Laetitia Sadier is best known as the voice of Stereolab – but, following her sister's suicide, the songs came quickly for her first solo offering. It showcases her deeper, more mature vocal style – but does this mean the end of Stereolab? SINEAD GLEESON finds out
IN THE mid-1990s every straight male I knew with even a passing interest in music was in love with Laetitia Sadier. Every woman wanted to be her.
It wasn't just that she was beautiful, or spoke with a sublime French accent – she was a multi-instrumentalist who penned lyrics about Situationism and politics, love and death. In 1990 she formed Stereolab with her then partner Tim Gane and cornered the market in Gallic-tinged electropop. They were hugely successful, and Sadier's purring, alto voice led to an appearance on Blur's To the End. For all the longevity of her musical career, it has taken 20 years for The Trip, her first solo album, to appear.
“I don’t know why it took so long. The rule was to never force anything or have any agenda whatsoever. It’s always been about doing things for pleasure and at my own pace. There was no ego involved, it was about letting nature take its course.”
Sadier is in the middle of a gruelling solo tour in Europe, and is packing her bag in a Barcelona hotel. The drives are “long and grinding”, but her “spirits are high” and the gigs are solo efforts. It’s just her and her guitar under the lights. There is none of the safety in numbers that comes from playing with an ensemble.
“It feels wonderful, you know? I think that I needed to claim my space, and now I have the opportunity to. It’s also good to come out of my comfort zone, to open up. It’s been a really rich experience, even though it’s been hard work, because I have no crutches and whatever mistakes I make . . . Well, there they are.”
While still in Stereolab, Sadier was compelled to form a new side project. In her early musical days she had learned to record with Rosie Cuckston of Pram, and in 1996 they formed Monade. It wasn’t until 2003 that they got around to releasing their debut album, following it up with another in 2004 and 2008’s Monstre Cosmic. Despite the quartet line-up, it always felt and sounded very much like Sadier’s own project, and now that she’s finally made something solo, she doesn’t feel she’ll make another Monade record.
“My boyfriend encouraged me to make an album under my own name, even though for me, Monade and Laetitia Sadier are not too far apart. It’s always the same path – the only difference has been the names. They’re both part of my soul, but now that Stereolab has evaporated, I thought ‘why not do something under my own name?’ The timing seemed appropriate.”
Timing is central to the record. If you read of the press surrounding The Trip, all reference Sadier’s younger sister Noelle, who took her own life last year. It was devastating for the singer and her family, but she found solace in the new project, in creativity as a distraction. The opening track, One Million Year Trip, is specifically about Noelle, and the album is dedicated to her.
“She was 33 and there was a lot of love in her that was probably not going to anyone specific. I think she was lonely. Very lonely. She fell into the trap of debt and there was an accumulation of things, but generally she was quite depressive. I wanted this record to be celebratory, but I didn’t set out to do it any one way. The point of art is to not control it, but to guide it, to channel it and that’s how that song came out. I wanted it to be lifeaffirming in the face of this kind of tragedy. It’s been cathartic too – it’s somewhere to put the grief and the sadness and to help the grieving process, but it’s still tough to accept.”
Although most of the lyric-writing in Stereolab fell to her, and Monade was Sadier’s own vehicle, the buffer of other people can impact on what you say in songs. Releasing a solo album grants a licence to be more personal and honest, especially when the subject matter is about the death of a family member. And yet Sadier says the band set-up has never daunted her when it came to speaking her mind.
“I’ve never felt restrained in any way, lyrically, when I was in a band. If I wanted to be personal, I would. In Stereolab, I wrote about my mother’s death. I’ve been political in Monade too, but to me political can be very personal too. On this record, I did use personal situations to therapeutic ends, because this, to me, is what art is about. It’s about using your emotions and expressing them so that they don’t rot inside of you. So I used them – and I hate saying ‘use’ . . . ” She trails off. Channel, I offer? “Yes, channel is better – I channelled those emotions.”
In the summer after her sister’s death, understandably, making an album wasn’t a high priority for Sadier, but songs kept coming to her, usually at night. Over a two-month summer period she wrote for several hours a day.
“These songs started in these dreams I kept having. I was dreaming of this music all the time . . . and the music of Ennio Morricone and Serge Gainsbourg. When I woke up, I’d have a song and I realised that I could do it, even though I’m very lazy.” She laughs. “What became this album fixated me and had its way with me.”
Two cover versions also make the album, Wendy and Bonnie’s By the Sea and Un Soir, Un Chien by legendary French band Les Rita Mitsouko. Sadier’s voice has always been an inextricable cornerstone of the bands she has played with. Her sing-song vocals were the mainstay of Stereolab’s sound and on The Trip it sounds just as rich. There is, however, a noticeable deepening, a maturity that affects most singers over time. It sounds lower, more diverse, and it recalibrates what we expect of her vocally.
“It absolutely is, but I think it’s to do with finding my deeper – truer – voice, and I see that I’m making my way towards that, which is exciting. In finding my voice, I have more consciousness about it and more focus than I ever did, so there’s more pleasure in it.”
Inevitably, fans are curious about what will become of Stereolab, now that Sadier is working on solo material and Monade has been subsumed into her solo persona. Her old band are on extended hiatus, despite the release of Not Music next month, gleaned from unused recordings on 2008’s Chemical Chords album. Sadier is vague, but only because she feels Stereolab’s future is not her call.
“I have no idea what will happen, but personally I’m enjoying the break from it, because I’ve been in that band for 18 years with six people. It’s up to Tim to put music together for Stereolab. I love his music, and I’ll always be willing to sing it, but will I in 10 years’ time? I don’t know. We’ll see.”
She laughs politely and we part so that she can climb into a van to San Sebastian and regale another audience with the heartfelt, wonderful songs of The Trip.
The Tripis out now on Drag City.
Stereolab’s Not Music is out on Duophonic on November 12. Laetitia Sadier plays Dublin’s Grand Social on December 2
