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Saint Etienne have always seemed to exist outside of time, so hearing news of their retirement felt like waking rudely from a dream, losing something you never really had. The group, comprising Bob Stanley, Pete Wiggs, and Sarah Cracknell, emerged as an immediate anomaly, releasing their debut album, Foxbase Alpha, to great acclaim in 1991. Now, in 2025, they’ve released their final one, International, an appropriate title for a band that’s always been so hard to pin down.
International was made with finality in mind, but instead of anything dour, it sounds like a right rave-up, a retirement party thrown by the forever young. They’ve invited guests, too: Tom Rowlands (The Chemical Brothers), Nick Heyward (Haircut 100), Confidence Man, Vince Clarke (Erasure), Tim Powell (Xenomania), Jez Williams (Doves), Erol Alkan (Flash Cassette), and Augustin Bousfield all appear. Listening to it is like being invited to some secret celebration held by the coolest cats in town.
The period between Foxbase Alpha and International found Saint Etienne bouncing along a balancing beam of paradoxes. They maintained a Zen-like consistency while also being restlessly chameleonic, attempting different styles and concepts with the same quality. They were decidedly European, and yet chronicled London like few other bands. They always seemed like the smartest band at the festival, but they moved your body as much as your mind. Forget retirement; the real question is, how did this chimera survive so long? Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell sat down with PopMatters to provide an answer of sorts.
Endtroducing Pete Wiggs and Sarah Cracknell
Ever prolific, Saint Etienne were already teasing International when doing press for their previous album, The Night, earlier in the year. That rainy, gorgeous ambient album, full of spoken word and slow melancholy, is as different from International as Sid Vicious is from Blackalicious. It was almost like the band needed to rid themselves of The Night before they could party and part ways with International.
“There’s definite overlap between the two,” says Wiggs of Saint Etienne’s last two albums, “but none of the songs we started for The Night ended up on this. Because often we do that. I think we tried to get one on there, but it didn’t really fit the rest of it.” So how did it start? Wiggs and Cracknell have a think. It’s clear that they haven’t meticulously chronicled all the dates and figures of their retirement for historical record, despite its significance.
“It had an earlier sort of genesis, I guess, demo-wise. ‘Two Lovers’, the one we did with Vince Clarke, that was probably a couple of years before,” explains Wiggs. “It went through a few phases.”
“Confidence Man, I think, was sort of last year,” adds Cracknell of their collaboration with the electropop duo, “Brand New Me”, which is a delightful, downright anthemic single from International. “Then, just as Pete was saying, things just evolved over time. You know, we’ll go in with an almost finished track and finish it off in the studio, or we’ll actually write whole verses and things in the studio in situ. It’s all different, actually; every bit’s different in that respect.”
Of course, things were especially different this time around – the last time around. “Yeah, once we started the actual making, knowing that we’re making an album and it being the last time booking studio time and stuff, we actually set ourselves a really, or our manager set us a really tight deadline to record this,” says Wiggs, smiling through his gray beard. “So we did the bulk of it in like a month, I think. It’s just crazy, really.”
Cracknell credits co-producer Tim Powell for speeding up the process. “Lovely man,” gushes Cracknell. Wiggs and Cracknell seem so strangely normal, awkward on the Zoom screen like the rest of us, far from Pop Stars™ or musical myths. They’re real, and their retirement suddenly made sense. That’s what people do, after all, if they can.
Throwing a Retirement Party
The idea of retirement was written into International. “We’d made that decision before we were recording the bulk of the album, so we knew it was the last,” explains Cracknell. “The way you described it earlier, about being like a final party, that was very much the feeling that we wanted, a real celebration, and to include sort of the styles and moods from our career, from 30-odd years. We wanted it to be a bit of everything that we’ve done. I feel like the first album’s a bit of a mixing pot of ideas, so it’s the same sort of vibe.”
Why retire? That’s the question most people will ask, but perhaps the more interesting question is, why announce your retirement? Why not simply and silently stop making music? Then, if the creative urge so compels them, they could release another album in three, five, or nine years. Or not. They could instead just quietly and mysteriously fade away, like the sad half of that Neil Young song. What is the point of the announcement itself?
“I think we just wanted a nice retirement gift, just like a clock to go on the mantelpiece or something like that,” says Cracknell, cracking up Wiggs.
“It’s more of an event, and hopefully, when we do gigs over the next couple of years, it’ll be like that. So it’s not like we’re not gonna do any gigs,” states Wiggs reassuringly. Still, the whole experience has been somewhat odd for him. “I think I’ve said this before, but it is a bit weird. It’s been like being at your own wake to see what people thought about you, and luckily, it’s been quite nice.
“It wasn’t my decision, but once I got used to the idea, I found it quite exciting,” continues Wiigs. “It’s made the whole process of doing something and promoting and everything much more kind of exciting in a way. The good thing is it’s doing quite well, as well. So that feels like we made a good idea. It was a good plan.”
“Bob and I are not quite sure whether it was my idea or Bob’s idea,” adds Cracknell, making it even clearer how little melodrama, aggrandizement, or mythologizing has gone on vis-à-vis retirement. “It was a joint decision, though, between the three of us. We wouldn’t have just closed the band.”
“I don’t even remember the actual conversation,” admits Wiggs. “I think generally, whenever we make an album, we think it is potentially the last one, because you don’t know if you’re going to get a deal (well, then we’d probably still carry them, put it out ourselves somehow). But yeah, it did just feel organic. The last couple of albums have been really well received as well, so it feels nice, rather than going until people think you’ve done a couple of shit ones or something.”
Saint Etienne’s Final Tour
While Saint Etienne are done with the studio, they’re not finished with the stage. The band will have a farewell tour, and they’re already planning it out. “First of all, we’re going to do festivals. Next summer and stuff will be festivals, and then we’ll do the tour,” explains Cracknell. “We’ll be playing songs from across our career, which should be really good fun. Rather than touring an album, we’re just playing all the fun stuff. Then, I don’t know; we quite like the idea of ending up with the Royal Festival Hall, but we’re not sure yet. That won’t be until the following year, 2027.”
Wiggs and Cracknell have been touring for as long as Saint Etienne has existed, but the band has always been wise about pacing themselves. This (last) time, they plan to fulfill the title of their final album. “I’d like to come to America again, obviously,” shares Wiggs wistfully. “And someone said that we should do our last gig in Saint-Étienne. That would be quite funny, but I don’t know if anyone would even come. I’ve never been there, strangely.”
Wiggs’ admission makes a certain amount of sense. Saint Etienne have always been unplaceable, cinematic, oneiric, so of course they’d be named after a place they’ve never visited. The places they have toured, however, have been memorable. Stanley has previously raved about Saint Etienne’s euphoric 1994 concert in Greece, one of those shows when the music transcends the moment and eternity is glimpsed.
“That was a good one, yeah,” muses Wiggs. “There’s been quite a few. We did play at the Limelight in New York, which was quite extreme. That was quite a memory, because America’s just so mad a place. It was like Studio 54, so that was pretty amazing. I just never thought we’d be doing a gig in a place like that.”
“I think my favorite one was just the first Glastonbury that we played in 1994,” adds Cracknell. “So memorable, so incredible, just walking out on the stage and seeing about 30,000 people.”
“We played in Basel, probably about ten years ago, maybe more,” recalls Wiggs of one strange Swiss concert. “It was on a floating stage in the river, which was quite mental, and these people dressed like gondoliers took you to the stage, and the audience was all on the bank. But when we did the sound check, there’s this thing that people do because the current’s really fast. They jump in the river with all their clothes and stuff in a plastic bag, inflated kind of, they jump in, hold it, and they go zooming by. So while we were playing, these people were just going by, like zooming past the stage. It’s really strange.”
International Music in the Time of Britpop
Of course, Saint Etienne will play multiple shows in their home country of England. Ironically, as they say goodbye, many of their 1990s contemporaries are reuniting or resurfacing for live shows. Oasis, Pulp, Suede, Manic Street Preachers, the Beta Band, Supergrass, and other leaders of the 1990s Britpop scene have either been touring or releasing long-awaited new albums in 2025. Hell, British icon Robbie Williams just released an album titled Britpop. Always the iconoclasts, Saint Etienne will be waving goodbye as the Britpop bands say, “Hello, hello (it’s good to be back).”
For such an international band so unstuck in time, Saint Etienne never quite fit into the hyper-nationalist, borderline xenophobic craze over Britpop. In fact, they traveled to countries like Germany and Switzerland to record different albums in the 1990s while their peers were waving the Union Jack. As Bob Stanley said in a 2016 interview with Drowned in Sound, “Britpop came along and ruined everything.”
“That is quite strong,” laughs Wiggs upon hearing Stanley’s grumblings. “I think it just became a bit of a self-parody in a way. I still like Blur. I wouldn’t really listen to Oasis anymore, I don’t think, but I saw Pulp at Glastonbury and they were brilliant. I think it just became a bit of a joke, and so everyone got a bit sick of it. So it’s more that you didn’t necessarily want to be tagged as a Britpop band.”
“Also,” adds Cracknell, “people get sucked into this whole scene, and then can’t get out sometimes. I think also, because our music changes a lot in style, because we don’t play guitars and drums and stuff, it means that we can sort of segue between various styles. They can’t really pigeonhole us, which is good. Journalists generally can’t pigeonhole us. It’s difficult to, when people ask me, ‘What’s your band like?’ – I found it really hard to explain.”
So how reactionary were Saint Etienne? Were they willfully distancing themselves from the Britpop label? “In some respects,” admits Wiggs. “I think it’s because on our first two albums, a lot of the press would say that we were super English, and we were like, ‘We don’t think we are!’ [They said] everything’s about London, and the first album was, to be fair, but then we thought we’d moved away from that. And then it was always people just saying it was London-centric. So we were trying to be more international, as it were.”
“For me personally, it wasn’t a really deliberate distancing away from Britpop and British things,” adds Cracknell. “It’s just the way we are. We loved being in the European Union – sadly – and loved being international, love traveling, you know, getting to go away for our jobs a lot of the time. So we feel so privileged.”
“It was a way of making each album, to make it feel different from the next one,” says Wiggs. “We’d have a concept, and sometimes that concept was, like with the Swedish album, Good Humor, it was to record in a particular studio in Malmö, and to make it more of a sort of live-sounding album than perhaps previous ones. And then, with the Berlin one, we were really into the sort of Berlin electro scene at the time, so it was a way of getting into that, really, and having some of that flavor on the record.”
“We really loved the provincial side of going to Malmö and Berlin. So we just liked sharing a flat, getting an apartment or whatever,” remembers Cracknell with nostalgic warmth. “That’s really good for ideas, you know, getting immersed in each other.”
“A lot of the lyrics on Sound of Water, which is the one recorded in Berlin, we hadn’t written them before, and so they were kind of influenced from hanging out together and writing lyrics and newspaper reports from back home and things like that,” adds Wiggs. He pauses with a half-smile hidden in his beard, his headspace lingering on the scene. “It was, yeah, it was really good.
The Philosophy of Saint Etienne
Pete Wiggs is hardly the only one looking back fondly on the songs of Saint Etienne. The band had one of the most devoted fan clubs out there, known as Lovers Unite, and for just five pounds a year, you could receive all sorts of special odds and sods from the band. Case in point, they had more private fan club releases than actual studio albums, and they shared all sorts of art and literature in addition to the music.
Saint Etienne made films with Paul Kelly, released Christmas music, and assembled compilations of obscure pop music. Bob Stanley wrote books, Cracknell released solo albums, and Wiggs curated wonderful playlists at his site, The Séance. Suffice to say, getting into Saint Etienne was like falling in love at the library, ensconced in references and catching the passion of artists like a contagion. You wanted to join their club. That was a song of theirs, “Join Our Club“, and it became Saint Etienne’s motto of sorts. “I know you want to hold my hand, I know you’re gonna love my band,” Cracknell sings in the song.
Wiggs explains that “Join Our Club” is essentially the band’s philosophy. “It’s not supposed to be an exclusive thing. It’s supposed to be – if you’re interested in something, sort of mention it somehow. It’s how you make friends and how you meet people that are on the same kind of wavelength as you, really, so I suppose that’s it.
“It’s sharing the things that interest you, and meeting like-minded people. Which is amazing, because we have done that over the years,” adds Wiggs. “You meet people and you go, ‘Oh man, until I’d listened to some of your stuff, or seen the sleeves or whatever, I didn’t know there were people like that, like me, out there. It’s good.’ We did a lot of signings last week in England and Scotland, and because it’s our last album, it was quite an emotional experience, lots of people coming up and saying stories about what we’ve meant to them over the years.
“It felt like that sharing of ideas has really affected people,” continues Wiggs. “And they’ve gone on tangents exploring different avenues, things they picked up from the film clips that we put on the second album, So Tough. I sometimes forget that many of those were lines that Bob and I thought were funny or that we used to quote to each other. And so I thought, let’s stick them on the album. But then you hear that other people quote those lines, and it’s sort of like you spread a sort of daft virus. I mean, they’re samples, but people call them drops now, and they become memeable, like an inside joke for a family.”
Cracknell excitedly agrees with the philosophy of Saint Etienne. “[It’s] that whole sharing of, you know, you find out something great, when you see a great film or a wonderful building or whatever, and you just want to share it,” explained Cracknell. “I think some people misunderstood ‘Join Our Club’ as, you know, we’re elitist, we’ve got our own club, but it’s kind of the polar opposite, you know? It’s about – ‘listen to this, it’s great, or look at this, isn’t it amazing?’ That’s what we’re about, really.”
That’s what they’re about. Saint Etienne is a feeling – that feeling when you discover something that sings echoes in your soul, something so wondrous that you’re overcome with the compulsion to share it with someone else, as if it’s only that thing that can finally bridge the existential gap between you and another person. As if you’re a happy vessel, overflowing with this new thing (a song, a book, a picture), and you absolutely have to pour it out for somebody else, and when you do, it’s like you two are sharing the same serene dream outside of time. Saint Etienne are the sharing.
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