Saint Etienne’s first big hit was a 1990 dance-pop remake of Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” In the two years between that first single and the band’s first album, Foxbase Alpha, Saint Etienne picked up Sarah Cracknell and dropped some of the more overt eurotrash dancefloor sounds. Thus was born the band’s signature sound, their brave new world in evidence on their next big single, “Nothing Can Stop Us.”
When reviews of Saint Etienne’s latest album, Finisterre, talk about a return to the glory days, they pretty much mean this song: swinging sixties London plus 90s indie dance equals an addictive, breezy pop classic that served as the Saint Etienne manifesto until Good Humor. Most bands would kill to have this on their resume. (Kylie Minogue essentially did a karaoke version of this very song on her “Confide In Me” single in 1994, showing that she at least had decent taste back then.)
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[...] Having already written about Saint Etienne’s signature song, it seemed like a good idea to finally post that “karaoke version” of Kylie Minogue’s for comparison. “Nothing Can Stop Us” was the first track Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs recorded with Sarah Cracknell, who was then supposed to be just another in a long line of guest vocalists—Moira Lambert was the woman behind “Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” the dance redo of the Neil Young song. That song was essentially recorded on a whim; the boys had some studio time and decided to see what they could put together. The other song from that session was also a cover, mainly because Stanley and Wiggs hadn’t bothered penning any actual material before heading into the recording booth. “Nothing Can Stop Us” was one of the first songs the band had written themselves, and became the formula upon which Saint Etienne’s early career would be based. But the band didn’t bother spending a whole lot of time on the track: “from the days when we recorded a song on Monday, mixed it on Tuesday, released it on Wednesday, buried it on Sunday,” as they put it. [...]
angels twenty » Kylie Minogue - Nothing Can Stop Us, May 4th, 2006 at 8:54 pm