''Tales from Turnpike House'' is the seventh studio album by English
alternative dance band
Saint Etienne. It is a
concept album in which the songs depict characters who all live in the eponymous
block of flats
An apartment (American English), or flat (British English, Indian English, South African English), is a self-contained housing unit (a type of residential real estate) that occupies part of a building, generally on a single story. There are man ...
in London.
Setting
The exact setting of the stories told by the album's setting is somewhat amorphous. The real Turnpike House is a high-rise block of flats in
Goswell Road
Goswell Road, in Central London, is an end part of the A1. The southern part ends with one block, on the east side, in City of London; the rest is in the London Borough of Islington, the north end being Angel. It crosses Old Street/Clerkenwell ...
,
EC1, an area of ex-council blocks between
Clerkenwell and
Upper Street
Upper Street is the main street of the Islington district of inner north London, and carries the A1 road. It begins at the junction of the A1 and Liverpool Road, continuing on from Islington High Street which runs from the crossroads at Penton ...
. The band had spent a lot of time in Turnpike House, as filmmaker
Paul Kelly lived there during the period in which they were collaborating on ''
What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day?''.
However,
Sarah Cracknell has said that the building imagined in the album is "not nearly as smart" as the real Turnpike House.
Bob Stanley has said that he imagined the album's setting to be more suburban, "probably somewhere like
Croydon
Croydon is a large town in south London, England, south of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Croydon, a local government district of Greater London. It is one of the largest commercial districts in Greater London, with an extensi ...
or possibly
Ponders End
Ponders End is the southeasternmost part of Enfield, north London, centred on the Hertford Road. Situated to the west of the River Lee Navigation, it became industrialised through the 19th century, similar to the Lea Valley in neighbouring Ed ...
".
Pete Wiggs has said that his experience of living in Croydon was the inspiration for "Side Streets" and "Slow Down at the Castle" (the Castle is a water tower in
Park Hill Recreation Ground
Park Hill Recreation Ground is a park near the centre of Croydon, Greater London, managed by the London Borough of Croydon. It runs from Barclay Road to Coombe Road beside the railway line, with the main entrances on Water Tower Hill and Barc ...
).
However, the title of "The Birdman of EC1" refers to the
postal district in which the real Turnpike House is located.
Collaborations
The album features two tracks co-written and produced by
Xenomania
Xenomania is an English songwriting and production team founded by Brian Higgins and based in Kent, England. Formed by Higgins with his Creative Director Miranda Cooper and Business Director Sarah Stennett of First Access Entertainment, Xenoman ...
("Lightning Strikes Twice" and "
Stars Above Us") as well as a guest vocal from 1970s pop star
David Essex
David Essex (born David Albert Cook; 23 July 1947) is an English singer, songwriter, and actor. Since the 1970s, he has attained 19 Top 40 singles in the UK (including two number ones) and 16 Top 40 albums. Internationally, Essex had the most ...
on "Relocate" (Essex had earlier appeared on the Saint Etienne album ''
So Tough
''So Tough'' is the second studio album by British band Saint Etienne, released in 1993. It is their highest-charting album to date, reaching No. 7 on the UK Album Chart.
''So Tough'' is the first Saint Etienne album to feature Sarah Crackn ...
'' via sampled dialogue from the 1973 film ''
That'll Be the Day
"That'll Be the Day" is a song written by Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison. It was first recorded by Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes in 1956 and was re-recorded in 1957 by Holly and his new band, the Crickets. The 1957 recording achieved widespr ...
'').
Releases
''Tales from Turnpike House'' was released 13 June 2005 on
Sanctuary Records
Sanctuary Records Group Limited was a record label based in the United Kingdom and is as of 2013 a subsidiary of BMG Rights Management solely for reissues. Until June 2007, it was the largest independent record label in the UK and the largest m ...
and preceded by a single for "Side Streets" on 6 June 2005. In the United States, the album was released 24 January 2006 by
Savoy Jazz
Savoy Records is an American record company and label established by Herman Lubinsky in 1942 in Newark, New Jersey. Savoy specialized in jazz, rhythm and blues, and gospel music.
In September 2017, Savoy was acquired by Concord Bicycle Music.
...
. Initial quantities of the UK release came with a bonus EP of
children's music titled ''Up the Wooden Hills''. The band felt that music for young children under seven was fed into unexceptional pop music, and wanted to make music that children and parents could enjoy together. Double-disc editions of the US release included instead the ''Savoy
Nu Groove
Sampler'', containing six tracks from various Savoy Jazz releases, including "Side Streets" from the album itself.
As part of the reissue programme of all Saint Etienne's albums, ''Tales from Turnpike House'' was re-released in a deluxe double CD edition featuring unreleased material and sleeve notes by
Jeremy Deller
Jeremy Deller (born 30 March 1966) is an English conceptual, video and installation artist. Much of Deller's work is collaborative; it has a strong political aspect, in the subjects dealt with and also the devaluation of artistic ego through th ...
in October 2010.
Critical reception
''Tales from Turnpike House'' was very well-received from critics, holding an aggregate 79 out of 100 from
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...
based on 22 reviews.
The album's most favourable reviews, including a five-star review from Dorlan Lynskey of ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'', called it the group's best album yet,
with praise going towards the album's songwriting, production, arrangements, sound, vocal harmonies and Sarah Cracknell's vocals.
Ernesto Lechner wrote in his review for the ''
Los Angeles Times
The ''Los Angeles Times'' (abbreviated as ''LA Times'') is a daily newspaper that started publishing in Los Angeles in 1881. Based in the LA-adjacent suburb of El Segundo since 2018, it is the sixth-largest newspaper by circulation in the U ...
'' that "If it's pop craftsmanship you are after, few can equal this melancholy concept album and the sheer virtuosity of its hooks",
while
Stylus Magazine's Edward Oculicz called it an "overwhelmingly forward, ambitious album for a group fifteen years into their career and long past their commercial prime who could have quite happily introduced no new ideas—musical or thematical—and not challenged their dwindling but loyal fan-base."
Allmusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databa ...
journalist Andy Kellman called it the band's most organic release since their fourth album ''
Good Humor
Good Humor is a Good Humor-Breyers brand of ice cream started in Youngstown, Ohio, US, in the early 1920s with the Good Humor bar, a chocolate-coated ice cream bar on a stick sold from ice cream trucks and retail outlets. It was a fixture in Am ...
'', highlighting ''Turnpike''
's concept as allowing "for a range of material that's as broad as what can be heard on any other Saint Etienne album."
Peter Relic of ''
Rolling Stone
''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first known for its ...
'', who also noted the variety of musical styles, called the record "an unabashedly joyful celebration of being British" that "could make an Anglophile out of anyone."
In a less positive review, Thomas Blatchford of
Drowned in Sound called ''Tales from Turnpike House'' "A good enough record, but we know they can do better." He felt the harmonies were "over-egged" and not complementary to Cracknell's lead vocals, and described the concept as difficult to grasp it due to it being "too downbeat to be uplifting and too uplifting to be downbeat".
However, a reviewer from ''
Q'' was the most negative towards the album. He found Saint Etienne's brand of indie disco "dated" and bashed the lyrical content as "a concept album of kitchen-sink dramas about Tony The Milkman and Doris The Housewife".
Track listing
* The Japanese edition includes two B-sides from the "Side Streets" single in the middle of the track listing.
* The US edition contains a considerably rearranged track listing, adding some songs while removing others. "I'm Falling" is a B-side from the second single, "A Good Thing".
* The 2010 deluxe edition included the original UK release of the album and a second disc consisting of rare and unreleased material. The three exclusive tracks from the US release were "mistakenly" left off the 2010 deluxe edition, but appeared on the 2011 single-disc reissue.
Personnel
;Saint Etienne
*
Pete Wiggs
Peter Stewart Wiggs (born 15 May 1966) is an English musician and DJ from Reigate, Surrey.
Saint Etienne
Pete Wiggs is a member of the pop/dance group Saint Etienne (alongside Bob Stanley and Sarah Cracknell) for which he co-writes songs, pro ...
*
Bob Stanley
*
Sarah Cracknell
;Additional personnel
*
David Essex
David Essex (born David Albert Cook; 23 July 1947) is an English singer, songwriter, and actor. Since the 1970s, he has attained 19 Top 40 singles in the UK (including two number ones) and 16 Top 40 albums. Internationally, Essex had the most ...
– additional vocals
*
Shawn Lee – help
*
Hugh McDowell
Hugh Alexander McDowell (31 July 1953 – 6 November 2018)[ELO and ...](_blank)
– help
*
Tony Rivers
Tony Rivers (born Douglas Anthony Thompson, 21 December 1940, Shildon, County Durham, England) is an English singer, best known for singing with the groups Tony Rivers and the Castaways and Harmony Grass. Additionally, Rivers sang on albums by ...
and Anthony Rivers – vocal arrangements and all male harmony vocals
B-sides
from "Side Streets"
* "The Leyton Art Inferno"
* "Got A Job"
* "You Can Judge A Book By It's Cover"
* "Murder in E Minor"
from "A Good Thing"
* "I'm Falling"
* "Missing Persons Bureau"
* "Book Norton"
* "Quiet Essex"
* "A Good Thing" (Das Germanwings Mix)
Charts
References
{{Authority control
2005 albums
Concept albums
Saint Etienne (band) albums
Sanctuary Records albums