The duo are back, sans reunion fanfare and grand gestures, but with an album that represents who they are today – gray hair and reading glasses included.
There is a humongous moment in Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt’s relationship and work life. The two are sitting in a hotel room in Australia in 1997 when the phone rings and the management of U2 is on the line: Wouldn’t Thorn and Watt want to support U2 on the “PopMart Tour”? Ben Watt, who took the call, is flabbergasted: What an opportunity! Tracey Thorn is also flabbergasted – but also tired. She sees in her mind how things would play out, an arena tour with U2, huge crowds, long waits, exhausting gigs… And then she tells her significant other and bandmate that she’d rather not do it – “No”. Wow!
Ben Watt is flabbergasted again. And looking back, it’s absolutely remarkable that despite Tracey Thorn’s cancellation, both their relationship and the duo Everything But The Girl survived. The latter has taken a quarter of a century long hiatus to come back with the album FUSE.
Career in a roundabout way
Everything But The Girl’s career has taken a number of detours from the start. In the 80s, the two played jazz pop, which is much too shy and smart to be heard by yuppies, which immediately robs the duo of the largest target group. Nevertheless, with their first album EDEN, they achieved respectable success in the indie scene. If you listened to the music of Carmel or Aztec Camera back then, you can also get something from Everything But The Girl.
In the late ’80s, when the train for bigger hits had actually already left, Thorn and Watt covered the song “I Don’t Want To Talk About It,” which Danny Whitten wrote for Crazy Horse before Rod Stewart popularized it. Everything But The Girl’s version becomes a minor hit, but the step forward is followed by two back: the 90s begin, and the duo’s smooth, sophisticated pop no longer looks classy and elegant, but has faded, like the cover of the album THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE, on which the two of them suddenly look like the yuppies they were trying to distance themselves from with their indie gesture.
It’s crazy that Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt look like role models of the zeitgeist in 1994, less than four years later. On the cover of AMPLIFIED HEART, the two look like ravers kicked out of the chill-out zone in the Balearics, tired and cool. The album’s music is subtly electronically charged, the song “Missing” stands out – and becomes a world hit when Todd Terry creates a club mix. Everything But The Girl followed up with WALKING WOUNDED, the even more electronic, perfect after-club record, which you can also dance to in the club. Suddenly, Tracey Thorn’s dark voice can be heard everywhere, on Massive Attacks’ “Protection” for example, or on Adam F’s drum ‘n’ bass masterpiece COLORS.
Everything But The Girl is touring the world, playing in Australia, sitting in a hotel room when the phone rings, U2 management answers – and Tracey Thorn just says “nope”.
What happens afterwards: Everything But The Girl record the album TEMPERAMENTAL in autopilot mode, which nevertheless succeeds, which is mainly due to Watt’s insanely good feeling for the sound of the time at the time. Even before the record was released in 1999, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt became parents of twins, a third child was born in 2001, and the two married in 2009, by which time they had been together for 28 years.
While Ben Watt opens a club, Tracey Thorn writes very good biographical books. Both release solo albums, everything goes smoothly. Until, almost 23 years after the last show at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, the couple came up with the idea of reviving the band.
Narcissism meets modesty
FUSE is the name of the record. And it sounds as you’d expect from a reunion whose circumstances couldn’t be milder: familiar. Those who like the melancholic downtempo club tracks of the two will find what they are looking for here, as will fans of the more acoustic years. A kind of best-of with new songs? “Hmm,” says Tracey Thorn, who speaks up more often than her husband, “that sounds too retrospective to me. More of an answer to what Everything But The Girl should sound like in 2023.”
The comeback of the duo came slowly, she says: “We just felt like making music together again.” That had died down over the years, on the solo projects one deliberately worked with other colleagues, “although then at home kind of a ping-pong game started,” as Tracey Thorn says, describing it as: “Today my single was on the BBC,” he said as casually as possible. “I got Howie B. as a remixer,” she replied, surpassing him in casualness. Narcissism meets modesty!
At the very beginning, the two saved the new tracks they were working on under a different name. Afraid of waking the spirit of Everything But The Girl too soon? Ben Watt replies: “A certain amount of caution was required, because it would have been a shame to jeopardize the enjoyment of the project by attaching too much importance to it.”
What is interesting when listening is that the years that have passed are reflected in the songs. “We didn’t want to sound like we used to, we wanted to sound like we are now,” says Tracey Thorn, whose singing voice has deepened with age.
We had already established that there are two musical types of songs: those suitable for clubs and those that are more floating and acoustic. But also lyrically there are two types. When Tracey Thorn writes the lyrics, it’s about the inner life of a person, often describing her own feelings, “because I know them best, and it’s wise to write about what you know”.
New mildness of old age
“When You Mess Up” is the name of one of these tracks, it deals with the emotional flushes experienced by a woman who has just turned 60. “Menopause is a hormonal break in life that I experience as intensely as I did puberty,” she says. The piece is about being more kind to yourself – especially when you’ve obviously said or done crap: “Don’t be so hard on yourself / For God’s sake have a cigarette / And don’t stop to laugh at yourself / Have another cigarette.’ “That’s fine with other people. But sometimes I look a lot harder at myself. What I want to change.”
The songs with lyrics by Ben Watt, on the other hand, often describe very concrete events. For example, No One Knows We’re Dancing is about the Sunday club events he threw in London. “While the families went to Sunday dinner outside or hung out in the parks, people from different nations danced in our dark shop. It was a strange in-between place, the song is a tribute and a reminder of that.”
“Karaoke” also reports an authentic experience: A few years ago, Watt was in San Francisco when he entered a karaoke bar for the first time in his life, “this was also an intermediate place because stars are born here for one evening, who only work in the context of that one night in that one bar.”
The song is about a young woman who sings Jennifer Hudson’s “Spotlight” and makes the people in the bar get on their knees. “I was struck by that innocent kind of enthusiasm,” says Ben Watt. “It took place in one of the most commercial places out there, a karaoke bar, but it had nothing to do with commerce itself, just the love of a song and the ability to perform it.”
Perhaps this story hits the point that Everything But The Girl has always been about, and is about now, on its return: playing in the midst of commerce a kind of pop that’s successful but still feels like it well it goes to commerce and eludes its mechanism. And what if it gets too much? Then just say: nope.
This text first appeared in the Musikexpress issue 05/2023. Order here.