Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne once wrote a blog post about
the London Pedway, “high walks” that were originally intended to go through the
West End and to provide an alternative to streets chocked with traffic.
Conservationists and regime change scuppered the plan and the most complete section,
from the Barbican to Moorgate has subsequently been demolished, the old flat
roofed pubs, gentleman’s outfitter and the two banks, Midland and National
Westminster Bank signage revealed near the end, all signifiers of an earlier
age and unfulfilled vision.
As with his music, Bob touches on the sweet spots of
optimism passed, imagined or otherwise, and it is where he has returned with
his band’s latest album, I've Been Trying to Tell You, made with vocalist Sarah
Cracknell and Peter Wiggs. Described by Bob as being about "about
optimism, and the late nineties, and how memory is an unreliable narrator"
the music is about the period of New Labour, from 1997 to 2001 and the beginnings
of the modern world with the attack on the Twin Towers. As we look back from this time of political helplessness and as younger creatives pick the sweet spots from the decade of Trip Hop and Brit Pop, we have to ask; is that all there is?
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| I once danced in a fountain in Liverpool... |
I've Been Trying to Tell You is the band’s first album based on samples since before
that time and, fittingly, it uses samples from the period as the basis for the
tracks. This is, of course, the perfect metaphor for their subject matter,
memories and music can be twisted, re-run and overwritten, extrapolated and
mixed with dream and misconception… sampled, slowed down and replayed at
greater length. It’s a Lockdown reverie that, as others have said, manages what
St Etienne often do, to create something old and something new.
Tapping into this is film maker Alasdair McLellan, who had already been talking to the band about making a film based on their music when told that, due to circumstances, the original album had to be shelved and then replaced with this one, created in remote studios from Brighton (Pete) up to Saltaire (Bob) via Sarah in Oxford. Alasdair is based in London and his mother in South Yorkshire and so the A1 became even more iconic in terms of the ensuing project along with the road signs that point the way and, indeed, spell out the album’s title and intent. In the progressive rock seventies, Hatfield and the North took their name from an A1 road sign, now McLellan was to infer deeper meaning form these signposts to British locations and feelings.
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| Timeless low summer rays transform Albion |
We all have our own relationship with St Etienne as Jason
Wood points out in his booklet essay on the films of Saint Etienne and for
McLellan their albums were a soundtrack to his formative years in the nineties.
The endless summers of his Doncaster youth walking for hours past endless rows
of bungalows listening to the music as he says in the excellent interview with
the BFI’s Stuart Brown and Bob Stanley. One of Sarah Cracknell’s instructions
was a reference to that late summer ambiance, and McLellan’s low-sunlit vignettes
form a cohesive visual commentary to the eight tracks of the album.
The opener features gorgeous orange sunlit stone of St Pauls and then Marble Arch as a young couple meet on a bench for a short but not so sweet assignation that leaves them setting off in different directions. They look dressed for a ball and yet there’s something stopping them which we can only imagine. They are both beautiful and that’s a hallmark of the film with models being used rather than actors and McLellan’s background in fashion photography enabling him to place these impossible people into everyday contexts that all ages can connect with.
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| Portmerion |
The cast drift through the loose narratives, edited in for
musical specificity or dramatic inference and against backdrops up and down the
A1 and far apart. There’s a lovely sequence in Port Merion, Clough
Williams-Ellis’ Italianate village in North Wales, famous for acting as the set
of The Prisoner and yet perhaps not given the credit it deserves by
younger generations. It’s a marvel of location, association and design and
allowed McLellan plenty of scope to improvise a compelling narrative with just
three performers and the giant chess board installed by the fans of No. 6… It’s
an unreal place at the best of times.
Elsewhere the use of a sample from Love of a Lifetime
by Honeyz on the first track, Music Again, which includes a synthesised harpsichord
which made the director think of Stratford-upon-Avon and comparing actual Tudor
with mock Tudor in Hampstead. It doesn’t stop there though as we drift from Marble
Arch to the stones of Avebury with their powerful connotations of seventies
children’s folk horror, another memory co-existing with alternate facts.
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| Youth being not wasted on the young. |
Memory and assoiation, real and constructed… European
cinema mixed in with sixties British kitchen sink and channelled out like a
city symphony albeit one based across the country. It’s like Arcadia…
but with more now than then.
Penlop features a sample from the Lightning Seeds’
Joy and features some wonderful sequences of Blackpool, the lights
barely changed from when I used to be taken up there every winter to see them.
Multiple Cracknell’s sing arcane words channelling the Cocteau Twin’s Liz
Fraser in tone and possible intent...
I don't really know you
But I'd like to show you
Just a town
We wear olive brown…
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| How many Sarah Cracknells does it take? |
As with memory, interpretation is fluid and McLellan’s guess
is as good as yours but its unerringly absorbing and attuned to the music. It’s
one to watch again and again if you want to refine your response and there are
some beautiful sections… but there’s always a point to all this and as with
memories, it’s ultimately down to you what you focus on. Few of us looked like
the models in the film back in 1997 and not every chemical processing plant
comes with a gorgeous soundtrack and a sunny day.
Ultimately, perhaps the question is how we use the memory
to move forward both those of us who were there and those who are, only now,
just visiting. Things can only get better… and maybe they will?
There is, after all, a young man eating a Zoom ice lolly.
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| Summer breeze |
The film comes with some splendid extras including:
·
Bob Stanley and Alasdair McLellan in
conversation with the BFI’s Stuart Brown (2021, 29 mins)
·
New Saint Etienne music videos directed by
Alasdair McLellan: Her Winter Coat, Hello Holly, Escalade
and Access to All Alone / Infinity 21 (2021, 20 mins)
·
An illustrated booklet, with the first pressing
only, including an introduction by Alasdair McLellan, an essay by Jason Wood;
Bob Stanley and Jason Wood in conversation, a director biography, full credits
and notes on the special features
You can order it now direct from the BFI shop online!
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| Pete and Bob grab a cuppa |
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