Hello Sarah. It's really good to chat with you and this is really embarrassing because I don't think my batteries are working? Words to live by. It's a massive change of direction from your last full-length record. It seems that the band's gone from Motown to Kraftwerk. It's going very well so far actually. But getting back to the second part of your question, the change in music styles was very much a natural progress for us.
It wasn't like we thought, "Right, now we're going to do something really different. We actually recorded a lot more songs at the time and left a lot of the up-tempo stuff off the proper LP. Yeah, stuff like that. When you were recording this last album, what was going on behind the scenes? Was there panic that there wasn't an obvious radio-friendly hit? Bob [Stanley, keyboardist for the band] even said in a previous interview that it isn't a singles album and it's most likely career suicide.
No, we really weren't panicking. The album's a body of work. We really weren't recording the songs with a view towards any of them being a single either. How much of a say do you have on the actual music of the records?
Do Bob and Pete [Wiggs, the other third of Saint Etienne] come up with the music and you put the lyrics to them or do you get into it as well? No, we all talk about it before and we spend so much time together anyway, that these things come up in conversation sitting in the pub and stuff like that.
Directions are usually plotted out that way and then we try and remember that great idea we had from the night before. How much did the surroundings of your recording atmosphere dictate what the sound of the album will be like? I ask because Good Humor was recorded in Sweden and Sound of Water was made in Germany and they sounded nothing like the work you've done in the past in London.
