Home Counties

The Home Counties are an embarrassing place to come from. The name itself suggests that somehow the rest of Britain isn’t ‘home’, not even London. It’s where John Major’s vision of cricket and warm beer was meant to exist, but it’s not really like that at all, and it never has been. The Home Counties are a land of bootleg DVDs at car boot sales, Saint Etienne grew up in the Home Counties. Here are sixteen new songs they have written about a day in the life of this doughnut of shires that ring the capital, punctuated by bursts of BBC radio to remind you what time it is, and all connected by train journeys – main lines, branch lines, commutes, escapes. Yet Saint Etienne understand that, if you squint, it could be almost utopian – here are the post-war new towns, much of the country’s modernist architecture, and the non-league football heroes of Sutton United, Leatherhead, Harlow Town. Three of the Beatles lived here. So did the Prodigy, the Zombies, Depeche Mode, Dr Feelgood and, naturally, Saint Etienne, small town groups looking to the capital but audibly inspired by municipal housing, box hedges and ring roads. 2LP – Double Vinyl with Download.