In recent years, Saint Etienne have supplemented their careers as pop musicians and film-makers with a fascinating sideline in musical archeology. The band’s members have helmed a series of esoteric compilations that attempt to shed light on ignored areas of pop’s past: their 2012 collection Saint Etienne Presents Songs for the Lyons Cornerhouse launched a lonely, doomed bid to rehabilitate the kind of 50s pop that proliferated in the British charts before rock’n’roll took hold; 2014’s Saint Etienne Presents Songs for a London Winter homed in on festive records of the pre-Beatles era; the same year’s Saint Etienne Presents Match Day went out of its way to uncover the most peculiar football records imaginable, among them a screaming 1967 freakbeat track hymning Queens Park Rangers and the deeply improbable sound of Faces-indebted hard rockers the Quireboys singing about non-league side Blyth Spartans.
If it’s not quite as recherche as that, English Weather still homes in on a short, overlooked era in British pop history: what co-compiler Bob Stanley calls “the post-psychedelic, pre-progressive moment”. It’s the sound of British rock on the morning after the 60s, head thick with hungover, pensive introspection; wistfully aware that something’s over but rattled and uncertain about what happens next, either for music or the planet in general: “We’re refugees, walking away from the life that we’ve all known and loved,” as Van Der Graaf Generator put it on Refugees, an impossibly beautiful song entirely at odds with their reputation as the prog band so fearsome even Johnny Rotten loved them.
The album corrals together a pretty eclectic cast. There are famous prog rockers caught before their sound had coalesced – not just Van Der Graaf Generator but Caravan and Camel – and singer-songwriters of varying degrees of celebrity, from John Cale in heavily-orchestrated Phil Spector mode on Big White Cloud to the recently rediscovered Bill Fay, and Belle Gonzales, a London-based Filipino jazz singer who recorded a solitary album in folky mode. There are forgotten “underground” bands whose career amounted to a lone album, a couple of plays on John Peel, then the kind of commercial oblivion that leads to WTF? prices on discogs.com: the Parlour Band, T2 and Aardvark. And there are obscurities that make Belle Gonzales and Aardvark look like household names with their own themed week on The X Factor and an ITV special revealing the nation’s favourite songs from their oeuvre. Fans of Saint Etienne’s longstanding obsession with rummaging in pop’s most arcane corners – they once made the Top 30 with a cover version of a song previously recorded by 1972 Opportunity Knocks winners Candlewick Green; Bob Stanley’s 700-page history of pop Yeah Yeah Yeah devotes more space to Lieutenant Pigeon than Led Zeppelin – should note that they appear to have excelled themselves here, with track four, Pamela by Scotch Mist. This turns out to be – wait for it – the B-side of a flop 1974 novelty single recorded under a pseudonym by soft rockers Pilot, of Magic and January fame. It’s a great track – eerie and spare, dominated by a really chilling, keening vocal – but the process by which it was rediscovered boggles the mind a bit.
It’s a pretty motley collection of artists trying out ideas – epic, episodic, orchestral ballads; jazzy piano-led soul-searching with abrasive guitar; ascetic acoustic pop decorated with woodwind – in a brief, directionless period when all bets were off, and before it became clear that early 70s rock would be dominated by prog, glam, West Coast singer-songwriters, and cocaine cowboys advising us to take it easy. Sometimes, the music the compilation alights on feels like a period piece; sometimes, as in the case of Camel’s Never Let Go, it feels weirdly contemporary – perhaps because a mood of pensive uncertainty has very much proved 2017’s thing thus far.
But what’s really arresting about English Weather is how unified and coherent it sounds. How the disparate elements come together and paint a remarkably vivid picture of an era. Everything here is of a really high quality: you wonder how so much of it went unnoticed, and whether it’s because the bar was set high 40-odd years ago, or because the compilers are adept at finding the one great track on otherwise unremarkable albums. Everything is shot through with the same autumnal melancholy. Everything sounds incredibly British, up to and including a minor psych-pop band called Orange Bicycle attempting to stave off the inevitable by copying the contemporary sounds emanating from LA. It takes a certain je ne sais quoi to still sound redolent of the London suburbs on a drizzly October day while singing about heading down the Oakland turnpike in the intricate harmony vocal style of Crosby, Stills and Nash, but somehow they managed it.
You hear detectable echoes of psychedelia everywhere: Strawberry Fields Forever mellotrons; the stinging guitar that punctuates Bill Fay’s ’Til the Christ Comes Back; the way Geordie-accented folk rockers Prelude’s Edge of the Sea declines into the kind of whimsical poetic interlude that decorated albums by Tyrannosaurus Rex or the Incredible String Band, albeit with a slightly darker hue: “Alas, said the cloud, what have we here? I believe it’s the world and it’s covered in fear.”
Maybe that’s linked to the fact that, in Britain, the 60s didn’t conclude with the same kind of violent, dramatic finality that they did in the States. The mood had clearly darkened since the Summer of Love, but there was no British Altamont, no British Kent State massacre to irrevocably shatter your faith in flower power’s utopian idealism.
1970 and 1971 were also the years of Ride a White Swan and T Rextasy, of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid and Meddle by Pink Floyd, of Hunky Dory, Maggie May and Madman Across the Water. Not much in the way of morning-after-the-60s hangover or pensive uncertainty there: the music that would come to define British rock in the 70s was well underway, and its progenitors already had their gazes fixed firmly forward. But English Weather tells an alternative story, using the stuff that fell through the cracks to create something really compelling and immersive: it’s a pleasure to lose yourself in it.
