Saint Etienne On Their Farewell Australian Tour…

One of the UK’s most beloved and enduring pop groups, SAINT ETIENNE, are heading to Australia and New Zealand for the very last time. Following the announcement that their 2025 album International would be their final studio release, the iconic trio will take their celebrated catalogue on a farewell tour across Australia this November and December. Released in September 2025, International was met with rapturous acclaim, returning Saint Etienne to the UK Top 10 and reaffirming their status as one of Britain’s most treasured musical institutions. Now, fans across Australia and New Zealand will have the rare chance to experience the band’s shimmering, genre‑blurring sound live, one final time.

With a career spanning more than three decades, Saint Etienne’s songbook is rich with classics including Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Spring, Nothing Can Stop Us, You’re In A Bad Way, He’s On The Phone and Wood Cabin tracks that helped define an era of British pop and continue to resonate with audiences worldwide. Formed in 1990 by Croydon natives Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs, Saint Etienne struck gold from the outset with their debut single, a transformative cover of Neil Young’s Only Love Can Break Your Heart, which quickly became a club anthem. The arrival of vocalist Sarah Cracknell in 1991 completed the definitive lineup, her debut on Nothing Can Stop Us and the Mercury Prize‑nominated album Foxbase Alpha cementing the group’s place in UK pop history.

Their follow‑up album So Tough soared into the UK Top 10, leading to a landmark moment in 1994 when Saint Etienne became the first band ever broadcast live from Glastonbury Festival. Now, after decades of innovation, reinvention and irresistible pop craftsmanship, Saint Etienne prepare to say goodbye to Australian and New Zealand audiences. Pete Wiggs chats with Rob Lyon about their Australian and New Zealand farewell.

It must be equally exciting and probably a touch sad that this is going to be the final tour of Australia?
Yeah, I know, because we haven’t done many tours of Australia. I think the last one was in 1998, and we never made it as far as Adelaide. So yeah, it’s very exciting, but a double‑edged sword, like you say.

Was it a tough decision to make?
It was, yeah. I was the last one to find out about the decision in the band, but it’s weird, it’s made things more exciting, in a way, to have a kind of lid on things, really, because we’re probably going to do Europe next year and then sort of finish at the end of next year. Doing the last album, it made us… I don’t know, it was quite liberating in a strange way to think, okay, this is the last one, let’s really enjoy ourselves and pack it all into the next couple of years and yeah, we’re all sort of vaguely with it still at the moment.

Do those sorts of decisions become more apparent as you’re working through an international release?
I guess so, yeah. I think we’d started getting ideas together for it, but we definitely made the decision and then it sort of reflected in the music a bit, certainly with the song The Last Times, kind of deliberate.

Did that make it more freeing, like the shackles were off, just being able to go with the flow and go wherever the music took you with this album?
It did, really, yeah. I think because we normally have a concept for each album, but this one was less of a concept. It was more that we were going to collaborate with lots of people that we wanted to collaborate with, and it was our last album, so it didn’t have a sort of mute sonic concept as such. So it was quite liberating to just see where it went and see what the spark from collaborators would give. Sometimes we’d start something off and send it to someone else, and vice versa, to get the ideas rolling.

Did you have a skeleton idea of the sound or themes you wanted to explore, or did that come more in the studio?
Yeah, it kind of came in the studio, really. It was recorded really quickly, actually. I think we set ourselves a deadline to do it, which we probably could have spent longer on, but that was quite good, having that restraint, because it meant we had to find people that could collaborate within that timeframe and just go, right, they’re up for it, let’s do something. We didn’t really have that much time to think, in a good way. It did feel a bit like the old days of actually being together in the studio and coming up with lyric ideas in the studio, whereas over the last few years we’ve done a lot more separately, collaborating by sending things backwards and forwards and doing more homework. This time there was more writing together in the studio again, which was nice.

What was it about working with Confidence Man that made them a collaboration you really wanted?
That was actually something that Sarah had started a while back, and it kind of kick‑started the idea of doing the collaborations. She was like, oh, can we revisit that song we started working on? And they were like, yeah, cool. So then we were like, oh great, let’s see who else we can work with. She came and sang with us when we did a radio station with that track, and Janet joined us, which was great, it was really fun to do that.

Were there other people you were clear about wanting to approach, or did that come naturally?
I think a lot of the cases were people we knew. Tom from Chemical Brothers, that was one we thought would be brilliant to ask. He happened to have started that track a while ago and thought it sounded a bit Saint Etienne, but he didn’t approach us. It was good that we mentioned it to him and he was like, oh… so that worked really well. Then Orbital, Paul, I’d met recently. Well, we originally met in the 90s, but I met him again because he lives near me, and I’d seen them at Glastonbury and it was amazing, and I thought, God, that’d be amazing if we could do a collaboration. I was sort of embarrassed to ask him, because we knew each other in a friendly way and I didn’t want it to be awkward if he said no, but he said he was chuffed to be asked. So it kind of worked like that you’d tentatively ask someone and they’d be like, oh great, which was nice. No one turned us down.

Was it really cool going top ten in the UK on the album charts? That must be a really good feeling.
Yeah, it was… especially because we said it was our last time. It could be an awful effort, you know, it was a real dud and sort of two‑star job, so that was really exciting. I saw a review of Boards of Canada’s new album, and they got really slated in The Guardian, I really felt for them, because they haven’t made an album for ages, and I just thought, oh, if we’d done that, it would have been a real sad way to go.

I guess it probably just reaffirms the decision to go out on top in a lot of ways as well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been nice in the sense that when we announced it, there was the sort of outpouring on Instagram, and some of the stories people told were so lovely, memories and things of how we’d impacted them over the years. It’s led the whole thing… rather than just promoting albums, it’s more like talking about our whole career, making you think back, and it makes it a bit more joyous, this sort of ending, rather than a sad one.

Career‑celebrating setlists, that must make it pretty challenging to work out how to fit an entire career into a show, plus the new album?
We’re still working that out at the moment, but yeah, it’s quite nice to have a lot of songs to choose from. But also, we don’t want to be one of those bands that just turns up and does all the new stuff and doesn’t play any of the hits, in inverted commas. So we’re going to try and pack them in.

Even when you reflect on International and what you’ve achieved with it, what do you feel and think about it now?
I feel sort of happy, which is good. We could have obviously achieved greater commercial success, but I think that’s another double‑edged sword, isn’t it? I meet other people that have been in bands as long as us, and maybe they’ve done better financially out of it, but I don’t know if they’ve had such fun as we have, because we do other stuff, we’ve got family lives, and we made sure we didn’t just be on the road all the time and fall out with each other. We’ve had the good side of it, really. We’ve been lucky in many ways to have been able to keep going for so long.

And being able to do it your way as well.
Yeah, yeah, and the fans have been brilliant. We’ve had people that have stuck with us for thirty‑odd years as well. But I think there’s some young ones coming up as well. Their kids, probably.

Have there been any particular memories or stories from past Australian tours, the last time you were here in ’98, that still stand out for you?
I just remember it being incredibly hot in Melbourne, and I was a bit spaced out when we got there, because I think we’d flown… I don’t know where we’d flown from. But it was great once you actually do the gigs, it was fantastic. I think when we arrived, the record company had put on a party for us, and we were just… we weren’t there, you know, like little zombies and it was quite surreal. They’d put sand on the floor inside this building, and they’d got people in bikinis dancing and stuff. I was like, hang on, are we actually awake? It’s a dream. So that was pretty cool.

Beyond these shows, what does life look like for you? Are you taking a break or pursuing other projects?
Yeah, it’s difficult. There’s something I need to finish that I started, which is a sort of music and poetry thing with a friend of mine doing the poetry. But on top of that, I’ve just done a film soundtrack, so maybe there’ll be more of that coming. I haven’t really planned anything yet, but in some ways, there’s things like… my wife wants me to do more around the house. I keep putting that off by disappearing into my studio and doing music instead.

When that final show does roll around, how do you think you’ll feel? Relief, or total pride?
Because at the moment, it’s still a year away or whatever… yeah, it’s going to be weird, I think. We haven’t done a gig for a couple of years, that’s the longest break we’ve ever had between playing live, because it used to be a fixture every year, go somewhere and do stuff. So in a way, I got used to not playing live, so I’m actually excited about doing it again, but then it’ll stop again.

Was everyone in agreeance, or did some people take convincing that it was time to move on?
Well, I was the last person to sort of know about the concept. But actually, it was a bit like, oh, let me think about it, and then quite quickly it became, oh, that it’s weirdly a nice feeling and like I say, it makes you concentrate, think about all the good things that have happened over the years. For people to say all those nice things about you… it’s a nice thing. You think, oh, I have done something with my life, touched somebody. Some of the lovely stories, and you think, wow, to have an effect on someone’s life like that, in a positive way, it’s a nice thing.

Is there anything in particular you look forward to when you come back to Australia?
Well, seeing more of it. I hope we get some time off, because I’d love to… I haven’t seen any animals yet in Australia. The people are lovely, food and drink. Yeah, it’s going to be be exciting. It’s a complete change of scenery.

Interview By Rob Lyon

Catch Saint Etienne on the following dates, tickets from Destroy All Lines…