An album I appreciate a great deal more than when I bought it when it came out and first listened to it in 1991. Some records are like that. Pet Sounds, Astral Weeks, Forever Changes, Blue Lines this one. I liked it, it had the two great opening statement singles Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Nothing Can Stop Us but it also had a lot more. I didn't really understand the love and thought that had been put into it at the time. It was built to last.
Bob Stanley, certainly the mastermind behind the band was a music journalist originally and perhaps is the great example of one who made the transition from that role into making truly wonderful and significant music. Neil Tennant and Chrissie Hynde are the others that come to mind. Greater journalsts like Lester Bangs and Nick Kent never managed to do this. Though Stanley is, it needs to be said, a pretty great music journalist too.
Stanley in many ways is essentially a nostalgist. Foxbase Alpha is full of sepia tinted nostalgia for an English childhood of the Sixties and Seventies. The album is superbly presented. An Indie girl in artfully tilted cap, t-shirt and skirt carrying a banner bearing the album title on the cover. An inner sleeve with pictures of heroes set up to resemble the stickers you used to buy in childhood days in those lost decades. Hendrix, Dirk Bogarde, Arthurly (sic), Tuesday Weld, Peter Noone, Audrey Hepburn, Micky Dolenz, Francoise Hardy, Billy Fury, Brian and Dennis Wilson.
The attention to detail is meticulous and quite wonderful. The painstaking made to look easy. Almost in the same way as Morrissey had in the previous date, they itemise an alternative canon and deine themselves. Saint Etienne of course never had the staggering impact that The Smiths did when they appeared. I doubt that they are many people's favourite band, though of course I'm sure they are for some.
But they and many of the British bands who started up at around about the same time heralded a better time. It was just after the Poll Tax Riots, Margaret Thatcher was on her way and it was time for something better.
So The Stone Roses, Teenage Fanclub, Massive Attack, Ride, My Bloody Valentine, Suede,The Auteurs, Blur, Primal Scream, Rave and Acid House in no particular order. And Saint Etienne who somehow seem more significant figures on this landscape than they might have done at the time. Eventually it all led to Brit Pop, Things Are Going to Get Better and Tony Blair and New Labour.
It all proved to be something of another false dawn. But looking back and listening to Foxbase Alpha it does seem to indicate a wonderful if illusory optimism that the Sixties were possible again. It also make London seem like a quite wonderful idea.
Really, although Pet Sounds and Forever Changes are clearly totems for the band along with the equally important Sixtiesand Seventies singles and cinema and TV, there are two albums that came out just before, (both in 1989) that seem like the main departure points for Foxbase Alpha. De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising and The Stone Roses. It's difficult to imagine this without them.
That's not to take anything away from this record. It's best heard on your record player and without headphones I'd say. Some of the production sounds a bit tinny and synthetic at this remove. On the record player it sounds fully realised, like the dreams in Stanley's head.
This starts with the band name and opening track This is Radio Saint Etienne. Saint Etienne were a French football team who briefly but magically punched above their weight in the Mid-Seventies orchestrated by the great puppeteer Michel Platini. Platini in time, like Tony Blair would come to disappoint but was wonderful, mercurial, transformative player during his career.
Foxbase Alpha, like Three Feet High and Rising and The Stone Roses accentuates the positive. It's a pick and mix of Pop, Dance and magical childhood soundbites just made for the times but also as I said built to endure. Sarah Cracknell, who came onboard after Only Love Can Break Your Heart is the ideal frontwoman for their enterprise, the missing link, the last piece of the jigsaw. Cool and unattainable like their Sixties female icons.
This is their essential album along with a greatest hits. After this I'd say they became primarily a singles band though it should be pointed out that there is nothing, absolutely nothing wrong with that. Foxbase Alpha still has a glimmering allure thirty years on. Who'd have thought it. Saint Etienne. Dark horses.
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