Tracey Thorn is the voice of everything but the girl, one of pop’s most enduring partnerships. Seven years after retreating from music to raise her children, she is back with a solo album. she talks to Sheryl Garratt about motherhood, music and life after the near death of her other half
It’s a bitterly cold night on an industrial estate just off the A40 in west London, and Tracey Thorn is doing something she swore she would never do again, even after deciding to release her first solo music project for 24 years. She is making a pop video.
Mother of reinvention: Tracey Thorn has found a new lease of recording life
The studio is huge, white and freezing. A row of grey metal desks is lined up down its centre, each with a grey plastic chair and an umbrella stand. The women at these desks have dark hair pulled into severe buns. The men have short, dark crops. They are all wearing glasses and frumpy outfits in the same shade of grey, and when the music starts, they sit typing at computer terminals. First one person makes a sudden, repetitive movement then another, and by the end they are all on their feet, opening and shutting black brollies in complex sequences and it is clear that they are professional dancers. The music ends, the video footage is scoured for mistakes in timing, and then it all starts again. And again. Actually they have been doing this for hours, but now Thorn is here to make her contribution, sitting languidly at one of the middle desks clad in a strikingly colourful mini-dress and lipsynching to her new single, It’s All True. There are a few fine lines on the face, but otherwise she looks much the same as she always has: slim, angular, elegant in her awkwardness, with the trademark mop of black hair. ‘Just this once, let me tell you you’re the sweetest thing,’ she sings over a catchy electro-pop backing. ‘We don’t need any kind of big parade. Just this once a little serenade to celebrate this love we’ve made.’
When we met to talk about the new album a few days earlier, she admitted that this is her first attempt ever at writing a straightforward, positive love song to Ben Watt, the father of her three children. Which is odd when you consider that they have been together for 25 years, and spent a great deal of that time making music together as Everything But The Girl. But perhaps it is because they have been together for so long that their songs have always been less about falling in love and more about relationships, the compromises you negotiate when you are in it for the long term. ‘We have quite a grown-up take on things,’ she agrees. ‘Which is just us speaking the truth, but it’s not necessarily the language of pop.’ The duo always had a ferociously loyal fan base that grew up alongside them, buying all nine of their studio albums, but perhaps because of this honesty, they also developed a reputation for dourness. By the early 1990s they were seen as miserable and middle-of-the-road, until they triumphantly moved from indie introspection to sparkling dance-based pop on their last two albums. But then the children came along, and Thorn opted to become a full-time mother to their son, Blake, now five, and their eight-year-old twin daughters, Jean and Alfie. Fittingly for a group that has always traded in subtleties rather than big statements, Everything But The Girl didn’t break up, they just faded away: they haven’t released any new material since 2000. Watt reinvented himself again, working as a club and radio DJ, opening a club called Lazy Dog (weeks after the twins were born; Thorn says drily, ‘Perhaps he wanted to get out of the house?’), and establishing his successful underground dance label Buzzin’ Fly. Thorn’s distinctively sultry alto voice disappeared altogether. Meanwhile, music and motherhood, for her, didn’t mix. ‘I just wasn’t good at combining the two,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t my nature. I knew as soon as I had the kids that what I wanted for them was a fairly conventional domestic stability. Which is what I grew up with. I could sense that they thrived on it, that they were very comfortable and content in a routine, steady life.’ And the money from their final hits meant they could always afford help in their north London home when she wanted it, ‘but I was always there, rather than walking out of the door and leaving them with a nanny’. So successful was her vanishing act that Blake recently came home from school with a question: ‘Mum, did you use to be famous?’ A little bit, she admitted. ‘But the teacher says she’s got all your records!’ he said suspiciously. ‘He wasn’t sure about it at all,’ she laughs. But then, until recently, neither was Thorn. When EBTG released an album of remixes in 2005, they did one short interview in which she was asked when she might start making music again. She just laughed. By then Blake had started nursery school, and she was busy writing a memoir, her inside track on the post-punk indie boom and two decades of making music. She had nearly finished it when she read it over and realised – with the rigorous self-criticism for which she and Watt have always been known – that it wasn’t good enough. ‘Music books that are not particularly well written are very boring to read.’ I suspect it’s better than she thinks, but it served a creative purpose. ‘It forced me to go back and listen to old records, read my press, revisit who I was when I was 21. And I started to think, “Why did I stop, what was it about it I hated? Is there anything I could salvage, any of it I need?” ’ Then she bumped into Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys on a rare outing to a music industry party. ‘What are you doing with that lovely voice of yours?’ he asked, and Thorn said, ‘Oh, shouting at the kids, mostly.’ It was just a throwaway joke, but it played on her mind. ‘I thought afterwards, “That’s a bit depressing. It makes me sound like Waynetta Slob.” I didn’t want to go back to the treadmill of touring. The last thing I want to do is leave the kids with a nanny. But I began to realise that I do miss singing. And it seemed weird that this thing I did for years and people said I was really good at, I just didn’t do at all. It felt like being in denial.’ So she bought a four-track recorder and some instruments on eBay and began working on songs at home, quietly, at her own pace. When she was ready she went into the studio, and realised how much she loved it, that here was something she was genuinely skilled at – and that others appreciated. ‘There are some aspects of being a mum that are thankless,’ she smiles. ‘It’s not a job that’s ever praised. You get your kids in bed at the end of the day and that’s an achievement in itself. There’s no one going, “God, you did that really well! When you defused that quarrel at tea-time, that was skill!” But back in the grown-up world, you go back to the skill you were good at, and you get praise for it. That’s a fantastic feeling!’ The result is Out of the Woods, an electro-pop album whose upbeat poppiness surprised even her. She took it to Virgin, and when they said they wanted to release it, she said it had to be on her terms: no tours, no videos, no promotion. It’s a sign of her continued clout in the industry that they agreed. So why, I wonder, are we sitting on a sofa in a plush West End members’ club, doing something very much like an interview? She laughs. ‘As it got nearer to being finished, I felt I couldn’t just abandon it. So I’ve compromised a bit. But I’m still not going to play live.’ Tracey Thorn grew up Hatfield, Hertfordshire, where her father worked as an accountant and her mother stayed at home to raise four children. She formed her first band, the Marine Girls, with two schoolfriends while still in her teens. They signed to the influential indie label Cherry Red, and in 1982 Thorn went into a budget studio with her guitar and made A Distant Shore, a quiet, unassuming little record that was hailed as reinventing the singer/songwriter genre and still turns up on critics’ lists of cult albums. The son of a jazz musician and a former RSC actress from London, Watt was also signed to Cherry Red; when they both started at Hull University, they met up in the Student Union. They have been together ever since, although they are not married. Instead they celebrate the day they met, so last October they went out to dinner together to mark their silver anniversary.
‘There is no magic fairy dust that you can sprinkle,’ Thorn says when I ask their secret. ‘The longer you’ve been together, the more you learn that the bad bits go around, and the good bits come back again. But if you give up too quickly, you don’t get back to the good point again. Replacing a person with someone new is great for six months, but after that I suspect it’s not that different. Everyone has their faults. There will be things that you clash about, they’re just different things. So you give up one set of problems for a different set.’ In 1984 the couple released their first album together, the jazzinflected Eden. The mood was perfect for the times, but when the times changed, EBTG didn’t seem to. After a sweet, melancholy cover of Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want To Talk About It became an unexpectedly big hit in 1988, they were suddenly positioned as the housewives’ choice, left on the sidelines while contemporaries such as New Order moved seemingly effortlessly into the new currents stirred up by acid house. ‘We were a bit lost at that point,’ Thorn admits. ‘We’d had our indie heyday, and we were at that awful point in a mainstream pop career where everything is starting to wobble. We were feeling intimidated by the new stuff that was coming in, and though we didn’t want to be stuck in indie-land, we just couldn’t see a way out of it. And we did things that were never going to help, looking back, out of complete aimless lack of direction. Like too many cover versions of soupy ballads.’ It’s easy to be honest now, she says. After all, the story has a happy ending. But first, it got worse. Much worse. In 1992 Watt began complaining of stomach and chest pains. He was admitted to hospital, where they at first thought he was suffering a heart attack, but then became so sick that he was taken into intensive care, and, one night, his family was told he had only a 20 per cent chance of making it through to the morning.
He was eventually diagnosed with Churg-Strauss syndrome, an extremely rare disease in which the body attacks itself, and after five major operations and the removal of most of his intestines, he pulled through. He recorded his experience in a beautifully written book, Patient, partly based on Thorn’s diaries. He still takes medication and has a severely restricted diet, but Thorn says it all seems a long time ago. ‘Even really extreme events like that do fade,’ she says. ‘Now when people ask me about it, all I can do is trot out glib phrases.’ They were both about to turn 30 when the illness struck, and with their career in decline Thorn felt it was time to start a family. That had to be put aside while Watt slowly recovered, and if standing helplessly by her partner’s bedside bearing witness to his suffering had been traumatic, being with him afterwards was also unexpectedly lonely. ‘It did change Ben, a lot. He sometimes asks, “Am I a completely different person?” And he’s not, he’s still exactly the same in many ways. But he had to confront death, quite consciously, knowingly, and then came out the other end. And unless you’ve done that yourself, you can’t know where that takes you, mentally. 'Certainly in the year immediately after it, he was somewhere… other. A bit unreachable. So it was quite lonely, realising that while he was recovering and he was going to live and so we were back together, we weren’t together at all, really. We talked and talked, but it’s the sort of talking where you don’t really get inside someone’s head at all. I was just listening to a lot of stuff that he had to deal with.’ Some people come out of experiences like this and decide to travel the world, to climb Everest. For Watt, the overwhelming urge was to make a great record. ‘Which speaks volumes really,’ Thorn smiles. ‘It tells you who he is.’ Stripping off the layers of polish that had accumulated over the years, in 1994 they produced Amplified Heart, a collection of emotional, strikingly beautiful songs that heralded a new beginning. Though the difference was so subtle that few noticed at first, they had their drive back, a confidence they had been lacking. ‘The songs were more heartfelt, and it was a bit more raw.’ In the meantime, the trip-hop band Massive Attack approached Thorn to do guest vocals on their album Protection. Before, she would have turned them down. ‘To me they just represented a kind of music I felt in aberration from. Maybe in my heart I felt that I belonged there, but I felt I wasn’t regarded as belonging there. But in the wake of such an extreme experience, all sorts of things became possible.’ As the Massive Attack collaboration began to reposition their image, something even more unexpected happened. The dance department on the American side of their record label, Warner Brothers, commissioned a remix of one track, Missing, by the house maestro Todd Terry to release to clubs. This happens all the time, and is usually a four-week wonder. But this one didn’t die. Over the following months clubs continued to play it, and it began picking up airplay on the dance stations. Something was happening, but Warners was so unaware that it chose this moment to drop the band. ‘We thought it was hilarious,’ Thorn says. ‘We just thought, “We’re going to win this one – you’re going to have such egg on your face.” ’ By the time Missing broke into the charts worldwide in 1995, the duo had moved to Virgin and went on to produce Walking Wounded, an album that replaced the bossa nova beats of their early work with the contemporary clatter of drum’n’bass. It introduced their songwriting talents to a far wider audience, and Thorn likens life then to being on a moving train: ‘It had picked up a lot of pace, and once that happens, you have to keep moving, and you have to make a conscious decision to stop.’ They toured the world with the new album and were in Australia when the call came offering them a support slot on U2’s American tour. To everyone’s horror, Thorn said no. She was in her mid-thirties, and unwilling to put off family any longer. Soon after, the twins were conceived (it runs in Watt’s family – before him, his mum had triplets), and their final album, Temperamental, was made when their daughters were just one. ‘I would say I was about 50 per cent present,’ Thorn says. ‘If that. And Ben would probably agree, looking back. Like any man, he was still immersed in his work, even though he’d had kids. He hadn’t mentally gone into another world as I had.’ They recorded it in their home studio, with Watt doing most of the writing. Thorn did vocals after putting the girls to bed, a baby monitor in the corner. When they toured the UK afterwards, they took the toddlers along. They had a great time, playing drums at soundchecks and being fussed over by the crew. ‘But for me, it was a nightmare. I was being mummy all day, giving them their tea from room service at the hotel, settling them to bed and leaving them with the nanny we’d taken with us. Then I’d go back to the venue, slap some make-up on and go on stage feeling like I needed to be someone else. My mind was split in half.’ They played a show in New York, Thorn flying Concorde so she wouldn’t be away from her daughters for more than 24 hours, then in the summer of 2000 they played festivals to try to reach big audiences with minimal travel. It was then that she found she was pregnant again. And when she decided to step off the train, moving or not. ‘From a real career dip, we hit the absolute high of achieving so much at a point when we’d written it off as ever being likely to happen. So it felt like I could withdraw without any qualms. Perhaps I’d have felt differently if it had happened 10 years earlier, when I was still very driven. But I had just done it all. And I had no desire to do it again. It was really good fun, but I wouldn’t want it to be my life for ever. There was part of it that was just stupidly boring, and not what I was about, really.’ When she finally returned to music, she had not sung a note in five years, nor once felt the urge to write lyrics. But it came back surprisingly easily. There was never any question of working with Watt. He has his own work now, and with Buzzin’ Fly has managed to break free of the game-playing and compromise of making music at the pop level. ‘In his world, you hear a track, you love it, you stick it on a piece of vinyl and it’s out there, within weeks sometimes.’ She has grown to like having more separate lives, being able to come back together at the end of the day and not still be discussing the minutiae of their music. More than that, she had things she needed to prove to herself. ‘The danger was we’d fall back into the same patterns. That I’d get lazy and I’d delegate to him. Because I’m still largely mum, he’d inevitably have more time to focus on the record than I would. I wanted to go at my pace. And it was slow. It took the best part of a year from start to finish, and Ben wouldn’t have been happy to work at that pace.’ Having done it once, she says, she will most probably do it again. She still can’t imagine another EBTG album, but having insisted two years ago that she would never get involved in music again, she won’t rule it out. They are both 44 now, but with the kind of music they play, age is no barrier: ‘Our generation has never grown out it.’ And if the new album is anything to go by, let’s hope it never does. Tracey Thorn’s new single, ‘It’s All True’, is out on Monday, and her album, ‘Out of the Woods’, on March 5
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