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Bob Stanley's flat looks like a set from a 60s spy thriller. The co-founder of St Etienne has fashioned a space-age bachelor pad with 60s film posters all around, a wallful of comics and children's books from that era, and a record player that belongs in the relaxation quarters of a rocketship from Space 1999. Unsurprisingly, the 60s figure heavily in his record collection.

"I started buying records in 1975, and records were crap then," he explains of the genesis of his love affair with the decade's more soothing sounds. "But the Beach Boys' 20 Golden Greats came out and I thought songs like Good Vibrations and God Only Knows were brilliant. Then I got The Golden Hour of the Kinks and it took off from there. Also, kids' programmes had music I liked; a lot of it had a folk aspect, with hurdy-gurdies and so on making it sound a bit spooky. It was because so many hippies were working in children's television back then."

The children's tunes heard in his youth have forged Bob Stanley's love for pastoral English folk. "Anne Briggs is one of my favourite singers. She didn't record much because she hated studios, but she used to go into pubs and start singing all the time. She started this country's folk scene - digging out old English songs and doing new vocal arrangements for them. She lives on a remote Scottish island now."

Another favourite, the Free Design, make St Etienne sound positively aggressive. "They're an American family, the Dedricks, who made a number of albums that completely bombed in the 60s, including this one, Kites are Fun," he explains, as the Dedricks lilt their way through a breezy affair called Bubbles. "When I first heard it I thought it was really wet, but it's got beautiful, intricate harmonies and gorgeous arrangements. In the last few years I've really swerved more towards this kind of music, and decided that Donovan had a lot more to say than Dylan. This peace-and-love philosophy has got quite a lot going for it."

An album of songs recorded as incidental music for television, KPM, fulfils a childhood longing. "When I was a kid I used to watch the test card because I liked the music, and I wrote to the BBC asking where I could buy it and they said I couldn't, so finding this album was a revelation. The KPM All-Stars played a gig at the Jazz Cafe a few months back and they're all accomplished jazz musicians. Apparently they used to write seven songs in a morning and record them in a single take."

As the name of his band suggests, Stanley has a soft spot for French pop, too. "What I like about French pop is that they blatantly got girls who looked good and couldn't sing. Sylvia Vartan was a huge star, and her voice is absolutely terrible." Françoise Hardy figures strongly in his record collection, as does Chantal Goya, now a children's TV presenter. "If you go to France and ask for her records these days you get laughed at because she's so uncool, but she did a great soundtrack to a Jean-Luc Godard film called Masculin-Féminin. The whole point of the film was that pop music was shallow and stupid and we should all be reading Marx and Engels, but it completely backfired because the political parts of the film are really boring, while the scenes with Chantal Goya in are fantastic."

He digs out a series of records by melancholy mavericks: Del Shannon, Billy Fury, Lou Christie. "Del Shannon had one hit with Runaway, then spent the next 10 years rewriting it, and you realise from his lyrics that he wasn't a very happy man: all of his songs are about running away or hiding. Then he did his psychedelic album in the late 60s, The Further Adventures of Charles Westover, and it was downhill from there. He started drinking heavily, and killed himself." Christie, meanwhile, sings like his testicles have been caught in a vice. Bob Stanley picks out Christie's psych concept album, Paint America Love. "He wrote all of these songs with a gypsy woman 15 years older than him, and I think they just lived in their own world. He made this one when he was coming out of his drug period, apparently."

Bob Stanley is certainly no rocker. "I've never felt any compulsion to own MC5 albums," he admits, before presenting his collection of Charlie Brown cartoon soundtracks by Vince Guaraldi, and his favourite Bee Gees album, Odessa, Robin Gibb's soft-rock opera about the Crimean war. Then he plays a truly pathetic version of Never Can Say Goodbye by easy-listening favourites the Sandpipers. "This is the best version I've ever heard," he enthuses. "I never thought I could be in a band when I was younger because I'd want strings and harpsichords rather than guitars and drums, but then samples came along and changed everything."

So might the soothing jingle-jangle waves of bands like the Free Design influence St Etienne's own gentle sound in any way? "Well I'm hoping that the Free Design's Chris Dedrick might produce our next album..."