Saint Etienne

With its name lifted from a French football club whose glory days belong to the '70s, Saint Etienne was a conceptual project dreamed up by a couple of music writers who successfully made the leap from pop criticism to pop creation. Starting out in the post-rave years of the early '90s, the band would help lay down the groundwork for much of Britpop, combining studied grooviness with musical smarts on cleverly constructed singles like "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" (a gorgeous reworking of the Neil Young original) and "You're in a Bad Way", which is a dream-like distillation of northern soul and insouciant, hipsterish pop. Saint Etienne perfects its formula, in Next Steps.

Set over one day in a block of London flats, Tales from Turnpike House (2005) represents Saint Etienne at the top of their game and, as it might well be their final studio LP, it holds true to the idea that it's best to go out on top. Shifting moods to give a sense of narrative and character, the tracks still hold together beautifully, with soft acoustic offerings like "Sun in My Morning" giving way to the lush pop loveliness of "Milk Bottle Symphony" (the vocal arrangements on those songs reveal a healthy obsession with the Beach Boys, also evident on "Stevie") as well as the uptempo catchiness of "Stars Above Us", which gets an extended dose of delirium in its Eric Kupper remix guise. The hip and wonderful world of Saint Etienne reveals more of its bounty, in Deep Cuts.

Here, the dependable eclecticism of Saint Etienne really starts to show itself: 1995's Reserection EP is a fascinating collaboration with French pop hero, Etienne Daho, whose spoken-word skills, combined with a funk-rockin' guitar sample, make "Jungle Pulse" a standout. "Blofeld Buildings" appears on Sound of Water (2000), an album which found the band in cahoots with the dreamier forces of electronica, while in the side-project department, "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" (a cover of the Dusty Springfield track) sees frontwoman Sarah Cracknell teaming up for a duet with icon of '80s electronica, Marc Almond.

Formed by music journalists, Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley — who settled on glamorous blonde vocalist Sarah Cracknell after early releases with Moira Lambert and Donna Savage — Saint Etienne was arguably the coolest British band of the '90s, blending an aura of continental sexiness with the style and energy of retro London. Much of their music was the ideal soundtrack for a post-clubbing café breakfast somewhere off a grimy urban sidestreet; other tracks seem more suited to a ride in a fast car on the Italian Riviera. Spoken word samples (often culled from old kitchen sink movies) punctuate their fresh and imaginative album tracks, to which the overused adjectives "hip" and "groovy" can confidently be applied. Our overview of the band's catalogue includes the leftfield Xmas track "I Was Born on Christmas Day" (a duet featuring Cracknell and guest singer Tim Burgess from the Charlatans) and 2009's club sunburst, "Method of Modern Love".