This duly came, albeit initially via very rough home recordings using nothing more sophisticated than a couple of tape recorders and a lot of hit-and-miss experimentation. It was a truly exciting time to be young — and not so young — as there was a palpable sense of optimism at the imminent passing of the decadent and materialistic s which in turn ushered in a new found optimism for the new decade to come.
And in many ways it felt like that, with the first signs of the death throes of Thatcherism happening. The much reviled Prime Minister stepped down in after the Poll Tax Riots — a mass national revolt of defiance partly instigated by the same clubbing community that acid house raves galvanised into action to resist and challenge authority — effectively brought her tenure to an end.
Bob and Pete were excited by the way in which dance music and club culture could be used as a means of sticking two fingers up to the establishment. And indeed they found great company in plenty of kindred spirits across the various scenes who felt more or less the same way. Both were already journalists writing reviews for the weekly music papers — Bob in particular was a notable name appearing in the Melody Maker and later NME , but even so, they wanted to have a crack at the pop lark themselves, inspired by so many others before them.
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. Inline Feedbacks.
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To contact customers for other reasons as occasion arises. Albeit one that can still be enjoyed by anyone not predisposed to hate the soft, the sunny, the lilting, the laid-back, and the mildly twee. Foxbase is on one level a UK indie pop record with a particularly unique sound and vision-- the joys and pangs of cusp-of-adulthood love and loss, delivered with a clued-in-ingenue mix of wide-eyed enthusiasm and knowing languor by Sarah Cracknell, set to a backing stitched from the gentler side of pop history by studio whizzes Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs.
It's just a unique indie pop record that happened to bump to a bright pop pulse. What's funny about bringing up the always divisive p-word is that I remember some big-name 90s dance producers actually dissing Saint Etienne by calling the band "bubblegum.
But much like the Anglophilic fantasy world the band conjures, that split allegiance is another part of Saint Etienne's specific appeal. Foxbase tracks like "Spring" and the cover of Neil Young's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" do indeed sound like heart-on-sleeve pop kids in the C86 sense trying their quite adroit hands at lounge-y hip-house and piano-driven disco.
The drowsy, heartsick ballad "Carnt Sleep" sounds like a humid summer spent spinning Sarah Records 7"s back to back with Sade, slick soul secretly slid into an indie-friendly sleeve. Or there's the Cocteau Twins-ian shivers of "London Belongs to Me", with its smitten, multi-tracked Cracknell crooning to herself across a diamond sea of piano chords. Assured but approachable, these club-informed but not quite club-ready songs offered a wholly other kind of "indie dance" from the previous punk-funk generation or the cheap-and-easy preset-punching remixes of the blog-house era, something like careful cursive on pastel paper compared to blurry cut-and-paste photocopies or generic computer typeface.
Foxbase squeezes so many "lighter side of" sounds-- be they from the worlds of rock, dance, soul, whatever-- into one LP that it's a marvel it sounds so unified, mostly owing to Wiggs and Stanley fixing on the platonic house rhythm as the glue to hold their disparate passions together.
But the second disc of bonus tracks often feels like two producers still figuring out how to make the raw materials of post-acid house their own. Fun, but ultimately too generic without Cracknell's voice or the sample-choice oddness and studio chops Wiggs and Stanley would bring to the band's later music.
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