As you get older, you can't summon quite the same feverish anticipation for new releases, even by your favourite artists. OK, I wish my copy of Distortion
had arrived — it was released on Monday, and I pre-ordered it a fortnight ago, so what are Amazon up to? — but I'm not losing sleep over it (I have, after all, been listening to the album for nearly a month). However, in June 2005 I was riding a wave of enthusiasm for all things Saint Etienne, and quite excited about the arrival of this album, which was released the same day as Eno's Another Day on Earth.
After Amazon shipped it to me (along with the Eno and Push Barman…) it felt like an anticlimax. With hindsight I think it's because the album sounds different to the ones before it — a good thing. Slices of working class inner-city London life set to West Coast pop harmonies.
I'm getting over that change now and can see myself growing to love the album, but I'm still irritated by the misty-eyed nostalgia for how that salt-of-the-earth culture is being swept away by globalisation. So irritated, in fact, that I even started writing emails to DJs about it. Here's what I sent to Gideon Coe after Saint Etienne played a live session on his 13 June 2006 show:
Re Saint Etienne, I do love them, and am very much looking forward to hearing the new album. But it irks me when they play the Grumpy Old Man card. If they are missing the 'old man's' pub in London, I'd like to invite them to either The Artillery Arms or The Two Brewers. Both are within 10 mins walk of Turnpike House… The Artillery Arms was refurbished last summer, and, at the end, it was exactly same only with an extra lick of varnish. Perfect. And they still play Neil Young, Bob Dylan, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen on heavy rotation on the stereo.
Gideon himself loves the wistfulness of Teenage Winter, with its homage to charity shops undermined by eBay and its mourning of executive housing developments and pubs where the bar staff (Australians, fer chrissakes) play Red Hot Chili Peppers too loud. But having now moved to East Dulwich, where executives with Saint Etienne albums (who? me?) trumpet exactly those sentiments, I'd take the mixed-up dog's breakfast of EC1 development any day. (Apparently, although the album mentions Goswell Road and EC1 a few times, it isn't based on the real Turnpike House on Goswell Road, London EC1, but the rest of the setting surely must be based on that area.) In fact the dialogue on Relocate between Sarah Cracknell and David Essex could have been that between Lucy and me a few years ago, but for the references to the pig and the hen.
Postscript: I was so enthusiastic that I bought the version of this album with 'bonus' EP Up the Wooden Hills, an insufferably smug attempt to make music for kids that adults — yes, those very same mummies and daddies of East Dulwich — can listen to. And why? "Two of us have had kids in recent years and we got particularly fed up with nasty kids music, where it's nasty keyboard sounds and nasty voices — there's quite a lot of it about," says vocalist Sarah Cracknell in this Guardian piece, which would like us to believe that this is a new frontier in pop culture. I can't say in writing how this makes me feel. But I hope the little darlings in their buggies hate the music as much as I do.
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