Since its inception in the 1960s, popular music has been riven by an ongoing conflict between Britain and America and, for the first two decades, you could convincingly argue that the vanquished but vital Greeks were one step ahead of the victorious but vapid Romans. Yes, the latter conjured Bob Dylan, the Eagles, and Bruce Springsteen, but the former birthed the genre’s progenitors in the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, not to mention the dominant figures of the 70s in David Bowie and Elton John. As the 80s gathered pace, however, the case for John Bull became harder to make; the Yanks delivered the unbeatable pop trio of Madonna, Michael Jackson and Prince, all while catering to the freaks in the corner with R.E.M., Metallica, and Guns N’ Roses, whereas the cowed Limeys could only muster the Smiths, Depeche Mode and, if we’re being kind, Duran Duran by way of response.
And yet worse lay ahead, for the United Kingdom’s darkest hour in the post-war pop Kulturkampf indubitably came in the early 90s, when a succession of seminal and all-conquering American grunge albums totally went over the heads of a British public thoroughly absorbed in appalling house-influenced dance-pop and unlistenable techno music. Let us mince no words here; the emergence of acts like Black Box, Right Said Fred, Londonbeat, and M People constitutes the origin point of some of the most annoying and insipid pop music ever created, an asinine attempt to take the insufferable and self-congratulatory club culture of the “second summer of love” and commercialise it, so that Sony could sell records beyond the niche demographic of scallies in fields off their heads on ecstasy.
Give me Layne Staley shooting up in a toilet any day of the week over that crap. But I digress; the point, dear reader, is that I approached Saint Etienne’s 1991 debut album Foxbase Alpha from this basic position of mordant vengefulness. After all, the red flags are everywhere you look – Saint Etienne were formed by a pair of music journalists turned producers who explicitly aimed to fuse “the grooviness of Swinging Sixties London with a post-acid house backbeat”, which is surely what Heather Small thought she was doing when she recorded the vocals to “Moving on Up.” And yet, despite my prejudices, Foxbase Alpha turns out to be an interesting, even compelling record, because behind the staccato synths and beats lurks the subdued and somber heart of an early-90s shoegaze album.
The record’s core is comprised of the eerie, ethereal, indie-dance trio of “Can’t Sleep”, “Girl VII” and “Spring”, all of which sound like New Order’s early post-punk material, while its most famous moment, a house version of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart”, marries ghostly vocals with shrill keyboards and undulating beats that are delightfully redolent of Yuzo Koshiro’s Streets of Rage soundtrack. The lyrics to all of these songs are desperate, desolate meditations on romantic obsession and torment, and they’re delivered with an eerie aloofness later replicated by 21st century synthpop bands such as Chromatics and M83. Everything gets flatter toward the tail end of the album, and there’s an ungainly smattering of pretentious “interludes” that set film and radio samples against chillout room ambient music. Broadly speaking, however, Foxbase Alpha sounds like Lush or Slowdive, but with synths instead of guitars – a compelling and disquieting combination, for my money.
Though it’s not quite enough to make me rethink my animus against early 90s British house music. In my eyes, the genre carries an eternal and irredeemable guilt-by-association with the objectionable pop acts that it spawned, acts that tormented me throughout some of the most delicate years of my young life, and which did so again in my early 20s, when I worked for an insurance company and the “on hold” playlists of our clients included songs like “One Night in Heaven” and “Midnight At The Oasis,” the mere mention of which still makes me want to start a forest fire. I will probably never be able to look past my own trauma when I listen to Foxbase Alpha. Still, on its own merits, it’s a good album, though not good enough to save British music from the hammering it took at the hands of the Americans in the early 90s. Girls and Boys with guitars were needed to snatch that particular victory from the jaws of defeat.
Overall rating: * * *
Standout track: “Girl VII”