LIVE REVIEW: Saint Etienne, Gwenno @ The Glasshouse, Gateshead (24.09.26)

Support gigs like this can’t be easy – opening for a heritage act in a big hall which is barely half full and with the seated crowd not paying much attention – but Gwenno gave it her best for this show. We got a song about cats where she wore a cat mask, we got a song in Cornish about cheese, which involved an attempt at teaching the crowd a little of her mother tongue with mixed results (there was another attempt at a crowd singalong at the end that was even flatter). I’d never really paid much attention to Gwenno’s work before and I can’t say I was either enthralled or appalled tonight: there’s a dreamy, soft-psych feel to it, like Broadcast with all the darkness removed but there’s a lot of that about. I’d probably give her another try in a more fitting venue (maybe a Cornish cave).

Saint Etienne started releasing records 36 years ago, just as I moved to London (I shared a greasy spoon in Tufnell Park with them for a while) and they were always there in those early nineties summers, soundtracking comedowns and wasted afternoons with their absolutely perfect blend of europop, indiepop, dub, chansons and house. They cheated though – bands like Saint Etienne are supposed to burn bright then die, but Saint Etienne kept going, releasing a steady stream of mostly excellent albums, turning their hands to films and curation and just being generally very fucking cool. They’ve soundtracked most of my life. And yet here we were, at the end (if you don’t count an Antipodean tour). I knew I was going to have a good evening; I didn’t know the whole thing was going to be an overwhelming, often tearful rush of nostalgia and sadness and euphoria. But sad euphoria was always what they did best: Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley perfectly understand the awesome power of the Sad Banger and Sarah Cracknell’s voice – a frail but affecting instrument – was just the voice we needed to tell us about lost loves, lonely suicides and the rest. Careworn and familiar.

Tonight they’re joined by Joe and Loz on strings and drums, and Debsy Wykes, a non-stop dancing, melodica playing, backing vocal dynamo (doing a fair bit of work supporting Cracknell’s charmingly approximate vocals) and they’re backed by some magnificent visuals – candy-stripe animation, northern soul dancers, kids on Vespas, Danny Lyon’s impossibly cool biker photos – all reminding you that Saint Etienne world is a beautifully appointed place to be. They start with an unimpeachable double-whammy: Tonight captures the excitement of going to see a favourite band, Like A Motorway is a contender for their finest moment, an untouchable Sad Banger that had me welling up from the opening beats. The fairly brief set covered a lot of ground, and while we got most of the early classics, the later albums were well represented and we even got a snippet of Cola Boy’s Seven Ways To Love slipped into He’s On The Phone. Cracknell was just delightful – a little bit tearful, dancing like a mum at a school disco, coming in at the wrong place on Only Love Can Break Your Heart and not really caring – which is why we all love her. The Glasshouse’s sound system got a good workout – Saint Etienne always had a fine understanding of the power of dub and everything sounded rich and full tonight, there was never anything frothy and twee about them. And then we got a perfect encore: Nothing Can Stop Us is one of the greatest pop songs ever made, that perfect Dusty Springfield sample a stroke of genius, and by now I was fully sobbing. And then, of course, The Last Time – final track from their final album – as a poignant finish. I miss them already.

‘(Whoa-whoa) for the very last time’