London Conversations: An Interview with Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne
Back in the middle of 2014, I was Features Editor of noripcord.com, and we were feeling ambitious. Between those of us who had been writing for the site for a while, we decided we wanted to bring the ‘zine into the 2010s. Enter NR+1: a long-form digital magazine where we could explore subjects in more detail and not be beholden to the up-to-the-minute pressures of the news cycle that a website will always have to consider. Issue One was great. We had Linda Perhacs on the cover, who had just returned to folk music after a long absence, and Pete Paphides was singing our praises on Twitter.
We were full of enthusiasm for Issue Two. Commissions were made, articles were written and then… it just never happened. Life got in the way, I guess. All of us who were involved had full-time jobs as well as writing for the website, so taking on another time-consuming venture, sadly, just wasn’t feasible in the long-term.
I was particularly disappointed as I’d secured the cover story for Issue Two: an interview with Pete Wiggs of Saint Etienne. Saint Etienne were — and still are — one of my favourite bands. They were about to release a book featuring pictures from their first quarter century together and were hitting the promotional trail, hence why I was able to get phone time. The resulting article has been sitting forlornly on my hard drive… until now.
The best and most enduring musical artists often seem to inhabit their own universe. They can take the humdrum and quotidian, put it through their own filter, and produce something that no-one else would be able to. For the past quarter century or so, Saint Etienne have also done this, except that the universe they inhabit is London, and the filter they use is comprised of the sights, sounds and untold stories of the UK’s capital city.
Saint Etienne’s London is not the London of movies and tourism guides, it’s the everyday London of the people who live there and who make the city what it is. In ‘Girl VII,’ a track from their debut album, ‘Foxbase Alpha,’ the band list areas of London alongside some glamorous and well-known world locations (“Gospel Oak, São Paulo, Boston Manor, Costa Rica, Arnos Grove…”). However, you notice it’s the areas outside of central London rather than, say, Leicester Square or Piccadilly Circus. Saint Etienne celebrate the lesser-known places, stories and voices. Indeed, in 2005, they released a concept album about the inhabitants of a fictional London block of flats, called ‘Tales From Turnpike House.’
This status of sitting slightly on the cusp of the mainstream when it comes to influences and London is also reflected in the music Saint Etienne make. Their early ’90s work may bear some of the hallmarks of the trip-hop style of the day, but they have always largely ploughed their own furrow, away from trends and fads, giving their work a timeless quality. The roots of their eight studio albums lie in synthpop, but their sound also brings in elements from genres as disparate as dance, hip-hop, disco and hi-NRG pop. They’re clearly keen students of the history of pop music, a love shown by their innate understanding of what makes a song work and their way with a hook. Further cementing this scholarly reputation, the band’s Bob Stanley released his book, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah,’ in 2013, an indispensable guide to the story of pop music from 1952 through to 2001.
Now, two years after the release of their last album, ‘Words And Music By Saint Etienne,’ the group are overseeing the release of a book containing a wealth of photographs from their long and varied career, annotated by the band themselves. Published by First Third Books Ltd and simply titled ‘Saint Etienne,’ the book is limited to a worldwide print run of 2,000 copies and features a foreword from Lawrence, the enigmatic frontman of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart.
In June, I spoke to Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs over the phone from his home in Sussex.
What made you want to put this book of photos together now, particularly?
It was put to us by the publishers, First Third Books, who are assembled friends of ours. It started off as a joint venture between Paul Kelly and Lora Findlay, who’s done lots of artwork for us as well; Lora did the cover for ‘Tales From Turnpike House.’ They’d been talking about it because they did a book about Felt, which was fantastic, so we’d seen that and loved it, and then they said they wanted to do one with us.
Lawrence from Felt actually writes the foreword for your book. How did that come about? Have you known him for a while?
We’ve known him on and off for a long time. We were always fans of Felt — Sarah actually went out with him in the ’80s before I knew her! We were big fans of Denim too, and when Bob and I had a label, we put out one of their singles which was withdrawn because it came out at the same time Princess Diana died and it was called ‘Summer Smash.’ It seems unfair not to play it because of that — it obviously wasn’t about her!
There’s a great film about Lawrence directed by Paul Kelly too, called ‘Lawrence Of Belgravia.’ I’ve got a cameo in it eating a sandwich! I didn’t realise I was going to be in it; they supported us at a gig and I’m just there in the background.
At the start of the book, most of the shots are just of you and Bob, as the band was just the two of you. Was the plan for Saint Etienne always to be just a duo and to use guest vocalists or were you looking for somebody permanent when Sarah came along?
Initially, it was the idea to just be the two of us — I’m trying to think who were basing it on; there were various precedents of people who had worked with many different singers. We thought that was a good idea but then it looked very unwieldy with just Bob and me. When we met Sarah we got on so well that we wanted her to join permanently. She was such good fun, we got on brilliantly and she could also put up with Bob and me!
Bob and you have known each other for years and years, but how did you come to meet Sarah?
It was through a girlfriend of Bob’s at the time. We said we were looking for a singer — we were always on the lookout for singers — and she said she knew a girl who was singing in Spanish. We thought it was cool Sarah was singing in Spanish, but she can’t even speak it! We hadn’t even heard the record but we agreed to meet up but we went round hers and she cooked us dinner, so she was in before we’d even heard her sing really. She joined us and sang on our next song, ‘Nothing Can Stop Us Now,’ which was only our third single but it seemed like we’d been around ages by then.
I was looking through the book and the pictures go back to the early ’90s. When you went through those photos, were there any that brought back specific memories or anything you’d particularly forgotten?
There’s one of Bob pointing a gun at me, which I’d completely forgotten. My memory’s normally alright but it’s timescales I’m just rubbish at. There are pictures where it’s Bob and I doing a photoshoot with cameras for ‘Foxbase Alpha.’ I thought that the picture for the cover of the album came from that shoot, but we were actually trying to recreate a shot that had already been done, which I’d totally forgotten. I remember doing the shoot but looking at the pictures gives you amazing memories and brings back that excitement of a really, really brilliant time. I’d just given up my job to do this full-time and I didn’t have any money but we were doing things like those photoshoots and going to the studio, so it was like a dream world.
There’s one really great picture in the book from 1993 which Bob describes as you going for the ‘Penthouse and Pavement’ look. It doesn’t actually say what that photoshoot was for — do you remember?
I think it was just us doing some press shots and I think it was Jamie Fry; he did some of our photos and we immediately got on really well with him. I’m trying to remember now — it might have been for Smash Hits actually. Jamie was a really good laugh so we got him to do a few shots for us and he came up with the idea of the backdrop. There’s another of his pictures where I’ve got a tea cosy on my head. He was in The World Of Twist and we were all mates with them, and then he was in Earl Brutus, so we often saw him.

The pictures in the book seem to show you as a band who were always game for a laugh. Photoshoots are a necessary evil for artists but did you make a conscious decision to approach them in a more fun or open-minded way?
It’s funny you should say that because a lot of the time we were completely the opposite. There were limits, there were certain things we didn’t want to do, which I suppose were the more standard things a lot of the time. When you get a photographer asking you to do poses which are ridiculous, it’s annoying, and that happened quite a lot. Although these ones might look a lot of fun there were plenty of times that we were actually freezing cold or something like that.
Are there any particular examples of things you wouldn’t do in shoots?
Things like the “thinker” pose, where we’d all be asked to sit there holding our chins. Earlier in our career we did some bad ones but afterwards we always thought that we shouldn’t have done them. You can normally tell when it’s wrong. These days, because it’s digital you can check and pick out which ones are good, but then we didn’t have a clue.
You’ve had Best Ofs and compilations and so on before, but with this book going through 25 years of Saint Etienne, does it feel like the end of a chapter or was it more that the offer of a book came at a particular time and it was just the thing to do?
I think ultimately you’re not going to get many more great pictures of us! There are fewer pictures these days anyway but I think people always are going to want to look at the earlier stuff where we’re a bit younger and not where we’re aging. So, I think it makes sense. I guess when you see a Best Of, you wonder if there’s any more stuff coming, but that wasn’t the intention with this book.
One of the things I’ve always thought comes across with Saint Etienne’s music is that, first and foremost, you’re big music fans, and particularly big pop fans, yourselves. Are you still fans today in the way that you always have been?
Yes, but I used to buy loads more music than I do now. With Spotify and things like that, I tend to listen more that way now, and get one song by someone rather than buy a whole album. I just get the one track that I heard and liked initially, which is kind of bad really. Traditionally, in the old days, you’d buy something and get to hear stuff that you wouldn’t like on first listen, but you don’t nowadays. I shouldn’t listen like that really.
It’s interesting because you make albums and therefore must think about the sequencing, but you’re just like the rest of us and cherry-pick the ones you like.
I know, I feel bad because we spend ages on sequencing and making each of our records flow as a whole. It’s the modern ailment though.
London has been a big source of inspiration for the band since the start. Is it still as much of an inspiration and is there still more of London to be inspired by?
It’s interesting because neither Sarah nor I live in London anymore — I’m down in Hove, near Brighton, and Sarah’s in Oxfordshire. In a way in preserves that outside view of London. Before that, I was in Croydon so I’ve been getting further away, so it’s kept the excitement going for now. We still get excited about going to London. Originally, Bob and I are from Surrey and Sarah was born near Windsor, so we’ve always been on the outskirts.
Do you think that’s part of the romanticism of London? If you’re in the South of England, everything is very focussed towards London and if you’re not actually from there, it ends up being this mysterious place that you get to go to occasionally.
Yes, that’s how it opened up to us. When you were younger, you’d go on the odd day trip there or maybe a school trip and it was always exciting. But even in the short distance from Croydon to central London, the differences in attitude, certainly when I was growing up, were really noticeable. I felt like I was in more of a backwater mentality in Croydon, certainly in terms of cosmopolitan attitudes or attitudes towards people wanting to dress slightly differently.
The band have always been about far more than music — there have been films, this book, of course, writing, DJing, and so on. What are the next projects for both you, individually, and for the band?
I did the music for the film we made together [‘How We Used To Live’], and I did that live. There were Q&As and that sort of thing, and we’ll be doing that again at The Barbican — that’s our next big, joint thing together. We’re doing a set of songs before it, which should be good fun. Personally, I want to do more stuff for films. I’m working on a commercial film, a documentary about the leather industry, which is a bit different. It’s quite good matching the footage to the music, so I’m really enjoying that.
There was a gap of seven years between ‘Tales From Turnpike House’ and ‘Words And Music.’ Are there any plans to get back in the studio or is it more a case of seeing how it goes?
Yeah, we’re not not making a record. We all want to do something but it’s just a case of timing and getting a deal. I don’t think we’re in a rush to do anything though.
