Album Review: Saint Etienne: Home Counties

Nothing screams summer like Saint Etienne, as the slinky Londoners have created some of the most blissfully sun-kissed music on earth. They’ve always explored their Englishness, and Home Counties sees them interrogate and explore the weirdly-named area where they were born and bred. “The Home Counties are an embarrassing place to come from,” they claim. “The name itself suggests that somehow the rest of Britain isn’t ‘home’, not even London. It’s where John Major’s vision of cricket and warm beer was meant to exist, but it’s not really like that at all, and it never has been.”

Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, who’ve remained a rock solid unit since 1990, explore these themes through the language of pop. The arrangements are sparkling and Cracknell’s voice is as sweet and seductive as ever. Their 1991 classic, FoxbaseAlpha, used samples and snippets to great effect. Home Counties, meanwhile, is introduced by a voice declaring that, “This is Radio 4.”
Saint Etienne are both remarkably consistent and criminally underrated. As they beautifully explain, their Home Counties is a land of pirate DVDs at car boot sales, parking disputes, bored teenagers in semis inventing ghost stories, squaddies causing trouble at all-you-can-eat buffets, train drivers in eyeliner and suburban rebels. It’s also a place from which Tony Hancock and Spike Milligan drew inspiration – as, of course, do Saint Etienne themselves, with winning results.

Listen: 'Magpie Eyes'

Out Now/ Eamon Sweeney