Music icons or just Mum and Dad? Turns out you can be both

The kids knew nothing about Everything But The Girl. Their parents, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, thought that best. The pop duo they’d steered for 18 years from lounge jazz to trip hop and Hull University to the world was quietly shelved after a final bow at Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000. Now was family time. The past was nobody’s business.

“There was one time,” Watt concedes, “where we tried showing a video of us on Top of the Pops to our twin girls [Jean and Alfie] when they were six or seven, thinking that it might be interesting to them, and they just burst into tears. They just couldn’t work out what the f--- was going on.”

“Why is she in the telly?” Thorn wails. “They’ve stolen my mother!”

“Tracey was always really skilled at doing her solo projects without anyone noticing,” Watt says. “She’d put a dinner for five on the table and then reveal her new album.”

Thorn made four of them after their son, Blake, started school. Elsewhere in the house, Watt was also busy, with three albums and a record label of his own. Mum and Dad wrote six books between them, all in the memoir ballpark and all highly regarded. But the duo that made their fortune spent 23 years forgotten until their forthcoming album, FUSE.

It was a tentative, even secret reunion, they explain via Zoom from their home in Britain. Gung-ho, big-beat titles such as Nothing Left To Lose and Caution To The Wind came late in the process, Watt says. The mantra during recording was more like “if we don’t like anything, no one needs to know we even tried,” says Thorn.
But when they finished, she says, “we began to be really excited about it”.

“It’s not like we’re saying to people ‘oh, we’ve made an Everything But The Girl record, how sweet’. Part of me was thinking ‘do you know what – we are going to slightly blow people’s minds. We’ve made a really good record’.”

The duo covered a lot of ground after their acoustic jazz-pop arrival with Eden in 1984. From orchestral grandeur to indie pop and acoustic covers, their wilful twists kept them mostly in the margins until Thorn’s fateful collaboration with Massive Attack, Protection, in ’94. Their hugely successful pivot to sophisticated ’90s club music was sealed with another chance crossover, Todd Terry’s world-straddling house remix of their 1994 song Missing.

One advantage of preparing their comeback in secret, Watt says, is that nobody from the office was calling to ask what kind of record they were making. Two decades after their last one, claiming any specific musical territory was less important than simply reconnecting.

“Psychologically we knew it was the right thing to do. We’d each had quite a difficult lockdown,” said Watt, who wrote about surviving Churg-Strauss syndrome, which causes inflammation of the blood vessels, in his 1997 book Patient. He initially stayed away from the rest of the family.

“When we came out the other end, I think we both knew that we’d been transformed in some way by it.”

In her most recent book, My Rock’n’Roll Friend, about her friendship with Lindy Morrison of the Go-Betweens, Thorn is more pointed about the years leading up to the creative reunion with Watt: “A 38-year-old relationship, however successful, can contain within it pockets of toxicity: unresolved issues, personal baggage, mutual grievances. Some of this stuff is black as tar and as hard to remove.

“During the pandemic,” she says, “some repair work got done without us necessarily knowing it.

“It didn’t seem possible to me a few years ago that we might work together. I felt like we were in slightly different mental worlds to do with music. But I just suddenly thought ‘if we don’t do this now, the danger is we never will’.

“It’s another reminder of how your life is never as much in your control as you think. You think you’re controlling it all. But then something massive happens. A bloody global pandemic strikes and you just have to work your way through it. And here we are having come out the end of it … in a better place than we were at the beginning.”

The beginning of the musical reunion, says Watt, was “a very humble place”. Scratchy voice memo recordings, piano improvisations and smartphone “field recordings” were massaged into atmospheric pieces Thorn began to weave with words and melodies. Her voice had changed; 20 years on it was deeper, smokier.

Lyrically, When You Mess Up is emblematic of that change. It sounds like a song of forgiveness to a child.

“It’s really more me to myself,” she responds. “These last few years have been classic transitional years. Moving into another phase of life … reaching that point of the kids having left home, looking at the years ahead, thinking, ‘What do I want to do next? Who am I?’ And some of that uncertainty, that inner turmoil, reminded me of being adolescent.

“Your teenage years, your early 20s, a lot of the time it’s really difficult. You’re trying to establish your identity, you’re trying to work out what you want from life. And there was something about being in my late 50s that reminded me of some of that turmoil ... you can become very self-doubting.”

Watt’s Run A Red Light is another learned perspective on a specifically youthful headspace. “It’s about the kind of characters he used to meet,” says Thorn. “That guy at the end of the night with the big talk; he’s gonna make it, he’s gonna run the best club ever, he’s gonna be this big shot...”

The stunning video is one of several directed by Charlie Di Placido and choreographed by Miranda Chambers. Thorn and Watt were clear they didn’t want to appear on screen, but they were close to the process. “The guy who’s the lead dancer, Samuel – as soon as we saw him, we just thought he’s got that brilliant mixture of bravado that’s masking some kind of vulnerability. And he dramatises that beautifully,” Thorn says.

The album’s last song might be the most profound and reflective. Karaoke began as a few verses of reportage from a night Watt spent in Los Angeles. Thorn’s additions take the random snapshots of amateur singers to an almost existential place.

“It just got me thinking,” she says. “Why do people sing karaoke? Why do people sing at all? Why do I sing? I wrote the choruses and the middle eight and we realised what we’ve ended up with is this kind of meditation on the purpose of making music, really.”

Filling concert halls is no longer on EBTG’s list. “No, we’re not touring,” Watt says. “The idea was just to go into the studio and try and make some music together and that’s what we’ve done. Going out on the heritage trail and playing all the old hits in arenas to people, that was never part of the plan.”

Fair enough. What would the kids think?

“Well, now they’ve grown up, they’re in their 20s,” he says. “I think they have a real mixture of pride at what we’ve done in the past, and I think they’re extremely relieved the new album is good and we haven’t embarrassed them.

“I suppose there’s a residual feeling of ‘are they still Mum and Dad? If we let ourselves in on a Wednesday evening, will we find them just watching TV like they used to?’”

“The answer,” says Thorn, “is yes.”

FUSE is out April 21 through Virgin Music Group.