPs, 'exotica'--is now tres hip. First there was Research's "Incredibly Strange Music" book/CD, now there's Joseph Lanza's "Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening and Other Mood Song", Bar/None's anthology of avant-muzak legend Juan Garcia Esquivel (coincidentally titled "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music"), and so on, ad nauseam. All that stuff appears to be on the verge of entering the canon of acceptable, cool music.

    Tim: "My only problem with 'Incredibly Strange Music', or at least the first Volume (I've heard # 2 is better) is that it seemed to be trying to attract people for kitschy, B-Movie reasons. You know how people have all the B-Movie posters but probably never saw the films?  There's a difference between putting that music on at a party to make people laugh, and genuinely liking it as music. For me, muzak, moog, exotica, etc, it did a lot of things much earlier than other more respected, artistically serious forms of music did.  Maybe for different reasons, but that doesn't take away from the fact that it did them, and created often shockingly original connections or juxtapositions of sound and genre. A lot of the reason why it's popular now is that it was very modern music."

     So you're saying that it's the context of a music's creation, and of its consumption, that determines how seriously people take it? And that muzak is denigrated because of the way it was used, i.e. background listening?

    "A lot of it was done for the crassest of reasons. Martin Denny's Moog album was obviously a cash-in, but what he created had a resonance that was far greater than if it had been done for high art reasons. It's kind of beyond high art or low art, it mixes up those categories.  And the best music should be confusing, something you can't immediately decide what it's all about.  And that applies to Stereolab--we want it to have lots of spaces where the listener has to decide 'is it avant-garde? Is it pop? Is it just self-indulgence?' Music can be surrealist if you look at it the right way.

    "My big attraction to mood & moog music etc is that it's about the future. But 'cos it was made in the '50s and '60s, its idea of 'the future' was quite crass, but also full of optimism and infinite possibilities.  And that's different to now, where the future isn't about infinite possibilities..."

   It's about infinite anxieties.

   "There's an attraction there, that people thought 'the future is gonna be fabulous, and wow, this is the weird music we're gonna hear there'."

     Other elements that you draw on seem purely nostalgic, though, like all the ba-ba-ba-ba backing harmonies straight out of French '60s MOR.

    "There's a problem with that, which is you can get too close to El Records--too cloying, and such a close copy of the original that it's pointless. The point is to take that music and juxtapose it with something else, something it's never been associated with before. So that you create your own personality and your own sound.  There's no point in fetishising something, copying all the details precisely..."

     Because you create something that just sounds dated...  I suppose Stereolab's prime juxtaposition of hitherto antithetical elements is the way your sound fuses ultra-naff middle aged easy listening with ultra-cool underground rock: the trance-minimalism of the Velvets, Silver Apples, The Modern Lovers,Faust, Neu!, et al.

     "My favourite music of all time is German music from the early Seventies. Laetitia too.  Hearing Faust for the first time, it completely changed me.  I don't know why, but that music has a power over me that is just a little bit above everything else.  But that said, I don't like the Faust & Neu! thing to be bludgeoned to death."

     A lot of your songs do rely on the motorik beat that Kraftwerk and Neu! used, though. That very metronomic, unsyncopated, uninflected rhythm, that's almost anti-rock'n'roll even though you can trace it back from Neu!  through The Modern Lover's "Roadrunner", The Doors' "LA Woman" and Canned Heat's "On The Road Again", to Steppenwolf's "Born To Be Wild". Why do you love that motorik feel?

     Laetitia: "You can never get bored with that beat.  There's a discipline there, but never as an oppressor, always as something liberating.  I find rock'n'roll really alienating, so I'm glad that Neu! exists."

    Tim: "Krautrock is also very anti-muso--it has spaces where it's free form, but it's always done in a way that's non-musicianly.  There's no solos or self-indulgence.  It's spontaneous and exploratory, but not in that jazz sense of musicians playing to their full extent.  I still don't know what the precedent for Neu! and Faust is. I always have this argument with some friends in France, who say 'well, the French don't really play rock music, it isn't really in the culture'. And I say 'well, until Neu! & Co, rock hadn't been part of German culture, but they took it and made it into something that no one in America or England had dreamed of.  It was an expression of something very particular to that country, and yet it was far in advance of anything going on in the USA or the UK."

     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

'Ping Pong' is a critique of capitalism's in-built cyclical crises of slump and recovery, masquerading as Francoise Hardy-style Gallic girl-pop; "Wow and Flutter" is a chug-a-long World Of Twist meets Neu! anthem, whose chorus--"it's not eternal, imperishable, oh yes it will go"--gleefully anticipates capitalism's fall. So, Laetitia, are you a card-carrying Marxist?

    Laetitia: "There is something there that I probably agree with.  I've read 'The Communist Manifesto' and that was written over a century ago, but some of it still stands up.  Some of it is obsolete, cos it was written at a certain time. I don't like the term 'being a Marxist' 'cos that makes it a religion or something. But it's true that Marx was a great thinker and there's a lot to be learned from his writings, even today"

     Stereolab's ideas about integrating politics and pop are a helluva lot more sophisticated than most forms of agit-pop--specifically Manic Street Preachers, Rage Against Machine, Fun-Da-Mental, where there's a rather pat equation of hard politics and hard aggressive music. That whole combat rock posture.  The trouble with that kind of agit-pop is that the punters who buy into that ethos seem to think that buying a CD or a concert ticket (and then standing in a crowd of likeminds) is somehow a 'contribution to the struggle'.

    Tim: "All records are about self-image, in that you buy the music that reflects your sense of yourself and position in the world. It's about wanting to belong to a certain group. And that's not something you can change."

   Laetitia; "That approach is not subversive at all, because it's obvious. So screaming = 'angry'. The real subversion lies where you don't expect it."

     So Stereolab's political contribution resides in fostering a subtle, insidiously effective climate of critical awareness, as opposed to constructing a tenuous, shallow solidarity via slogans and calls-to-arms?

    Tim: "There has to be a certain amount of thought process involved on the part of the listener.  Like Dada--when they wanted to combat the First World War, instead of putting up posters that said 'We are against the War', they transformed it into an art thing that wasn't immediately or literally about the war, but evoked its horror and absurdity. The Situationists did the same thing, with 'detournement'".

     I was a big fan of the Situationists when I was younger, having read of them in interviews with Malcolm McLaren and initially assuming they were some fabulously subversive, evil rock band called The Situationists. Anyway, like you, I was very taken by their playful, mischievous forms of subversion--like pasting speech bubbles over advertising hoardings so that the people spouted anti-bourgeois rhetoric or surreal poetry. At the same time, the Yippies in America were doing similar kinds of agit-prop pranks, like proposing a pig for President.  Eventually, however, the far-left and anarchist radicals of the late Sixties realised that Dadaist wit was no match for the batons and bullets of state power.  And many of the idealists who were mobilised by 1968 evolved into terrorists units--the Weathermen in American, the RAF in Germany--and waged war on the State, fought fire with fire.  I mention all this because I remember Laetitia once said in an interview that she believed revolution would necessarily involve bloodshed and violence.

     Laetitita: "It's inevitable. The other day I was thinking about this, wondering: 'if revolution really does happen, what do we do with people like John Major? Do we kill them? Do we brainwash them? Do we get them to mop the streets?' When it gets that concrete, it's 'fucking hell!' Cos that's a hell of a responsibility. And that's why such a lot of revolutions, like the Maoists, involved so much blood and slaughter."

     I sometimes whether the problem is not capitalism versus socialism, but industrialism itself.  The Communist Bloc, as we all know, was state capitalist, not socialist--the surplus value generated by workers went to the Nation instead of private shareholders, which just meant that it went to finance the USSR's military-industrial complex. In some respects--like polluting the environment--Soviet state capitalism was worse than its Western equivalent. But who knows, even if 'proper' socialism was achieved--with real 'soviets', i.e.  workers councils--maybe life would still be dreary. Because you'd still be living in a managerial, bureaucratic society, you'd still have people working on conveyor belts or cleaning toilets with minimum job satisfaction. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to ask is: do you have a mental picture of utopia, of a perfectly run and just world?

   Laetitia: "No, I don't have such a picture. I don't think there could ever be a perfect world. At the same time, there's plenty of scope for a much fairer system. At the moment 6 percent of the world owns 90 percent of the wealth. All that wealth should belong to nobody and to everybody! It's completely mathematical, things just don't add up in our system.  And that's why there's slumps, that's why there's wars, and all these other dreadful things.  So I can imagine a much better world. But when you get down to practical details, it's harder...."

     I once asked another band this question (bizarrely enough,  Dinosaur Jr, of all people...) Can you imagine a situation where you would take up arms against the state?

    Laetitia: "The thing is that EVERYTHING must be used--your cleverness, the fact that you might be an acrobat...  Everything from weapons to the little money that you have that can be invested properly, to cunning tricks. So, weapons, yes. They have a whole army out there, a police force, and they don't hesitate to use them."

     Maybe the link between your interest in the Situationsts and the muzak & moog records is that very '60s sense of anticipation and excitement about the future. The Situationists' utopia was predicated on the idea of total automation leading to the abolition of work and a life of perpetual play. Which isn't so far from the idea of the comic book idea of the future, where your robot-butler brings your fried egg. The sleeves of the Moog records are full of techno-phile/neo-philiac, this-is-the-future iconography. It seems so naive now, but it's strangely touching and poignant.

    Tim: "It's just the idea of the future as strange because it's so totally non-traditional."

    Whereas now we know the future will be just like the past, only even more delapidated, and with hi-tech surveillance cameras in most urban areas.

   Laetitia: "That's the trouble, people don't believe in the future, they don't believe in revolution, or a better world, anymore.  They don't even want a better world. So therefore it's not gonna happen.  You have to want it first and to think it's possible, in order to make it come about." 

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This isn't even all my Stereolab writing! Did a thing on them and the Charles Long exhibition The Amorphous Body Study Center for Artforum (the CD they did of the music for that might be my single favorite album of theirs);  a review of Emperor Tomato Ketchup, a feature for Rolling Stone around that album.  

There can't be many artists I've written more about (Goldie? Who also got a single of the week the same week as 'Crumb Duck'. Young Gods? The Smiths / Morrissey, I guess... Aphex Twin...  in recent-ish times Ariel Pink. And oddly Royal Trux)