The New Cue #310 August 14: Everything But The Girl
“When Tracey started singing I thought, 'Why do I even bother to try and sing'?”
Good morning,
Hope your weekend was everything you hoped it could be and more. If not, don’t be blue, we’ve got a wholesome and thorough chat with Everything But The Girl’s Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt to cheer you up. Read on to find out all about the pair’s surprise comeback album after a twenty-year hiatus, their forthcoming new EP, and what made them decide to finally get the band back together after all these years.
We’ll see all paying subscribers on Friday for your usual grab-bag of new music recommendations, albums to blow your mind and more. If you’d like to help us fund these two editions every week, there’s a useful ‘subscribe now’ button below. We’re very grateful for all and any support.
Enjoy the edition,
Ted, Niall and Chris
Start The Week With… Everything But The Girl
Photo: Edward Bishop
Having met at The University of Hull, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt formed Everything But The Girl in 1982. The pair went on to make a string of stylistically different albums through the 80s and 90s. From their jazzy 1984 debut Eden, through jangly indie, lush orchestral pop and their highly successful club-influenced sound in the 90s. Todd Terry’s remix of their 1994 track Missing became an international hit and the following album, Walking Wounded, put them in the forefront of the more mature, post-clubbing sound that was dominating UK music at the time.
Then, right at their peak of their success, they decided to call it a day. Thorn, who suffers from stage fright, has mentioned the moment U2 asked them to support them as the point she realised she wanted to wind things down. More dedicated family life beckoned for the couple who already had twins, with a third child on the horizon.
With Everything But The Girl on hold, both Watt and Thorn concentrated on solo careers, and also found success as authors, with Watt concurrently running his own record label, Buzzin’ Fly. It was something as a surprise, then, when Thorn causally tweeted last year that the first Everything But The Girl album in 24 years was on its way. Released in April, Fuse received rave reviews and went to number three in the UK charts. Last week, they put out a new EP, At Maida Vale, which features songs from Fuse re-recorded for BBC radio sessions. Chris spoke to Tracey and Ben about getting back in the live music saddle and what led them to start making music together again after over two decades…
Thanks for taking 20 minutes out of your afternoon to talk to us. Your new EP was recorded semi-live at Maida Vale. How did you find it approaching these songs in a live setting after all these years not performing together?
Tracey Thorn: It took some thought. We didn’t have a band. We’d recorded the album without thinking about a band or ever playing the songs live. We wanted to get a mixture of spontaneity, but also a feel of the record. And we wanted to do it on our own, just as a duo. We did all four tracks as piano and vocal takes live then said if we’re going to do any overdubs, let’s do them all in one take as well. We had to do it all on the day, but we completely ran out of time and had to mix all four tracks in 38 minutes. We walked away thinking it was a disaster, but they sent it to us a couple of days later and we really liked it. It added a real freshness. It felt a bit like the record but also very live.
Had you missed that sort of spontaneity?
TT: It was kind of stressful. We weren’t like a tightly rehearsed outfit mid-tour, we were still trying to think our way through. Plus, I’d had COVID. On the Friday before I was still in bed. We thought we might have to cancel, that it was going to be a disaster. It was alright, but yeah, was a bit stressful. But just being in that room was quite emotional. It’s an incredibly beautiful space. It’s dripping in history, you walk in and you have this sense of all the music that’s been recorded in there over the years. And, you know, it’s a history that in some small way we were part of having done our sessions there back in the ‘80s. We said we weren’t going to do any live performances but when that request came up it did make us sit up and think about it.
Was your first John Peel session at Maida Vale?
TT: I think so. I think I did a [Thorn’s pre-EBTG band] Marine Girls session there, too. If not two, actually.
Ben Watt: Dale Griffin from Mott The Hoople produced our first Peel session. He was like an in-house producer at the BBC at the time. He wore white leather Chelsea boots, which I remember thinking was a strong look.
Can you remember when your last live performance was?
TT: At the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, I think.
Did you think at the time, OK, this is our last show..
TT: No, not at all. I was kind of at the point where I was beginning to have thoughts about wanting to pull back a little bit from going for it full time. But no, not consciously. There certainly wasn’t a moment, during that gig of thinking, ‘Right, this is it, this is the last one…’ But then I don’t think you ever do that, life just intervenes.
BW: I’d actually been playing live a lot up until this. I did three solo records, I was touring quite a bit with Bernard Butler and then I had a trio that was all set to go out on the road and then COVID happened. We had dates all over the world which I was unable to do. So I had my pedal board ready to go…
Was COVID the catalyst for making a new Everything But The Girl album?
TT: Not immediately. I think it was more coming out of the end of it. We had a long-ish, strict-ish lockdown, because of various health issues in the house [Watt has a rare auto-immune condition, Churg-Strauss syndrome] and I think it was more of that feeling of finally coming to the end of it and getting back to normal life. We were just thinking, OK, well, what does that mean? What life are we going back to? Are we going back to exactly where we were or make a change and do something new? And what’s the obvious, new, different thing we could do? It struck us that working together was something that we were perhaps in danger of shying away from, and endlessly deferring and saying, ‘Maybe one day we’ll work together again…’ It just pushed us to make a decision.
Was it always a case of ‘never say never…’
TT: Yeah. But that’s very easy to say. And you can say that forever until the moment passes. That’s what I mean by just deferring it. We don’t have to make a decision. We don’t have to actually commit because we can just say, ‘Oh, maybe...’
Was there a sense that the longer the gap went on, the bigger the pressure got. Five years away turns into ten, 15, then it’s 20 years. Did you have a lot of trepidation because of that?
BW: Tracey pushed for the idea first, and I was a little bit resistant. I knew that if we were going to do an Everything But The Girl record a lot of the arranging and programming would fall on my shoulders, and I felt that to be quite a pressure. I didn’t really have any music lying around. I hadn’t thought about making another record with Tracey. But then there was just one evening on the kitchen table and we were talking about it for the umpteenth time having said yes, maybe, no, I’m not sure. And then I just said, ‘Oh fuck it, let’s just do it..’ Tracey called my bluff and said, ‘Well, OK, have you got any music?’ I had some sketches on my phone that I’d done during COVID, some piano improvisations, a few ambient soundscapes. Tracey said, ‘Well, I like three of those so let’s start from there...’ So we started with very little expectation. We were allowing ourselves to fail, which was very important. Tracey said if we only managed to do one song then that’s one more song than anyone ever expected us to do. We did three, four weeks’ work at home with me piecing together ideas on my laptop, sending things to Tracey, her coming up with melody ideas, writing a few lyrics. We had three or four things ready to record properly and went into the studio. Tracey did three lead vocals that day, and listening back to them we just thought, Fucking hell, they’ve got to go on a record. Shit just got real. We’ve got to step up now. We’d been a bit like kids messing around, pretending that it didn’t really matter. But then it suddenly got quite serious. It was a question of rising to the occasion. We both like a challenge.
TT: Just getting started is the hard bit. The blank page. The complete silence is the thing that can be so intimidating to all artists. So, if you can get started in that mood of: This doesn’t matter, I can make a mistake. If you can get yourself into that mindset, that’s the best starting point and then you just think, OK, it doesn’t matter, let’s just put some stuff down.
Also, if it didn’t work out it’s not like anyone would have known you’d even thought about it.
BW: It was a secret, yeah. I also realised once we got started that the past was so far away that it didn’t feel like it was too much pressure. [1996 EBTG album] Walking Wounded was so long ago it was hard to even remember how we did it. Then you realise that, actually, you’ve been a sponge for a lot of other stuff in the interim, and that starts to come out. I’ve had a lot of interest in ambient, kind of drone-based music the last few years and that made an appearance on the record. I was interested in doing tracks with beats that weren’t quite beats. And then if we were going to use a beat, on something like Nothing Left To Lose, to do something that I hadn’t really done before, that kind of two-step, UK garage feel, which we never really did. There were little micro challenges going on all the time which felt fresh.
TT: When you’re following up an album you made two years ago, you’re always in that mindset of: are we continuing in the vein of what we’ve just done, or are we reacting against it? But when your last album is 20 something years so it’s quite liberating. It’s literally history. It was almost like we were starting our first record together. We’re just two solo artists collaborating,
BW: It felt a bit like when we made [debut EBTG album] Eden. When were up in Hull and the music industry was down in London and we felt quite isolated. We’d put this sort of exclusion zone around us by not telling anybody we were recording. It did feel a bit like the early days.
How did having two decades of working separately effect how you worked together?
TT: I felt it made us less competitive in a way. We weren’t each trying to assert our own individuality, because we’ve had lots of space to do all that.
BW: I think we realised that instinctively, we had so much in common that we’d forgotten about. That our instinct for certain things was exactly the same. We loved economy in the arrangement. We like emotional directness in the lyrics, but lacking sentimentality. You know, there were things that we both responded to, instinctively, when we started writing, which was really helpful. All these kinds of things just fell into place.
Were there things that you realised you’d missed about working together?
TT: I had totally forgotten how amazing is when Ben just goes to me, ‘Oh, here’s this little tune I’ve knocked up, it’s a bit rubbish...’ And I’m like, ‘What the fuck? That’s brilliant!’ When you collaborate with someone, the benefits that you get from each other’s input are so incredible. When you get used to working on your own you value the whole independence thing, and that’s a wonderful thing, but it’s a really wonderful thing when you start working with someone else and suddenly all their ideas are coming at you as well. I had forgotten that. I’d got locked in my own little world of making my own music.
BW: I also realised, when Tracey started singing in the studio I just thought, ‘Why do I even bother to try and sing when there’s this to work with?’.
How did you find the reaction when you finally told people you’d made the first Everything But The Girl Record in 24 years?
TT: The level of excitement took us by surprise. I think we’d become a bit detached from the idea of what the name Everything But The Girl meant. I don’t think we appreciated how much residual affection there was out there. I did a little casual tweet, because I thought this was the nicest way to announce it, and the response to that was incredible. It felt like lighting a beacon on the top of a hill and suddenly out of the darkness gathered all these people full of affection and love. It was really moving, we didn’t know those people were still there.
It was more than just residual affection, though. Fuse is the most successful album of your entire career.
TT: That’s true. It might have just been a nostalgia thing. I was worried that we might get reviews along the lines of: Aww, they’ve made a little record. Bless them… We were nervous that it wouldn’t do justice to the high we went out on. But the reaction was amazing. I couldn’t have written better reviews myself!
And might there be more?
BW: I don’t think we really know. And that’s the honest answer. Because Fuse happened very spontaneously, and very quickly, we only really started working on it in March 2022 and it was all recorded, mixed and delivered by October. So we don’t have any residual stuff that we’re still working on. We don’t have any plans to go into the studio. But I feel that anything could happen. A spark might happen and we might well do another one, but I don’t know. Maybe that’s a good way to be rather than thinking, Oh, it’s nine o’clock in the morning. I better go into the studio and prepare the Fuse follow up...
Hopefully we don’t have to wait quite so long for the next one though…
TT: Yeah, we’ll come back again in another two decades. Yikes!
CC