Saint Etienne – Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Neil Young Cover)

Facebook’ made a big push into music last night, but I still tend to head to YouTube when I’m looking for a bit of serendipitous discovery/reminiscing. And today it didn’t disappoint.

There are a lot of great things celebrating 20th anniversaries this year: Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, Massive Attack’s Blue Lines, Nirvana’s Nevermind, my GCSE results. And Saint Etienne’s first ever single, a house-tinged cover of Neil Young’s beautiful Only Love Can Break Your Heart: I know this because of the nifty timeline that YouTube have introduced for bands & artists.

Saint Etienne’s take on Only Love Can Break Your Heart takes a downbeat, acoustic little ditty and turns it into a dirty, great skanking club monster. It might be twenty years old, but it still sounds fresh enough to take your nose off. Or something. It’s taken from their début album Foxbase Alpha, which was an interesting and eclectic take on post SUmmer of Love London, but is, ultimately slightly frustrating (like much of Saint Etienne’s work if you ask me). But this single is a stone cold classic.

Lego album cover by hazymemory on flickr

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