Skip to main content

Saint Etienne

Queen's Hall, Edinburgh
Four stars

“This is dedicated to Theresa May.” These aren't the sort of words you'd expect to hear at a Saint Etienne concert, especially given that singer Sarah Cracknell is sporting a feather boa and introducing the band's well worn cover of 1970s bubblegum hit Who Do You Think You Are? Touring on the back of their just released Home Counties album, the band's core trio of Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs remain a contrarily conceptualist bunch. An expanded eight-piece line-up troops onstage following a series of floridly fonted village notices beamed behind them. These are localised to include 'We Miss Josef K' and the Hue and Cry referencing 'Winthrop My Baby' (think about it).

The opening Kiss and Make Up conjures up ghosts of indie discos past in a a set that pitches an impeccable electro-pop pastoralist back catalogue alongside brand new nuggets. This allows the Euro-fizz of I've Got Your Music and Telstar keyboards of You're in a Bad Way to nestle next to the harpsichord-led Whyteleafe. During the joyous Magpie Eyes, images of Stevenage new town flash up, while Cracknell and long term vocal foil Debsey Whykes shimmy their way through the organ break.

With Stanley and Wiggs overseeing proceedings from behind a table load of electronic kit at the back of the stage, studio constructed samples are fleshed out by live flute and violin. The latin fiesta of Dive and motorik folk of Like A Motorway give an internationalist edge to Saint Etienne's sound of the suburbs. As does a final projection following a euphoric He's on the Phone. 'For the many, not not the few' it reads, a pop manifesto for our times.

 
The Herald, July 12th 2017

ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more