The Videodrone Extra Falls Head Over Heels For Saint Etienne

The video for Saint Etienne’s first single, a springheeled overhaul of Neil Young’s weepy “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” featured future/permanent singer Sarah Cracknell, looking both plain Jane and utterly exotic, wandering through market stalls and dreaming of nothing more exciting than the right sparkly old-school frock, as her geek-boy producers dream of the singer who will bring their (plain Jane and utterly exotic) pop to life. It may have nailed the band’s whole aesthetic–retro raw materials filtered through modern dance music glitz; the “happy being sad” lyrics of plastic kiddie record box full of British indie singles–the first time out. But it also set up the following 12 more-or-less essential singles, the kind of run that you only get a few times in a decade (if you’re lucky).

They’re actually not all available online–was there a video shot for the sublime “Join Our Club”/”People Get Real” double a-side?–but the remaining 11 make the case just as strongly. Tom Ewing of Freaky Trigger once argued for the Pet Shop Boys’ first 20 singles as “the greatest run of singles in the whole history of pop music.” I’m not necessarily going to argue that point, but I might nominate Saint Etienne as the PSB’s junior heirs, at least for a brief moment in the early ’90s.

1990’s “Kiss And Make Up” was also a cover, another languid dance version of a song by a bunch of moon-eyed mopers. There may be a bit of a gulf separating the Field Mice’s indie-pop jangle from Shakey’s ragged glory, but in Saint Etienne’s hands the songs become of a piece: bongo break, skanking piano, and a sigh that suggests any day would be better spent lazing around in bed. The video’s parade of androgynous mod cuties and striped jumpers is like a Belle and Sebastian record sleeve come to life, with the bonus of a much better beat.

The 12-inch mix of 1991’s “Nothing Can Stop Us” sounds far more like New York’s deep house clubs than London’s indie nights, with the incandescent organs and skipping snares you’d hear booming from Manhattan discos in the early ’90s, Cracknell’s vocals deployed like a downtown diva ripe for funky sampling. The whole song chilled on half a joint, the video’s swirling tye dye backgrounds and flower-power computer graphics are the stoned-to-say-the-least cousin of Dee-Lite’s manic ’60s and ’70s kitsch.

Saint Etienne producers Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley are infamous for recycling that kitsch, the kind of “junk” that Stanley captured in the title of his glam rock collection Velvet Tinmine, the bubblegum that time forgot. But 1992’s “Avenue” is nostalgic in a wholly different way–less cheery, more eerie. The beat is still up to date, but the video glows like it was shot with a spectral Super-8 camera, a Boards of Canada promo clip with an actual song attached.

’93s “You’re In A Bad Way,” on the other hand, always erred too far on the up-with-people end of kitsch to be anything but merely cute, right down to the video’s easy gag of casting the band as a ’60s beat combo, Beatles-style logo on the kick drum and all. Which suggests that if you subtract the lovelorn mood and the disco beats from Saint Etienne’s music, all you’re left with is a yellow residue of chirpy indie-pop.

With the same year’s “Hobart Paving” we’re back on steadier footing–i.e. the wistful brand of nostalgia the band does so well–with sour grayscale footage of dismal English teenagers moving through dismal English streets, counterpointed by the song’s lonely mix of harmonica, piano, and trumpet, until it’s suddenly not dismal at all, but charming in a down-at-heel way. Only a band so sentimental (and unashamed of being sentimental) could make such a purposefully grubby, heart-tugging scene come off romantic rather than maudlin.

And with “Who Do You Think You Are?” we’re back to what the band does best: dance-pop for collegiate sophisticates written by two pasty nerds and casually mimed by beautiful women in bob hairdos and pretty print dresses. Obviously the video budget was all used up on the classy Frenchie new wave look of “Hobart Paving” when it came time to shoot this trifle of a b-side.

Far from a stop-gap holiday single, “I Was Born On Christmas Day” is one of those rare Christmas tunes worth slipping onto mixtapes year ’round, probably because it’s got very little to do with either Santa or baby Jesus, unless they also enjoy bopping around their bedrooms to knock-off Hi-NRG.

1994’s “Pale Movie” lays it on a bit thick with the street sign pointing towards “Exotica”–especially for a video featuring three Brits with scooters and snappy ’60s suits who are idealizing the kind of Spanish countryside that only exists only in subtitled-and-letterboxed romances about impossible trysts among the very beautiful–but song (with its somehow non-pukey Spanish guitar) and clip are certainly of a piece.

And from the foreign-film idealized to the kitchen-sink real on ’94s “Like A Motorway,” with boxy British cars racing down overcast English highways, rather than Vespas crusing along under the Spanish sun, plus some make-do live footage, a music video trope I’ve never understood outside of the record company watching the bottom line. The matte finish on the song’s understated indie-techno beat makes it one of their best downcast disco moments, however.

“Understated” is not an adjective you could comfortably throw at the lounge-record-on-78 giddiness of “Hug My Soul,” especially when combined with its video, a Freudian car crash of sex and twee where Cracknell dresses like a pervy 12-year-old, cuddles with stuffed animals, and frolics in the woods. The whole thing is just…off. Somewhat wrong. Generally uncomfortable. The clip may only be for fans with a tolerance for nuclear-level creepy-cute, but the song’s vibraphone vibe anticipates the batchelor pad Stereolab of a few years later, while having a pulse the ‘Lab of that era so often lacked.

And it’s another all-change for their greatest single, 1995’s “He’s On The Phone,” the band turned shabby chic cosmopolitans sporting sensible suits and stylish shoes, the kind of dressed-up nightlife that their music would soon embody a little too well. Still deliciously cheesy here, the song is easy for grouches to criticize as being built on one easy trick–huge, booming Eurodisco production played against Cracknell’s winsome indie-wallflower delivery–but abjuring easy tricks quickly turned Saint Etienne’s music into bloodlessly polite “pure pop” formalism. It’s here, on the cusp of embarassing themselves to get to achieve big pop moment, where they made the kind of ambitious, pleasure-centric records that current indie-pop/rock bands should start imitating yesterday.

[EDIT: Thanks to commenter Jupiter8 for the corrections/factual heads-up.]