If we’re using DIY as a starting point for the story of Foxbase Alpha, when did you first become aware of DIY culture in pop? Was it through music fanzines?
Yeah, totally. I used to get sold them at gigs as far back as I can remember. The Birthday Party, the Fall, Dead Can Dance, Factory bands. The first ones I remember were pretty dull, because I was buying them in 1982 and 83, and they were writing about bands like the Inca Babies or the Folk Devils or the Luddites. It was all pretty boring. I didn’t see the point of them for a while, because the music papers existed and these fanzines weren’t really doing anything different. It wasn’t until 85 that I started seeing fanzines that made sense, because by then the NME was putting Courtney Pine on the cover and writing about Green on Red, and things I didn’t get.
You mean the explosion of the C86-era fanzines?
Yes. I moved to Peterborough because I couldn’t afford a flat on my own in glamorous, high-priced Croydon. I was working at [record shop] Our Price, and I got a transfer to Our Price in Cambridge, so it was an 80-mile round trip to work every day. Then I moved to Virgin in Peterborough when a job came up there. I was a fish out of water – I’d never lived outside suburban London before. I fell in with a bunch of blokes who’d been talking about doing a fanzine for ages, and then I came along and said we should do it. So we did it. That was Pop Avalanche. That went well, so I thought me and Pete Wiggs could do one called Caff.
Did Our Price and Virgin let you sell the fanzine in the shops?
No, but it never occurred to me to ask. They wouldn’t have done anyway.
But some of the big chains could be quite adventurous in those days, because often they had their own buyers, so they had their own identities. Even WH Smith did – the Reading branch was particularly strong on metal for a while, and its record counter had all the NWOBHM stuff. I’ve read about big-city branches of HMV and Virgin with interesting ranges of stock.
Yes, Virgin certainly had that. I remember the Virgin in Croydon being like that. When the Joy Division flexi came out, they had a stack on the counter and you could just help yourself. I think I took 10. I took a lot. Peterborough wasn’t like that, though. It was quite soul destroying. On a Saturday, people would come in and they wouldn’t even buy numbers six to 10, they’d only buy the Top 5. When I’d been working in Epsom Our Price it was a lot more interesting. I remember one bloke coming in and buying Forever Changes. I told him it was one of my favourite albums, and he said, “Oh, I bought it when it came out, but my old copy’s got a bit of a warp. I’m going to throw it away. You can have it if you want.” So I’ve got an original Forever Changes. Warped. Things like that never happened in Peterborough.
In the interviews around the original release of Foxbase Alpha, you all talk about how you made that music to share your tastes. Was that why you worked in record shops? Or was it just to get discounted records?
Both. There were a lot of Chelsea soul-fan hooligans who used to come into the Epsom shop in ’84, ’85 to buy soul. So I did a Top 10 soul reissues and put it out in the racks. And I got in trouble for that. For using my initiative. Because I hadn’t cleared it with the heavy-metal fan manager. I think that explains my residual dislike of heavy metal.
One thing that often goes unremarked on in coverage of British indie culture – except in David Cavanagh’s book about Creation – is the importance of Channel 4, which helped repopularise trash culture, the 60s pop art aesthetic, French and continental styles, and mixed it all up with the brashness of contemporary pop culture. So you’d get The Munsters, The Avengers, The Tube and a Godard movie on the same evening. It created a cultural melting point that was really attractive to a certain kind of person.
Yes, definitely. I used to tape so many of those films – buying blank videotapes cost so much back then. I’d try to tape all the Truffaut films, all the British kitchen sink films. It was the first channel to show [the Monkees’ film] Head. I’d read so much about it and never seen it – that seems quite hard to comprehend now. But a lot of things that you’d see referenced were hard to see and hear. The Byrds’ albums had all been deleted, for example. You could get a couple of compilations and that was it. Channel 4 was definitely important. Though I hated The Tube. It was so long, and it was on every week. You always seemed to have half an hour of Tears for Fears.
I guess C86 was exciting, then, because it felt like it was “ours”. For people who had been too young for punk and found goth a bit unappealing. It also, if you were a nice kid, didn’t feel dangerous.
Most importantly, it felt as if all those people making records were watching Channel 4 at the same time we were. And I didn’t feel scared to talk to people in bands, so I ended up getting to know those people. Obviously, doing a fanzine, I had to talk to them anyway. But it definitely felt like these were my people. Which doesn’t really explain Foxbase Alpha. But it’s part of it.
I think C86 is the part of Foxbase Alpha that people ignore, in favour of the clubbing part of it. Because I think, in sensibility, it’s very much an indiepop record, even if it doesn’t sound like one. Especially in its fetishisation of the 60s. What it reminds me of more than any actual record is the collaged covers I used to do for mixtapes with bits from 60s Penguin book covers – the photos and the quotes that are all unrelated but work together.
Yes, we made mixtapes. And we made them before we did the fanzine. Someone made me one called Don’t Put That Sausage in Your Mouth, Mrs Worthington. You wouldn’t have given that to a girl. You’d put bits between the tracks – bits of films on Channel 4, bits of adverts, bits of the Dangerous Brothers. So Tough [Saint Etienne’s second album] was exactly that, and it even had bits we’d taken from our cassettes. With pop art, I didn’t know anything about that until 1985, but that was absolutely mind-blowing.
So, Bob, what did you actually do on Foxbase Alpha?
I get asked this all the time. I was accused in the pub the other day of doing nothing.
No, clearly you do something. But what is it? The back covers of Saint Etienne records don’t exactly define it. How did you actually make records? Did you go in with a flow chart to explain to Ian Catt, the engineer, what you needed him to do?
Kind of. Let’s have a think. How would we have done something back then? We’d start with a loop, then work out a bassline and build up from there.
Did you have the skills to make a loop yourselves?
No. We needed someone to do it. We had to go to Ian Catt’s studio. Most good engineers can play most instruments reasonably well, and Ian’s certainly one of them.
So it would be at the level of you humming him the melody or the bassline?
Yeah. Or playing him a chord change off a record and telling him we wanted the chord change to be like that. Working with Ian you’d learn that adding a ninth makes a chord change richer – we just picked stuff up. I never wanted to become a musician, because I thought that if I knew how things were meant to work, I wouldn’t be able to do the things I wanted to do. I’m absolutely an amateur, because expertise would exclude doing anything new. That’s my philosophy. Although Pete’s managed to build himself a studio and become a proper musician in the last 25 years.
I’ve been reading some old interviews with you, and there’s one with Jim Arundel in Melody Maker where you all get annoyed at the suggestion you’re a clever group. Come off it. Of course you were a clever group.
Clever’s a bit of a problematic word. Does it mean arch? We used to be called ironic all the time. We didn’t like things that suggested we were using reference points because we thought they were funny, rather than because we liked them. I remember in that interview he refused to believe we liked Dazzle Ships by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, which these days is accepted as a great record. That album was a huge influence on us – a massive pop group putting together two or three recognisable pop songs and loads of found sounds. But what’s clever? Where does that come from?
You made an album with a very clear worldview and aesthetic sense, employing your knowledge to locate the sources of the material you wanted, and with the intelligence to deploy those sources correctly. You could be a 60s-inspired pop group, using 60s sources, and be recognisably stupid, but you weren’t.
That’s true. I never felt particularly clever myself. I think what annoyed us was clever and ironic being seen as the same thing. Betty Boo never got called clever, and I could never see any difference between us.
You also get defensive in those old interviews about the idea that you might be elitist.
That really baffled me. It seemed really obvious – making a song called Join Our Club doesn’t mean you’re being sarcastic.
I understand where the idea that you were elitist came from. You’re singing about a super-cool London …
We’d only moved there six months before!
The people hearing your music don’t know that. They hear a group writing about cool London, filled with carefully chosen references to pop culture they might well not know. They’re getting a display of impeccable taste from people dressed like they’ve come out of Blow Up.
That was the opposite of what we trying to do. It’s interesting you say that. I used to read interviews with Julian Cope [of the Teardrop Explodes] or Nick Heyward of [Haircut 100] and they would talk about their influences really openly, and it was like opening a door: if you like what I do, here’s where it all comes from. We probably overdid that, and it looked like we were showing off.
Are you surprised at the affection in which Foxbase Alpha is still held, 25 years on?
I am. But I’d also be disappointed if it was people’s favourite Saint Etienne record, because I don’t think it’s the best one. At the same time, I know as a pop fan that people tend to like the first album by a group most, because it’s the moment of discovery, and the one that captures the band’s youth, so I can understand it. But it’s always sounded like a scrapbook to me.
- The 25th anniversary edition of Foxbase Alpha is out now on vinyl and double CD, via Heavenly. A deluxe box set edition is released on 6 January. This interview is an edited version of one that appears in the sleevenotes for the box set.
