The album was recorded in a style which drew on the club culture and house music of the time, but also incorporates the group's characteristic love of 1960s pop, with tracks also bridged by samples from films or by short songs. At the time of recording, Sarah Cracknell was not fully part of the group, and as a result she does not sing on "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", which is sung by Moira Lambert. The album was on the shortlist of nominees for the 1992 Mercury Prize.
Originally, Stanley and Wiggs envisioned Saint Etienne as a platform designed for multiple vocalists, a la London dance circuit compatriots Soul II Soul and Bristol sound system stalwarts Massive Attack. On Foxbase Alpha, three different vocalists can be heard: Moira Lambert (formerly of the London-based group Faith Over Reason), Donna Savage (of Auckland-based band Dead Famous People), and Cracknell. While the latter is the most prominent of the three across the entirety of the album and deservedly earned the permanent gig as a result, the three-headed voice heard on Foxbase Alpha certainly makes for an intriguing listen. Particularly so when coupled with its mellifluous, multi-textured mélange of house, disco, dub, folk, and pop influenced flourishes, which Stanley described as “a scrapbook” and “stylistically all over the place.” Instead of a messy hodgepodge of incongruous elements, however, Foxbase Alpha was a gorgeous, gratifying pastiche of symbiotic sounds and expertly incorporated samples.
Saint Etienne was finally conceived in 1990, the name taken from the French football team, just because, in Bob’s words, they liked the sound of it, nothing more, nothing less. They made their mark quickly with an audacious and magnificently inspired dub-meets-Balearic debut single, a cover of Neil Young’s plaintive 1970 acoustic ballad Only Love Can Break Your Heart, recorded in just hours for the princely sum of a few hundred quid.
The song was an otherworldly delight: a tripped out, hazy, lazy shuffle with some gorgeous filmic atmospherics and a spaghetti western, tumbleweed aura conjured up by the heavily-reverbed production. An eerily distressed honky-tonk piano playing out the catchy motif along with a cavernous dub bass underpinned everything, whilst on top of this floated an almost spectral vocal from guest singer Moira Lambert. It was almost as if King Tubby had hitched a ride on a train bound for Brixton and Clerkenwell rather than his native Jamaica.
A second cover version followed a few months later – this time a faithful rendition of a dance track Let’s Kiss And Make Up by indie pop legends The Field Mice, which further boosted the profiles of both bands (Saint Etienne shared personnel and producer/engineer: Harvey Williams and Ian Catt respectively). A different female singer fronted this song: Donna Savage from venerable Australian indie popsters Dead Famous People.
After two different singers, the band were divided as to whether or not they would pursue their original intention of having just guest vocalists on all future tracks, as they regarded with great admiration the likes of many other acts who featured guests, such as Massive Attack to cite but one example.
Sarah Cracknell was previously in a short lived indie band Prime Time with guitarist Mick Bund, who also later played in Felt, but she was asked by Bob and Pete to contribute vocals on Nothing Can Stop Us, the first self-penned composition to be released as Saint Etienne’s third single in 1991. It was at this point that their new partnership gelled when they realised that Sarah could sing more than just one track, and they duly recruited her to lend vocals to other tracks on what would become their first album.
Saint Etienne’s stirring, Lambert-fronted debut single and album opener "Only Love Can Break Your Heart," which was recorded in all of two hours’ time, manages to stay faithful to the original’s melancholy weight while transforming Young’s minimalist composition into a fresh and thrilling dancefloor-friendly affair.
Propelled by multi-layered dub basslines, house rhythms, piano loops, and pounding drum breaks, the group’s interpolation sounds little like Young’s 1970 single, save for the equally plaintive power of Lambert’s ruminations. While the album version stuns, the various remixes orchestrated by the likes of the late Andrew Weatherall and Masters at Work are worth seeking out as well.
Fueled by a sample of Dusty Springfield’s 1967 track "I Can’t Wait Until I See My Baby’s Face," the buoyant throwback soul of third single “Nothing Can Stop Us” is an indisputable highlight, though plenty of other standouts abound. Atop a rolling groove bolstered by Cracknell’s emotive admissions, “Spring” is an endearing ballad framed from the perspective of a friend expressing her support and love for a heartbroken man.
Elsewhere, memorable moments include the soaring house soundscape and hypnotic, repeated refrain of “Carrie’s got a boyfriend” on “Girl VII,” the lush and dreamlike "People Get Real" (the second of the two US-only bonus tracks), and the propulsive instrumental track "Stoned to Say the Least." The kinetic "She’s the One" examines the deplorable jealousy of the girl who thinks nothing of breaking up two people in love, with sampled vocals from The Four Tops’ "In a Different World" (1968) and a nod to The Crystals’ "Then He Kissed Me" (1963) and "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)" (1962). Finally, with lines like "Close our eyes, breathe out slowly / Today London loves us only,” the aforementioned, downtempo "London Belongs to Me" explores finding bliss in the city one calls home and doubles as the group’s first of many love letters addressed to their beloved London.
"Foxbase Alpha" was an incredible album. Cracknell has suggested. "We thought 'my god! We're making an album and we might not get to make another one ever!’ so we really went for it." And their ambition and musical adventurism paid off, both in the short- and long-term. Foxbase Alpha was shortlisted for the first-ever Mercury Prize back in 1992, but ultimately conceded the honor to another masterpiece of the period, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica. No matter though, as in the years since, Saint Etienne have crafted nine wondrously nuanced studio albums and a slew of compilations and mixtape-like collections, not to mention Cracknell’s underrated solo recordings (most recently the sublime Red Kite).
As Foxbase Alpha first made abundantly clear three decades ago, and as each of their subsequent recordings has reminded us time and time again, Saint Etienne are an indisputable class act and will forever remain an (inter)national treasure”. Foxbase Alpha was only the first instalment of Saint Etienne’s enduring legacy of great albums. Bob Stanley strangely now looks back on the record with surprisingly less fondness than he did when it was released, saying that it doesn’t even figure in his top 6 of favourite SE albums as he found it too ‘uneven’ and ‘unfocussed’. Perhaps the shifting sands of time can have that sort of effect on one’s reassessment of their early work, who knows?
