Only Love Can Break Your Heart In Two Places

Hobart Paving / Who Do You Think You Are? Saint Etienne Heavenly Records Released: May 1993 Highest Chart Position: #23 Available on: Smash The System Some of the groups in Select Magazine’s Britpop-defining March 1993 issue, like Pulp and Blur, went on to become the biggest bands in Britain. Saint Etienne, also featured, lurked behind in the shadows, never quite managing to find their place at the top of the charts. Too much in love with pop for the indie crowd, and too arch and knowing for a music-buying general public that turned its back on intellectual pop back in the 1980s. Saint Etienne’s world is one where girls in Mary Quant dresses, scarves and white-rimmed sunglasses drive out into the country in their Ford Capris, ready for a rave in the middle of Hertfordshire. A world where the modern concrete architecture of the 1960s looks the way it does in dreams, instead of the dismal concrete reality of The Tricorn. A world of Paris, of London, of beaches under the pavement, of architecture, of being dropped by your record label for taking the money for a promo video and making a full-length film with it instead. It’s not our world, but it could have been, if only we’d tried harder.

Hobart Paving is a deceptive song. It sounds simple on the first listen; Sarah Cracknell singing over what seems like a sparse backing track, the lyrics regretful and contemplative. But there's more going on. The backing tracks starts off with just a piano, with new instruments gradually coming in, building the backing up layer by layer until, at the end, the song is accompanied by a pocket electronic orchestra of drums, strings, and horns. Is Sarah talking about Elvis Presley's tears, or Elvis Costello's? There's a big difference between the two. It feels like the end of a 1960s kitchen-sink drama film, where the young and successful star returns to her humble beginnings, but finds that she's no longer welcome. She leaves, never to return home again.

Who Do You Think You Are?, the other side of this double-A single, is one of those times where the band were almost too clever for their own good. It’s a cover of a song by Candlewick Green, winners of several Opportunity Knocks programmes (Opportunity Knocks was a long-running (1956-78) British TV talent show; this song comes from the 1970s). This could have just been an ironic exercise of kitsch, but the band drag the track into the 1990s, stopping off in the 1980s to borrow some acid house, mixing together cool and uncool parts of British culture to create something new, exciting, and danceable.