Forgive me; I was in the mood for something personal. Skip over this if you like; there’s a rare video at the end and the song truly is ace.

All it took was one errant YouTube search, but that was enough. For the past two days, I’ve been obsessing over Saint Etienne as if I’d found them for the first time. I’ve been playing live appearances over and over again. I found their Myspace page so I could listen to a track off their upcoming soundtrack for What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? I signed up for the Avenue mailing list so I could get access to their archives and download rare tracks. I even held my nose and sorted through the Savoy Jazz site to listen to the remixes they commissioned for “Stars Above Us.” I think I fell in love with Saint Etienne again this past Tuesday.

In one of the interstitial monologues that pepper Finisterre, Michael Jayston utters the evocative phrase, “I feel a nostalgia for an age yet to come.” The unrequited romantic can find a great deal of comfort in those ten words; it describes perfectly the act of wishing for something so strongly that you have already lived it in your imagination, your dreams more vivid than memory itself. But Saint Etienne are a group that caters just as much, if not more so, to the overtly nostalgic. “He’s On The Phone” and “Nothing Can Stop Us” conjure up fond memories for anyone who used to love Saint Etienne at the peak of their popularity, the most prominent aspect of the backdrop of their youth. All pop groups endure the burden of a million half-forgotten endless nights. But because Saint Etienne keep returning to the scene of the crime, continually renewing their associations with London and Britain, their link to the collective consciousness of a very specific time and place remains strong even today.

I didn’t grow up in that place at that time. This makes things somewhat difficult. When Saint Etienne announced their brief U.S. tour earlier this year, I would’ve killed for a plane ticket and a spot at the show. But the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea. My fears were confirmed upon hearing the general makeup of the crowds at each show—generally people in their thirties and forties, people who have a reasonable claim to being part of that era. I obviously don’t have a claim to that era, can’t even say I’m reliving my own past, but rather someone else’s past, imagined through my own eyes. There are so many levels of nostalgia that it borders on the ludicrous.

The most devious thing about pop music is convincing people who were too young for the era that everything was simpler back then, more direct, more carefree, more fun. Saint Etienne is perhaps guiltier than most. But at the same time, it takes two to dance. Nostalgia is the last resort of those who cannot bear to live for today, they say, and of the perverse kind of nostalgia for an age that never really was, perhaps I’m guiltier of that than most as well.