“It’s not totally unusual for a band to be together for more than 20 years, but it’s not all that common,” she says. Cracknell was brought on after Stanley and Wiggs had already begun recording “Foxbase Alpha” with other singers. When they first emerged in 1990, Stanley and Wiggs were creating songs with a hodgepodge of samples and beats layered over synthesizers. That’s something that disappears from a lot of people over the years.”Ĭracknell confesses that she is somewhat surprised at the band’s longevity. “And I think the fact they are still music fans excited by discovering records, new and old, means they constantly feel the need to make music, to be involved. “They’ve held together as a band because they’re still good friends, even after all those albums and studio sessions, which is a rarity,” he says. Richard X, the producer who has worked with the band on several projects, attributes Saint Etienne’s longevity to that essential love of music. “And when I was married, and when I had kids, would Marc Bolan still be so important?” “It would be there for me,” Cracknell says in spoken voice on the song. The three members of Saint Etienne (and most of their audience) are now in their 40s, and after two decades together, the trio were clearly feeling a bit sentimental on “Words and Music.” The album opens with the song “Over the Border,” which tidily sums up the concept: how music shapes us in our youth, and how it evolves in our lives as we get older. The band also wrote music for a cartoon series, Stanley wrote a book, Cracknell had a baby, and Saint Etienne toured the UK behind a revamped version of its first album, “Foxbase Alpha.” None of these albums found overwhelming commercial success in the US, but the band does enjoy a cult following of Anglophiles here. They culled B-sides, unreleased material, rare cover versions, and fan-club-only songs. Cracknell, and bandmates Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, re-released deluxe editions of all eight previous albums. The band was not entirely sedentary during those years. “It doesn’t seem so long since we’ve put out ‘Tales From Turnpike House.’ It’s just a really organic process of doing other stuff,” she says. The delay between albums brought rumors of a breakup, but Cracknell attributes the delay to the band’s unstructured nature. It’s also Saint Etienne’s first album since 2005’s far more subdued “Tales From Turnpike House.”
Saint Etienne, now in its 22d year of cornering the market on this kind of retro-tinged pop, appears newly revitalized thanks to “Words and Music.” It’s one of the band’s best-reviewed albums in years and has pushed the trio back on tour, bringing them to the US for the first time since 2006 - the band comes to the Paradise Rock Club on Saturday. I love things like ‘Dancing Queen.’ I love that juxtaposition.” “But that’s a great thing, isn’t it? ABBA always had that. “There is indeed a bit of melancholy, but then you can dance to it,” Cracknell says on the phone from her home in Oxfordshire.