1994, the seeds of the crazily over-rated Brit Pop were just sprouting into the snotty nosed second rate indie bands it spawned. Let us not remember Shampoo right now shall we?
As a movement however, Britpop (this excludes Blur, Oasis and Elastica who all transcended the moniker to become the leading lights of said scene) made everyone feel like they were in the last gang of town and whilst turgid indie popsters such as Echobelly and Menswear were the de rigueur of indie bedrooms across the land, it took Saint Etienne to provide the pop music to the film soundtrack and on their third album, ‘Tiger Bay’, they did it perfectly.
With at least EIGHT compilations under their belt despite not being that prolific and this latest batch of re-releases (this is paired with 2002’s ‘Finisterre’) mean all but their last album, 2005’s ‘Tales from Turnpike house’ have been re-released and repackaged numerous times, hey, maybe it’s time for a new album?
1994 heralded the more mature sounding St Etienne, gone were the camp Europop-isms of tracks such as ‘You’re In A Bad Way’ to be replaced by something much more considered and artistic.
Behind the bubblegum exterior of front lady Sarah Cracknell, all feather boas and chardonnay breath stood Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs & Ian Catt making some very sophisticated and very serious British pop music, it clicked gloriously into place on this album.
They decided to veer away from the sampling they used on previous albums and for the first time collaborated with outsiders. The burbling techno on intro ‘Urban Clearway’, co-produced by Underworld had them pulling the genius stroke of mixing their sorrowful, soaring retro horn sounds with with minimal house beats to great effect.
With age, pretentious songs about drinking black coffee in twee North West London cafes haven’t aged well but with Tiger Bay, they reached out to record something more thoughtful, the dreamy acoustica of ‘Former Lover’ pre-dates Goldfrapp’s wicker-man referencing ‘Seventh Tree’ by a mere fourteen years, in fact, her entire back catalogue can be sourced directly from this album.
‘Like a Motorway’ and ‘Hug My Soul’ were two of the absolute best tracks from the nineties, the former, a masterclass in pop exhilaration, latter a brooding song about death set to a pulsing Giorgio Moroder style baseline to kill for, a stone cold classic which sounds more and more relevant as the years go by.
‘Cool Kids of death’ also co-produced with Underworld is reminiscent of early 90s house music whilst Shara Nelson’s velvety croon is poured over the delightful flamenco led dub track ‘On the shore’, and proves to be a pleasant break from Sarah Cracknell’s vocals.
This re-release has a bonus disc of exclusive tracks, the usuale apply here, they’re mostly non-exclusive tracks, just the bsides from the singles released from the album, a couple of demo tracks, ‘Urban Clearway’ is particularly fascinating as it shows how Wiggs and Stanley could turn their hand to techno without the assistance of Underworld, this version sounding like the kind of techno CJ Bolland was making at the time with tracks such as ‘Rave Signal’.
Elsewhere, there are a couple of yawnsome acoustic tracks which highlight the reason why they didn’t make the grade and as for the excruciating ‘Black Horse Latitude’ with Cracknell rapping over crunchy guitars about Arsenal being champions again and the god-awful pun very much intended line of “Is Michael Jackson’s ‘Dangerous’ is ‘bad’ as people say?”…oh stop it Sarah…no really, don’t ever do that.
Knowing winks on tracks that should have stayed in the vaults aside, ‘Tiger Bay’ has stood the test of time much more than their other albums. For all the praise given to their début ‘Foxbase Alpha’, that album is very much of its time and sounds like it was made twenty years ago as it was.
This album however looked to the future, they had to change because the retro pop sound was nearing to becoming a gimmick, it wasn’t a huge shift, it’s not like Bon Jovi releasing an album of Slayer covers, it was subtle, unassuming, classy and it has stayed current because of those reasons.
Words by Chris Todd
