Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley on Charli XCX, Nostalgia, and the Death of the Music Press

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Saint Etienne are, simply put, one of the greats. The indie-pop legends just released their latest album The Night, which goes even deeper into the ambient lane than 2021's I've Been Trying to Tell You and finds the trio yet again twisting their own previously established styles into new and thrilling shapes. I interviewed Bob Stanley more than ten years ago for a short little news hit during my early years at Pitchfork, so I was happy to get a bit more space and time with him to chat about the new record, his perspective on pop and the music landscape writer, and much more. Check it out:

Saint Etienne have flirted with ambient throughout your career, but this record—as well as the last one—really pushes things into the ambient side. Tell me about that choice when it comes to this new one.
We wanted to do something that was calming. I suffer from insomnia—I haven't really slept the last couple of nights, so hopefully I'll get some sleep tonight. [Laughs] I listen to rain noise to help me get off to sleep, and I was thinking, "What have I listened to most in the last year or so?" Rain noise was #1, so it stemmed from there, really.

I also love the KLF's Chill Out, and we all thought that it would be nice to do a modern update on what that would be. So we all wrote songs and started taking them apart to fit the sounds of the album, and they got more and more stripped back until there were no drums at all. We probably worked on it for a couple of years, this one.

This isn't a new observation at all, but it does feel like there's been a general uptick in interest when it comes to ambient music across this decade at large. Tell me about your thoughts on that, as well as your relationship to ambient music in general.
Yeah, there's the New Age stuff as well—the kind of things that Numero Group have been putting out, and some private-press records which, until a few years ago, I had no idea ever existed. I remember working at a record shop when Windham Hill was a big deal. I really wanted to like those records, and I didn't at the time—I would've been 18 or 19 years old, it wasn't really what I wanted. But I've always loved film soundtracks, and so has Pete, so that's always been a big influence on us—John Barry, Ennio Morricone. Obviously, a lot of that is long, held chords and deep atmospherics, rather than verse-chorus structure.

I think the fairly obvious reason why people are listening to more ambient music now is the state of the world. You can make a party record and go, "Sod this, I'm going to be hedonistic," but no one's particularly excited about the future. It's obviously a depressing thing to say, but I think it's broadly true. And from most points in the past—certainly growing up—everyone thought about the future all the time. Now, everyone's scared of the future, and that's a big difference.

I do wonder if that fear of the future drives culture's obsession with nostalgia that's been running for the last eight or nine years. What's your relationship with nostalgia?
I hate nostalgia. I don't think I'm nostalgic at all. I'm really interested in history. I've never understood why people just want to see what's new, and completely ignore hundreds of years of history. I've always found that very odd, because obviously, to understand what's going on now, you have to have a grasp of history in any subject. But I don't think I'm something nostalgic at all. You can look back on chapters of your life the older you get and draw on them, and they'll appear different in your mind at different different stages of your life.

I suppose the reason I'm not nostalgic is, when you listen to radio and somebody will request a song being like, "This is from my time, the '80s—like, you're still alive. I don't understand what you're talking about, "my time." "When you were young" is what you mean. But because I've always kept an interest in architecture or music or whatever, I never think, "Well, my time was in the mid '80s—that's when all my favorite stuff happened." That is nostalgia, and I've always steered away from it. Saint Etienne get called nostalgic a lot because, obviously, we reference the past a lot—but I don't think that's nostalgia. I think it's a different thing.

You've written two books on the history of pop music at this point. What's the current state of pop music, in your opinion?
I think there's a lot of good music—there's a lot more good music being made that I'm aware of. I actually saw Charli XCX last week. Of all the things I found most exciting in the last 10-15 years, vaporwave and PC Music are the two things
that really stood out for me as something brand new, which is very hard to do in pop because modern pop's been around a long time. Obviously, guitar bands are basically over but there's still ways of going forward. To see Charil in this big arena and having the #1 album across the board in album of the year votes. is terrific. Her and A.G. Cook as a producer, they've definitely made my favorite records in the last few years. So that's been exciting and good to see.

I'm sure there is a lot more really good music being made that I'm unaware of. I tend to delve into the past more to find out about things that were new at the time that I might not be aware of, because I struggle now to find things that I find genuinely new. I'm 60 in a few weeks, and the nature of getting older is that you're more aware of what's gone on in the past. To hear something and think it sounds brand new, that you've never heard anything like it, is obviously going to be a rarer rarer event. So double thumbs up for Charli XCX for actually managing to do that—in my mind anyway.

Talk to me more about your listening habits. You're definitely right that there's more new music than ever before, and it's quite overwhelming. I myself find it hard to keep up with it without employing byzantine listening habits.
Oh, crikey. I do think Numero Group is a great reissue label. They dig so deep that it's mostly music that I've never heard before, which is always exciting. I've been doing reissues for Ace Records as well, which doesn't really skew what you're listening to because you're listening to things for research purposes.

A friend of mine had a radio station on WFMU, and when she started doing it, she was really not listening to modern music at all and thought, "Well, I'm going to struggle to find things to play." Of course, having to listen to stuff, she just found that there's more great records being made now than ever before. I'd probably find it to be the the same if I was doing doing something like that, but I'm not. I'm listening to things to put out as reissues, and things to write about in books.

So I'll tend towards more old stuff—but, you know, that just goes on forever too. I've got a Patreon, and I was writing a piece on Kay Starr over the last couple of days—and I thought I knew Kay Starr's catalogue pretty well, but there were all these great songs I've never heard. There's always going to be old and new stuff you've never heard. that's going to really excite you. I'd like to listen more new stuff, but oh well [Laughs]. If someone recommends something, I'm always going to give it a listen.

For this new record, you made it in the studio together after making the last one remotely, right?
Yeah. We all live in different parts of the country now. We all lived in London for a long time. Now, Pete's on the South Coast, Sarah's in Oxford, and I'm in Yorkshire—so we're all quite a long way from each other. But it's always exciting to get together anyway. We just like to meet for something—to eat and talk about what we're going to do next year um—but that was the first time we've been in the studio together since 2019, and it was great. The way we've been recording over the last 15 years has been that we'll write songs separately, bring them to the studio, and work on them together there. We hadn't done that for a few years, so it was lovely—really good fun.

When it came to working completely remotely on I've Been Trying to Tell You, were there challenges that emerged from that process?
It was obviously limiting to some extent, but it didn't really make a huge amount of difference. We just did Zoom calls and talked to each other on the phone a lot about how things were going. Gus Bousfield did half the album up here in Yorkshire, and Pete did half the album in his studio in Sussex. They were each working on their own quite a lot, which must've been quite odd for them. They usually just come up with 3/4 of the thing finished, play it for me and Sarah, and say, "You got any suggestions?"

It did make me realize how much we get ideas from being in the same room at the same time. It would've probably have gone in a slightly different direction. I don't know how, but I think if we'd all been in the room at the same time, it wouldn't have sounded exactly as it does. But we were all really happy with it, and the reaction it got was great. It was a top 20 album here, which is the first one we've had since the '90s. That was a thrill.

Yeah, tell me more about hitting the charts again. That was a pleasant surprise to witness, the 2020s have had a few of those across the board.
I mean, it was really nice. I don't think the charts count for very much anymore, sadly. But, you know, they're there, and they're real. They reflect sales. One of the things that I do find hard to get my head around now is the the death of the music press as well as some sense of collective thought on where music's going, or who you should be listening to. The fact that that's gone, and that anyone I talk to is listening to something completely different, I find a little hard to get my head around.

So the charts, in that respect, are nice. They're like a digest of what people are listening to. It's there in black and white. "These are the 20 most popular records this week." The album charts in Britain, in particular, can have some really odd things in them—I don't know what America's like. It's good and bad. I mean, Shed Seven have had two #1 albums here in the last few years, which... [Laughs]

The death of the music press is very much a real thing, though. You're someone who's been on both sides of the aisle—as a musician and a music writer—so I'm curious to hear your perspective on the situation and how you see it, as well as what the future might look like.
I mean, I think people want to read about music. The number of music books coming out, there's five times as many now than there was 20 years ago. There's a book about pretty much anyone I can remember. Even 15 years ago, I don't think there was a book on Aretha Franklin by anybody. When I started thinking about writing the Bee Gees book, there was one book on them that David Leaf had done in the late '70s, and there was this massive brick-sized book which was basically a fan account. That was it. So I thought, "Well, there's an open door, I'm going to write this Bee Gees book." By the time I actually got a deal for it, three more had come out.

There's definitely an appetite for reading about music, and for music criticism. "Music criticism," it's a term people don't really like anymore, because everyone's a critic and people don't have the ability to write. I think maybe that will swing back around, but it just feels like it's getting more and more atomized. Newsletters, Patreons, Substacks, is certainly—for the imminent future—the way it's got to be. Or podcasts, I guess.

I agree. I also tell younger people all the time when I talk to them about what things are looking like—10 years ago, things didn't look very good either! It might feel worse, but it also just feels different in some ways.
Yeah, you're right. I was asked to do a talk in Huddersfield to some people who were studying music journalism, and I was asked, "What can you suggest to people who want to become music journalists?" I really couldn't think of anything. There wasn't even the Patreon or Substack thing back then. They were going to do a three-year course, and at the end of it they'd have nothing. Obviously, I didn't say that to them.

I really like consensus in music. I think it makes it easier to follow and understand. There's no real consensus, and there's more and more music coming out, so I find that hard to get my head around. If I was 14, I'm sure I'd feel completely different, but I'm not, so that's what i really miss. TV music programs don't really exist here at all anymore, either.

In addition to making and writing about music, you've also effectively worked in the music industry in various forms, from the shops to the labels. How's the business changed from your perspective? Is there anyything that gives you hope?
The number of record shops now, compared to 15 years ago, is obviously massively different. It felt like they were disappearing and everyone was just gonna buy stuff online 15 years ago, and that's just that's changed completely.

I was watching something the other day from 1979 where they were talking about the music industry as if it was dying on its arse. In 1979, you'd literally just had one of the biggest years ever for singles in Britain. It feels like people have always said that things are falling apart and the industry is dying or whatever. While I was writing Let's Do It, I found that there were always periods in history where record companies were going bust. In the early '30s, [people thought] records were going to disappear completely because of the radio. You always have to cut your cloth.

The number of record shops that have sprung up all over the world—not just here—in the last decade is really heartening, as well as the number of people who want
to see live music and are happy to pay way more than I ever used to play when I was a teenager. That's going to keep people afloat as well. I think the model constantly changes, and I don't think things are going away at all. I'm optimistic about where pop music's going. I don't think of it as a particularly bad time. There's less and less small venues in this country—that's the one thing that's quite noticeable, but that could change too, quite easily I think.