SARAH CRACKNELL IN LOVE WITH THE SONGS: A SAINT ETIENNE STORY
- 12 hours ago
- 9 min read
GOOD GOD, THAT’S NOT supposed to happen! Sarah Cracknell is non-music-industry punctual (“I know. I am, I can’t help it. I hate being late.”), reassuring even when plans are thrown out the window (“Oh dear, I’m scared now. No, I’ll cope.”) and has the kind of laugh that warms. A good human from a band, Saint Etienne, no one has ever knowingly said a bad word about.
A good human even to, or especially to, an unabashed fan on the other side of the call, a pop music fan like she was years back on hearing songs like David Essex’ early ‘70s moody groove, Rock On (“It has this crazy production where you’d go, I’ve never heard that before, I love it!.”). A journalist fan whose favourite album of her band is Words And Music by Saint Etienne, 2012’s joyous full-scale exploration of how and why we fall for music and those who make it.
And it is in this world of lifelong love affair with song, with it turns out some unwise drinking choices, where our story takes place today.
As Saint Etienne – decidedly southern English notwithstanding the name; a trio of Cracknell up front, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs behind/around; purveyors of music that has linked crowded dancefloors, solo bedrooms, sunny festivals & low sky wistfulness – conduct a farewell tour on the heels of a farewell album that touched on many sides of their 36-year career, they are going out the way they came in – as devotees. So does Cracknell still consider herself a fan, first and foremost?
“Yeah, I do get a bit fan-like about certain artists and bands. Definitely. I absolutely have that feeling about certain people,” she says, her back to a yard bathed in sun, goalposts to one side, greenery to the other. “I was really gutted to hear that Oliver Tree had died. I just love that guy so much. I went to see him in London and came away from that thinking what an amazing character, what an amazing spirit. He’s a really good guy and I’ve read about him and he’s a real philanthropist. He made a will apparently saying that if anything ever happens to me – it’s almost like he foresaw the future – any money he had would go to aspiring artists. What a good guy: I love him. I love Lola Young, she’s another one I’m a bit obsessed with at the moment.”
If it isn’t already clear from those three decades-plus and 13 albums, not to mention Bob Stanley’s many books – you could do worse than starting with the fabulous Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story Of Modern Pop – Pete Wiggs’ DJing and film score composing, and the labels they’ve run, this isn’t new. Nor fleeting.
“We all are, all three of us, music fans. I started with that when I was in my teens, getting really obsessed with bands and going to all their gigs and turning up at the record shop on Monday morning to buy their newest album,” Cracknell says, before correcting herself. “Ordering it. I’d order it the week before and then you’d get in on a Monday.”
What does she get out of being a fan?
“It’s different now but when I was younger, in my teens and stuff, it created a kind of gang of people. My friends, we’d sit in the pub – when I was 15, when you were allowed to sit in the pub at 15 and nobody cared. My friend used to turn up in her school uniform, get changed in the toilets [she laughs] and the landlord didn’t care – and become quite gang-like, but in a nice way, because there was no other way to research bands or find out about bands apart from just talking, gossiping about them.
“It was a really lovely feeling of kinship. I hope people still have that. It is different, because obviously you can access anything and you can cherry-pick, not get a whole album, and all that kind of thing, but I think there are artists that people sit and talk about and all love that same band.”
That “gang” would be familiar to anyone who didn’t just like music but felt like they’d found a community even if at a distance. It can turn unpleasant, as those who’ve watched the petty gatekeepers decide what’s cool and who’s out would know, but at its best it is inclusive.
“That’s it,” Cracknell says. “It’s not excluding people, cause I would hate that as a thing, it’s about sharing and going ‘listen to this band, I think you might really like it’. It’s sharing ideas.”
Did that sense of excitement about sharing dissipate or become tempered by being someone who was making the music and being judged?
“No, not at all. I definitely still feel that sharing thing. Interestingly, I’ve got two sons and they’re in their early 20s and they share stuff with me that they think I might like. And that’s great. It’s full circle isn’t it?”
The value of that circle becomes clear – and an intra-band secret revealed – when Cracknell is asked if she is someone who still buys music to have and to hold.
“I’m pretty crap actually,” she confesses. “I don’t listen to music nearly as much as I should do and I especially don’t buy as much music as I should do. But I live vicariously through my sons, who do. And Bob, as we know, is a big collector of records still. His house nearly caved in once, some time ago, cause [his vinyl] were all in the loft and he started to get subsidence in his house.
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t collect records. I keep giving my records to my sons because they play vinyl a lot more than I do. And I love the fact that there’s a big resurgence in vinyl for the youth, I think it’s great. Because it is that thing about having a physical thing and then reading sleeve notes and who wrote what and who played what and looking at everything. Artwork is so important and it can make it a lovely tactile thing, and I love that.
“I should get back into it. Maybe I’ll start another collection.”
Inevitably, one fan to another, there is the perennial question: what’s her most recent discovery? Or rediscovery?
“One of the things that’s been happening, for a while, is the resurgence of drum’n’bass kind of beats. So I love Pink Pantheress and I loved drum’n’bass when it started. When I first heard it I was absolutely obsessed. I used to go to this club called The Rocket, on Holloway Road and I remember being in the queue to go in and everyone was really young – I was young but there were a lot of really young people – and they’d all take pills on the way in, in the queue.
"Sometimes the queue would go on for a really long time and you’d see that they were starting to get really out of it in the queue. Oh, they’ve peaked too soon.”
It got weirder, or straighter if you like, inside the club though.
“I actually wanted a drink, an alcoholic drink, and you’d go to the bar: ‘can I have a Jack Daniels and Coke?’ and they’d look at you like you were mad,” Cracknell continues. “They’d find some dusty bottle on the shelf, dust it off, and pour you a drink. No one was drinking apart from me; everyone just had water.”
Hopefully she did grow out of the JD and Coke order, and I say this as someone who started drinking scotch and coke at around the same age she was, even though I didn’t like the taste of either.
“I think I overdid that,” she laughs. “I have a memory of my first ever drink in a pub. I was with my cousin, Chrissie, who was older than me, and some of her male friends who were older than her – I was about 14 or something, isn’t it awful? – and they said what would you like to drink and I didn’t know what to say. Maybe I got it from a James Bond film or something but I said ‘I’ll have a scotch on the rocks’, and I remember sipping this like medicine, it was the most revolting, horrible thing I’d ever had, trying to get it down. Made me feel sick.”
Sick, sure, but a little sophisticated too, no?
“I did. I felt really sophisticated.”
If the drinks have improved, or at least better chosen – “I met Neil Tennant and he was lovely. Bought me a bottle of champagne. He’s a good guy!” – are the gigs still happening?
“I do like a live gig. I often think, oh god I’m going to be standing for hours!,” she says with a smile. “Do I get in the mosh pit? I don’t think so. But once I’m there I do get very engaged and swept away by things.”
As for her own gigs, Cracknell reveals there are times when “I have these slightly out of body experiences where I’m looking down not only on myself but on the audience. And then I start having inner conversations like ‘am I waving my arms in the air too much? Do they think that’s weird?’”, though she does seem otherwise sane. And still keen.
“We get excited about a lot to be honest. We still embrace the whole experience [of performing live]. We’re very excited about Barcelona [where they’ll be on the bill with Tennant’s Pet Shop Boys] and we’re very excited about these upcoming shows with Belle And Sebastian, so that will be great.”
All great. Still exciting. So why give it up?
“Ah,” she says with a chuckle followed by a long pause. “Basically, I wanted to finish and I wanted to finish on a high and I wanted to finish when we’ve still got it. Some bands I think keep crapping on a bit and they should just go away. I’m not going to mention any names, obviously, but I wanted to finish at the top of our game. I wanted our final album to be a real celebration of all our music and I wanted to go out and say goodbye to everyone. I just thought it was the right time, personally.”
They got it right with the album, last year’s International, sound like they’re getting it with the tour, so I guess we have to accept they’re getting it right with the ending even if, being greedy, we might hope they do maybe one more. Two if it sings. Ok, three if there’s time….Hmm, maybe Saint Etienne know us better than we know ourselves. (And we can still hold that little fan dream that they could always come back in five or ten years and go again. Right?)
What will Sarah Cracknell do once this ride is over and she goes back to being a music fan not a music fan musician?
“I haven’t got a clue! It’s not a very well thought out plan. Bob will be writing, Pete’s doing really well doing film soundtrack work but I haven’t thought it through for myself, which is a bit foolish.”
Oh no, that’s not foolish. Why does everything need a plan? What’s the rush?
“Absolutely. I look at my two sons [one graduated from film school, one a musician], who are doing great, and I often think god it’s tough isn’t it? They’re at that part where they’re really working out how to do things, what to do, striving for stuff. It’s a lot easier for me to stop and go, well I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.”
Maybe a book though? She has been asked to write an autobiography it turns out, and there’s a handy co-writer/ghost writer right there in Bob Stanley, a prolific chronicler of pop music past and nearly-present. Though turns out his greatest appeal isn’t his obvious ability.
“I don’t remember enough whereas Bob knows everything about me, so I won’t have to remember that much. [whispers] Bob will do a really good job.”
Hopefully he avoided the Jack Daniels and Cokes back in the day, which can’t be said of all of us.
“I did have an incident in Japan where I’d been drinking a lot of Jack Daniels and Coke and not eating very much and jetlagged. I ended up with a kidney infection,” a wry Cracknell recalls. “So there you go, there’s a lesson to the youth!”
Alternatively, for the ultimate music fan, going out that way would have been so rock’n’roll.
“Oh it is isn’t it?,” she laughs. “How terrible. I’m ashamed. Very ashamed.”
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Saint Etienne play:
Powerstation, Auckland, November 20
Meow Nui, Wellington, November 21
The Gov, Adelaide, November 23
Forum, Melbourne, November 26
Enmore Theatre, Sydney, November 27
The Tivoli, Brisbane, November 29
Freo Social, Fremantle, December 1