Faster than a speeding bullet

At 5604 beats per minute I give you Saint Etienne.
When I was a kid pop music did two things. It gave you something to talk about with friends and it stimulated those first flushes of sexual desire. For a lot of boys in their teenage years the sex thing is replaced by this pathethic attempt to appear culturally valid and so the guitars and moody singers dressed in black become all important. But even that is about a shared identity, about fitting in, they just don't realise it at the time.
Eventually we all hit the adult music and the second flushes of musical sexual desire.
For pretty much every boy of my age is was Debbie Harry first of all. Some then branched of into Madonna others into the Smiths. Many branched off into the Smiths whilst secretly hoping that no one would twig their Madonna fixation (see what I did there? Branch, twig? Oh, come on)
And yes, eventually everyone seemed to get the Kylie thing for their second flush although there seem to be a lot more nubile, scantily clad young female singers around these days. Remember the time when the height of sexual excitement in music was Buck's Fizz at the Eurovision song contest and two strikingly plain woman revealing something called legs? Excuse me while I wipe the cold sweat away.
But for me, one stood out above the others. And I think you can tell where I'm going with this. Sarah Cracknell.

I loved her when music started going a bit haywire in the early nineties, when the split between grungey pop (face it Nirvana were pop) and dancey pop opened up forever. She sat somewhere in between. You could tell that if she really wanted to then rocking out was a possibility, though she never did. You could tell from her voice that she possessed all the charm anyone ever needed to fall in love with her and the band.
And here I am fifteen years on, still listening, still thinking "if only", still wondering why it took so long to find a decent picture of her and amused to think that the best ones I found all had her alongside Wiggs and Stanley (who are the brains behind the band after all).
Which proves that like all of these fixations, I'm only human. And it's only pop.
And for the next fifteen minutes the best song ever is the forlon fun fuelled frenzy of He's On The Phone by Saint Etienne.


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