Musical Musings: Five of the Best - Stereolab

Jarrett McCall is back on Musical Musings: Five of the Best, and after last time’s romp through the American seventies alphabet he’s narrowed his sights to a single band — one of the most quietly influential groups of the last thirty-five years. Stereolab were born in London in 1990 out of a Paris romance: Tim Gane, guitarist with the fiercely political indie band McCarthy, met the French singer Lætitia Sadier at one of his own gigs, and the two of them built something new around the relentless forward pulse of German krautrock, banks of vintage analogue keyboards, sixties lounge and French pop chord changes, and lyrics drawn from Situationist philosophy. They named themselves after a Vanguard Records imprint that made hi-fi demonstration discs, ran their own label, Duophonic, from the very first ten-inch, and were happily dubbed “space age bachelor pad music” — as well as being among the first bands anyone ever called post-rock. In 1992 the last piece arrived: an Australian singer and guitarist called Mary Hansen, whose weightless counterpoint to Sadier’s voice became the sound people mean when they say Stereolab.

Jarrett’s five run chronologically from 1994 to 2004, and they are, quietly, a portrait of that second voice. We open with “Ping Pong” from Mars Audiac Quintet — the band’s biggest UK hit, ninth in John Peel’s Festive Fifty for 1994, and the sunniest tune ever written about the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism. Then a deep cut from the album most people call their masterpiece, “Monstre Sacre” from 1996’s Emperor Tomato Ketchup, named after a Shūji Terayama film and made in Chicago with John McEntire of Tortoise. Next comes the loveliest thing they ever recorded, the harpsichord waltz “The Flower Called Nowhere” from 1997’s Dots and Loops, a track Gane described as an attempt at mid-sixties European exploitation film music. Then “Naught More Terrific Than Man” from Sound-Dust in 2001 — which nobody knew at the time would be Mary Hansen’s last album with the band. She was killed cycling in London in December 2002. So Jarrett closes on “Dear Marge,” the final track of Margerine Eclipse, the first record Stereolab made without her, and one mixed so that every song carries two complete arrangements, one hard-panned to each stereo channel. Five songs, ten years, and a sixth presence running through all of them.

Broadcast 24 August 2026