Saint Etienne
A few days ago I drove down to the Park West in Chicago to see a band that hardly anyone cares about - Saint Etienne. I have been listening to them since the mid-nineties and was pretty excited that they were touring a few select U.S. cities in celebration of the twenty year anniversary of their excellent album, Good Humour. Even though it would’ve been fun to go to the concert with a group of friends, I couldn’t think of a single soul that would have been even remotely interested in going with me, so I went alone. It was just me there with about four hundred enthusiastic, mostly gay, middle-aged fans. Since two out of three of those qualities applied to me, I didn’t feel too out of place. In fact, I might’ve been the coolest person in attendance. I’m usually not the coolest person in an elevator, much less an entire room full of people.
I was early for this event, early enough to down a crummy meatball sub and still spend forty-five minutes in a line outside the club waiting to be let in. The sun was going down and I leaned against the hot brick wall and took in one of the last hot summer nights of the year. The passersby would look at our line and probably think, “chess club?”, “bingo night?”, but certainly not a rock show. Once inside, I bought an Excedrin from the washroom attendant, a soda from the bartender to wash it down, and found a seat to wait for the show to begin. When the lights went down, I just walked up to the side of the stage and watched, from ten feet away, the musicians who have contributed to the soundtrack of my life for the last two and a half decades. I loved every second of it.
I won’t spend too much time describing the band to the very few readers who have followed me to this paragraph. Saint Etienne is an English group with a soft spot for French sixties pop. They use a lot of spoken-word samples and will mix in electronica with traditional instruments at regular intervals - always with a perfect rhythm track and usually a killer bass line. You will find heartbreaking mini dramas alongside soul-stirring disco anthems on every album, all sung with Sarah Cracknell’s breathy voice.
There are some singers whose voices put me firmly in a certain place and time. Glenn Tilbrook, Billy Bragg, and Neil Finn have a lock on my late eighties-early nineties years and seeing them in concert can be a little strange. The voice that I know so well is coming out of a real person’s mouth right there in front of me. It happened with Paul McCartney also. Wait a minute, that’s really the actual guy? Sarah Cracknell has a voice that brought me into the 2000s, with marriage and houses and kids and my own need to buffer those changes with a comforting voice that I could listen to whenever and however I chose. On this night, I chose to stand next to a column of speakers and have her voice wash over me - total immersion. I left the venue singing to myself, partly because of the show and partly to keep myself company while walking through the dark side streets between the venue and the parking garage. Once at home, I took a shower to wash the city off and laid in bed thinking about a night well spent.
Well, thank you for indulging me, even if it was just a courtesy read. I guess if I couldn’t find anybody interested in seeing this band, I can’t imagine there would be anyone wanting to read about them either. So why write this? Maybe for the simple reason that I saw a great concert that meant a lot to me at this particular moment in my life last Thursday and I just wanted to tell someone about it.
