[ebooktalk] and finally

• From: "David Russell" <david.russell8@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
• To: <ebooktalk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
• Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2013 19:47:21 +0100

Hi again

I know Ian has read this one, it is the autobiography of Tracey Thorn, the
singer with "Everything but the girl".

'I was only sixteen when I bought an
electric guitar and joined a band.
A year later, I formed an all-girl band
called the Marine Girls and played gigs,
and signed to an indie label, and started
releasing records.

Then, for eighteen years, between 1982
and 2000, I was one half of the group
Everything But The Girl. We released
nine albums and sold nine million
records. We went on countless tours,
had hit singles and flop singles, were
reviewed and interviewed to within an
inch of our lives. I've been in the charts,
out of them, back in. I've seen myself
described as an indie darling, a middleof-the-road
nobody and a disco diva.
I haven't always fitted in, you see, and
that's made me face up to the realities
of a pop career - there are thrills and
wonders to be experienced, yes, but
also moments of doubt, mistakes,
violent lifestyle changes from luxury
to squalor and back again, sometimes
within minutes.''

From suburban post-punk teen-band
rivalry to international chart-topping
success via a shared bedsit in Hull, three decades of making music, and
collaborations with Paul Weller, Massive
Attack and dance legend Todd Terry this
is the funny, candid true story of how
Tracey Thorn grew up and tried to be a
pop star.
HOW I GREW UP AND TRIED

TO BE A POP STAR
TRACEY THORN
virago
VIRAGO

First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Virago Press

Reprinted 2013

Copyright C Tracey Thorn 2013

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without

the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated

in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published

and without a similar condition including this condition being

imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-84408-866-9

Typeset in Bembo by M Rules

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

Papers used by Virago are from well-managed forests

and other responsible sources.

03MIX

Paper from

responsible sources
FSC
FSC' C104740

Virago Press

An imprint of

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y ODY

An Hachette UK Company

www.hachette.co.uk


wvvw.virago.co.uk
For Ben
And all the effort that it took to get here in the first
place
And all the effort not to let the effort show

'Downhill Racer', from Temperamental, 1999
AUTHOR'S NOTE

M

y story spans a full thirty years. I was only sixteen when
I bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year or
so later, I formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls and

began playing gigs, and signed to an indie label and started
releasing records.
Then for eighteen years, between 1982 and 2000, I was one
half of a group called Everything But The Girl. In that time
we released nine albums and sold around nine million records.
We went on countless tours and promo trips, had hit singles
and flop singles, were reviewed and interviewed to within an
inch of our lives.
I've been in the charts, out of them, then back in again.
Been signed, dropped, re-signed, mixed and remixed. I've seen
myself described as an indie darling, a middle-of-the-road
nobody and a disco diva. As Bono once sang: 'There's nothing
you can throw at me, that I haven't already heard.' The
career I've had has been one that's existed mostly on the margins,
outside of the genre-specific accounts of the period. I
haven't always fitted in, you see, and that's made for some
uncomfortable moments over the years. But it's also forced me
to face up to the realities of what a pop career is, and to realise
that there are undoubtedly thrills and wonders to be experienced,
but just as often there are doubts and mistakes.
Moments of boredom and shame. Trivial irritations and petty
humiliations. Violent lifestyle swings from luxury to squalor
and back again -- sometimes within minutes.
If you like those kinds of stories, stories where the lead characters
seem to blunder through life, much as you do through
your own, then you might like this one. The experience of
writing it has sometimes been very like drowning, except that
I've spent months, instead of seconds, with my past life flashing
before my eyes. It's been strange, and disconcerting; it has
made me confront what I've done with my life, take a close
look at who I once was and how that has a bearing on who I
am now And so often I've heard David Byrne singing just over
my shoulder, 'How did I get here?'
Or even, on occasion, 'My God, what have I done?'
March 1997

I

'm in a hotel in Perth, Australia. To be more specific, I'm in
the air-conditioned penthouse suite of a hotel in Perth,
gazing through the huge wrap-around windows at the limitless
expanse of blue sky and ocean beyond. In the centre of the
living room, next to the mushroom-coloured leather sofa and
the shagpile rug, stands a white baby grand piano. It's a pure
1970s luxury rock 'n' roll hotel-room setting, beyond parody.
Ben and I have come out here a few days before the start of
our latest sold-out Australian tour, to 'acclimatise' and get over
jet lag. In other words, lie on the beach, get a tan and lounge
around in penthouse suites with baby grands. And now we're
sitting here, languidly waiting for room service or something,
when the phone rings. It's our manager in London.
'You won't believe the conversation I've just had she says.
'I've had a call from U2's management office. You've been
offered the support slot on their American stadium tour!'
This too is beyond parody. It's the kind of moment when
you expect to be shaken awake any minute by your mum and
told to get up for school.
Ben covers the receiver with his hand while he tells me the
news. We're both laughing and shaking our heads in disbelief.
Have they muddled us up with someone else?
'What d'you reckon?' he says to me. 'Should we do it, or

what?'
I can't really think what to say. I wish it wasn't up to me, but
I know why Ben's asking. It's not a foregone conclusion at all,

you see, and Ben knows me well enough to have guessed this
immediately.
I look around the room at the view, the grand piano, every

thing.
It's a top moment, obviously. And I'll be able to dine out on
it for ages. But here's what I say
PART ONE
I 'd always kidded myself that it was punk that got me started.
It was certainly the answer I gave in interviews when I was
asked about the beginnings of my musical career. I even had
a box of punk singles upstairs that seemed to support my claim,
and if, when I did the sums and realised I was only thirteen
when many of them were released, it ever gave me pause for
thought and made me wonder whether I'd actually bought
some of them after the event, well, that wasn't anything I was
going to own up to.
It's not that the punk version of my story is a complete lie;
more that it's a compression of a story that begins just after
punk. It's a simplification of a truth that's a little more complicated
than journalists tend to like answers to their questions
to be; an acknowledgement of the fact that, if they were confused
by my liking for punk, it would hardly have made
matters easier to start trying to draw fine distinctions between
punk and its immediate aftermath, or to define the precise
delineations of post-punk.
In terms of chronology, a year or two either way might have
made all the difference. If I'd been born a couple of years earlier
or later, I wouldn't have been thirteen when punk
happened, and everything that followed it might have just
passed me by. Maybe being thirteen when it all began was the
reason for everything. If I'd been born a couple of years later,
I might simply have been too young to have been attracted to
something so ostensibly dangerous and threatening. A couple
of years earlier, and I might have been a year too old to have
been so completely taken in by what could have seemed a
mere fad, a musical novelty aimed at impressionable, easily
scared children and their easily scared parents.
As it was, in 1976 I was almost too young. But not quite.

I grew up in the suburbs, in Brookmans Park, a little satellite
town about twenty miles north of London. It was once a
proper village, and during the war had been considered just far
enough from London to be safe for evacuees. And so for my
parents it represented an idyllic escape from the blitzed London
they had both grown up in. In the early 1950s they had left
Kentish Town and headed out to safety, away from the bomb
sites and the terraced streets now riven with sudden gaps, to a
classic little semi on an unmade road, with potholes that my
mum filled every morning with the sweepings from the coal

fire.
By the 1960s when I was born, Brookmans Park was still
clinging to its green-belt status, while gradually and unavoidably
merging into the rest of the homogeneous sprawl that
surrounded London. By the 1970s, once I had outgrown the
innocent attractions of fields to play in, shops near enough to
walk to and quiet roads to ride your bike on, it represented for me everything 
that was suffocating and inhibiting about small
town life. Near enough to London that you could almost see
it if you peered hard enough down the railway line, it was just
far enough away to bear no resemblance, and like other
modern suburbs it turned its back resolutely on all that the city
seemed to offer or threaten, depending on your point of view.
But growing up in a place like Brookmans Park meant that
I was hardly at the epicentre of punk when it began. I wasn't
really there when it was all happening, so why is it that my
memory has fixed that moment in my mind as being the starting
point and the reason for everything that followed?
To show you just what I mean about having kidded myself
that I was a true child of punk, I will share with you some of
the home truths from my diary for 1976. Granted I was only
thirteen, and the diary itself is clearly a work-in-progress -- the
handwriting, for instance, going through dramatic changes as
I try out different styles, slanting to the left for a bit, or suddenly
getting very, very tiny. There are scribbled love hearts, stickers,
extra bits of paper taped in with now dried-out, yellowed
Sellotape and so many asterisks and exclamation marks it's like
trying to read Braille.
But even making allowances for my tender age, as a story of
someone discovering, and falling for, pop music it doesn't get
off to a very promising start. In 1976, the number of records
I bought was -- seven.

'Rock On' by David Essex
The Love Hangover LP by Diana Ross
'This Time I'll Be Sweeter' by Linda Lewis
The Beach Boys Greatest Hits
The Eagles Greatest Hits Vol. 1
'With Your Love' by Jefferson Starship
'I Want More' by Can

Now, I'd be happy to hear any of these records if you put one

on right now, and I'm not ashamed of them at all. But they are
none of them quintessential punk classics.
I can find only four other mentions of music all year:

16 Jan -- I hear a record on the radio by Nilsson and I
like it.
3 April -- Brotherhood of Man win the Eurovision Song
Contest.
22 June -- I am happy that The Real Thing are number
one.
29 Oct -- I describe Songs in the Key of Life as 'brilliant'.

Here we are then: 1976, pop's Year Zero, the year punk gets
started, and I think it's fair to say that I am completely
untouched by it. In fact, pop music doesn't seem to impinge on
my life much at all. What this diary mostly reveals is that I'm
more interested in boys and what's on the telly. School features
heavily, of course. And the weather. The twenty-second ofJune
for instance, is notable for the fact that I get 85 per cent in my

1

t

11
music exam and the summer is turning very hot. This is
marked by a little shining sun around the date, which appears
every day for three solid weeks. 'Weather STILL boiling,' I keep
recording, with ever-increasing numbers of exclamation marks.
This is the famous heatwave summer of 1976. But of the other
famous events of punk's inaugural year, well, there is simply no
mention. In February the Sex Pistols played at St Albans art
college, just down the road. But I was apparently too preoccupied
with the weather forecast to notice.
In November they released 'Anarchy In The UK', and then
on 1 December appeared on the Today programme with Bill
Grundy and made pop history by saying 'sod' and 'fucking

rotter'.
But did I even see it? My diary makes no mention of it,
concentrating instead on the fact that I 'watched Superstars. Washed hair and 
had a bath.'
In 1976, the truth is I was not even a part-time punk.
But opening up my diary for 1977 is something of a shock.
Sellotaped to the inside front cover is a photo of Johnny
Rotten, and on the facing page I have written 'Never mind
the bollocks ... here's my diary'. I must have cheated and stuck
the photo in and written that slogan towards the end of the
year, because the first half of 1977 reveals no evidence of any
such sea change having taken place. In fact, I seem to be losing
interest in music.
Records bought pre-June 1977: zero.
Then, suddenly, it happens. Something happens. Number
of records bought from June 1977 to end of year -- eight.

'In The City' by The Jam
'Lights Out' by Dr Feelgood
'All Around The World' by The Jam
'Something Better Change' by The Stranglers
My Aim Is True by Elvis Costello
'Gary Gilmore's Eyes' by The Adverts
'Grip' by The Stranglers
'London Girls' by The Vibrators

Other mentions of music between June and December that
year include:

14 July -- on TOTP are The Commodores, Supertramp
and the SEX PISTOLS, whose name I have
surrounded with a sort of starry biro halo. I describe
their appearance as being a 'film of them doing
"Pretty Vacant". Phew!' (I have finally had my socks
blown off.)
7 Aug -- see Sex Pistols on London Weekend Show -- they
are 'absolutely brilliant'.
31 Aug -- 'Charts are really chronic now apart from Jam,
Stranglers, Adverts, Boomtown Rats and Mink
DeVille' (Right, so really chronic, apart from being
mostly fantastic.)
29 Sept -- I'm listening to new wave on Your Mother
Wouldn't Like It.
20 Nov -- listening to punk records on Radio
Luxembourg.
10 Dec -- see The Clash on So It Goes ('fantastic, I luv
'em').

So at some point in June 1977, later than I had liked to
remember, but not so late as to be totally embarrassing, I discovered
punk, and it triggered in me a passion for pop music
and a record-buying spree which was new and obsessive, and
which carried on for years. Up until that point I had only half
cared about music, but this moment marked the point when
I changed -- not as many of my immediate elders changed,
from people who liked Genesis into people who liked The
Clash -- from someone who had barely noticed pop music and
didn't seem to care much either way, into someone who cared
about very little else.
Mind you, I should also be honest and admit that at this
stage my interest was still largely that of your average hormonally
afflicted Bay City Rollers fan -- i.e., I fancied them.

7 Aug -- 'Steve Jones -- CCORR!!!'
6 Oct -- J. Burnel is so hunky!! Luv his jeans!!???!!
3 Nov -- 'David Bowie was on TOTP. Boy, he's so
hunky'
1 Dec -- 'Bob Geldof is so gorgeous'

And so on, and so on ...
At this point I was simply having fun with it all in a quite
uncomplicated way, still just a fourteen-year-old pop fan. Sadly
this phase didn't last long, and as it began to occur to me that
liking punk was, or was supposed to be, somehow different to
liking David Essex, things got more awkward, especially at home.
It goes without saying that the teenage years can be 'difficult',
and that problems at school and with your parents are
perhaps more the rule than the exception -- but even given all
this, the period of punk, and of punk's influence, was a particularly
problematic time to be a teenager. Punk demanded a
stance of such antagonism and rejection (a 1976 press handout
from the Sex Pistols has them saying 'We hate everything') that
it seemed impossible to carry on being civil to your parents
while claiming to like The Stranglers. The two appeared to be
utterly incompatible, to a degree that I'm not sure has ever been the case 
since, and certainly wasn't before. Bear in mind,
too, that thirty-odd years ago the generation gap between
teenagers and parents was a lot wider than it is today. It has
been steadily closing since, so that now it is almost a cliche to
observe that many parents like the same records as their kids
and happily go with them to Glastonbury.
Well, may I just say that it wasn't like that for me and my
parents, whose musical tastes were rooted in the pre-rock cool
of Sinatra and Glenn Miller, and extended into the present
only as far as the unarguable musicality of someone like Stevie
Wonder. They had used to enjoy listening to me play the
piano, and had no objections to my David Cassidy collection,
but by late 1977 they were reeling in shock at what had happened
to me.
I wasn't supposed to have gone to the bad like this; it wasn't
in the script at all. I was the youngest child in the family, and
like all youngest children, exploited my position mercilessly.
My brother Keith had been born in 1953. Then in 1960 came
my sister Debbie, after which my mum was abruptly informed
by the doctor at the end of her hospital bed that medical complications
meant she would not be able to have any more
children. Two years later, in defiance of this inept prediction,
I was born, though I did my best to prove the doctor right by
attempting to die as soon as I appeared. I had apparently mistimed
my first breath and inhaled a lungful of amniotic fluid
instead of air, and so had drowned before I was even born. The
midwife who delivered me, in the front bedroom at home, had
been on a training course only the week before, where she had
learned for the first time how to perform neonatal resuscitation.
Presented with her first opportunity to practise her new
skills, she gave me the kiss of life and saved me, though I would
spend some time in an incubator at the hospital with pneumonia.
It would be eighteen months or so before the doctors
were able to reassure my parents that my brain hadn't been
damaged by that initial lack of oxygen.
All in all, it was the kind of arrival likely to confer upon any
child a special status within the family. Throughout my childhood
this had worked in my favour, but now, as I entered my
teens, the level of attention and expectation that was focused
on me was all of a sudden proving to be troublesome.

I had always been bright and done well at school, along with
being something of a goody-goody. I was chatty, too, and
indulged, so when I rebelled against school dinners as a picky
primary-school child, I was allowed to walk home every day
for lunch with my mum -- a special private time of our own,
where we'd sit in the kitchen and I'd regale her with tales of
the morning's events and entertain her with impressions of all
the teachers. If I wanted the same food every lunchtime -- a
crusty cheese roll -- and if I wanted to eat Jacob's Cream
Crackers for breakfast, well, that was all right. It was allowed.
Mealtimes might be punctuated with cries from my mum of
'Tracey! Eat your peas!' but it wasn't really serious. It was just
who I was. The fussy one, the youngest. I wasn't really a problem.
I was an avid reader, which also marked me out as clever,
and that was to be respected. I had my weekly piano lessons,
and impressed everyone with my endless practising and my
jolly Scott Joplin tunes. Within the cosy structure of the family
I felt central, liked for who I was. Special.
But as I attempted to forge a new and adult persona for
myself, using punk-rock singles as a kind of catalyst to bring
into being, with a lot of unexpected heat and light, a person
who was ME, really, truly ME, and not just a mini-version of
my parents, the bond between us was stretched to breaking
point. Having been chatty, I became sullen. Dinner-table conversation
had always been light-hearted, never analytical, in
our house and there was no tradition of friendly debate, so
now if I disagreed with things my parents said there would be
a brief, terse exchange, the stakes would be raised within minutes,
a sharp insult might be flung -- 'Fascist!' Ignorant!' -- and
I would leave the room. Not a row as such, but an absence of
friendly communication, which left me feeling unlistened to,
my opinions worthless.
Instead of confrontation, I opted for secrecy. In a timid way
I would make minor adjustments to my fashion style. On 10
September 1977 my diary records that I 'changed my sloopy
jeans into drainpipes. They're really tight and straight!!! Look
dead punky!!! Saw Starsky and Hutch.' Then on 18 October I
had my hair cut 'all spiky at the front -- looks punky', though
I have to admit I can't find any photographic evidence to back
this up, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it only looked spiky
up in my bedroom and was flattened down each time I went
downstairs. Later, a proper confrontation would be triggered
by a sweary badge from Stiff Records, carefully hidden by me
in my bedroom, and yet somehow 'found' by my mum. Her
shock at my apparently casual reaction to something which
was, to her, profoundly offensive left me wondering whether
I truly had betrayed some kind of unspoken and universal value
system, or whether she was overreacting.
As for the music emanating from my bedroom, it was
beyond the pale. Nothing in life so far had prepared my parents
for a daughter who suddenly loved ugly, swearing rock
groups instead of Diana Ross. You can see their point, really.
When I was ten I thought my brother was God
He'd lie in bed, and turn out the light with a fishing
rod

I learned the names of all his football team

And I still remembered them when I was nineteen

Strange the things that I remember still --
Shouts from the playground, when I was home and ill
My sister taught me all that she learned there
When we grew up, we said, we'd share a flat
somewhere

When I was seventeen
London meant Oxford Street

Where I grew up there were no factories
There was a school, and shops, and some fields and
trees

And rows of houses one by one appeared
I was born in one, and lived there for eighteen years

Then when I was nineteen

I thought the Humber would be
The gateway from my little world
Into the real world

But there is no real world
We live side by side

And sometimes collide

When I was seventeen

London meant Oxford Street
It was a little world

I grew up in a little world

'Oxford Street', from Idlewild, 1988
20 January 1978
'TERRIBLE NEWS -- the Sex Pistols have split up, torn up
their contract, Malcolm's quit and Sid's in hospital with an
OD ... This is the end of punk, really.'
Whaaat? Hang on a minute there, I mean, it's only just
started for me! This is the problem with 'movements' in pop
music -- you're forever trying to keep up. No sooner do you
become a fully paid-up devotee of the latest craze than someone,
a journalist usually, comes along and declares it's dead. All
over. I think my diary entry is probably just something I
copied out of the TIME and I'm sure it felt suitably apocalyptic
to declare punk well and truly finished. Especially since
hardly anyone I knew had even had time to get into it. And
yet, did punk being dead make any major difference to my life?
Not a bit of it. It had, as I say, only just started for me, and
whatever you want to call it -- post-punk if you like, new wave,
whatever -- it was taking me over.
The local record shops were still largely the bastion of greasy
haired, leather-jacketed Status Quo fans ('greebos', we called
them), and even if they did stock the records I wanted -- and
usually they didn't -- they were not appealing locations for a
girl to hang out in. But in those days before internet shopping
there was another way of accessing things that were unavailable
locally, and so I started relying on the mail-order lists in the
back of the TIME, filling in tiny little order forms and mailing
them with a postal order. Illicit-looking seven-inch brown
cardboard envelopes would arrive at the door for me from
Small Wonder Records. The Clash, X-Ray Spex and Patrik
Fitzgerald singles arrived in this way, and seemed all the more
precious for being so hard to come by.
If I was going to get out there and engage with this stuff,
though, I needed allies. At school I made an effort to befriend
the smattering of cool girls who wanted to go to gigs, and
while I had reservations about how much I actually LIKED
my new girl-gang, it was a typically pragmatic kind of teenage
friendship: they were my friends because I needed them.
There was Joanne, who I noticed had stuck some torn-out
pictures of The Jam on the inside of her desk lid. There was
Amanda, whose dad was a policeman and Denise, who dated
Paul Young before he was pop star Paul Young. And Dee,
who had unspecified problems at home, which led to our
French teacher beginning every lesson by fixing her with a
concerned gaze and gently asking, 'Are you coping, Dee?' We'd
get dolled up in our skinniest trousers, outsized pale blue
policeman shirts borrowed from Amanda, cheap stilettos and
school blazers smothered with button badges, and someone's
dad would drop us off outside Hemel Hempstead Pavilion,
where, over the next few months, I saw Ian Dury, Siouxsie
and the Banshees, the Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and the
Boomtown Rats. On one occasion we even managed to get
tickets to see The Jam recording an In Concert programme at
the BBC studios in Regent Street. Afterwards I breathlessly
noted in my diary that 'Outside, Paul Weller and Rick
Buckler walked right by me!!'
The school we attended was something of an anomaly, an
ex-girls' grammar which had recently gone comprehensive,
which meant that although it was a single-sex school it was by no means posh. 
But, like most girls' schools, it could be a scary
place, with that intense, emotionally manipulative atmosphere
that swirls around teenage girls. In the spirit of the times the
gang I'd hooked up with could be bitchy in the extreme, and
my allegiance to them demanded a shift in my behaviour at
school. Up till now I'd always been well behaved, a bit of a
swot in fact, but now I began to get into trouble more. My
diary describes incidents of being sent out of lessons, or told
off for 'being insolent'. It was a continuation of the conflict at
home -- liking this new music seemed to demand that you
behave badly.
I may have had qualms about whether or not these girls
were true friends, but the alternative to hanging out with them
was too awful to contemplate as I discovered when, in a
momentary lapse of judgement, I agreed to go to the
Knebworth Festival with a couple of boys from down the road.
They had a car, and they were going anyway, and had some
spare tickets, and ... Oh, you know. It was a day out, after all.
In the car the whole way there they insisted on singing along
to a tape of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, while
I scowled and made sarky comments. When we got there it
turned out Peter Gabriel was on the bill, and they were beside
themselves with excitement. Later on Frank Zappa played too,
by which time I was more or less comatose with boredom.
(Ironically, the day was billed as Not Another Boring Old
Knebworth.) I only woke up at the end of the night when
The Tubes DROVE ONSTAGE IN A CAR! Now that's
more like it, I thought.

In my heart I knew I needed to find a proper gig buddy --
someone who wanted to go to the same gigs as me, but was
outside the somewhat charmless circle of the girls at school. I
wanted to be able to go out without having always to engage
with the inevitable dramas and constantly shifting loyalties of the
gang. As if by magic, the person I needed without even consciously
realising it turned up in the unlikely form of the brother
of a schoolfriend of my sister's. Huw was five years older than
me. He wasn't at school like everyone else I knew, but was at art
college studying to be a photographer. Old enough to have
been following music since before punk, he had some perspective
on it all, and was also literate and political. The girls at
school didn't like him, were suspicious of him even, but that
made it all the better. I found him interesting and good company,
and for some reason he decided to take me under his
wing. He'd been out to New York for a while in 1976 and had
hung out with the band Suicide, and when they came over to
support The Clash on tour, Huw went along with them and
photographed the whole tour. In 1978, he started a local
fanzine called The Weekly Bugle and, discovering my passion for
bands, asked me to write something for it, and on this basis we
went to gigs together, looking for things to review We started
out locally and spent a few evenings trawling round the pubs
that had bands on -- the Duke of Lancaster and the Horn of
Plenty, but it was all hippy hangovers and pub-rock losers. We
saw Paul Young with his group Streetband, and I succinctly
described them in my diary as 'really boring', apparently not
spotting any likelihood that he was destined for pop stardom.
Because Huw had a car, we started driving up to London to
see bands, and in their wisdom my parents had decided that
Huw was safe to be with, their logic being that the five-year
age gap (he was twenty-one and I was sixteen) meant that he
would look after me. (Huh?) There was some truth in this
assumption, in that our relationship was never anything more
than platonic and he never tried to get off with me.
Much more importantly, he offered me an entry into the
world I was longing to be part of, or at least get close enough
to look at -- the world of London and bands and gigs. At the
Music Machine in Camden, we saw Patrik Fitzgerald, who
had come up with a kind of romanticacoustic version of
punk. It was unheard of at this time for anyone to pick up an
acoustic guitar without expecting, and possibly deserving, to
get beaten up, but somehow the very riskiness of what Patrik
did made him seem truly punky. When Huw managed to get
us backstage passes to interview him for the fanzine, I felt I was
at the heart of urban hipsterdom -- I might as well have been
Julie Burchill interviewing the Pistols.
Over the next few months we went to an amazing series
of gigs. When Siouxsie and the Banshees played at the
Roundhouse, they were supported by Spizz Oil, who gave the
loudest live performance I have ever witnessed, and which
Huw, being something of an extremist when it came to things
like volume, insisted we experience from near the stage, in
front of the PA, where it was so hair-flatteningly loud that I
was nearly sick. We saw The Human League at the Nashville,
in the 'Being Boiled' days, when they were a very serious and
theoretical concoction of post-punk electronica -- the pop
songs and the shop girls a long way off in an unimaginable
future -- and I swear that I stood next to David Bowie at the
bar.

We went to the Lyceum a lot, usually to the Sunday gigs,
where we'd lounge around on the greasy carpet upstairs,
watching boys with mohicans slouching in and out of the
kot l'44{ t

:aidon City Entertainments in conjunction with rTh
Decorum District Council

present
Siouxsie and the Banshees
with

SPIZZ OIL

+ GUESTS

PAVILION

HEMEL HEMPSTEAD

WEDNESDAY, 11th OCTOBER, 1978 at 7.45 p.m.

£2
N.9.0411

Girls' Boudoir (the ladies' loo). It's quite hard now to convey
just how scuzzy and down-at-heel everywhere was during the
1970s. When you went to gigs at places like the Hope and
Anchor or the Nashville, it really did feel like stepping into an
alternative and entirely punk-designed universe. Maybe my
impressions of this time were informed by being a nice suburban
girl from a relatively middle-class home, but even so, in
the decades before 'design' was a widely used word, or concept,
it's salutary to remember the grubby grottiness of it all.
Sticky, floral carpets, damp dripping walls lined with stickers
and posters, and behind the bar, beer on tap or spirits. I don't
remember anyone ever having a glass of wine or a bottle of
lager, and there was no such thing as an alcopop. Cocktails
hadn't been invented. Everyone smoked, everywhere, all the
time, and ate crisps and pies. Personal grooming came
nowhere near the standards which are now considered the bare
LYCEUM BALLROOM
897I07Mimoe °Pen 12 -6 Mon.- Sat
T:47;00e

SUNDAY17
JUNE


LYCEUM BALLROOM
Box office open 12-5 Mon Sat
8.00p.m (Normal Sessions) Telephone: 536 376
SUNDAY
JULY29
at 7.30 p.m.
straight Music presents
The
Pretenders

N2569
29
toto.
„I Po'
LYCEUM BALLROOM
sox Moe open 12-5 Mon-Set
8 pM (Normal SeeIlona)
SUN DAy
Telephone : 838 8715
SEPTEMBER
at 6.30pm
Straight Music presents
Echo and the Bunnymen
retained
1073
Wined
(P.T.o.)

LYCEUM BALLROOM

Off100 epee Ilvenhnie only
5.00 min. (Normal Illesalone) Telephoea: 835 3715

SUNDAY
MAY
at 7.30 p.m.

Straight Music presents

GANG OF FOUR
LYCEUM BALLROOM

Box office open 12-6 Mon-Sat 8pm (Normal Sessions)
Teleph00e:11.322215----
SUNDAY2
NOVEMBER
at 6.30p.m.
SBTRUITZPAECOPrilllitiCKS
N21312
27

This portion to be retained
Us?S
This mesa be be relalmed
IP.T.O.
minimum of what's acceptable. In other words, we were all a
bit dirtier and smellier, as were the places we frequented.
The Lyceum was no exception, and despite having a sort of
faded grandeur, it often felt like a decidedly dodgy place to be
spending an evening. It also offered the most extraordinarily
mixed line-ups: the UK Subs playing with The Fall, who got
glasses chucked at them -- presumably by UK Subs fans, who
might have found The Fall a bit difficult and upsetting -- or The
Members playing with the Mekons. There was one night
we went to where the billing was Delta 5, the Mekons, Gang of
Four -- plus The Specials. The Leeds University punk-funk
politicos versus the heroes of 2 Tone in a meeting that makes no
sense at all in the category-specific descriptions of the period, but which I 
promise you I saw. It was a memorable night.
I'd never taken much in the way of drugs before, my
attempts to experiment having been limited to cough tablets
called Do-Dos, which in sufficient quantity made you feel
speedy; and also a small plastic bag of unidentified multicoloured
pills which my friend Katrina came to school
wielding as a trophy following a backstage encounter with
Velvet Underground survivor Nico. Not knowing what they
were, she was reluctant to take them -- my friend, that is, not
Nico, who I don't think was renowned for her drugs squeamishness
-- so she sold them to me, and I thought the sensible
thing to do would be to take them one at a time, so that any
unexpected effect would not be too greatly magnified. For the
next few nights I secretly took one each night at home, and I
think they were probably barbiturates, as all that happened was
I got a really good night's sleep.
But this evening, on the train up to town, I had taken some
blues -- speed in tablet form. At first I felt great, but as the
evening wore on I began to wonder if I really liked this somewhat
jaw-clenching experience. Was it my imagination, or did
Gang of Four sound even edgier and choppier than usual?
They seemed to be gripping their guitars as tightly as I was my
drink. Were those Delta 5 girls shouting just a bit louder than
was strictly necessary? And were The Specials' songs usually
this bloody fast? Back at home, I sat up in bed most of the
night staring straight ahead of me, counting every lost minute
of sleep as the morning, when I would have to get up and
dressed and off to school, loomed ever nearer, and my belief
that strong stimulants were not for me became a firm and lasting
conviction.

It's Sunday 30 April 1978. The Anti-Nazi League have organised
a huge rally, kicking off with speakers in Trafalgar Square
and marching from there to Victoria Park in Hackney, where
several bands are due to perform. I have somehow persuaded
my parents to allow me to go, so a group of us from school --
Dee, Amanda, Kym and Shelley -- are going up on the train.
I'm wearing a dark blue men's suit jacket with badges up and
down the lapels: TRB (Tom Robinson Band), Rock Against
Racism and The Clash. Amanda is wearing her pink leopard
skin trousers, which I covet desperately. This is s000 exciting.
We are going to see loads of bands we like AND stop the
Nazis, all in one day. We go to Trafalgar Square first with
everyone else and listen to some speeches, one of them by
Tom Robinson. A steel band plays. Then we all start marching
the five miles towards Hackney, a huge crowd, eighty
thousand or so, though the figure will always be disputed by
the organisers and police.
We get to the park. It's a very urban park, more tower
blocks than trees. I've never seen a park like it before; it's a
kind of punk park. We're just in time to hear the end of
X-Ray Spex, and then see Patrik Fitzgerald. Before The
Clash come on we try to get down nearer the front, but it's
difficult pushing through, and in the huge crowd I manage to
lose the other girls. At first I think I'll spot them any minute,
but as I try and shove my way forward we become irrevocably
separated, and I begin to realise that I'm not going to find
them. Suddenly I feel even younger than my fifteen years. I
may have been going to gigs in London and experimenting
with drugs, but this is only half of who I am. I'm not the cool
girl at school, not at this moment, anyway. I'm like a very
small child, peering through the grown-ups' legs, trying to
find my mum and dad. All at once everyone else around me
looks a lot older, and tougher, like proper Londoners. I'm
only up from the suburbs for the day, and now I'm lost.
I decide to stick it out now I'm here, and stay at the front
to watch The Clash. They're fantastic -- I'm nearer than I've
ever been before (or since) to Joe Strummer! -- and I'm thrilled
to be seeing them, but I'd enjoy it more if I wasn't basically
feeling completely shit-scared. After The Clash finish, I make
my way to the back of the crowd again. It's less oppressive here
where it thins out, and I have another look around, but it's
hopeless -- there are so many people. I'm not sure what to do.
Should I stay or should I go? I can't just give up, it seems so
wimpy. So I stick it out for a bit longer, still half wondering if
I might see someone I know, and only when I look at my
watch and realise it's getting late and I need to get home by the
promised time do I accept the fact that I'm going to have to
find my way from Victoria Park back to Brookmans Park by
myself.
Leaving the park, I tag along with the few stragglers who are
heading off already -- the show isn't over yet -- and find myself
walking towards Mile End tube station through an unfamiliar
and scarily urban landscape. There's been a lot of talk before
the rally today of possible violence from racist skinheads and
the like, so I'm walking with my head down, eyes darting from
'I
it A ca an re in
tin
Ey,
iii r let Dv
II1C
side to side, wishing I wasn't wearing a big pink Rock Against
Racism badge. Can't stop and take it off, though -- that would
be pathetic. Others who've left the park at the same time as me
seem to have peeled off in different directions, and I am now
completely alone walking along Mile End Road, and while
I'm loath to admit it, one of the reasons I feel so unsettled is
that I am the only white person on the street. The shops are
all Asian, as are the few people I pass, and I'm not sure how I
look to them. Should they like me because I've just been to an
anti-Nazi rally? Or do I look like a horrible little punk, of uncertain 
political views?
I get to the tube station, my tail between my legs. No one
bothers me in any way, of course, and with the help of the
Underground map that even a little suburbanite like me can
follow, I make my way back to Highbury and Islington station,
where I bump into Dee and Kym.
'Where were you? What happened?' they ask.
Dunno, must have got lost. No, no, I'm fine. Yeah, it was
great, wasn't it? Clash, yeah, brilliant!'
Can we just go home now, please?

You never knew the teenage me
And you wouldn't believe
The things you didn't see
Some pretty, some ugly
And the lovely mirrorball
Reflected back them all
Every triumph, every fight
Under disco light

C'mon, girl, it's all right
C'mon, girl, it's gonna be all right now

Well, I guess some boys adored me
But the one I loved ignored me
And caused me in the end

To murder my best friend
And though I got her letter
It never did get better
So I got out of my head
Then I joined a band instead

C'mon, girl
It's too late
C'mon, girl
It's too late now

i

1

I

II i

II

I 1

11
Some good times I remember
My birthday that September
We lay down on the lawn
And counted until dawn

The stars that we lay under
And is he still I wonder

The fairest of them all

Mirror, mirrorball
C'mon, girl
It's too late
C'mon, girl
It's too late now

C'mon girl
Let it all go
C'mon, girl
It's too late now
It's gonna be all right
No, it's never gonna be all right

But it's too late now
Let it all go
'M irrorball', from Walking Wounded, I 996
I t's August 1979, and I have just bought my first electric
guitar. It's a black Les Paul copy which I bought for sixty
quid from a bloke in London Fields, via a small ad in the back
of Melody Maker. I'm amazed at myself-- where have I found
the audacity to buy this, well, very masculine icon? And it does
feel masculine -- that's one of the things I like about it. It's
heavy, for a start. I hadn't realised it would be. I get a strap with
it in the case, and I hang it round my neck and almost immediately
it makes my shoulder ache. I love the feel, the weight
of it. I get it home, take it out and fondle it. Then try to play
it a little. And here's the thing: I don't have an amp, or even a
lead, and if I'm going to be really honest, I'm not certain I
even realised you needed one. I had never paid any attention
to what happened behind and around guitar players in bands,
and so I think I imagined that the point of an electric guitar
was that you plugged it into the electricity socket in the wall
and somehow a loud noise came out. I still have a lot to learn.

I sit in my bedroom and quietly play my unplugged electric
guitar, and it is, of course, even quieter than an acoustic guitar
would be. I practise like this for a while, and get into the habit
of making very little noise. This is good too, because I am self
conscious in our small house, and I feel very watched by my
parents. I don't want the confrontational aspect of making a
loud noise and having rows about it. I just want to be allowed to be on my own 
and get on with playing, without anyone
noticing. I become quite secretive about my music, and I go
to great lengths not to be overheard. When, shortly afterwards,
I borrow an amp from someone, I can't bring myself to turn
it up very loud, and so the quietness thing begins, born of
necessity and ignorance and embarrassment. Only later will it
become a kind of manifesto.

What had prompted this decisive step was my growing conviction
that I wanted to be in a band myself. Like many other
fundamentally shy and awkward teenagers both before and
since, I'd realised that joining a band could be a shortcut to the
kind of local status and prestige I dreamed of. I was uncertain
about my looks, being a skinny, flat-chested, slightly androgynous
girl, and thought I had a better chance of making an
impact if I became someone. And being in a band surely made
you a someone.
I had met up with a couple of boys from nearby St Albans
Boys School -- Dave Foster and Ade Clarke -- and in the
summer of 1979 they told me they had formed a band. Just a
few days later I announce in my diary that: 'Jane Fox and I
have decided to try and form a band sometime' -- this despite the fact that 
neither of us had any instruments (it was just
before I bought my guitar), or any songs, or even knew each
other very well. It just seemed like an entirely reasonable
proposition -- we liked lots of bands and we had lots of records
and went to gigs, so what was to stop us?
Meanwhile all around me, in the quiet of their own bedrooms,
countless other teenagers (mostly still boys, if the truth
be told) were having the same idea. It has been repeated so often that it is 
now a cliche, but it is a fact that punk groups,
like no other groups before them, inspired in those of a certain
age the conviction and desire to take part in what was
happening rather than simply to watch and listen. Perhaps previous
bands had inspired those with genuine musical talent to
buy instruments, start practising and dream of one day being
good enough to perform. But after 1977 it seemed there was
no need to fanny around wasting time on things like practising,
or honing your craft -- you could just buy an instrument,
get together with anyone else who had one and go out and do
a gig. Right now. For teenagers with the patience and attention
spans of goldfish, this was enormously appealing. There
was the added bonus that the grown-ups hated it all, and so
wouldn't try to spoil it by being supportive (i.e. interfering).
You didn't want or need anyone's help, the whole point was to
Do It Yourself. And so that's just what we did.

The first local band I had any real contact with was The Toys.
Top dogs at the time on the St Albans school band scene, they
were what would probably now be described as a jangly pop
band, more Postcard than Rough Trade. Their main strength
lay in Gez Sagar's vocals, which were unusually strong and
tuneful by local standards -- by any standards, in fact -- and I
would later practise at home, singing into a borrowed mic,
trying to sound like him. In contrast to the majority of other
bands at the time, they wrote mostly love songs, slightly world
weary and bitchy, and because of this were very popular with
the girls.
In June 1979 I was impressed beyond reason to discover
that they had actually managed to put a record out -- it was a
seven-inch, four-track EP called 'My Mind Wanders' -- and
my diary for 21 June says: 'Got TIME. Gez Sagar's band The
Toys have got an EP out and Danny Baker gave it a pretty
good review.' Then, fantastically, Huw came up with the suggestion
that we interview them for his fanzine. His idea was
that we would both interview them but I would write the
piece. This sounded great to me, and I didn't like to disillusion
him by admitting that I had not the faintest clue what you
were supposed to do once you had an interview on tape, or
how you turned it into an article.
So we spent the evening in the pub, me with a tape
recorder, while they mucked about throughout the 'interview',
taking the piss out of Huw and flirting with me in a very old
fashioned, sexist way. Didn't they realise I was a serious
journalist, and a bit of a feminist too? They left messages and
phone numbers for me on the tape while I was in the loo, and
of course this section of the tape was the bit that most excited
my interest when I got it home later. Huw was very cross with
them and wanted me to write a dismissive piece, saying how
silly they were. But they were a band, for God's sake -- I fancied
them! And what's more, they made me want to be in a
band too. I loved the camaraderie they displayed, the being-ina-gang
aspect of it all, and I knew I wanted some of that for
myself.

The phone rang at home one evening. It was Dave Foster.
'I hear you've got yourself a guitar,' he said casually.
'Yeah, that's right. I'm thinking of forming a band with Jane
Fox.'

'Well, we could do with a second guitarist, why don't you
come over and rehearse with us? You know, we could see how
it sounds.'
Hey, this was cool. I was being asked to join a band. As the
___MIIIMINNI 1111==1
token girl! I liked the idea, so I kept quiet about the fact that
I couldn't play yet, and got my dad to give me a lift over to
Dave's house.

I learned a few of their songs, and they were, if not madly
enthusiastic about my guitar-playing, at least tolerant of my
ineptitude, and three days later Dave rang to tell me I was officially
in the band, which was called Stern Bops.
And did I mind being let into the band as the token girl?
No, I don't think I did. In fact, I thought there was a certain
sex appeal to being the only girl. Clearly being onstage with
a guitar was sexy anyway. But standing next to a load of blokes
just enhanced the sexiness if you were the only girl. I was also
quite clear that this was a good way to get a boyfriend who
was in a band, one of my current ambitions, and indeed that
did happen, as pretty soon I started going out with Ade, the
bass player. But even that wasn't the whole story. When it
came to boys in bands, I didn't want just to go out with them,
I wanted to BE them.

The very next Saturday after being invited to join, I went
over to rehearse at Dave's house and then we all went out
together in the evening to see The Specials and Madness at
Hatfield Poly. This was the 'being part of a gang' that I'd been
hoping for. Lucy O'Brien wrote in her book She Bop: 'Being
in a band gives you instant power. No wonder boys love it.'
She was talking about her own experience of being in a
teenage all-girl band, but I found that being the only girl in a
band had the same effect. Almost overnight it seemed my
status had improved, and I was Someone.
Over the half-term holiday I spent every day rehearsing
with them, and after a few days plucked up the courage to
show them some lyrics I had written. These included 'Trendy
Last Wednesday', in which I drew a cunning link between the
fickleness of pop fashion and the inconstancy of boyfriends: 'I
was trendy last Wednesday Like wearing leather trousers and
expressions of hate Yeah, I was trendy last Wednesday But
now I'm out of date'. And 'Julie', my ode to Julie Burchill,
whom I worshipped and adored. At home I had pinned to my
bedroom wall that iconic black-and-white TIME shot of her
and Tony Parsons leaning against a brick wall, though I had
ruthlessly cut Tony out of the photo, knowing exactly who the
talent was, and my song was written in her defence -- as if she
needed my help. 'Everybody hates you, Julie Everybody
hates you, but they can't see What you're really like, Julie
Everybody hates you -- except for me'.
I went on to make a career out of being a songwriter, you
know. As Morrissey would say, these things take time.
Despite their obvious flaws, the boys loved these songs of
mine. Theirs weren't much better -- one of our more popular
numbers was called 'Down The Horn' and was about,
well, going down the Horn of Plenty for a drink. We were off
and running now. The only real problem in the band was
Paul, the singer, who was neither very keen nor very good,
and so when he failed to turn up for a rehearsal one day, the
boys turned to me.
'What about you, Trace? Can you sing?' they asked.
Could I sing? I had no idea -- it had never occurred to me.
I had sung a bit at school, in the choir, but it was hardly an
Aretha-style gospel training -- it was more that we got together
at lunchtime in the music room and sang Joseph and His
Technicolor Dreamcoat. Since I'd got into punk, I'd spent a lot of
time singing along with records at home, but that didn't mean
I knew what I sounded like. The singer I most wanted to
sound like was Patti Smith, whose Horses album I had played
endlessly, but it was already clear to me that her style of singing
required a level of confidence and assertiveness that I was
pretty sure was beyond me. In fact, I was worried that any kind
of singing ultimately demanded self-confidence more than
anything else. Playing rhythm guitar in a band was one thing:
it was quite easy to hide behind your guitar, and behind what
the other guitarist was playing, but being the singer put you
fair and square in the middle of the stage (not that there were
any stages yet) and at the front of the whole band. I wasn't a
natural show-off, so was that really where I wanted to be?
At the same time I was intrigued by the idea, and flattered
to be asked. Too embarrassed even to try as long as everyone
was looking at me, I made what was probably a fairly unique
request.
'Um, I'll have a go. But I can't do it if you're all looking at
me. Can I go inside the wardrobe and sing from there?'
The others looked at me strangely, possibly beginning to
worry about the apparent absence of any stage personality in
this girl they had just recruited, but to their credit they agreed,
without killing themselves laughing, and so in I went. From
inside my hidey-hole I sang David Bowie's 'Rebel Rebel'. I
emerged to a very positive response, the others all declaring
that I sounded like Siouxsie Sioux -- I was trying very hard to --
and while I was quite pleased with myself, I wasn't sure that I
would be able to do it in front of an audience. We could hardly
take the wardrobe around with us. Anyway, the strain of trying
to sing like Siouxsie had already given me a sore throat, so the
very moment that opened my eyes to the possibility of being
a singer was tinged with the disappointment of acknowledging
that I would never be a Siouxsie or a Patti Smith. And at
that time, I wasn't really sure what other type of girl singers
there were.

It was decided. I would stay on rhythm guitar, and Paul
would remain the singer. Though not for long -- he soon left,
and Ade took over on vocals.

The boys were disappointed, and I came away from the
rehearsal wondering if I'd let them down. The thought worried
away at me during the bus ride home. Why didn't I want
it more? Or, not that exactly, for in many ways I really did
want it, desperately. But why was I so ambivalent about the
very concept of attention, both wanting and not wanting it?
Making music is never just about making music. It's about
being heard, fighting for your personal vision -- your own version
of events -- to be listened to, given weight. It's about
making people sit up and notice you, and acknowledge your
worth. But while I wanted all this, I seemed to want it in an
invisible kind of way. I wanted to be heard without having to
be heard, or perhaps more specifically, without having to be
looked at.
I only have one old rehearsal-room tape of the Stern Bops
to remind me of what we sounded like, plus a couple of tracks
we recorded for other people's compilations. The cassette --
which has 'Some good stuff' scrawled on one side, and 'DO
NOT PLAY EVER' written menacingly on the other -- captures
a fairly classic rackety, punky, poppy garage band. Very
tuneful and punchy, jangly like our local heroes The Toys, but
a little bit heavier and chunkier due to the two guitars. Our
drummer, who was a ginger-haired skinhead, dressed permanently
in a pale blue Fred Perry and Doc Martens, attacks
every corner of the kit. Possibly with his Doc Martens. We're
obviously influenced by the Buzzcocks, The Undertones and
The Specials, and as my one little press cutting about us, from
the St Albans Review of April 1980, says: 'They do a nice line
in pop originals, that combine echoes of the 60s beat-group
sound with a modern up-tempo zest'! We were never likely to
set the world on fire, but we were good enough.
On 2 November 1979 we did our -- and my -- first ever
'gig', playing at a party at Dave's house. We had rehearsed hard
for it, and it went off OK until some gatecrashers barged in,
Copyright © Simon Neil
a fight broke out and Dave's dad got beaten up and the police
were called. Apart from that, it was a lovely evening.
Two days later we did our second gig, at the Randall Hut,
which was the location for the boys' school youth club. We
played seven songs including 'Julie', 'Stern Bops' (our theme
tune, which I had quickly written), 'Down The Horn' and
'Barbed Wire Love' -- possibly our political song, though the
lyrics now escape me. Not many people there, but the few
seemed to like us', says my diary.

It's Christmas 1979, and you can tell Ade and I are the perfect
post-punk romantic couple -- he gives me The Cure single,
and I give him 'Time Goes By So Slow' by The Distractions.
I also get London Calling by The Clash, the Mekons LP and a
book by Leonard Cohen. Style-wise, we are now fully into
our 2 Tone-inspired look -- Ade wears very short, almost skinhead
hair, fatigues or narrow suit trousers, DMs and a
Harrington jacket. I have a bob held back with a hairband, and
wear pedal pushers with flats or stilettos and an old anorak of
my mum's. Sixties-style round-neck jumpers from The Spastics
Society shop. An old khaki mac, tightly belted and worn with
stilettos to emulate a photo I have on my wall of Jean
Shrimpton. A straight-cut floral dress, also from The Spastics
shop, worn to look like the lead singer of The Mo-dettes.
Because of his look, Mum is not very happy about me
seeing Ade, and given the regularity with which violence
breaks out at the gigs and parties we go to, she fears, quite reasonably,
that we will be targeted. In these excessively tribal
post-punk days there seem to be fights all the time, and my
parents are shocked at this development -- they had, after all,
based a whole lifestyle choice on the deeply held belief that
suburbia was a safe place. Suddenly this doesn't seem to be the
case any more.
In August that year, when Gez from The Toys threw a party,
some skinheads started a fight and one of our friends needed
four stitches in his face. At The Specials' gig at Hatfield Poly
with the rest of the Stern Bops, another friend of ours was
mistaken for the wrong kind of skinhead (i.e. a nasty racist
one) and clobbered over the head with a metal bar by some
vigilantes from the Socialist Workers Party. In November, at
our school disco, Dave and Ade got beaten up and the police
were called, and a year later, when my school held another
disco, my diary records casually: 'Not too much trouble --
police were there loads of the time'. What does this say about
the times, that a police presence at a suburban girls' school
disco was taken for granted?
The culmination of my own personal experience of this
atmosphere of violence will come later still, when on the way
out of a party at Hatfield Poly there is an outbreak of fighting
and a boy I am with gets stabbed in the head. I don't even
remember seeing it happen. One minute we are standing aimlessly
around, waiting for a lift, then there is a sudden scuffle,
he is on the ground and there is blood. I have had a certain
amount to drink and become almost hysterical at the sight of
the blood, and convinced it is a lot more serious than it turns
out to be. An ambulance is called and I go with him to the
hospital, where he is stitched up, and then on to the police station
where, still drunk and blood-spattered, we attempt to help
them with their enquiries.
I don't go home that night as I am staying at Jane Fox's
house, and the next day we go straight out, so that by the time
I finally get back home the police have already called round to
my house to get my statement, to the complete horror of my
parents, who I haven't yet thought to tell of the previous
night's events. So I arrive home with quite a lot of explaining
to do.

The next day the police come back again to talk to me, but
as I say in my diary: 'I found it hard to remember exactly what
happened, and cocked it all up something terrible'. I am put
in an awful quandary when the police ask me to describe what
I had been wearing -- this is apparently so that they can identify
people described in other statements and get a full picture
of what happened. But the previous night, I had changed outfits
after I left home and before going to the party. For some
reason I had decided to wear a very tight pair of black plastic
trousers and some ridiculous stilettos and looked, well, a bit
extreme, in a classic 'you're not going out dressed like that'
kind of way. Ever one to avoid confrontation if at all possible,
I had preferred to change at a friend's house rather than have
a row at home.
But now my plan has backfired, and here I am in our lounge
at home with a policeman, both my parents lurking just outside
in the hall, and if I tell him what I'd been wearing my
__..1111 11111 11M11
mum will be furious. On top of being in trouble for nearly getting
stabbed, I'll be in trouble for wearing tarty trousers. Faced
with the choice of perverting the course ofjustice or being told
off by my mum, I do the obvious thing and lie to the police.
Suburbia, la.m., you're walking home again,
Shopping bags and broken glass
I hate going thru the underpass
I wish there was some other way round
But you got beaten up by the playground
And it's no use, we'll have to go thru
The deserted shopping centre, pedestrian walkways
I thought they were meant to
Make things better, but it's just emptier
And scary at night time
Hatfield at this time

This is the place I live
Where is everyone? Are we the only ones?

Hatfield 1980, I'm seeing my first knife

My first ambulance ride
I hold your hand the whole way, crying

Get home the next day
Police have already been, well, you can imagine the
scene

And if I'm going home
I better change my clothes

This is the place I live

Where is everyone? Are we the only ones?

'Hatfield 1980', from Temperamental, 1999
DIY

A

II of a sudden, it seemed as though everyone I knew
was forming a band. Like the biggest playground craze
of all time, it swept through the schools of suburbia offering
an escape route to every nerdy, bullied kid who'd never cut
it on the sports field. Turn your back for five minutes and
yet another alliance had been formed at the school bus stop,
or in the art room, and the fun of thinking up another name
for a band would begin. And once we'd worked out how
to start a band, we all turned our attention to the job of running
the whole show ourselves, taking self-taught crash
courses in the recording, processing and selling of our own
music. The punk and post-punk period had seen an explosion
of indie labels being set up from Rough Trade through
to Small Wonder, Mute, Fast, Zoo and Factory, but even
these labels seemed a few rungs above us on the music-biz
ladder. For a start, they were all city-based labels -- Rough
Trade in west London, Factory in Manchester -- and living
out in the suburbs it was still easy to feel cut off from what
was happening in town, and a bit country-cousin next to
their urban hipness.
In St Albans we had our very own Waldo's Records run by
Phil Smee, who released the wonderful 'Happy Birthday Sweet
Sixteen' by Clive Pig. But even a local label seemed too much
like a proper record label to us, and so Dave Foster decided we
should put together a compilation cassette of local bands (including us, of 
course, along with The Toys, The Alcoves,
Clive Pig and The Innocent Vicars) and release it ourselves.
The demystification of the record-making process was a
very current idea, with groups like Scritti Politti sharing information
on how to go about literally Doing It Yourself,
without recourse even to an indie label. A local fanzine called 99% (started by 
Richard Norris, who would go on to form
The Grid) was as much an information booklet as anything
else, and gave step-by-step breakdowns as to how to put
together and distribute your own cassette or single, along with
advice about how to organise your own gigs. (`Get a list of the
local halls for hire. If you are planning a gig in St Albans, write
to the Director of Leisure and Legal Services ... ') With all this
kind of thinking around us, making our own tapes and then
selling them ourselves seemed a logical thing to do. The tape
put together by Dave was called Local Produce, and was priced
at L1.50. We sold it through J and J Records in Hatfield, and
Rough Trade, and when we ran out of copies to sell, I went
with Ade to a tape-copying facility up in London to get more
done.

While we may have felt at one remove from the institutions
of the London music scene, they were by no means impregnable,
and by virtue of our own industriousness we were able
to make use of what they had to offer without sacrificing any
of our independence. It was a mindset that was enormously
empowering, at least in the beginning, and would continue to
inspire all our decisions for the next few years. Only when the
obvious limitations of scale, in terms of what you could achieve,
became apparent did this ideology begin to crack. But it would
be some time before any of us harboured ambitions to sell more
than a few hundred copies of anything we produced.
As for the Stern Bops, we were nearing the end. Throughout
early 1980 we did a few more gigs -- playing in a pub with The
Alcoves, at my school sixth-form party and (our biggest gig!)
at St Albans College, supporting rockabilly band Whirlwind.
That was the first occasion I remember experiencing proper
stage nerves, possibly because it was the first time I got anywhere
near a proper stage. Photos of the evening show me
looking apparently cool and detached, with a heavy dark Cathy
McGowan-style fringe, a turquoise Pringle jumper and tight
black drainpipes, but in fact my hands were shaking so much I
could barely hold my guitar or form a chord shape. It was
thrilling to be onstage, but I didn't breathe properly until we got
off again.
We may have carried on playing gigs like this for some time,
though I think looking back we were not overly burdened
with the desire to achieve anything in particular. But we could
not have foreseen the sudden and somewhat brutal event that
would precipitate our demise.
On 18 July 1980 we were due to play a gig in Harpenden,
and for a little while preceding this gig a rival local band called
the Manic Jabs had been threatening to have a go at us somehow
There was intense rivalry and bitchiness within the local
scene at the time, which was sometimes exacerbated by divisions
between bands from the boys' school and bands from
other schools. In a nutshell, the Manic Jabs regarded Stern
Bops as posh boys, while they themselves were rough boys
from the town. If at this point it all sounds a bit Enid Blyton,
it was about to get a bit Irvine Welsh. On the day of our gig
in Harpenden they visited a local butcher's shop, and came
down to the gig armed with suspicious-looking carrier bags.
Halfway through our set, they appeared down at the front
of the stage and started throwing something at us. I remember
being hit, I didn't know by what. It was heavyish, but soft, not
a bottle or anything like that. It flopped to the floor and I
looked down and saw something pale and bloody. I stopped
dead in my tracks, having no idea what it was but realising it
was something genuinely nasty. We stopped playing, as you
would, and some fighting broke out, during which Ade got a
bit roughed up, and eventually the police were called.
We'd all had a look by now at what was lying on the stage
floor.

Pigs' ears. They'd been throwing pigs' ears at us.
Blimey. This was a step on from gobbing at the band, I
thought. It was all a bit too Carrie for my liking. I mean, pigs'
ears. Come on.

I never played another gig with the Stern Bops, though they carried
on without me for a while. I can't remember that anything
as dramatic as me 'quitting the band' ever officially happened.
Instead, on 12 August 1980, my friend Gina Hartman came
round to my house and we recorded, in my bedroom, a song
called 'Getting Away From It All' for another compilation cassette.
Gina was a friend from school who was famous for having
made a screen-printed Joy Division canvas bag, in which she
used to carry her books to school each day. We liked the same
records, and the idea of being in a band. That was all it took. My
diary makes no mention of our plans until the day of this first
recording, so there is no build-up, or indication of what led to
this decisive step away from the Stern Bops and back towards my
friends from school, though possibly being pelted with animal
body parts was influential.
The song for this new project features me playing two intertwining
lines on the guitar, reflecting the fact that I was now
listening to The Durutti Column as well as The Undertones,
though Vini Reilly's guitar-playing skills would for ever be out
of my grasp. Gina was on vocals (she remembers telling me
that she could sing like Pauline Murray out of Penetration,
who was one of our heroines) and we had a tiny little drum
machine that sounded rather like an automated biscuit tin.
And the lyrics to this utterly fey piece of wimp-pop? Well,
they describe people 'getting caught up in a terrorist bombing
while on a package holiday in Spain, inspired by my reading
about just such attacks, which had been carried out by ETA on
Spanish tourist resorts since 1979. You can see how this
approach was always going to confuse people, can't you?
In a nice casual aside, my diary remarks: 'PS-- we're called
the Marine Girls.'

We hear they're having fun

In the continental sun

It's so action-packed
With everything their lives at home lack
Can this be real?

Yes, it's all part of the deal
At the railway stations
Explosive situations

Nothing to spoil our fun
But underneath the Spanish sun
This isn't what we bought
A holiday resort
The weather's great
There's only one complaint

All the hills are haunted

This isn't what we wanted

We didn't want to see Spain fall
All we wanted was to get away, get away from it all
This isn't what we bought
A holiday resort

We wanted relaxation

Don't like this situation

Can't stand another day
We want to get away, get away, get away from it all

'Getting Away From It All', 1980
T

he Marine Girls began as just me and Gina in my bedroom,
playing the wafer-thin little songs I had written. We
played quietly -- after all, it was only my guitar and a drum
machine -- and Gina sang quietly, and I still didn't really like
being overheard. In September our friend Jane Fox joined the
band on bass. Jane recalls now the fabulously casual manner in
which she was recruited. 'Tracey just said, "Why don't you
join? What do you want to play?"
Although me and Gina were the original members, we
were by no means best friends, and it was my friendship with
Jane that was at the heart of the band. At school I had drifted
away from the girls I used to go to gigs with, and made a conscious
decision that I would try to get to know Jane. Despite
being a music fan, she had never been part of that early crowd,
and she seemed slightly separate from any of the cliques or
gangs. Her reputation was that of being The Nicest Girl At
School, usually to be found in the art room, paint-spattered or
ink-stained from some current all-absorbing project. She was
independent-minded but very well liked by pupils and teachers,
and became Head Girl with a personal manifesto of
wanting to abolish school uniform. Unusually for the time she
had parents who were divorced, and she lived half the time
with her mum and half with her dad. The more I got to know
her the more I realised she was a lovely person to be friends
with -- cool, in that she was arty and listened to John Peel, but
more importantly, warm and kind.
Once she joined, we were a bit more like a band. Three
members, two instruments. Despite all of us having a solid
grounding in recent punk and post-punk groups, we had
apparently not bought into the convention that bands needed
a drummer -- and we would never in fact acquire one. What
became our trademark, and a statement of our nonconformism,
started from the simple practicality that we didn't know a girl
who had a drum kit -- and we had by now decided we would
be a girl group. All the other bands we knew were either
groups of boys, or groups of boys with a token girl, but we had
an inkling that the only way to be in charge was to do it without
the boys.
When Gina missed a rehearsal one day, Jane's sister Alice
stood in on vocals -- and so we became four. Alice was two
years younger than us and so only fifteen years old, and she
sang with a kind of deadpan blankness, an affectless cool, that
was in direct contrast to the often emotional lyrics written by
me and, later, by Jane. Her delivery gave us a harder edge
than we might otherwise have had and made us sound defiantly
indie. Jane, meanwhile, developed an approach to
playing the bass that was absolutely unique and a signature
element of the sound of the band. Having no drummer
meant that the bassline wasn't part of a rhythm section -- there was no rhythm 
section! -- so instead Jane played complex
melodic lines, often interwoven with the vocal melody,
or what I was playing on guitar. It was quirky, without straining
to be.
By this time I was writing songs on a daily basis. Much of
what I would have poured into my diary was diverted into my
lyrics instead, and every event of note was recorded and
replayed in song. By November we had a list of about eight
songs, including our best one so far called 'Hate The Girl'. An
almost direct steal from Delta 5's 'You', it's all shouty vocals,
jerky funk bassline and staccato guitar bursts, with lyrics about
hating a girl who was trying to get off with your boyfriend. A
friend of Gina's in Hertford asked us to record it for a local
compilation album called Rupert Preaching At a Picnic, and after
that point the Marine Girls got moving pretty quickly.
I borrowed a four-track tape recorder from Ade and spent
an evening working out how to use it. This simple fact will
cause hilarity to anyone who knows me now, and who will
appreciate that in terms of technological understanding and
ability to master recording equipment, that evening probably
marks the high point of my career. I have never progressed any
further beyond working out how to use that four-track. In
fact, it was probably downhill from there.
Still, I didn't know then that technology was a bewildering
and daunting thing. I had worked out how to press Record on
each separate channel and we were away. The following
evening we recorded ten songs, intending to put out our own
cassette. In other words we were RECORDING OUR
FIRST ALBUM, some three months after forming -- a feat
attempted so far by none of our contemporaries, all of whom
had restricted their ambitions to tracks on compilations or the
odd single here and there, an EP at most. God knows where
this audacity came from, though perhaps, being girls, there was
a sense of having something to prove. Nonetheless, while it's
true that this was the era of do-it-yourself dynamism, and there
were now more fanzines and independent record releases than
you could possibly keep up with, we were still only seventeen
years old, at school and living with our mums and dads. We
were as industrious and self-motivated as any conservative parents
could ever have wished for, and it simply never occurred
to us that there was any reason not to do these things, or anything
that could stop us.

The inside cover of my diary for 1981 reflects the fact that for
the first time my own musical activities were more important
to me than anyone else's. Instead of the usual pictures of other
bands, there is a Marine Girls sticker and a small clipping from
the TIME advertising a gig we will play much later in the year,
at the Moonlight Club in London. My resolution for the New
Year is to 'put less trivia' in my diary. Somewhere along the
way I seemed to be getting more serious. Or maybe just growing
up, and pretending to be more serious.
The ten songs we had recorded in December, with another
two added later, made up the cassette called A Day By the Sea --
of which we got fifty copies made for L36. We paid for this
ourselves, pooling any cash we earned from my Saturday job
in the village toy shop, and Jane's serving 'intergalactic burgers'
at the space-themed restaurant The Module in Welwyn
Department Store.
J and J Records in Hatfield agreed to sell a few copies, and
we put a little ad in the back of the TIME advertising the fact
that you could order a copy by sending a postal order to my
home address. The day after this ad appeared I got my first
order, and then two more the next day. When a few days later
I got a letter from a tape distribution company wanting some
tapes, I didn't have enough left to fulfil their request. A week
after this I got a letter from someone in Germany wanting to
play the cassette on his radio show, and in the same post a set
of interview questions for me to answer from a Dutch fanzine.
You may have noticed that we had never played outside my
bedroom at this point, so it's debatable as to whether we could
truly be said to exist as an actual band yet, but we were certainly
getting noticed.
Listening again to that first tape, A Day By the Sea, I'm
amazed at how incredibly primitive it is. It's perhaps not surprising
that it should sound so completely lo-fl -- after all, it's
not as if we had the means or the technique to make it sound
otherwise. But even so, I can't help thinking as I listen to it, 'How on earth 
did we get away with it?' It has all the sophistication
of a class of Year Five children let loose in the music
room to express themselves. There's a moment at the start of
one song when the volume leaps to such an extent that if you
are listening on headphones, as I am now, you have to snatch
them off quickly or lose your eardrums. The level settles a few
seconds later, presumably as I found the relevant control knob.
But at the same time, I can see its merits too. The songs
have charm, and are as melodic and engaging as the playing is
haphazard and unpredictable. And the simplicity of the sound
gives the whole thing a directness and spontaneity that's impossible
to dislike. Mostly Gina on vocals, I sing only two songs,
and the four of us share backing vocals. There's bass on only
about six tracks, the rest are just electric guitar and vocals. No
drums, of course, and no percussion either. The influences are
plain to see, and reflect the fact that we were all listening to
Young Marble Giants, Delta 5, the Au Pairs and The Modettes.
At least, those were the influences we had any hope of
attempting to sound like. Jane and Gina were, at the time,
probably more devoted to Joy Division, but emulating the
sound of a doom-laden, post-punk Manc art-rock band was
never going to be easy.
The sweetness is there, and is so in-your-face that it's easy
to miss some of the lyrical content. 'Getting Away From It
All', for example, with its terror-bomb lyrics, and the final
song, simply called 'Marine Girls', which is pure feminist invective but sung 
as a kind of nursery rhyme: 'Trying so hard,
trying to be, what every girl should be Meek and mild, good
with children Not too bright and no opinions Kind and
pretty, sweet and willing, finds every party thrilling'. The dripping
sarcasm of these lyrics was not subtle, and showed that we
were growing up now, and getting very fed up with the limitations
of femininity, or at least the version of it that seemed
to be on offer to us.

There's a random element to how bands develop, which goes
against the idea that there has to be some unifying plan or
manifesto giving rise to the band's sound and identity. Often,
it's more that there are chance meetings with people who turn
out to be important. And when you're young and moving in
somewhat limited circles, it's not as though you have a world
of choice. The people you meet are just the people you
happen to meet, and the rest all follows.
If you'd considered what sort of person might be appropriate
to help the Marine Girls make some progress with their
recording, I'm not sure you would have settled on Pat
Bermingham, but there you go -- he was the one we met. He
was a dub-reggae fan with a motorbike and a mobile recording
studio, which he sometimes set up in his garden shed in
Ilford. Later on, this location would always provoke hilarity
from journalists, who liked nothing better than basing whole
articles around the fact that some of our early recordings,
which went on to sell in reasonable quantities, were recorded
in a garden shed! Right next to the trowels and the weedkiller!
Not so much garage rock, as shed rock!
Pat had recorded us when we did a song for yet another
local compilation, and he liked us and we liked him, so when
he suggested that he record us we happily agreed. It may have
been an incongruous pairing but, as is often the way, its very
unpredictability introduced a certain magical element to the
story.
Pat's original and startling plan was to do a C60 tape with
our songs on one side and dub versions of them on the other
side. The dub part of the plan sadly never came to fruition, but
between March and May 1981 we went over to his shed and
recorded the songs that would make up Beach Party, six of
which were simply rerecorded versions of songs from A Day
By the Sea. Patrick had his own label -- didn't everyone? --
called In Phaze, and so the plan was that he would put out the
cassette this time, instead of us doing it entirely ourselves.
A year or so later, when we befriended the Television
Personalities, it was released as an actual vinyl LP on their
Whaam! label, and so it is what most people regard as our first
album.

In terms of musical sophistication, it's not a great leap forward
from A Day By the Sea, though there is more of a sense
of there being someone at the controls, and Pat's production
is great, bringing a real dubby sense of space and emptiness and
a willingness to turn the echo up to eleven whenever possible.
It's a very sparse record -- still just guitar and bass, with a little
bit of percussion -- but it's not acoustic-sounding, in that the
guitar is all electric, and with Pat's treatment of both guitar and
vocals the overall sound is more metallic than woody.
Musically it's still a minimalist post-punk blend of ska-pop,
funk-pop and classic Shangri-Las-style girl-group pop, plus a
sprinkling of the defiantly non-rock Postcard Records sound
which we had absorbed from Orange Juice and Aztec Camera.
If this all sounds great to you, then I should perhaps just
own up and admit that the record is not without its flaws, and
I would be lying if I said it was an instant hit, universally loved.
It's much more the case that from this point on, when people
started noticing us, opinion was completely divided. We were
the kind of band that some listeners fell instantly in love with,
treasuring our quirks and rough edges, feeling a personal affinity
and connection with the kind of people we seemed to be.
But we were never the kind of band that appealed to the muso
brigade, who wanted someone to admire for their slick professionalism.
For all those who got it, there were surely many
others who didn't, and never would. An overview of my musical
output on TrouserPress.com has this to say about Beach
Party: 'The Marine Girls' minimalist debut is a sorry attempt
at writing and performing offbeat romantic pop. Between
Thorn's hapless guitar-playing ... and the quartet's two inept
singers ... Beach Party is a winceable soiree worth missing.'
That just about sums up the case for the prosecution, really. If
the shambolic sincerity of it left you cold, then all that
remained was a kind of amateurish hopelessness.
The case for the defence, however, would hinge on the
uniqueness of what we were doing, despite all those influences
I've mentioned. Unlike the other local bands we'd started out
with -- Stern Bops and The Toys, and so on -- we sounded
utterly unlike your average local garage band, and while we
may have been less competent than some of our peers, we
were definitely more original. Something intangible happened
when we got together, and we ended up producing music
which was more than the sum of its parts, and which sounded
emotional as well as intelligent, vulnerable as well as brave and
somehow mysterious, as though even we ourselves weren't
quite sure where it was coming from. We owed a debt to
Jonathan Richman and The Modern Lovers, and to Patrik
Fitzgerald, for showing us that you could be raw and challenging
without ever making much noise. And, as with all
things that are something of a specialised taste, for those who
did get it, or who could at least see past some of the obvious
failings, it was the beginning of a very deep attachment.
As more people started to notice us, though, so something
began to change for me: I began to get more attention as a
singer. I still thought of myself primarily as a band member --
singing, playing guitar and writing songs. Stuart Moxham of
Young Marble Giants had said of their singer, Alison Statton:
`Alison's not a singer! She's someone who sings.' That was how
I saw myself too, but now other people were beginning to see
things differently. In March 1981 the Marine Girls did our first
gig, at Balls Park College in Hertford, and a week later we got
our first review in a Hertford fanzine which said: 'They all
have nice voices and use them well, especially Tracey.' And,
symbolically, the day I left school, 26 June,' was the day we got
our first review for Beach Party in the Hertford Independent Press, describing 
the cassette as 'something rich and strange and
unforgettable', and saying that I had 'a voice with a future --
rich, controlled and soulful'.
I was flattered, and excited too. Having been too scared to
sing with the Stern Bops, I had now taken a few steps forward
and let people hear what I sounded like. And they liked it. I
was beginning to realise that singing could possibly bring me
something ultimately more satisfying than just playing the
guitar. The shyness that inhibited me and made it problematic
for me to be the singer was, ironically, the very thing that made
me need it so much. Shy not just onstage but in everyday life,
I never found it easy to be emotionally expressive or overt.
Things would often remain unsaid; a lot went on below the
surface. I was never demanding, or dramatic, instead presenting
to the world a reserved, controlled demeanour, which was
really a front for a lot of unexpressed interior turmoil.
But singing, I found, was a way of expressing it. Not only
58
BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN

via the words you sang, but also through the physical act of
making a sound with your voice. I wasn't able to be the kind
of shouty singer I had longed to be, but discovered instead that
I made a sound that was unquestionably emotional, heartfelt,
sincere, and which connected with people and moved them.
Surprised them too, in that it seemed to reveal to them a side
of my personality they hadn't suspected. It was an outlet, a
direct conduit from the interior The' to the outside world, and
it was proving to be more fulfilling and held out more potential
for me than my 'hapless guitar-playing' ever would.
In July, Gina, the other founding member with me, decided to
leave the band. Although we didn't know it at the time, she
had been forced to quit by her parents who, disapproving of
her being in a group, had simply refused to let her go to
rehearsals any more. Heartbroken, she was nonetheless too
proud to admit to us that she'd effectively been grounded, and
so announced her departure as her own decision. And in that
self-obsessed manner common to all teenagers, where your own problems seem 
almost life-threatening, while those of
even your closest friends barely attract your passing attention,
we other Marine Girls had merely shrugged our shoulders and
taken at face value her excuse that she had got bored with
being in a band. Only some twenty-five years later would we
finally discover the truth, a little too late to make any meaningful
amends.
Her departure, though, left Alice, not me, as the main singer.
I was beginning to think this wasn't ideal, and that it was awkward
writing songs and then having to discuss which of us
would sing them. I couldn't say so, but more and more I wanted
to sing my own songs, and yet the democracy of the band meant
I sometimes had to hand them over to Alice. It was a completely
buried issue, never brought out into the open, and so as these
things do, it simmered and festered and would ultimately
become the weak point along which the band would fracture.
But for now it seemed impossible to bring up any grievances
or problems, because we were on something of a roll and
coming to the attention of more and more people. Rough
Trade agreed to take fifty copies of Beach Party, saying that they
planned to send twenty-five of them to America! In June, Jane
and I went up to Rough Trade ourselves to sell them some
more copies, continuing to operate in a completely DIY fashion.
John Peel had started playing tracks from the cassette on
his show, and inevitably we had been noticed by someone
from a real, proper indie label -- Mike Alway from Cherry
Red -- and were unwittingly approaching the end of our
period of total independence.
Honey wants possession of my heart
Wants to know the secret of my dreams
Doesn't understand my treachery
I know I'll love him for ever

Or until I find another boy

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la la la

La la la la la la la

Honey wants the sole keys to my love

Wants to know the reasons why I'm feeling blue
Doesn't understand me when I say
I love him every day

Or at least until this feeling goes away

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la la la

La la la la la la la

Honey holds his breath and waits to see me
Can't trust me when his back is turned

He locks the door, I steal the key
But honey knows I never lie
And I'll be his until this feeling dies

La la la la la la la

La la la la la la la la la

La la la la la la la
'Honey', from Beach Party, 1981
I

knew exactly who the cool indie labels were. I could have
listed them for you. Rough Trade, and Postcard, and Factory,
and Zoo ... But a name that wouldn't have been on that list
was Cherry Red Records, and it wasn't even because I sneeringly
dismissed them as uncool -- it was just that I'd never even
heard of them. At the time they were a non-label; they didn't
count.

Cherry Red had been started by lain McNay in 1977, and
was run for a time out of his house in Wimbledon. Iain's
involvement in music pre-dated the punk era and the label,
though admirably independent in spirit and motivation, lacked
any coherent or credible image, and by 1981 seemed disconnected
from the vibrant post-punk scene. In an attempt to
rectify this situation, Mike Alway was recruited as A & R man,
specifically to sign new artists to the label.
One of the most engaging characters in the music business,
Mike Alway was a true pop maverick. It's too cliched to
describe him as a typical English eccentric, although that is
certainly part of his make-up. But how to sum him up? For a
start, he didn't look like anyone else did at the time. He would
wear smartly polished leather shoes and crisp, if frayed, cotton
shirts and had his hair cut in a sort of Richard III-style bob. He
didn't eat like anyone else, either, existing on an apparently
food-free diet of coffee and cigarettes, and his particular passions
were not the same as anyone else's: you would find him
enthusing on the one hand about Brentford FC and on the
other about Quentin Crisp, or Ennio Morricone, or
Quicksilver Messenger Service. His combination of tastes and
influences was so singular as to make him a unique figure,
transcending the stereotype. Although, when the Marine Girls
first met him, it seemed to us in our naivety that he represented
something slightly ominous called 'the music industry',
we could not have known at the time how lucky we were to
have encountered someone so original and so sympathetic to
artists. Up until the point when he joined Cherry Red, he had
been running a club in Richmond called Snoopy's, where he
had promoted gigs by, among others, The Low Countries -- or
The Artist Soon To Be Known As Ben Watt. The new job at
Cherry Red presented itself as something of a challenge, and
he says himself: 'I was seized by the idea that Cherry Red prior
to my arrival was a terrible label, full of singing milkmen and
things ... which I was determined to get up there with
Factory and Rough Trade and 4AD and Mute:
Mike first heard of the Marine Girls via a fanzine, and
remembers getting in touch with Pat Bermingham for a copy
of Beach Party. 'I was a little envious of the fact that Geoff
[Travis, head of Rough Trade] had The Raincoats,' he says. He
was in fact on the lookout for a similar kind of alternative girl
group, and along came the Marine Girls.
Good friends with Ben Watt by this stage, he remembers
them listening together to the tape of Beach Party and being
11
struck by my singing: 'I remember playing it to Ben, and we
Just realised that in your voice, it was, you know, it was like
going to Hackney Marshes and finding the new Pele ...
d'you know what I mean? It was like, "He's good. He's a bit
better than you would normally expect to find on a Sunday
morning at eleven o'clock," and we were aware that it was
something that was going to transcend indie.'
Through August and September of 1981, having just left
school, we started having meetings with Mike to discuss signing
to Cherry Red Records, and with Theo Chalmers of their
publishing department to talk about a publishing deal. If you'd
asked me what a publishing deal was I wouldn't have had a
clue, but I don't think we admitted to that level of ignorance
in front of anyone. We went up to Rough Trade a couple of
times to discuss a possible publishing contract, Rough Trade
being a kind of mecca to us at this point. Gina had made
friends with Nikki Sudden from Swell Maps, and we used to
go to the Rough Trade shop in Notting Hill to meet up with
him sometimes, hanging around, offering to fold flyers and
stuff them in envelopes. Anything just to be there, at the heart of the scene 
we idolised. Geoff Travis remembers us all coming
up one day with a birthday cake for Dan Treacy of the Television Personalities, 
and having a kind of impromptu party
in the back room.

But Theo at Cherry Red must have been quite persistent,
and persuasive, and by September we were close to a deal. My
diary says that on 22 September a contract from Theo arrives,
'thick and confusing and very official-looking'.
During that summer, we played our first gigs in London.
We rehearsed hard for these gigs, and would tape the rehearsals
to listen back to, though because we had had no schooling in arranging or 
performing music, we had very little idea how to
correct the obvious failings and would often simply repeat the
same mistakes over and over till the rehearsal ended. Jane's dad
worked for the Lea Valley water board, and allowed us to
rehearse after school at their social club, setting up on the foot
high stage, while he watched us from the back of the room
and let us have an orange juice from behind the bar.
The very first London gig was on 27 August at the
Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, and felt like something
of a triumph. We'd been to the club to see people like Swell
Maps and Maximum Joy and Pigbag, and now here we were
ourselves, on a bill with Cherry Red label-mates Felt, and The
Reflections, featuring original Sniffin' Glue punk guru Mark
Perry Many from the old St Albans scene turned out to see
us -- Ade Clarke, Huw Davies, Richard Norris -- and if I'd
looked out into the crowd that night I would have seen several
people who would turn out to be important to me --
people like Lester Noel and Dave Haslam -- though fortunately
none of them witnessed me throwing up from stage fright just
before we went on. Lawrence from Felt was the one who sympathised
with me for this moment of sudden panic when I was
overwhelmed by a fear I hadn't experienced before, but which
was only a foretaste of things to come. I hadn't suspected that
I would feel this bad, and it was a horrible shock.
I was, after all, thrilled to be playing this gig. It was an enormous
achievement, and I felt incredibly proud -- as the only
local girl group, we had beaten the boys at their own game and
got a London gig before any of them. There was an element
of defiance involved in all of it: if the boys had always thought
that they were the ones who really understood the music
scene, we had proved to them that we could take it and make
of it something of our own, and gain a wider kudos than any
of them. So although I was terrified to go on, so terrified that
I was physically sick, it was the defiance that won through. I
was defying not just those who thought perhaps that girls
couldn't really do this, but also my own inhibitions, the awful,
crippling shyness and reserve that threatened to derail me. I
was damned if I was going to let it get the better of me, and
so I rinsed my mouth out, wiped the sweat off my forehead
and went onstage. Proud, excited, terrified, determined.
Also in the crowd watching that night was Ben Watt, who
was due to play at the club himself the following night.

In September, we played three gigs at the Basement in Covent
Garden -- Richard Norris remembers coming to see us and
being very impressed that we were playing in London now,
thinking, 'Yeah, this is proper' -- and after one of them we
were interviewed for the first time by someone from the
national music press, Mick Sinclair from Sounds. The article
didn't come out till the December, and was one of those
annoying pieces where every line contains a humorous maritime
reference -- partly our own fault, I suppose, given that
the Beach Party cassette came with 'Catch the Cod' stickers,
and we had songs called 'The Lure Of The Rockpools' and
'20,000 Leagues Under The Sea'.
'Mick Sinclair dons his scuba gear to meet the Marine
Girls', quips the headline, and it goes on from there. 'The seafaring
threesome admit to a dislike of recording, and would
much rather promote Marine Girl mania (it will come) via the
live media.' (Eh?) It ends with a somewhat unprovoked outburst
of feistiness from me: 'I'm worried that Sounds readers
will think we're sweet little things. We're not sweet little things,
and we don't make sweet little records, OK?' OK.
This was the tone of much of the attention we received,
from both press and public, and you can see how well it went
down with us. On the one hand men and boys seemed to
revere us and on the other, patronise us. It's often stated by
men in the music business that they formed bands in order to
meet girls, and I've admitted that I was motivated at the beginning
by the hope that there was a link between being in a band
and getting a boyfriend who was in a band. But we found out
in the Marine Girls that the atmosphere that surrounded us
was sexually complicated and confusing, and there was certainly
no easy or clear connection between our being in a band
and attracting boys.
I was no longer going out with Ade, and neither Gina nor
Alice had a boyfriend at the time. Jane sort of had a boyfriend
but not really. Local boys in other bands would flirt with us a
bit, then run away. And for girlfriends, they'd often choose
girls who weren't in bands, and would never be in bands, but
just wanted boys in bands to be their boyfriends.
I was utterly pissed off at being made to feel that it was inappropriate
and unfeminine to be spiky and opinionated, an
attitude I struggled with particularly at home, but which I then
also encountered in many of the boys I met, who, I realised,
could be as reactionary as my parents when it came to their
opinions about girls. It drove me mad to discover that the kind
of female docility which I'd hoped had died out in about 1958
could still be appealing to boys who seemed otherwise to be
part of the same generation as me. I was probably a bit slow on
the uptake, but I had assumed that the qualities I found attractive
in boys -- being clever and spirited and having a good
record collection and being in a band -- would work in reverse,
but I was starting to wake up to the fact that, of course, many
boys found those things threatening and unattractive in a girl.
Just like my mum had said they would. Which made it even
more annoying.
Meanwhile, I was hopelessly in love with someone who was
either not interested at all, a little bit interested, or very interested
but too inept to do anything about it; I never really
knew.
Until I reread my old diaries recently, I had truly forgotten
how monotonously wretched I became for a few months in
1981. I only mention it at all now because the whole sorry
business inspired me to write a few good songs, and maybe
even brought about a shift in my songwriting that marked the
true beginning of everything I've done since.
In June 1981, for instance, I write that we had a Marine
Girls rehearsal at which we practised the song 'On My Mind'
for the first time, which I had only just written. Perhaps my
most genuinely heartfelt song at that point, it was a real step
on from the kind of generic teenage boygirl lyrics I had been
writing, and made a first move into the territory of grown-up
emotional pain. It still sounds like a pop song written in pop
language, but it is confessional and intimate, as many of my
songs would be from then on.
As for the one-sided love affair, it dragged on through the
summer. I tried getting off with someone else in front of him
to provoke a reaction (there was none). After another irritating
semi-flirtation I wrote a new song, 'Don't Come Back', which
adopts the opposite stance from 'On My Mind'; where that first
song had been all indulgent suffering, 'Don't Come Back' was
my attempt at defiance. Marine Girls singer Alice, who was
only sixteen at the time, enquired astutely: 'How can "On My
Mind" and "Don't Come Back" both be about the same
person?' Ah, but she was too young to understand. Even I was
too young to understand that what I was having to put up with
was just a bit of emotional fuckwittery. If only I'd known.
And even that's an unfair accusation. He was only a boy,
seventeen years old, totally unprepared to face a world of girls.
I'm fifty now, and I have a boy of my own. Every day I watch
the sixth-form boys mooch out of the gates of the school
over the road. Lanky, awkward, sucking on fags and cans of
Tango, they loiter outside our house, sometimes leaning on the
car, then leaping shamefacedly out of the way if one of us
approaches. On sunny days they lie down in the road, just
assuming the fact that it's a cul-de-sac means that no cars will
ever reach speeds that will in any way threaten them. They
look as if it hasn't yet occurred to them that anything will ever in any way 
threaten them. They look innocent, naive, more or
less hopeless, barely more than children. My heart goes out to
them, and in retrospect, to the boy their age whom I blamed
and raged at and sulked over, when probably he had not an inkling of what was 
going on inside my complicated girl head.
And what was going on was a complete mess.
After the second of our gigs at the Basement, at which the
boy was in the audience, I wrote that I was feeling so bad that
'at the end all I wanted to do was smash a window'. The
twenty-sixth of September was my nineteenth birthday and
the Marine Girls played at the Basement again, after which a
whole crowd of us went to an all-nighter at the Scala cinema
to watch some camp horror films. It should have been a great
birthday celebration, but when I got home this is what I wrote
in my diary, a quote from Jack Kerouac: 'Strange melancholy
forebodings were in him, and a heaviness of heart, a dark sense
of loss and dull ruin, as though he had grown old at nineteen.'
I was nineteen myself, and obviously feeling heaviness of heart
and melancholy forebodings.
Even now, reading that quote, I can recall something of the
disconnected emptiness I was feeling -- admittedly not uncommon
feelings for a nineteen-year-old, but nonetheless painful
for that. Possibly, without realising it, I was also in a state of
anxiety about the changes that were about to occur in my life. I was leaving 
home only a week after my birthday and going
up to Hull University to study English. Despite all the music,
the DIY industriousness and the gathering attention we were
getting, it never occurred to me not to go to university. Being
in a band wasn't a job, it was just ... being in a band. It was
what you did. I'd still have to have a proper job at some point,
and given that I had no idea what I wanted that to be, I was
happy to put the decision off for three years.
And despite the apparent teenage rebellion, I had never completely
turned my back on schoolwork, although by the time
of my A levels it was really only English literature that was holding
my interest. For years I had been precociously reading
Camus and Sartre, along with George Orwell, Sylvia Plath,
Kerouac and D. H. Lawrence, and the opportunity to carry on
reading them for three years while I thought about related possible
careers -- journalism? teaching? 'something in the
media'? -- was too good an opportunity to turn down. In those
days, it was a readily available opportunity. My A-level results
were scarcely brilliant by any standards -- an A for English,
which I was proud of, but then only a C for history and a disappointing
E for economics -- but were still good enough to get
me into Hull. Not my first choice, admittedly; I'd been rejected
by the University of East Anglia after a disastrous interview
where I suddenly couldn't think of anything insightful to say
about 1984, but the course at Hull had the distinct advantage
of beginning with twentieth-century literature, instead of the
study of Beowulf; and that appealed to me, so the choice was
made. I'd be leaving home and going up to Hull.
My last night at home was spent out at a party, and afterwards
I sat up talking to him till 4.30 a.m. That was the last
time I ever spoke to him at any length. A brief and futile
episode, but at the time it seemed to go on for ever. And I can
laugh about it now, but at the time it was terrible.
And so, in the midst of what should have been a brilliant
and exciting time, I was as unhappy as I have ever been. It was
2 October 1981. The next day I would leave Brookmans Park
and home, and go up to Hull, and meet Ben.
You got me feeling so happy
(Feeling so sad)
Only smile now when you're with me
(She's got it bad)
I look around for someone new
(Wasting her time)
'Cause no one can compete with you
(And that's a bad sign)

My friends I don't hear what they say
(Talking to you)
My heart's a million miles away
(What can we do?)
And I don't know whether to laugh or cry
(Please don't ask me)
But I know I've kissed my heart goodbye
(Well, that's easy)

(We tell her she's wasting her time
But still she finds)
You're on my mind
On my mind

And every day is just another
(Day without you)
And I don't know why I bother
(Thinking about you)
I see you should I run and hide?
Well, I get home and slam the door and shut the
world outside


(We tell her she's wasting her time
But still she finds)
You're on my mind
On my mind

On my mind

'On My Mind', 1981

PART TWO
It's 3 October 1981, and along with thousands of other soon
to-be-students
from across the country, I am leaving home to
go to university I'm the first of my family to do this, and so it's
a significant and symbolic event for all of us. I pack my clothes
and guitar (but no amp) and stereo and record collection into the
back of my dad's car and we drive up to Hull, where I am going
to be sharing a room with a complete stranger in a small terraced
house in Cranbrook Avenue. When we arrive at the student
house I meet my new room-mate, Tina, who has been carefully
selected for me on account of the fact that we both put 'Music'
in the hobbies section of our UCCA form. Musically we're very
compatible: Tina plays the trumpet in a brass band. She has
arrived earlier than me, and has already bagged the bed farthest
from the window, and, more alarmingly, has tacked up a kind of
little curtain across one of her bookshelves, behind which, I later
discover, she has arranged her toiletries. My parents help me
unload my stuff and we say our goodbyes, and within about an
hour I realise I am not going to be able to stand this.
Cranbrook Avenue is just on the edge of campus, and is a
long terrace of houses that have been taken over by the university,
lending it a Prisoner-like air of uniformity. I look out of
the bedroom window and can see the university buildings just
across a windswept car park. Only a five-minute walk away is
the union bar. 'I'll head over there: I think, 'and see if I can
spot anyone I know.' A couple of other girls from school have
come up to Hull, so in the bar I scan the room for familiar
faces, but can see no one. I start queuing for a drink when an
announcement comes ringing out over the tannoy system: 'If
Tracey of the Marine Girls is in the building, will she please
come to reception.' Now I'd be lying if I implied that this was
a complete shock -- I had already been told earlier in the
summer by Mike Alway that a label-mate of mine on Cherry
Red, a solo artist called Ben Watt, was going to Hull at the
same time, though I barely took it in at all. Mike had pointed
out Ben's photo on the wall at the Cherry Red offices, but
again I took no notice, and he also gave me a copy of Ben's
first single, 'Cant', and I still took no notice. Hearing this message
broadcast, I realise it is probably Ben trying to track me
down, and he suddenly seems like a possible kindred spirit in
this hellish place full of prats in rugby shirts and girls who hide
their Tampax behind flowery curtains. I make my way up the
stairs to reception and there he is, leaning against a pillar.

After all these years, can I still picture him standing there, and
recapture my first glimpse of him?
I can't, exactly. The memory is there, but slightly out of
reach, or blurred, a first impression buried underneath so
many later impressions. He had short, close-cropped hair, but
what was he wearing? Levi's probably. A white shirt? Or possibly
an Oxfam overcoat? Maybe his little blue canvas James
Dean-style shoes. But there was something striking about his
face, something exotic. He wasn't entirely English-looking. I
immediately guessed there were genes from somewhere else,
and later found out that they were Romany Gypsy. Above all, he seemed 
unfamiliar.

D'you know who I am?'
'I think you're probably Ben Watt.'
'That's right. Have you got your guitar with you?'
I have, of course, though not literally. I have by now learned
to leave it behind when I go out in the evening. We go back
down to the bar and have a couple of drinks, and share some
thoughts about records and students, until eventually Ben suggests
we go back to his house. It turns out that he has also been
allocated a shared room in a student house, only three doors
away from mine in Cranbrook Avenue, so we walk back there
together. It's only October but it's already freezing, and an icy
wind blows across the exposed car park, as it will do for the
rest of the winter. I'm wearing a thin anorak, 1950s-style
rolled-up jeans and bare feet inside my pumps. He teases me
about how ridiculously underdressed I am -- as he will do for
the rest of the winter. I've known him for about an hour, and
already he doesn't seem so unfamiliar. We get to his house and
go up to his room.
Bear in mind that Ben only arrived that afternoon, and so
has been here for exactly the same amount of time as me, that
is, about five hours. But already his room has been completely
transformed, and looks nothing like mine. His desk, the piece
of furniture theoretically so central to a student's bedroom, if
not their very existence, has been put safely out of the way on
top of the wardrobe. In its place is a huge trunk, on top of
which sits Ben's record deck, with two enormous speakers on
either side. I've never seen speakers that big before: I hadn't
realised they were an option for the home listener. The entire
wall above his bed is papered with photos and posters, stuck
edge to edge with no wall showing between -- pictures of
bands, film posters and a large black-and-white photo of his
girlfriend. I know why I am here, and so I waste no time and
immediately start looking through his record collection, where
I find my two current favourite albums -- Vic Godard and The
Durutti Column.
A pivotal moment in any relationship, I described the
impact in an interview years later: 'I thought, this is incredible,
complete soulmates. But in retrospect, when I now think
of all the other records which were in his collection, I don't
have any of them. He was a big fan ofJoy Division, and he also
liked people like Kevin Coyne and John Martyn ... music I
knew nothing about.'
That is all about to change, though, for Ben rolls a joint,
puts on John Martyn's Solid Air and my mind, as they say, is
opened.

I had never met anyone quite like Ben before. He was on the
one hand simply posher than anyone I was used to, while at
the same time less conventional and suburban through having
grown up in a bohemian household. His dad had been a jazz
musician and big-band leader, his mother an actress-turnedjournalist
and he was the fifth child in the house, the other
four being half-brothers and a half-sister from his mother's first
marriage. Though three months younger than me, he had
somehow managed to cram in a year off between school and
university, during which time he had worked as a groundsman
at a sports club, mowing lawns and marking out pitches. He
seemed older than me, infinitely more self-confident and
assured (which he wasn't), and at first, after he interrupted a
lecturer to correct a mistake the poor man had just made in his
introduction to Beckett, I mistook him for an intellectual
(which he certainly wasn't). The displacement of the desk by
the record player in his room should have alerted me to that
fact, but it took me a while to realise that all he cared about
was music, and it wasn't until I noticed he was choosing his
courses purely on the basis of which ones required the least
reading that I finally let go of my initial misapprehension that
he was cleverer than me.

So we would never share a passion for reading long
Victorian novels, but at least he liked Vic Godard. As for the
rest of his record collection, well, it reflected the fact that punk
itself had largely passed him by. There were no Sex Pistols or
Clash records. The band who really first inspired him was Joy
Division, followed by other archetypal post-punks like
Magazine, Wire, This Heat. Along with these bands Ben had records by people I 
had barely even heard of Eno, Kevin
Coyne, Robert Wyatt and Captain Beefheart. In 1977 Johnny
Rotten had famously broadcast a show on Capital Radio
where he played his eclectic record collection. Many of the
records he had played were also in Ben's collection, alongside
Public Image Ltd's Metal Box. Then there were things like Neil
Young's Decade, and John Martyn's Island albums, Solid Air and One World, all 
records Ben loved for their emptiness and sonic
open spaces. A sprinkling of soul -- Stevie Wonder, George
Benson, Chic, Earth Wind and Fire. And jazz, of course, via
his dad -- Roland Kirk, Bill Evans, Clifford Brown. Not much
pop, though. No Undertones, Buzzcocks or Orange Juice.
Ben had more albums than me, but fewer singles. I thought
that might need addressing.
He had played guitar in a couple of bands during 1979 and
1980. First, the startlingly named Fleau Moderne (French,
apparently, for 'modern scourge'), who dressed in grey sweatshirts
and digital watches to look like David Byrne, except for
the lead singer who was allowed to get away with wearing
make-up and red trousers. They played one triumphant gig in
front of an audience of two hundred and fifty at a church hall
in Twickenham, at the end of which the drummer performed
the customary salute of throwing his drumsticks into the
crowd, only to have one thrown back and catch him in the eye
as he left the stage. The local rivalry inspired by this gig was
such that another nearby school formed a band called Macabre.
In 1980 Ben met Mike Alway at Snoopy's, the club in
Richmond where Mike promoted gigs, and asked if he could
do a solo slot there one night.
'Sure,' said Mike, 'what do you sound like?'
'I sound like The Durutti Column with songs: said Ben,
and on the strength of this Mike offered him a slot supporting
the then unknown Thompson Twins, in ten days' time. At this
point Ben had never played a solo live set, or recorded anything,
or in fact even written any songs. Surely this was
audacity gone mad? But remember, the DIY ethos, still firmly
entrenched, suggested that you could and should do anything
you wanted, so he simply went home, wrote ten songs in ten
days and did the gig. Performing under the name of The Low
Countries (possibly to avoid identification, should it all go horribly
wrong) he stood up with an electric guitar, a cassette
player playing pre-recorded drum-machine patterns and sang
desolate, atmospheric songs with titles like 'Communion', 'A
Darkness So Deep', and 'Ice'. It wasn't hard to spot the Joy
Division influence, and it all sounds about as far removed from
the Marine Girls as you could possibly imagine. But the
common strand came from the philosophy of the moment,
which embraced more or less anything as long as it wasn't
hoary old rock music. Both of us were making quiet, minimalist
music but within the context of rock-gig venues, where
playing at low volume was in itself a confrontational thing to
do. Music journalist Simon Reynolds quotes Stuart Moxham
of Young Marble Giants replying to a heckler, who demanded
some rock 'n' roll, with the words: 'Anyone can do that.
They're doing it all over town. But we want to do this

And so when Ben and I met, we clutched at the little we had
in common in our music, realising immediately how much we
had in common in our attitudes. The lyrics to Subway Sect's
'A Different Story' (the B-side of 'Ambition', another of the
few records we shared), were defiant and wilful, and they

became our manifesto.

We oppose all rock and roll
It's held you for so long you can't refuse
It's too much to lose

We both bought into that completely, albeit from different
angles -- he from the avant-garde corner, opposing the idiocy
of rock; me from the popster's corner, feeling an instinctive
affinity with the pure simplicity of pop.
The other thing we had in common, of course, was that by
late 1981 we were both signed to Cherry Red. Ben and Mike
Alway had become friends, after those gigs at Snoopy's, and
Mike remembers being convinced of Ben's potential even
before it was apparent to others around them: 'Ben struck me
as someone who was probably out of time stylistically. That
was not to say his time had gone, but that it might be about to
come. I was very impressed by his hunger, and when Cherry
Red came along he was one of the early signings. I can
remember not arguing with lain about it, but certainly being
asked if it was wise. The days of everybody quoting Nick

Drake were still in the future:
Mike had duly signed Ben as a solo artist, and released one
single, 'Cant', before Ben left to go up to Hull, where, as Mike
predicted, he would meet me.
Knowing us both, Mike anticipated the effect that Ben's
record collection might have on me: 'We understood that the
things Ben and I were listening to -- Kevin Coyne and Can and
people -- were not things that in any way we were going to
attempt to foist on you ... We were afraid you'd be frightened
away.' Having two of his artists thrown together in this way,
though, inevitably led his A & R brain into thoughts of a possible
collaboration, but he decided to bide his time. For all of,
oh, six weeks.
On 19 November, with the usual complete lack of preamble
that would be considered entirely implausible in a novel, my
diary announces: 'Mike Alway wants me and Ben to do a
single together. A-side will probably be Ben's new song, B-side
"On My Mind" and "Night And Day". We want to call ourselves
Everything But The Girl.'
Meetings arranged, they say, never work out
I say we've proved them wrong without doubt
I can't remember now just what we said
Though I never could have guessed what lay ahead
As I ran towards you up the stairs

Did a voice in my ear cry beware?

Even now I'm surprised to recall
Such a short time it took me to fall
Pretending that my heart still lay elsewhere
When in truth I had long ceased to care
For one I thought I'd never replace
Till in my heart you left him no space

You say you wonder what was it I saw
I say, oh, I don't recall any more
My first impressions have been left behind
Replaced now by feelings of more lasting kind

Sure that you know but you never can tell
When I think I understand you so well
Shakes me that you are a constant surprise
Or so you appear in my eyes

Tempting to think now it will all be plain sailing
Old enough now to know there's no such thing

'Plain Sailing', from A Distant Shore, 1982
A

fter that first evening in Ben's room, we spent most of our
waking hours together. After playing Solid Air to me, he
turned up a couple of nights later on my doorstep with a

bottle of wine and a Bill Evans record and that was that, really.
He was living only three doors away, and was doing virtually
the same course as me, so we went to lectures together, ate
together and sat in the union bar together slagging everyone off.
There didn't appear to be anyone else in the whole place who
might have any of the same records we did, and we were at the
age when that seemed to matter more than anything else. Or
maybe we were just the kind of people to whom that mattered
more than anything else. United in feeling isolated, we decided
that the contrary elements of our very different personalities and
tastes were exactly what we liked about each other.
I loved Ben's dynamism and motivation, the irreverent sense
of humour he had inherited from his dad, and I envied the freedom
he seemed to have enjoyed at home and in his relationship
with his parents. On the day we both arrived at Hull, he too had
been driven up by his dad, but his journey was somewhat different
to mine, with the two of them speeding across the
Humber Bridge, windows down, Count Basie blasting from the
speakers, passing a joint back and forth. Earlier on on the
evening we first met, Ben had already tried to make friends with
someone else over in the bar, and they had gone back to Ben's
room to listen to records. Possibly unaccustomed to smoking
dope, the poor bloke had promptly been sick and gone home
to bed. So Ben had come back to the bar and found me.
All this perhaps makes him sound a bit scary. And it's true;
I think he could be. But it became apparent to me very
quickly that all of that self-confidence went barely skin-deep.

The influence we had on each other was mutual, and soon I
was listening to John Martyn while he was borrowing my
Postcard singles. The Vic Godard record we had in common
was his brilliant album What's the Matter Boy?, and it became
a starting point for us. Before coining to Hull, I had used to
go with Jane of the Marine Girls to Club Left, which was a
residency Vic and Subway Sect had set up on Thursday nights
at the Whisky A Go Go on Wardour Street. Now they were
doing a tour, and so Ben and I went to Manchester to see Vic's
recreation of a kind of swing-era jazz joint. What Vic Godard
was doing was confrontational and punky in the same way
Young Marble Giants' quietness had been. He would tour
with Bauhaus and The Birthday Party, getting bottled off in
Liverpool, and writes of this period that: 'We were wedged
between Bauhaus and The Birthday Party ... wearing our
tuxedos and smiles in a sea of gothic black leather and mascara',
describing the whole experience as 'the most satisfying
rebellion I have ever been a part of'.
For a while Ben and I toyed with the idea of trying to start
a club in Hull, in the image of Club Left -- somewhere people
would dress up, albeit in thrift-shop clothes, drink spirits not
beer, smoke Park Drive not Benson & Hedges and listen to
Blossom Deane, Scritti Politti and Nico. Looking around us
at the sea of cagoules and non-haircuts which seemed to be the
regulation Hull student look, we didn't think there'd be many
takers. Instead, we spent much of that first term getting drunk,
watching Brideshead Revisited and hatching a plan to take over
the world with our stark jazz minimalism.
Hull was not in any sense a trendy university, and it attracted
neither the flamboyant high-fliers of Oxford or Cambridge,
nor the urban hipsters who, quite sensibly, were drawn to
Manchester or Liverpool or Sheffield -- cities where there was
actually a music scene and where bands regularly came and
played. Larkin's poem about Hull described the building of the
Humber Bridge as 'this stride into our solitude', but it was a
stride that very few bands ever bothered to take. Hull's geographical
remoteness -- despite the bridge -- and its lack of any
rock glamour to speak of meant that we were forever left off
the tour circuit. In all the time I was there I can remember
going to see Haircut 100, The Polecats and, er, that's it.
One result of this situation was that Ben and I began to
evolve in a musical isolation that was both good and bad for us,
and like some bizarre Darwinian experiment we gradually
became more and more like ourselves and less and less like
anyone else, anywhere else. The seeds of our separation from
the main developments in pop music through the 1980s can
perhaps be traced in part back to this separation, our sense of
being set apart; that 'you and me against the world' attitude
which was finally spelled out on Idlewild in 1988 but was there,
really, from the moment we met.
In the Christmas holidays at the end of that first term, I was

reunited with the Marine Girls and we did a couple of gigs. I
also went over to Pat Bermingham's studio in the shed with
some songs I had written in Hull and recorded them on my
own. Ben and I went into the studio together for the first time,
and recorded the three songs that would make up the 'Night
And Day' single. Doing a Cole Porter cover was a statement
of intent, allying ourselves with Vic Godard's slightly controversial
attempt to resurrect jazz, and we also did a version of
the Marine Girls' On My Mind' and a new song Ben had
written. It was my first time in an actual recording studio,
Alvic Studios in West Kensington, but I don't remember being
particularly excited about that. I was more focused on the fact
that it meant I got to spend time with Ben, even away from
Hull. This holiday marked the beginning of a complicated
period of trying to be in two bands at the same time, as well
as being a solo artist, while attempting to get a university
degree. The logistical difficulties of all this were only compounded
by the competing loyalties involved: I had a new
gang now and it was me and Ben, not me and the Marine
Girls. My friendship with Jane, which had been so intense
only a few months earlier, was now stretched thin by the distance
between us -- she had gone to art college in Brighton --
and by the fact that we were both meeting new people. Ben
and I may have recorded those three songs in a fairly casual
manner, certainly with no view to the fact that we were a
band, or at the beginning of a long career, but it was a pivotal
moment, an axis on which something tilted and would never
be the same again.
On hearing the tracks Ben and I had just recorded together,
Mike Alway put it to us that the Cole Porter cover, 'Night
And Day', which we had planned as a B-side, should actually
be the single. We agreed to this decision, went back up to Hull
and suddenly started to become celebrities.
In February, the Marine Girls did their first ever John Peel
session, and then the first Marine Girls single 'On My Mind'
was made Single of the Week in the TIME, earning me the
nickname 'Popstar Trace' up at Hull. It was a lovely review
that summed up exactly what I wanted the Marine Girls to be:
"On My Mind" is a lovesick lament that lies midway between
The Shangri-Las and Nico's Velvet Underground'.
For the next few months we seemed to be in the music
press every other week, and as Mike Alway, who was handling
our publicity at the time, remembers: 'It would be eleven
o'clock on a Sunday morning and I'd be on my twenty-fifth
cup of coffee and I'd just be thinking, "This is easy" And it was
easy.'
In March, the Marine Girls did a Melody Maker interview
which would end up as the front-cover article. There we are
in the photos in our second-hand chic --Jane wearing a 1950s
print dress, Alice looking punky in drainpipe jeans and brothel
creepers and me in my mum's old 1960s anorak and a grey
sweatshirt. Reading the piece, it's clear to see the cracks
appearing in the band, one unresolved issue being our changing
attitudes towards our own musicianship, or lack of it. I was
starting to be bored by the limitations set by that idealisation
of amateurism that we were taken to represent.
Mike Alway summed it up charmingly when he said to me
recently that we were 'unintentionally atonal', and while that
may have been a good starting point, it didn't seem to me to
be a road you could travel down for ever. From a feminist perspective,
too, I was beginning to feel that it was pandering to
an audience's patronising expectations of female musicians to
remain at this shambolic level, and that we'd be making more
of a point if we improved. Jane and Alice didn't fully agree
with this, and instead were more concerned about the music
being too professional or overproduced in a slick, commercial
way. We were by no means alone in having this argument,
either. By now, the post-punk consensus about avoiding the
mainstream and deconstructing the pop song was splintering, and some of those 
who had been at the very core of this
scene -- most notably Scritti Politti -- were formulating a whole
new concept based around making gorgeous, lush pop records
and infiltrating the pop marketplace. For the first time since,

well, since before punk, credible groups started to talk about
wanting to have hits, and were championing the quest to
create the perfect pop moment. In this climate, there was a
danger that the semi-skilled approach might just start to look
wilfully dated and Luddite. Even, God forbid, less committed,
in that it might seem as if you simply didn't care enough, as if
you were a mere pop dilettante.

In April, we went to Birmingham to appear at a couple of arts
events being staged by our friend Dave Haslam. He called
them Extravaganzas, and combined bands playing with screenings
of films and performances of plays. His diary descriptions
of the couple of days we spent there capture what we were like

at the time.

Went to meet the Marine Girls at Digbeth bus station. They
arrived about four-ish with guitars in solid little battered
brown cases. Tracey is the oldest and most musical and the
quietest, Jane is by far the most enthusiastic and Alice is the
singer, and she was wearing a big flying jacket with fur neck
and collars and leopardskin shoes. When we got home I
tried to feed them but they weren't bothered, and so we
walked up to Boots for throat lozenges ..
The Marine Girls went on earlier than planned but did
really well. Alice hit objects and sang and Jane sat down in
the front row when Tracey and Alice duetted 'Fever' which
was stunning ... After the play we cleared up .a little and
91
POPSTAR TRACE

then the [Marine Girls-I and Chris and two of his friends
went and got the bus into town for Lesley and Libby's party
at Holy City Zoo. I danced with Jane and talked to Pete
Wylie a lot of the time, he's a very funny man. Introduced
him to Guy but not to the Marine Girls. He said pop
groups meeting each other in clubs was "gross":

Dave's diary encapsulates how young we were, and how small
our frame of reference.

Up earlier than usual and had a cooked breakfast and took
the Marine Girls into town. Went to Inferno Records, then
Virgin and spotted Marine Girls posters here and there.
Spent ages trying to buy a stamp for Tracey. In HMV the
man there put their LP on when he saw them, he was very
excited and said he was coming to the gig. Then we went
buying sweets in the Bull Ring and Alice was excited
because she'd been studying the Bull Ring in her geogra

phy
lessons.

Still studying the architectural landmarks of urban Britain
for school projects, we were at the same time being splashed
over the front cover of Melody Maker. A week later there was
a Marine Girls interview in the TIME, and a couple of weeks
after that an interview with Ben in Melody Maker (he had
released a solo twelve-inch EP in April called 'Summer Into
Winter', with Robert Wyatt guesting on piano and vocals).
This was followed by an TIME interview with Eveything But

The Girl ... and so it went on.
Mike was right. It did just seem so easy. We wrote songs and
made records, and got into the music papers more or less every
week. Even writing the songs themselves was basically easy.
With the certainty of youth, I felt sure that the things I liked --
the books I read, the music I respected -- were simply the correct
things to like, and the list of my influences was something
I could proudly display to anyone. The lyrics I wrote now
were almost exclusively personal, and given that every second
of my life seemed so vivid and rich with detail and event, there
was no shortage of subject matter. The smallest, most 'trivial'
things could provide inspiration or an opportunity for reflection.
I had no worries about whether or not these stories were
too private to be of interest to an audience; I never really even
considered any particular audience. I felt entirely connected to
the time and place in which I was writing the songs, and so
believed that those around me would feel the same as me and
would understand them. Like every other new band who find
themselves taken up by the press, we took the attention for
granted, having no idea how precious it was, how hard to
come by and how impossible to recapture once lost.
What our fellow students thought about it all I'm not
entirely sure. We were still trying to fit everything in around
university, so during term-time we did what all the other students
did; it's just we were marginally famous. There was the
little Popstar Trace quip, but aside from that, in a typically
English way, most people dealt with it by not referring to it.
We were neither unduly feted nor shunned -- it simply wasn't
mentioned.
As our first year at Hull ended, the first Everything But
The Girl single, 'Night And Day', was released, to good
reviews in the TIME, Sounds, Melody Maker and Smash Hits, where reviewer Neil 
Tennant wrote that it was 'an outstanding
new cover of this classic song ... Tracey Thorn is the
young, smokey voice against the picked electric guitar of Ben
Watt. I've got this under my skin.' It was also reviewed on
Radio l's Roundtable by Elvis Costello and Martin Fry of
ABC, who both loved it and threatened to steal the show's


PO PSTAR TRACE93
copy afterwards. I have an old cutting from Melody Maker with
the week's indie chart, showing 'Night And Day' at number
one, and the Marine Girls 'On My Mind' at number 9.
Ben and I came down to London for the summer and were
promptly interviewed by the TIME again, this time for their feature
piece 'Portrait of the Artist as a Consumer'. More lists.
Heroes, favourite songs, films and books. Ben's included Paul
Weller, Bill Evans, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan 1961-64 (you have
to be specific about these things); The Third Man, Mephisto,
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, Frankenstein by Mary
Shelley; 'Just like Gold' by Aztec Camera and `So Strange' by
Kevin Coyne. My heroines were Billie Holiday, Lesley Woods,
Siouxsie, Nico and Astrud Gilberto. My favourite songs were by
Marvin Gaye, Scritti Politti, Vic Godard and Stan Getz, while
my favourite films included Badlands and Assault on Precinct 13. One of my 
favourite books was still Kerouac's On the Road.
In August, Cherry Red released my solo album -- or mini
album, as it's only about twenty minutes long -- A Distant
Shore. It was really a handful of songs I'd written during the
winter of 1981, intending them to be Marine Girls songs, but
which were so intensely personal that I knew I had to sing
them myself. I went and recorded them in Pat's shed, the
whole recording session taking me no more than two or three
days, and I think costing the grand total of L167. I sent the
tracks to Mike Alway as demos, not sure in my own mind
what they were for or who was going to perform them, but he
was adamant they be released just as they were.
The resulting record is even more minimalist than the
Marine Girls --just me and my guitar and a bit of Pat's reverb.
By the time it came out in the summer of 1982, Ben and I had
worked things out between us, and after a period of pretending
to be friends, were now living together in a flat in Hull's
95

POPSTAR TRACE

Pearson Park. But the period A Distant Shore records and the
mood it captures is one of uncertainty and vulnerability. The
first song, 'Small Town Girl', sums up the whole story, in that
it's a song about trying not to fall in love -- 'keep your love and
I'll keep mine' -- and blankly owns up to the fact that my self
esteem was at an all-time low: 'Still so much a part of me is my
past disgrace And you might say you don't care But how

could you when you weren't even there?'
I felt I had made a fool of myself back home, falling in love
with someone who wasn't available, or wasn't interested, even
though, in truth, probably no one had even noticed and the
humiliation was all in my own mind. But I was damned if I
was going to let it happen again, and so Ben and I had been
through a slightly tortuous few months of advancing towards
each other, then backing off; beginning a relationship, then
ending it. It had been difficult, but also quite inspiring, and led
to the creation of something that was raw and truthful and that
struck a chord with a lot of listeners at the same stage of life

The record was again well received by the music press. (This
as we were.
whole period was really one long honeymoon.) The TIME
said the songs revealed 'a simple skill that hasn't been apparent
in the pop chart, save the odd Undertones single, since the
heyday of Pete Shelley and the Buzzcocks'. I treasured that, of course. Sounds 
described it as 'stunning in its very simplicity',
while Melody Maker said: 'It's the most extreme thing Tracey

has done so far. This is a demanding record to listen to, both

emotionally and intellectualI was glad people had noticed the extremity in it. 
The grow
ing
concern we had at the time was that the quiet, minimalist
thing could easily be misinterpreted as easy listening, and we
would soon begin to be defensive about this issue. In a solo
interview I did with Sounds in
October, I say of A Distant


96BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN
Shore: 'People say they relax to it, but I can't relax to it at all.
I play it and it puts me on edge! The music is relaxing, but the
lyrics certainly aren't. I'd hate it to be thought of as background
music.'
Those dreaded words, background music and easy listening.
They were out of the bag now, and we were just at the beginning
of an argument that we would continue to have, on and
off, for years.
I know you're down again and you see nothing but
rain

You put your friends through hell
And that's why we get along so well
You see, I always was your girl
It always will be
You and me against the world
We know the years can give
Romance to the street where we once lived
You wondered why no one called
Between you and me we scared them all
You see, I always was your girl
It always has been
You and me against the world
Maybe we're wrong and the world is right
But don't tell me that tonight
Self-assured and abusing guests
That's the way I like you best
You see, I always was your girl
It always will be
You and me against the world


'I Always Was Your Girl', from Idlewild, 1988
In December 1982, The Jam played their last ever concert, at
Brighton Conference Centre, before Paul Weller split up the
band who were by now, apparently, inhibiting his desire to experiment in 
different musical directions. The band were
huge at the time, certainly the most successful group to have
emerged during the punk era, and when 'Beat Surrender'
went to number one in December 1982, it was their fourth
number-one single since 'Going Underground' in 1980. Paul
Weller was still only twenty-four, but was a heroic figure to
many of us, managing to bridge the worlds of credible and
commercial pop, with a Midas-like touch to his songwriting.
During late 1982 we had heard that Paul liked the Everything
But The Girl single 'Night And Day', and was possibly interested
in producing us. We still didn't really have any long-term
plans to become a proper band, so we weren't sure what to do
with this suggestion, but we were flattered and star-struck.
Ben and I were now planning to do our first gig together,
at the ICA in London, as part of their annual Rock Week. The
night was being organised by Jamming! magazine and we were
going to be playing in between King, with their paint
spattered DMs, and Pete Wylie's Wah! Heat. Shortly before the
gig, word came through to us from Paul Weller's 'people' that
Paul might be interested in playing. As Ben put it in an interview
with the TIME: 'He asked if he could, er, jam with us.'
We were up in Hull at the time, in our student flat with no
phone, and so in order to try and plan the thing it was
arranged that Paul would call us at the phone box at the end
of the road. A time was arranged for him to call, and the two
of us huddled inside the cream-coloured phone box, waiting
for it to ring, like something out of a 1960s spy movie. When
the phone did actually ring, and Ben picked it up to actually
find Paul Weller at the other end, we couldn't help boggling
at each other, both of us gawping and pointing silently at the
receiver, even as Ben tried to carry on a conversation, as if this
were the most normal thing in the world and something that
happened to us every day.
As yet, Ben and I didn't really have many songs, so we
arranged to meet up with Paul down in London to rehearse a
few cover versions. We only managed to get together for one
day, Ben and I both completely in awe, nothing up to this
point having prepared us for the likelihood that we would suddenly
be encountering one of our musical heroes, face to face,
in a rehearsal studio. And that he would be excited about the
idea of coming onstage with us to perform covers ofjazz standards.
But it didn't go seamlessly, and at the end of that day
things were a little vague, and up until the very last minute we
were uncertain as to whether Paul would actually turn up or
bail out.
On the day of the gig word leaked that he might be appearing,
but no one was sure. Ben and I arrived at the ICA early
and spent an anxious couple of hours wondering what would
happen. We were relieved when he suddenly appeared backstage.
I remember him peeping round the door of our dressing
room, where we were getting ready for the gig.
'What are you gonna be wearing?' he asked.
'Urn, well, this ... ' we said, pointing at the second-hand
clothes we had on. I had chosen another slightly shabby 1950s
print dress, and Ben was doing a kind ofJacques Brel look in
a white shirt, jeans and a corduroy cap.
'OK,' he said, 'but, you know, it's a gig. Maybe you should,
like, dress up a bit.'
He didn't seem too impressed.
He himself was wearing a blue cotton shirt with pale polka
dots, narrow grey Sta-Prest trousers with a razor-sharp crease
down the front, white socks and black bowling shoes. His hair
was immaculate -- spiky on the top but sculpted around in
front of his ears. Every inch the tiber-mod. In the photos I
have of the night, I can see now that he was right, of course.
We look a bit rubbish, and he looks fantastic.
Ben and I went onstage, and started out with our own version
of 'On My Mind', the Marine Girls song, that we had
recorded. Then we did an old song called 'Nevertheless', and
a song of Ben's, 'Waiting Like Mad'. The element of uncertainty and expectation 
in the crowd added a frisson of
excitement to our set, and when halfway through Paul wandered
onstage, to no real introduction from us, there was a
definite moment of thrilled disbelief As I said in John Reed's
Weller biography: 'The whole audience collectively fainted.'
I have a bootleg tape of the night, bought years later from a
stall at Camden Market from a guy who couldn't believe it was
me buying it. You can hear the gasps as people realise who has
just walked on. A few whoops. Then I say, 'This is a really old
song' (cheeky), and we play The Jam's 'English Rose', which
we had just recorded for the NME's Racket Packet cassette. Ben
and Paul play interweaving guitar parts, and at the end is Paul's
unmistakable, gruff 'Thank you' into the mic. Next we do
'Night And Day', where Paul plays a guitar solo, and then a
version of 'Fever', with each of us taking a verse on vocals. Paul
sounds great, singing with that trademark tightly coiled energy
and gritted-teeth soulfulness, and in many ways the contrast
between us could not be more striking. There we are, the two
arch-minimalists and anti-performers, with Paul beside us offering
us an understated lesson in how to 'give it a bit more'.
Unusually, both for us and for Paul, there is some humour
involved: when we go on to sing 'The Girl From Ipanema'
you can hear very clearly that both Paul and I are trying not
to laugh as we sing the line, 'When she passes, each one she
passes goes aaahhh'. The very notion of Paul Weller singing
this song at this point in his career is so unlikely, there's a ripple
of laughter from the audience, which we both seem to share
in, and it's a very human and likeable moment.
And then that's it, it's the end of the set. The crowd cheer
and stamp and we come back for one more, but we don't actually
have one more, so we just do 'Fever' again. We leave the
stage to more applause. Then an American girl standing next
to the guy making the bootleg tape says, 'What were they
called again?'
'Everything But The Girl: he replies.
'Excuse me?'
'Everything BUT The Girl,' he repeats, a little irritated this
time. And the tape clicks off.
The reviews of the night were great, with big photos in the TIME, Sounds and 
Melody Maker. Record Mirror hilariously notes
that the touts outside were charging a tenner for three-pound
tickets. This was, of course, before the first Style Council
album had been recorded, and no one was anticipating Paul's
sudden transformation into a sleek jazz sophisticate. It was his
first appearance onstage since he'd last been seen with The
Jam. We went back to Hull barely believing it had happened.
Paul, however, kept in touch, with a view to us appearing
on the album he was starting to record. His enthusiasm was
incredibly infectious, though his thought processes could be
hard to keep up with. Letters and tapes would arrive, demos of
songs he wanted me to sing, complete with handwritten lyrics
scrawled on bits of paper. I would get into one song, and start
learning it, only for another to arrive a few weeks later with an
accompanying letter announcing a complete change of plan.
At first I was keen on `Headstart For Happiness', but then
a letter arrived saying, 'I'm not sure about "Headstart" any
more, but I have a new song which I'd really like you both to
play on (it's a two-part harmony, very close harmonies, and it
could be great for Tracey's voice ...) It's called "Run Away
With Me".' I don't remember even hearing that one, but then
a tape of a song called 'Ghosts Of Dachau' landed on the doormat,
followed soon after by the song we eventually settled on,
'The Paris Match'.
It wasn't until November 1983 that we finally got together
to record it at Paul's Solid Bond Studios down in London. We
did a very slow, torch-song version of the track, with Ben on
guitar and me singing. It certainly sounds moody and languid,
and captures an atmosphere of sort of exhausted desire. But
I've found it hard to shake the feeling that we just did the song
too slow, and remembering how it was recorded has always
tainted the experience of listening to it. Paul wanted me to
sing and re-sing the vocal many times, which I simply wasn't
used to. I've always been something of a one-take girl, and I
get bored and tired very quickly. For some reason I remember
Paul being unhappy with the way I was pronouncing the word
'fire', so I sang it over and over again, trying to vary it each
time, although it sounded the same to me however I sang it.
THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT105

That sounds churlish, but it was just that we had different approaches to the 
whole process of recording. And perhaps
even then there was a sense of Paul battling with the concept
of what he was trying to do. That Style Council album, Cafe
Bleu, struck many people as being the sound of a square peg
trying to force its way into a round hole, and while I quite
liked that tension between his dynamics and this newer, cooler
context, for many people it was just too confusing. It was that
Vic Godard conundrum again -- how could a bunch of ex
punks be getting into jazz? Was it all just a silly fad?
But part of the impetus behind the jazz infatuation was a
growing boredom with the deliberately lowly and amateurish
element of the old indie DIY ethic. As the 1980s got under
way, a new fascination with pop's glamour was beginning. The
Style Council flirted with images of luxury, continentalism and
sophistication, and we too were beginning to crave something
more than the defiantly small-scale ambitions of the indie
scene. As Simon Reynolds writes: 'Post-punk's refusal to
swoon or risk intoxication quickly became oppressive and selfdessicating.
And demystification kinda took the mystery out of
everything.'
Working with Paul had meant a brush with something outside
of our self-referential indie world. The gold discs in the
corridor of his Solid Bond Studios were a testament to a different,
higher level of achievement. We began to peek through
a door which had started to open. We didn't know what was
behind that door, and up until now we hadn't even wondered.
But now we'd had a glimpse, and it was intriguing and a little
bit tempting.
T

he ICA gig with Paul Weller was, most probably, the beginning
of the end for the Marine Girls, symbolising the gulf
that was growing between us, which was more than just geographical
or even musical. It was there in that Melody Maker interview, where Jane and I 
expressed our differing attitudes
towards our musical amateurism. It was to do with ambition,
fame and success: all those filthy concepts which punk had
briefly swept under the carpet, but which were back now, if they
ever really went away. We didn't want the same things, so it was
hard to see how we could carry on being in the same band.
In September of 1982 the Marine Girls had recorded our
second album, Lazy Ways, at Cold Storage Studios in Brixton.
It was produced, in the most hands-off manner imaginable, by
Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants, who did little other
than sit around and let us get on with it. Despite the addition
of a producer and an actual recording studio, in many ways it
doesn't sound as good as Beach Party, which had been recorded
in a garden shed.
I had bought a new semi-acoustic guitar and Jane had
bought an acoustic bass, and we had absorbed a more jazzy
influence. Sonically the record is more mellow than Beach
Party, and somewhere along the way a bit of the punky spirit
seems to have been lost. This might not have mattered if there
had been a leap forward in other directions, but as that TrouserPress.com 
piece, which was so rude about Beach Party, comments, much of the album still 
falls on 'the wrong side of
competence', though we are acknowledged to have made 'an
overall improvement in songwriting' and my 'jazzy playing is
vastly improved'. But it suffers from being neither as spiky and
quirky as Beach Party, nor as extreme and stripped bare as A
Distant Shore.
When it came out in March 1983 it was mostly well
received, although interestingly one of our long-time supporters,
Mick Sinclair at Sounds, expressed some reservations:
`... their much fabled "innocence" acts as an imaginary barrier,
preventing them striking ahead into a style that is assertive
and mature ... while so much [of this LP] is good, so little is
brilliant'. He was hopeful for us: 'I still await great things',
echoing Penny Kiley's comments in Melody Maker that 'it's
obviously a transitional record, pointing to a future that could
be interesting, though what form it will take is as yet unclear'.
There was an unspoken problem between us all at the time,
and it was to do with singing. I'd moved on a long way since
those days of singing from inside the wardrobe, and since working
with Ben and making my solo album I had been growing
in confidence and self-belief. It had occurred to me by now
that I wasn't really cut out to be a guitar player, but perhaps I
did have a future as a singer. The trouble was, in the Marine
Girls I wasn't really the singer, Alice was. It was impossible for
me to say that I wanted to change that, because then what
would Alice's role be? And without her, what would the
Marine Girls be? Like any band which has two almost diametrically opposed lead 
singers, we tended to polarise audience
opinion, often having quite separate but equally devoted fans.
Penny Kiley in her review of Lazy Ways said of Alice: 'If her voice lacks the 
passionate intensity that's made Tracey Thorn so
popular, it has a wit of expression that allows her to be sad or
sensuous, playful or relaxed, wistful or defiant.'
Defiant indeed. It was onstage that Alice fully came into her
own, being less shy than either me or Jane. When we played
at London University in February 1983, someone made the
mistake of lobbing a glass at the stage. Adrian Thrills wrote in
his review: 'Any cynics in this audience were left in no doubt
about a more caustic, cutting edge ... the offender was immediately
offered the chance to have it out onstage but politely
declined.' That was Alice -- vertical peroxide hair standing a full
six inches above her head, leather miniskirt and boots, beckoning
the audience up for a fight.
We soldiered on, doing a gig at Kingston Poly (where
another review said that 'the Girls' sweetness is the type that
suggests they'd break your arm before you broke their heart'),
a Capital Radio session, another Peel session and a gig at the
Lyceum supporting our heroes Orange Juice. On that day we
arrived at the Lyceum, the largest venue we'd played yet, carrying
our guitars, our bag of percussion and our extremely
small amps, at about six o'clock in the evening. Which seemed
reasonable to us. Orange Juice's crew and management were
in a fury.
'Where the hell have you been?' they shouted. 'What time
d'you call this to turn up for a soundcheck?'
'Er, what's a soundcheck?' we asked. We genuinely hadn't
had one before, and had no idea you were supposed to be
there in the afternoon, check the levels of everything, then go
away again and come back for the gig. Only the intervention
111=111111111EEMBEIMIE

110


0-BET WEE US
p.US
THE Ana
THURSDAY 31st MARCH 7-30prn
Crt
itE
Derek Block presents
sower
s THE
MARINE


IRLS

EDMII=11
ALL TICKETS E3.50
Loadmo Mears Boo... Krith Prows< ersmiar 11. ,Peen anol malagents.

of Edwyn Collins prevented us being thrown off the bill in disgrace.
We meekly lugged our amps up on to the stage, plugged
in and soundchecked in two minutes flat and were allowed to
stay and do the gig.
But it was all just a matter of time, and in August everything
came to a head when we went up to do a gig in Glasgow at a
club called Night Moves. My memories of the night are hazy
now. It did not go well: some guys in front of the stage started
spitting, and I walked offstage, ending the gig. That in itself
might not have been such a disaster, but backstage an argument
broke out between us. We quarrelled about whether it was
right or wrong to abandon a gig that was going badly, though
that wasn't what we were really arguing about, of course.
Alice's boyfriend got involved -- I seem to remember he had
even somehow been onstage with us, and that had in itself
been a source of anger for me, that he had invited himself into
the band. Some harsh things were said, and by the end of the
evening the Marine Girls were no more.

Do we all remember the past in an edited version, choosing to
recall versions of events which suit us? Forgetting things we
said, or didn't say, which reflect less well on us than we would
like? And even if we compare notes with others who took part
in those events, do we end up with the complete truth, or
simply a disjointed set of different points of view?
For twenty years or so I'd carried around with me my version
of how and why the Marine Girls split up, and as time
passed I forgot some significant details and embellished others,
and played and replayed certain scenes in my mind till I had a
scenario that suited me and that I could live with. It revolved
around the backstage row after that Glasgow gig, and it painted
me as more or less the innocent party. Meanwhile Jane and Alice each had their 
own interpretation of what had happened.
If we'd stayed in closer contact, or been twenty years older and
able to talk about difficult emotions like jealousy and resentment,
friendship and betrayal, we could have made an attempt
to see things from each other's point of view Instead, as is the
way with these things, we drifted apart after that gig in
Glasgow, and our slightly different takes on that last evening
hardened into something approaching complete contradiction.
For some years I bore a vague grudge about having been
made to feel that I was the one who carelessly let the Marine
Girls die. Jane and Alice harboured alternative grievances.
Occasionally we were each called upon to give our version of
the Marine Girls story, usually to anoraky fanzine writers, and
because we had never spoken about the way the band ended,
our versions differed and so the grievances deepened.
In 2005, when I started thinking about writing this book,
I finally met up with Jane and Alice, and Gina, for the first
time in over twenty years, and we laid everything out on the
table. It was a reunion of sorts, though unlike other band
reunions it didn't involve us picking up any instruments or getting
anywhere near a stage. It was enough to be in the same
room again; that was something. There was a conversation
about the ending of the band, which started politely, got a little
heated and then ended politely, and it seemed as though we
had all said our piece and made our peace. But in truth, I think
that all that happened was we got a few things off our chest,
then went home with our opinions intact. We're grown-ups
now, of course, so we can be civil about it all, at least to each
other's faces, but there are some rifts that will never be healed,
and there are things that it seems cannot be forgiven. But this
is how bands break up, isn't it? There's not much that's new or
unique in this story It's rock's oldest cliche, the one where the
phrase 'musical differences' seeks to cover up any number of
personality clashes and petty quarrels. Marine Girls ended
badly, and to be honest we've never really recovered, but that
takes nothing away from what we had, and what we were, and

what we did.
We used to get up onstage in front of mostly male crowds
who'd come to see a rock gig, and we'd quietly but defiantly play our heartfelt 
songs about boys we loved and despised, with
strange, mysterious references to the sea that created an almost
magical sense of other-worldliness. We hand-built our own
little universe, and when audiences were allowed a glimpse of
it, often they were entranced. I'll never be sure where we got
the courage or the imagination to be quite so much ourselves
and so unashamedly unconventional, but we were radical in
being unlike anyone else around, and brave to defy audience
expectations of what we should be doing.
But whatever happened, and even if we'd never done that
disastrous gig in Glasgow, or fallen out over what direction we
should take, the Marine Girls were one of those bands who
could only ever have lasted for a couple of albums. However
messily we handled it, there is a kind of perfection in our
having split up just when we did, leaving a legacy of a more
or less uncompromised version of indie pop.
The two albums we made went on to sell something in the
region of fifty thousand copies each, which is extraordinary
when you think that the first one began its life in my bedroom
and was completed in a shed. And while we might have
expected to be forgotten fairly quickly, in fact the opposite happened,
and in that curious, late-night obsessive world of the
internet we have become a somewhat seminal post-punk DIY
band, more revered now than we ever were at the time. Those
who loved us did so deeply and enduringly, and Jane, Alice and
Gina all have great stories of suddenly being recognised at unexpected
moments down the years, as someone discovers they
were in the Marine Girls and reveals themselves to be a fan.

The unlikely nature of this enduring aftershock of ours was
brought home to me some fourteen years after our split, when
I was appearing on Later . . . with Jools Holland, performing with
Massive Attack. Also on the show that night was Courtney
Love with her band Hole.

Widely regarded at the time as something of a loose cannon,
she was the focus of all attention in the studio that day, and
when the bands gathered on their respective sets for the filming
there was a sense that all eyes were on her, mine included.
Just before the cameras started rolling she looked across to our
stage, put down her guitar and strode across the empty central
area to crouch down next to me where I was sitting. 'Hey, she
said, 'you're Tracey from the Marine Girls! Kurt and I were
both huge fans of your band.' (Kurt was not long dead at this
point.) 'Y'lcnow, my band, Hole, we do a cover of one of your
songs, called "In Love":
More or less speechless, I managed to mumble something
polite in return, before she strode back and the show began.
Fast-forward to May 2010, a full twenty-seven years after the
demise of the Marine Girls. I was back on Later . . . with Jools
Holland, this time performing as a solo artist. Also appearing
on the show were the current incarnation of all things hip and
New York, LCD Soundsystem. I was sitting at the side of their
stage, watching them set up to do their song, when a member
of the band looked up and saw me, made his way over to
where I was sitting and said -- yeah, you guessed it -- 'I just have to tell 
you, I have always been such a huge fan of the Marine
Girls.'
It's become a recurring theme, but at the time of the
Courtney Love confession I'm not sure I entirely believed her
story. It was one of those bizarre showbiz encounters that
happen from time to time, where things are said and you're
never quite sure how much of it is true. What I pieced
together later was that it was a distant old friend of ours called
Calvin Johnson who had carried our legacy to Portland,
Oregon, first by forming a band almost entirely in our image,
called Beat Happening (whose records he had sent me during
the 1980s) and then by starting the label Sub Pop which ultimately
signed Nirvana. He had played Beach Party to Kurt and
Courtney, along with things like The Raincoats and Kleenex.
The whole unlikely story only finally became real for me
when Kurt Cobain's Journas were published in 2002 and I was
able to see for myself, in his own handwriting, our appearance
in his many lists of favourite bands. There are the Marine Girls
on page 128 and page 241, while on page 77, in a list of his all
time favourite songs, are two of mine, 'Honey' and 'In Love'.
Most incredibly, on page 271 Beach Party is listed as one of
Nirvana's Top Fifty albums, along with the Sex Pistols, The
Clash and Public Enemy.
Something has come between me and the world that
I knew

What I thought would last is falling apart
In the face of something new
How can I explain that I had no choice?

The sound of the waves fills her ears

And drowns out my voice
And I'm just too far away for her to believe what I
say
She couldn't hear me

And she wouldn't listen anyway

How can I write a letter, the post is so slow
If I'm to disappoint her then that's something she
ought to know
I can just hear her voice fall as I wait here alone
How can so much harm be done by just two minutes
Spent on the phone

You say that things will get better

But she would hate me if I let her

And she reads so much in every word that I say

I thought that being apart would just bring us some
variety
But after some time it seems clear that she's changed
In a different way from me

And I would like to shout at someone but no one's to
blame

It's just her, it's just me, and everything that is just not
the same
Sometimes I would turn back the clock
And recapture all that we've lost
But I couldn't give up all that we have today

The Spice Of Life', from Eden, 1984
STUDENT UNION

D

uring 1983, a steady stream ofjournalists made their way
up from London to the bedsit I shared with Ben in Hull.
The thing they loved most of all was describing the conditions
in which we lived. This is from Hot Press:

Midway, the gas fire gutters and dips low.
'Have you got a ten pee, Trace?'
Trace hasn't. So I dig deep.
'This is dreadful. Every time someone comes to interview
us, we wind up getting ten pences off them!'
This exchange occurs in a dishevelled ground-floor flat
in the unfashionable end of Hull's bedsitterland. The bell
push tag reads BEN WATT & TRACEY THORN; it's in
newsprint lettering cut out of some article about them.

And this is from Sounds:

The flat, which he shares with fellow songstress Tracey

Thorn, is vast and cold, littered with records and books. As
we huddle round the rampant gas fire for life-supporting
warmth, a brief glance around the room reveals a wall
adorned with press clippings, the odd photo and a couple
of guitars.
This is from Melody Maker:
Huddled round a gas fire eating crumpets and toast ...
Look, what is all this? Didn't they have gas fires down in
London? I know, I know, it's just all so romantic, isn't it, and
that cutting on our bell-push proves that we were as aware of
this as the next man.

The flat they describe was a shrine to everything we loved,
papered with photos of everyone from Siouxsie to Virginia
Woolf, and we stoically refused to go down to London to do
interviews. Instead, we thoroughly enjoyed making them
come to us and shiver round our gas fire, letting the meter run
out. Oooh, we were well on our way to becoming honorary
Northerners.

Life in Hull was looking up a bit, as a new club had opened
called Desolation Row, and in May we played live there.
'Shyest duo's Hull debut', announced the review in the local
paper, going on to describe the club as the sort of place where
you could hear 'twenty minutes of Peter Tosh, followed by the
Doors, and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles'.
We'd also done a gig with Weekend at Ronnie Scott's down
in London earlier in March, The Times reporting that 'the
avant-garde rock kids' had had 'a novel idea: let's turn Ronnie
Scott's into a jazz club!' In all the press, the audience's clothes
were reviewed as assiduously as the music: 'all flecked jackets
and baggy jeans, deep-chested charcoal v-necks and crew cuts
modified like art-class studies', said The Times, while Sounds
commented that 'crowds of foaming trendsetters mixed with
mere mortals'.

Paul Weller came to see us, and many more came to see
him, and the whole atmosphere reeked of a 'scene', which
really we were more than happy to leave behind, fleeing back
to Hull.

If there was a New Jazz movement we felt only partly connected
to it, in that it seemed to be as much a clothes scene as
a music scene. In his book about the history of modern street
fashion, The Way We Wore, Robert Elms brilliantly chronicles
the competing styles of the period, pointing out that a group
like Blue Rondo a la Turk 'had formed, primarily, to display
their wardrobes to the world'.

Ostensibly, we had much in common with the style crew
currently congregating in Soho, but living in Hull most of the
time meant that we were a million miles away from what was
happening and were carving out our own, somewhat warped,
version of cool. We hoped that people would notice that,
while we did covers of jazz standards like 'Nevertheless' and
'Night And Day' at the Ronnie Scott's gig, we also did Echo
and the Bunnymen's 'Read It In Books', and that they would
understand why. We were basically 'a little bit indie, a little bit
bossa nova', and while we knew lots of people who were
either one or the other, not many were trying to be both. In
our musical tastes we were eclectic without even knowing
there was a word for it, and our choice of cover versions
ranged far and wide, from the Velvet Underground to Paul
Weller to Cole Porter. It was all about trying to piece together
a kind of lineage of classic, simple songwriting, no matter
where or when those songs had been written.
But however interesting a search it may have been, we
couldn't just go on for ever building up a repertoire of unexpected
cover versions. If Everything But The Girl was going

to become anything more, then we needed to start writing our
own songs.

Question: Is it a good idea to start a band with your
boyfriendgirlfriend?
Possibly not, but that's what I was about to commit to
doing. Ben had released his solo album North Marine Drive by
now, and I was planning to record a follow-up to A Distant
Shore and we were each still holding fast to an element of independence
from the other. Despite sharing this glamorous Hull
bedsit, we very rarely sat huddled round the sputtering gas fire
trying to write songs together. Instead, I tried to find moments
of solitude in which to work. I still disliked being overheard
while working on songs as much as I had when I'd lived at
home, and would wait for Ben to go out before I'd pick up a
guitar and start trying out ideas. Perhaps even then the creative
difficulties involved in living and working together were something
of a hindrance. I was writing songs quite often about
Ben, and about the relationship we were building, and to sit
and do that in front of him was a step too far.
The other thing was that I had discovered feminism, and
through my reading of Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and
Kate Millett, I was finding a theoretical framework for many of the instinctive 
grievances I'd had since I was a teenager. A
lot of what I was reading was helpful, but some of it created as
many problems in my mind as it solved. For instance, it was
obviously Good and Feminist of me to have been in an all-girl
band (or all-woman, as I now felt obliged to say), and being a
solo female artist was OK too. But was it the right decision to
be in a band with my boyfriend? In fact, was it even cool to have a boyfriend? 
Was monogamy inevitably awful and oppressive?
Should I really try to be a lesbian? These were serious
concerns within feminism at that time, and I agonised over
many things I wanted to do, worrying about whether they
were the right things to want to do.
In the end, there was no clear moment when we made a
firm decision to become a permanent band together; it was a
choice which simply emerged from the realities of the situation.
I was struggling to write songs fast enough, and at the
same time Ben was working on his own songs, and it got to
the point where we had about four each, and it suddenly
occurred to us that if we pooled the songs we had, there'd be
nearly an album's worth! Our commitment to the idea of
Everything But The Girl as a full-time band was about as profound
as that. For God's sake, if we'd known we were going to
carry on for years we would have come up with a better name.
And if I worried about whether or not it was sufficiently
right-on to form a band with your boyfriend, I could also
point to the fact that the very shape of our new group seemed
like the most up-to-date current model. The boygirl duo was
more modern, more unconventional in rock terms, than any
other band format, and so we joined the ranks of Yazoo,
Eurythmics and The Cocteau Twins, sticking two defiant fingers
up at the notion of the four-piece male rock group.
But whatever the shape or make-up or gender balance of a
group, there are always going to be issues about power and
control. I was a strong-willed, opinionated individual, and I
was at the end of a period of frustration, feeling that I'd had to
compromise while I was in the Marine Girls. Ben was used to
working solo and having his own way completely, without any need to compromise. 
There were things about each other that
we both needed -- it was clear that my real strength was
singing, and Ben was a better guitar player than I'd ever be --
but how democratic were things going to be? Would our relationship
take precedence over our work, and if we had a row,
would we still be able to do a gig? Who'd be in charge, and

have the final say? And the big, ultimate question -- what
would happen if we stopped being a couple? Would we still be
a group? That question was answered in 1983, when we very
nearly split up. (Answer: NO! We would not still be a group.)
But at the time I was only twenty-one years old, so I didn't
really have the answers to any of these questions, and I'm not
even sure that I asked them. They were issues which would sit
there, usually in the background, for years and years, not
always easy to discuss.
Meanwhile, we simply carried on regardless, and set about
recording an album together. Next question: Did we need a
producer? Between us so far we'd only had two producer
experiences, and they had both resulted from asking an artist
we admired to produce us, rather than employing anyone who
had any experience or talent at producing. So in the Marine
Girls we'd been 'produced' by Stuart Moxham from our
beloved Young Marble Giants, while Ben had his first single
'Cant' produced by Kevin Coyne. Disastrously, Ben had
booked the studio for this latter piece of recording on what
turned out to be the day of the FA Cup Final. To his credit,
Kevin had turned up anyway, only to spend the entire session
listening to the radio commentary of the match via an earphone
in one ear. As Ben attempted to record his track, a
plaintive acoustic little number, he found himself staring
through the glass panel of the vocal booth at Kevin, who in the
control room was punching the air and mouthing the word
`GOAL!!'

But now Geoff Travis introduced us to the concept of the
actual producer, someone who might conceivably add something
to the recording process. The name that came up was
Robin Millar, another of those music-biz mavericks we
admired, who genuinely liked music and musicians. His philosophy
of making records was simply to try to let a band
capture exactly what it was they intended, and as such he was
a kind of anti-producer in the same way that we were anti
performers. He describes us at the time as 'formulating this
bizarre, bizarre hybrid of jazz, and at the same time still influenced
by people like the Buzzcocks', which shows a very good
grasp of what we were wanting to do, and proves that he saw
the difference between us and Sade, whose Diamond Life album
he was producing at the same time.
Sade and her band were in and out of the same studio,
Power Plant in Willesden, while we were recording Eden, and
while being very nice people, they were all intimidatingly gorgeous
and fashionable and just absolutely not indie. They
seemed wholeheartedly to embrace and embody the New Jazz
cool soul aesthetic in a way that was so pure and simple as to
be easily translatable into pop terms. Diamond Life was patently
NOT a bizarre hybrid. (Which is why it won the Brit Best
Album Award that year, while we sat at home in a rented flat,
watching the whole ceremony on a rented telly.)
Our album Eden, on the other hand, was a much stranger
record. We had by now come up with a fairly clear-cut musical
manifesto, consisting of a somewhat esoteric set of ground
rules which informed the recording sessions. We were defining
ourselves as much in terms of what we were anti as what
we were in favour of. What we liked about the small-combo,
1950s-style jazz that we were inspired by was the precision of
the playing, the no-fuss, no-frills approach, which we saw as
being the antithesis to rock's excesses. In the austerity of the
jazz trio we saw a continuation of the purity of punk.
So there were basic rules about what was and wasn't allowed
to appear on Eden, and to be honest I think probably only Ben
and I understood what on earth they were.
On drums was Catweazle lookalike Charles Hayward, who
had played in one of Ben's favourite avant-garde post-punk

groups, This Heat, and he had to adhere to Rule Number
One: no snare drum, which was too rockist. Only rimshot was
allowed.

Rule Number Two: no electric bass guitar; had to be
double bass instead.

Simon Booth from Weekend was on guitar, and had to
abide by Rule Number Three: no acoustic guitars, as they
meant Folk Music. He was allowed to play electric or semi
acoustic guitars only.
There was some Hammond organ, which we saw as being
very 1960s, and therefore cool, but--
Rule Number Four: no piano, which meant ghastly 1970s
rock ballads.

Rule Number Five: no backing vocals too glossy, too
high-production, potentially vacuous.
Though Eden was finished in the autumn of 1983, it
wouldn't be released until June 1984, nearly a whole year
later an unthinkable time gap in the world I'd been used to,
where songs had been recorded in the morning and practically
in the shops by teatime. It was a delay which contributed to
some of the problems the record faced on its release, and it was
caused by a drama which would prove to be my introduction
to the machinations of the real music business.

Mike Alway had left Cherry Red, and turned to Geoff
Travis at Rough Trade with the concept of setting up a new
label an indie which would be financed by a major, potentially
harnessing all the merits of an indie label but with greater
financial backing and support.
He described to me recently what his dreams for the label
had been. They read almost as a blueprint for his whole aesthetic
ideal: 'I thought ... [it's going to have] a cosmopolitan
feel, it's gonna be very international, it's gonna take us away
from rock music ... superior ... timeless ... just a little retro,
but largely futuristic.' The label was to be Blanco y Negro, and
Mike wanted us to join him there, but unfortunately Ben and
I had both made the textbook teenage music-biz error of signing draconian and 
binding contracts with Cherry Red, which
would take some escaping from. It would be almost a year
before we could extricate ourselves from Cherry Red and
rejoin Mike. All this time our debut album was languishing on
the office shelves, unreleased and unheard.
And there was still another year to do at Hull University, so
after recording Eden, and being unable to release it, we quietly
returned to student life. We'd moved out of the famed bedsit
on Pearson Park and into a top-floor flat on Salisbury Street,
with an attic room reached by climbing up a ladder and a loo
shared with the flat next door. For a while I concentrated
much more on studying and less on music, building up towards
my finals in June 1984. For me, there had never been any
question of abandoning university; I was absorbed in my studies
there. I fell in love with William Blake, and wrote the
longest essay my tutor had ever seen on the subject, and
through a Women in Literature course I learned even more
about feminism and, like many female students before and
since, became immersed in the world of the Brontës and Sylvia
Plath and 'lost' classics such as The Yellow Wallpaper. I'd got no
nearer to making a decision about where all this studying was
leading, and hadn't really confronted the job question. Was I
ever given any careers advice? I have no memory of such a
thing. The decision was being made for me, it seemed, almost
behind my back, as music began to break free of its role in my
life as Just A Hobby and to make claims for itself as A Career.
I never really asked myself whether it was what I wanted, or
whether it was the life I was cut out for. Part of me enjoyed
the limelight, but another part, possibly a larger part, was happier
in the library.
Finally, in May 1984, just before my exams started, the first
single from our album, 'Each And Every One', was released on
Blanco y Negro. Any group should be full of dreams and aspirations
for their first single, but in truth I think my attention
was more focused on my work in Hull. Ben's heart, though,
was set on the progress of the single, which seemed about to
be a hit. A proper Top Forty hit, not the indie charts we were
so used to. If Ben was dreaming of imminent stardom, I was
more fired up by the fact that I was now predicted to get a
first, and I was damned ill was going to let a record get in the
way of that. I broke out in an itchy and irritating rash all over
my hands, caused by stress, the doctor said, but what was causing
the stress? Was it the pressure of exams, or the pressure of
a hit single? Or the pressure of having both at once, and not
being sure which was more important?
On 4 June 1984, at nine-thirty in the morning, we sat the
last exam of our finals -- Seventeenth-century Literature. 'Each
And Every One' was number 28 in the charts. We finished the
exam, got straight on a train down to London and were in the
recording studio by the afternoon, finishing off a new B-side.
Bye-bye student life, hello ... Well, what, exactly?
I had no idea.
Here is the street and here is the door
Same as it was before

And up the stairs and on the wall
Was Doisneau's kiss

And Terry Hall
And Siouxsie Sioux and Edwyn too
And Bobby D in '63
And everything I knew was good
And like it was just understood
And now I need that feeling
I'm reaching for that feeling
Hands up to the ceiling
'Hands Up To The Ceiling', from Out of the Woods, 2007




F

or a long time there was a popular story about Everything
But The Girl, which provided the opening question to
many of our interviews, and it ran like this: despite having a

Top Thirty hit, the band refused to go on Top of the Pops

because they were sitting their exams at university! Aaah, bless.
Like most of these kinds of stories, it isn't true. There never
was a phone call asking us to appear on that week's Top of the
Pops, to which we replied, 'No, I'm sorry, however much we
would love to come to London and be filmed lip-synching to
our current single for the nation's biggest pop show, we are
unable to do so as we will be taking our Birth of the Modern
Novel paper.' So, no, it's not quite a true story.
But then again, it is exactly the sort of thing we would have
done. And not because of our exams, but because of politics.
I violently disapproved of Top of the Pops, which I regarded as
being too mainstream, too commercial and, what's more,
probably sexist (there was a period when they had a set featuring
women in CAGES dancing at the side of the stage, and
that, for me, led to a complete veto). Our career may have
been heading at full speed towards the mainstream pop world,
but I had in no way made my peace with what that meant, and
so while we were making quite commercial-sounding music,
we were at the same time trying to uphold the stand taken by
The Clash, who had also famously refused the show. I think
what we actually said to our record company was, 'We won't
do Top of the Pops even if they ask us!' And then, guess what?
We weren't asked. I wonder why.
'Each And Every One' did well anyway, spending seven
weeks in the chart. Besides not doing Top of the Pops, we did
very little else to help its progress, having as yet no sense at all
that there was such a thing as a promotional schedule to follow
So instead of staying in London, poised and ready to appear on
any TV show offered, or do a phone-in radio interview, or just
be 'on call' for whatever might arise, we went on holiday. It
may have looked to our record company as if we were deliberately
sticking two fingers up at the idea of promotion, but it
didn't seem that way to us. After all, we'd just finished our
finals at uni, and we felt we deserved a break, and we had a
cheque in our pocket from Paul Weller, so we did what any
thrustingly ambitious young pop group would do and jetted
off to Lesbos for a fortnight. Long before mobile phones or
email, this meant that we were effectively uncontactable for
two weeks, while our record company were working on our
hit single. As they tried their best to keep it on the airwaves
and in the shops, we lazed on a beach and pottered contentedly
around the archaeological ruins.
Deliberately flouting the rules? I just don't think we knew
there were any.
Finally the album, Eden, was released, and on the back of
the hit single it entered the charts and was to spend twenty
two weeks there, getting to number 14 at its peak. This was
commercial success at a level way beyond what I had achieved
until now. The honeymoon period with the press, though, was
coming to an inevitable end and, while I have copies of good
reviews from Sounds, Time Out, the Guardian and The Times, there is a 
noticeable gap where the TIME and Melody Maker reviews of Eden should be, 
leading me to the conclusion that
they were unfavourable. Those who didn't like what we were
doing had marshalled themselves by now and launched an
attack, and it was mostly based on the recurring accusations
that we were soppy wimps, wallowing in easy-listening blandness,
making jazz-tinged soft-rock background music for
bedwetters. I think that about sums it up -- have I forgotten
anything?
Those who did like Eden defended it at least in part by
making reference to the lyrics -- drawing attention to the grittiness
of some of the stories being told, the kind of
kitchen-sink drama quality of the subject matter. 'Eden is
wordplay in motion,' wrote Dave Henderson at Sounds, 'like
some 60s armchair theatre, graphically illustrated in black and
white, exploring the emotions and expressions of everyday
people.' City Limits commented that: 'The ballads are sad vistas
of wasted lives ... And the drippiness quotient? Absolutely nil.'
Adrian Thrills would write about us later in the year at the TIME, describing 
us as 'new realists', along with Billy Bragg
and the Redskins.

That was all great, and showed that many people, as well as
just enjoying the music, had understood what we meant and
the context into which we fitted. But we took very badly the
criticisms from other sections of the press, and began to give
dreadful interviews in which we came across as defensive, dogmatic,
humourless and aggressive. Those who came to meet us
found two people who were ready for a scrap before the tape
machine was even turned on. I remember once hearing Peter
Ustinov say of film actor-director Charles Laughton that he
was 'somebody who was hanging around waiting to be
offended', and that just about sums up what Ben and I were
like in 1984. Woe betide any unfortunate journalist who made
a lazy remark about politics or New Jazz. I exploded with
indignation and stormed out of one interview when the journalist
uttered the words 'easy listening', and I remember that
much of the time I seemed to delight in being almost pathologically
opposed to the most trivial things.
Dave Henderson talked to us for Sounds (and remember, he
had actually liked Eden!) and found us exhausted and irritable:
'Other journalists, too, feel the rougher edge of the EBTG
tongue, following their inability to grasp just what the duo are
about.'
Adrian Thrills was sympathetic to our rantings about not
being easy listening and not having sold out, but even he worried
for us: `EBTG have an admirably rigorous approach to the
marketing process, and are reluctant to take part in anything
that conflicts with their punk-rooted ideals. Whether such idealism
stands up to commercial pressures remains to be seen.'
Eleanor Levy at Record Mirror wrote that 'Tracey Thorn and
Ben Watt ... have a reputation for being perhaps a little
unfriendly [to journalists] ... ' though she admitted we were
'hardly the enfants terribles I'd expected'. By the time Graham
K. Smith came to talk to us for the same magazine later in the
year, our reputation was secure -- the headline read 'Difficult,
Us?' -- and Smith pointed out that 'they both appear more
concerned with using their new-found position to impart
opinions, rather than honing their budding abilities as songwriters
and makers of records ... they possess a fear of
misquotation that is quite out of proportion with the tenuous
position they hold in today's pop palaver.'
Dave Henderson had seen to the heart of the problem,
which lay in the apparent gap between the actual sound of the
music we made and our intentions in making it. 'If they were
Test Dept, they could probably beat their critics into submission,
but their far more subtle approach requires a much more
sophisticated ear to discern between innuendo, implication and
intention.' In the musical melting pot that constituted early
post-punk, everything had been allowed for a while and it was
acknowledged that many bands, though sounding nothing like
each other, shared a common pool of inspiration and intent.
But that didn't really last long, and soon a kind of rock orthodoxy
reasserted itself, especially within the music press, and our
musical experiments began to be seen by some as being reactionary
rather than progressive. The result was that I felt
misunderstood, out of place, and responded by trying to display
in interviews the spikiness and attitude which wasn't
immediately apparent in the music. But sounding like Astrud
Gilberto while coming on like Gang of Four was always going
to be a problematic approach.
It didn't help either that we were becoming more successful,
so we would have arguments about 'selling out', and about
what was and wasn't permissible in terms of pop promotion.
We refused, for instance, to release a second single from Eden, believing that 
that was ripping off the fans, and having no sense
that a single was merely a marketing device to gain airplay and
sell an album. I felt that was making a very strong point -- but
did anyone even notice? Did they hell. You didn't get crowds
coming to our defence with, 'Well, you can say what you like
about old EBTG, but at least they don't release four singles off
an album.'

Many of the old punk attitudes about the music business
were beginning to fade away during the 1980s, and some felt
that those debates were simply over. I was left clinging to the
wreckage of an ideology that others had abandoned, like some
old drunk in a pub carrying on an argument long after everyone
else has given up and gone home. Pop hadn't yet entered
the phase of ironic postmodernism which now holds sway over
the whole show, but even so, we perhaps hung on to a seriousness
about it longer than some of our contemporaries.
There's a quote from journalist Ian Penman, talking about the
post-punk era and saying, 'Post-punk was post-everything,
really ... except, oddly, sincerity. Everyone was brittle with it.'
In 1984, and for a while afterwards, we still were, and it didn't
make for easy reading.
Not only had attitudes changed, many of the original bands
who had inspired me had split up by 1984 -- the Buzzcocks
had called it a day as early as 1981, along with The Specials and
Delta 5. The Undertones and the Au Pairs had split up in
1983, Gang of Four and The Raincoats in 1984 and even
Orange Juice were on their last legs, having been dropped by
Polydor at the end of the same year, and would finally play
their last gig in January 1985 (ironically at a miners' benefit,
where we were also on the bill). If 1984 was the point when
post-punk was officially `over', it was unfortunate that it was
just then that we released our first album. We were in the
uncomfortable position of being the products of an era and a
musical movement that was winding down before we got our chance to make 
ourselves heard, and for most of the rest of the
1980s nothing would really fill that void left after punk and
post-punk dissipated into the ether. From now on, it seemed,
we were just an individual group, alongside all sorts of other
fairly disparate individual groups, with no sense of belonging
to any kind of collective moment in pop history. That
wouldn't really change until the late-1980s rave scene, but acid
house would in itself prove to be more troubling than helpful
to those of us who pre-dated it by such a long way.
Though we have often been described as an '80s band', I
still feel in many ways that I was a fairly typical child of the
1970s. Punk may have claimed that it hated hippies above
everything else, and I certainly remember joining in with that
claim, but really my ideological mindset had more in common
with the political and ethical movements of the 1970s than
with what came afterwards. I'd grown up in an era of collective
thinking, of 'movements'. I was full of political and moral
certainties, and the wave of feminism that had taught me so
much was a very uncompromising one. It was purist, and
could drift into being puritanical, but for better or worse it had
formed much of my way of thinking, and it was a mindset that
had seemed the norm if you were part of 'alternative' culture.
But that was all starting to change. For now there was simply
a sense that we were on our own, as were our contemporaries
-- individual bands in an age that revered the individual
above all thoughts of collective identity. If the 1980s saw an
attempt to undermine and belittle the notion that there was
any such thing as 'society', then it was perhaps no accident that
the feeling we had of every band being an island took hold at
the same time.
If you ever feel the time to drop me a loving line
Maybe you should just think twice
I don't wait around on your advice
You tell me I can go this far, but no more
Try to show me heaven and then slam the door
You offer shelter at a price much too dear
And your kind of love's the kind that soon disappears

So don't brag how you have changed
And everything's been rearranged
I thought all that was over and done
But I still get the same from each and every one
Being kind is just a way to keep me under your thumb
And I can cry because that's something we've always
done

You tell me I'm free of the past now and all those lies
Then offer me the same thing in a different guise

'Each And Every One', from Eden, 1984




A
lmost a year had passed between the recording and the
release of Eden, which added to some of the awkwardness
we experienced on its release. Aside from our increasing politicisation
during 1983 and 1984, something else had happened
which left us out of step with ourselves -- we had discovered,
and fallen in love with, The Smiths.
I remember Mike Alway playing me their first single, 'Hand
In Glove', in the summer of 1983. My first thought was that
I wasn't sure. It was a bit alarmingly like a rock record, wasn't
it? Though probably not rockist, and therefore OK. The singer
sounded quite defiantly masculine. And the sleeve -- well, the
sleeve, with its adoring gaze at a male nude, looked very sexual
and obviously gay, so what was going on there?
As that year progressed, you couldn't help noticing The
Smiths more and more. When Geoff Travis came to visit us up
in Hull he gave us an early pre-release copy of their first album,
and the penny dropped. They were simply unlike anyone else.
Pretty soon I was besotted, and during November 1983 started

following them around on tour. Wearing the little brown
badges given to us by Geoff, which in tiny writing said things
like 'Handsome' and 'Don't Ask Me About The Smiths', we
went to several gigs on what was their first proper UK tour,
seeing them at Leicester Poly, The Hacienda in Manchester,
and Westfield College and the Electric Ballroom in London.
The gigs were fantastic, ecstatic celebrations. Morrissey,
skinny, shirtless and energised, seemed to be both throwing

himself on the mercy of the crowd and utterly dominating us.
It was as exciting as any punk gig, but with a total absence of
unwanted aggression -- instead of snarling at us, Morrissey
would flatter us. 'Thank you, you're very charming, very
charming,' he'd say, or change a lyric slightly to see if we'd
notice: 'No, I've never had a job because I'm -- too handsome!'
(We did notice, of course.) The Smiths at this point were
funny, and moving, and sexy, and that was a new and unfamiliar
combination.

I loved Morrissey with a devotion which outweighed anything
I'd felt for a rock singer before, and which I now blush
to recall. It wasn't that I wanted to sleep with him (well, no,
I did actually, but that seemed unlikely to happen, what with
one thing and another). It was more that I wanted to BE him.
I know I wasn't alone in feeling this, though I suspect most of
the others who felt this way were probably boys. For an
androgynous girl like me, Morrissey was an intoxicating new
kind of role model -- camp in many ways, but also surprisingly
butch. He reminded me more of a male version of the female
singers I liked -- Patti Smith or Siouxsie -- than any previous
male rock star. His onstage performance style inspired mine for
a good couple of years -- a Melody Maker review from 1985
reads: 'Tonight Tracey might have played it like the girl with
the Morrissey at her side', while this one is from Sounds: 'Thorn continues to 
stifle her desire to impersonate Morrissey,
arms threatening to lose control of themselves.'
Of course, it wasn't unheard of for female rock fans to want
to emulate the guys onstage -- after all, Patti Smith herself had
claimed that when she saw the Rolling Stones she knew she
wanted to be Keith Richards, and adopted much of his iconic
look. But in doing so she was buying into his unfettered rebellious
masculinity, and the status it offered, as an escape from the
limitations of femininity. It surely says something about the
more fluid gender-identity politics of the early 1980s that I
aspired to look like a flamboyantly oversensitive and self
dramatising gay man.
My appearance was changing by 1983 anyway -- I'd had the
black curls chopped off in reaction to seeing one too many
photos of myself in the press looking doe-eyed and ringletty,
and my hair was now long and spiky on the top and shaved all
round the back and sides, inspired also in part by Terry Hall's
current look. I'd started wearing a Sex Pistols T-shirt and big
boots, deliberately trying to look as unlike the music we were
making as possible, in order to undermine people's preconceptions.
The Morrissey influence merely completed the new
style. Baggy, ill-fitting tops. Cardigans. Beads. And flowers,
flowers everywhere.

In March 1984, The Smiths had played at Hull University. Ben
and I managed to get backstage and hang out with them by
virtue of being minor recording stars ourselves, but I can only
remember being tongue-tied and overwhelmed. We started
writing to Morrissey, fan letters really, but on the pretext that
we were all equals, sort of, although that's not what we felt.
Thrillingly, he wrote back, addressing us from that point on as
The Kittens, and was very complimentary about our music.
We took heart from this, and pinned the postcards to the wall.
Already they were influencing our new songs -- among them,
one which would end up on the B-side of 'Each And Every
One'. 'Never Could Have Been Worse' is absolutely pure
Smiths, a heartfelt homage to 'Reel Around The Fountain' or
'Wonderful Woman', and shows quite clearly where we were
going next. The trouble was, at that point Eden wasn't even
out yet, and we'd already moved on. Hence the awkward
interviews after it was released. The business of promoting a
record that was a year old, and sometimes defending it against

criticisms we were beginning to see some truth in, was uncomfortable
to say the least, and left us in the middle of a full-scale
identity crisis. We were desperate to start recording again as
soon as possible, to prove that we had less to do with New Jazz
and more in common with Morrissey and Marr.

In my own mind, it didn't feel like that big a deal. Maybe we
didn't SOUND much like The Smiths, but that wasn't the
point, really, was it? There was obvious common ground in
that love of melody, and the purity and directness of approach,
and a lyrical fascination with the kind of bleak romance of the
everyday, the mundane and the humdrum. Morrissey's passion
for British 1960s black-and-white films and the kitchen-sink
dramas of Shelagh Delaney echoed my own obsession with
exploiting the emotional drama in the lives of ordinary people.
In the slogan of the times, which still seemed quite fresh as a
theoretical idea, I definitely believed that 'the personal was
political', and that by telling stories about individuals -- often
women in familiar 'domestic' settings -- you could make a
political point about women's lives. With this in mind, only
four weeks after the release of Eden, we released our next
single, 'Mine', a song I'd recently written which doesn't appear
on that album and which had been recorded in an enthusiastic
hurry as we tried to move forward. The track itself was a
somewhat mournful ballad with gritty lyrics about a single
mother, and the gender politics involved in surnames.
Surprisingly, given all these commercial elements, it failed to
follow 'Each And Every One' into the charts, stalling at
number 58. In July we appeared on a TV show called Earsay performing the song, 
and also on was Morrissey doing an
interview. He sent us a postcard later that week saying that
'Mine' had made the show blossom.

When our next single, 'Native Land', which even featured
Johnny Marr on harmonica, came out in September, it didn't
trouble the charts at all, merely scraping in at number 73. We'd
committed the cardinal sin of changing before people were
ready for it, and left an audience who'd only just discovered us
wondering what they'd done wrong to be so quickly abandoned.

Not
that I much cared about lack of chart success at this
point -- I was happy that as a band we'd caught up with ourselves,
and whether a wider public wanted it or not we were
making the music we wanted to make. And, all told, it hadn't
been a disastrous year, more an eventful one, where things had
taken off in a perhaps unexpected direction. The end-of-year
readers' poll in the TIME had The Smiths as Best Group, and
Morrissey and Marr as Best Songwriters, but there we were at
number 10 in Best New Act. 'Each And Every One' was the
24th Best Single, Eden was 17th Best LP and I was number 4
in the Best Female Singer category. Eden was even voted to
have had the 15th Best Dressed Sleeve. All this was much
better than we might have hoped for, and suggested we had
been premature in becoming so defensive.
Even more amazingly, when they asked the poll winners for
their own lists of favourites, Morrissey chose me as his Best
Female Singer. Paul Weller did, too, also citing Eden as Best
Album, and Ben and me as Best Songwriters. Weller and
Morrissey might not have had much time for each other, but
here they were, two heroes of mine, selecting me as their
favourite singer of the year! In some ways, they represented the
two strands which had been apparent in the records we'd made
so far, strands which to some people seemed to be polar opposites
-- that tug of war between the indie roots on the one hand
(Lyrics are important! Skill is not!) and the soul-jazz roots on
the other (Fuck all that -- let's dance!).
The same dichotomy was apparent when the unlikely
triumvirate of Morrissey, George Michael and Tony Blackburn
discussed Eden on a TV talk show. Tony Blackburn had been
playing 'Each And Every One' incessantly on his radio show
because it had soul, but admitted that the rest of the record
made him realise that he didn't really like albums. George
Michael too liked the single, but owned up to the fact that his
favourite song of mine was 'Plain Sailing', while Morrissey
complained that he hated the single 'Each And Every One'
because it was sort of ghastly and jazzy, but loved other tracks
on the album, such as 'Another Bridge'.
There were two sides to our music, then, and in simplistic
terms they represented me on one side and Ben on the other.
I'd come from the more indie background, while Ben grew up
knowing about jazz. So it may have seemed clear who was
bringing what to the table, although a closer look would
always reveal it to be more complicated than this. But still,
some listeners would always see a clear divide between the two
strands, and which one was more important depended entirely
on where you stood.
Blown in on winds of mischance

He would stay but that's not his way
What escape for her, she swims in the dark
In too deep, but still waves,`I'm OK,
And I don't need his name, thank you
Mine fits me nicely and mine will do
Yeah, mine will do'

Unsteady footsteps, can't walk alone yet
He sends a postcard, he says he's in debt
Now she's treading water

Got a back room to let

Curses in the backyard, neighbours on the doorstep
'You must give the child a name sometime'
'Well, you mean his and what's wrong with mine?
Yeah, what's wrong with mine?'

Sometimes she could kill him

And sometimes this house gets too small
She drives him to distraction

To see if he will fall

And if the truth were told

Which it never is

With a family like that, who needs enemies
She'd be better on her own

You sink her like a stone
'Mine', 1984
I n 1984 I'd never been 'on tour' before. Neither had Ben. I'd
done gigs with the Marine Girls, here and there, one at a
time, and Ben and I had done a couple of what would now be
called 'acoustic' shows, just the two of us. But touring seemed
to be something that other bands did. Proper bands. Bands
with careers. But now here we were, with a booking agent and
a tour manager and a set of printed and bound itineraries
telling us where we were going to be every moment of every
day for the next four weeks. A whole team of people had been
hired -- roadies, monitor engineers, lighting riggers -- who
were temporarily part of our entire existence, but who otherwise
had nothing to do with us at all. We'd never met them
before, and would possibly never see them again after the tour
was over.

In order to play live, we'd assembled a band: Phil Moxham
from Young Marble Giants on bass, June Miles-Kingston from
the Mo-dettes and Fun Boy Three on drums and Neil Scott
on guitar, who'd auditioned after an ad was placed in the
TIME. It was important to me that there was at least one other
woman in the band, and I tried to make that a rule for the first
few years, though later it lapsed, and there would be long trips
across America where I was the only woman on the tour bus.
On this first tour, we were playing mostly universities, and
The Hacienda in Manchester, where the promoter was Mike
Pickering, future resident DJ there and founding member of
M People. The tour was something of a revelation, and I had
to learn pretty quickly about the routine of travelling and
soundchecks and support acts and onstage times, and all the
paraphernalia of life on the road. I was like a kid just let out of
school.
At the first hotel, I ran out into the corridor shouting, 'June!
I've got a PHONE in my room!' I'd barely travelled anywhere
before, and certainly had no experience of hotels. It all seemed
very glamorous, though at that point the hotels were anything
but. Arriving late at one overnight stop we banged on the
locked front door, managing to rouse a surly night porter who
scowled through the glass at us. 'What time d'you call this to
be arriving?' he barked at us. 'You're not coming in at this
hour.'
'But we're the band, you've got to let us in. We're
Everything But The Girl!'
'I don't care if you're the Dave Clark bloody Five, you're not
coming in!

The first gig was at Aberystwyth University. I stepped out
onstage in front of a crowd of students. The noise they made
in the hall was quite overpowering before we'd even started. In
the Marine Girls we had confronted this dilemma by simply
playing quietly and forcing the crowd to shut up. This time,
with a band consisting of bass and drums and two guitarists, the
plan was to make some actual noise, create some excitement in

the room and be more than just the hushed supper-club act
some accused us of being. I took a deep breath and decided to
sing as loud as I could, and prove that I could dominate an
audience, that I was no wallflower, but a Strong Frontwoman.
The plan worked brilliantly for about five songs, then I lost my
voice. What had started as an apparently confident and assertive
vocal suddenly dwindled into a nervous, tight-throated croak
and then vanished altogether. Seizing control of the situation,
Ben stepped forward and sang a couple of his lead-vocal songs,
while I chucked back glass after glass of water, tried to relax,
and got back the ability to make a bit of a sound from out of
my mouth. Chastened, I sang the rest of the set more gently,
realising that I'd have to learn about pacing myself and not
giving everything away in the first five minutes, before I'd even
warmed up. It was something I'd seen happen to Liz Fraser,
when she'd played at The Hacienda with The Cocteau Twins
and fled the stage in tears when her voice deserted her. At least
I'd managed not to do that -- I hadn't cried, and I had managed
to finish the gig, but it was a baptism of fire.
Back at the hotel, June said to me that I ought to drink hot
milk and honey onstage, so the next night I had someone
backstage provide me with some throughout the set. It seemed
to help, and from that point on I became dependent on hot
drinks with honey onstage, though the milk would soon be
replaced by tea. I would get into the habit of always having a
thermos, which I'd carry on with me and place on the drum
riser, pouring myself little cups throughout a gig, as if I'd set
up in a lay-by for a picnic and all that was missing were the
sandwiches. The thermos became my onstage prop, or more
to the point, my crutch. So much so that, years later, a gig promoter
would have made for me my own tiny silver flight case,
into the thick foam lining of which was cut the perfect outline
of the flask. Too embarrassed ever to use it for that
purpose, I removed the lining and used it as an on-tour makeup
case.
But I soon got used to the rituals and routines of life on
tour, and also began to realise that, like much of the pop-star
life, it could be a strangely infantilising experience. It's easy to
imagine that pop groups have an enviable amount of freedom,
and I suppose they do in many ways, but on a day-to-day level
the job can be subtly disempowering. From the moment you
get a manager, they become the adult, playing the role of
Mummy or Daddy, while you are at liberty to be, childlike, the
artist. On tour you have a tour manager, who organises every
waking moment of your day. You are told what time to be
down in the hotel foyer each morning in order to get on the
bus, what time you will be collected for the soundcheck, what
time you are onstage. You are given 'per diems' -- an amount
of money each day that should keep you alive, i.e. buy you a
day's worth of food and other necessities. At the gig venue,
your evening meal is cooked for you backstage and you all eat
together around a big table. Lasagne and chips. Apple crumble,
with custard in a stainless-steel jug. School dinner.
And when you're not on tour, there is still a sense of other
people doing all the boring bits for you. The record company
will book a car to take you to be interviewed, or to an airport.
At the airport, if you are going abroad for a day or two to do
press and promotion, a representative from the record company
will go with you to look after you. Because how else will you get
on a plane, take a taxi from the airport and manage to check
into a hotel?

So yes, it's infantilising, but also addictive. Turning up to a
video shoot, you will be ushered into a dressing room with a
clothes rail hung with outfits to choose from. Sitting down,
your hair will be pinned back and you can close your eyes for
an hour while someone else puts your make-up on. And then
the stylist will help you into the best outfit, and then finally, finally, you 
might be called upon to go out and pretend to sing.
Then a break, and someone will fetch your lunch. You can see
why celebrities turn into arseholes, even if they're not to begin
with.

The days seem on the surface to be luxurious and lazy, but
in the middle of it all you can feel powerless, useless and without
choice. If the room you're in is too hot or cold, for
instance, you can't do anything about it, like finding the heating
control and turning it up or down -- you have to ask
someone to fix it, you have to complain. Immediately, you're
a diva. If there's no food you actually want to eat, or the
clothes really don't suit you, again you can't do much about it,
except complain. Again. Diva.
Technically you are your own boss, and yet much of the
time you're not, and the hardest thing is working out how to
continue being normal. Not too starry, not too humble, not
a bossyboots, or a pushover. There is a tightrope to be walked,
an awful lot of balancing to be done.

By now Ben and I were living down in London, in a rented
flat in a mews in Belsize Park. I had duly got my first from
Hull University, but having collected it, had straight away
moved to London and abandoned all my vague ideas about
carrying on to do a PhD. That would have to wait; there was
a music career here which seemed to be mine for the taking,
and it would have seemed reckless to turn it down.

Morrissey and Marr were living in London now too, and
Ben started hanging out with Johnny a bit, going guitar
shopping with him and enviously watching while Johnny
spent some of his new-found wealth on beautiful classic guitars
which Ben could still only dream of.
By 1985 we had made a new album, Love Not Money, much
more of a pop-rock record this time, with the band of June,
Phil and Neil. I tried to deal with the singing problems that
had emerged through touring by having some lessons, with
renowned Singing Teacher To The Stars Tona de Brett. She
got me doing classical la-la-la-LA-la-la-la-type exercises,
which I would have to sing in an entirely different voice to the
one I used for my songs -- a fairly high 'head' voice as opposed
to my usual lower tone -- which always made me wonder how
helpful it was. She told me that she had also taught Liz Fraser,
and that one of the things she was trying to encourage Liz to
do was to wear more make-up onstage. Singing along to the
warm-up tapes, I began to get the feeling that the message
they were subliminally sending me was that I was singing
'wrong', that in fact all pop-singing was, in effect, more or less
'wrong', in that it comes from somewhere different to the classical
voice, from the throat rather than from the chest. It's what
makes the pop voice difficult to sustain, and, yes, does create
all sorts of problems, but ultimately it's what makes people
sound the way they do, and to confront it fully is to throw the
baby out with the bathwater. I took an executive decision, and
during the recording of Love Not Money I would go into the
office upstairs at Power Plant before recording any vocals, stick
on a Pretenders album and spend half an hour singing along at
full volume with Chrissie Hynde. And that made me feel a lot
better in every possible way.
When the new album came out, Morrissey remained supportive,
and sent us a postcard thanking us for the copy we'd
sent him and mentioning 'Shoot Me Down' as his favourite
track.

He invited us for tea at his flat in Kensington, but at the last
minute I had to cancel, suffering from flu. Another postcard
arrived, suggesting that I had chucked him in favour of going
to the Wag Club. We rearranged the tea date, and duly turned
up outside his flat at the appointed time -- only to find him not
in, or hiding somewhere! Perhaps, it began to occur to us,
Morrissey could be a little unpredictable. We remained
devoted, but slightly wary. And though the relationship was
still violently unbalanced in terms of status, this was beginning
to change as we ourselves were becoming more of a main
stream
success.
As would become the pattern, we failed again to have a hit
single to promote the record, but the album still did well,
charting at number 10 and selling 100,000 copies. Selling
100,000 records means you get a gold disc, those trophies so
beloved of the ageing rock star with acres of Cotswolds wall
space to fill. The discs themselves were huge, framed artefacts --
a piece of twelve-inch vinyl sprayed either gold or silver
according to how many you'd sold -- but here's the hilarious
bit: it wouldn't necessarily be your own actual record that had
been sprayed gold -- just any old piece of vinyl. You would
know, for instance, that your album had five tracks on side one,
but there it was, a piece of 'gold' vinyl, with seven clearly separated
sets of grooves on that side. You might have earned the
prize for selling an admirable number of copies of a fairly
quirky, uncommercial British pop record, but there on your
wall you might well have a framed and gilded copy of The
Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden.

Ever since the release of Eden, we had been becoming increasingly
well known across Europe, and especially in Italy. In
March 1985 we went out to do a tour of Italy -- playing in
Bari, Naples, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan and Padua --
and experienced for the first time a taste of genuine pop-star
treatment. Just before we arrived, my photo appeared on the
front page of the newspaper Ii Giorno, alongside pictures of
John McEnroe and the Pope. The headline read, `Arriva la pin
bella voce del pop inglese' -- The most beautiful voice in English
pop arrives!
We were surprised to find ourselves playing in enormous
tents, apparently perfectly regular venues for concerts in Italy.
The sound swirled around inside the cavernous spaces, and I
found it impossible to hear myself or to sing in tune. Added to
this was the fact that the audiences had come hoping to hear il jazz-pop 
inglese, with Brazilian percussionists and a horn section,
and instead found a very British guitar band. The review
in Ii Giorno, which I think needs no translation, describes us
as sounding 'come una pub band'.
It should have been a disaster, but such was the heat of the
moment, all was forgiven (at least until the next time we
toured in Italy, when reduced audience numbers revealed
that we had in fact done some damage). Expectations had
been so high that no one wanted to admit to disappointment,
and so we performed in an atmosphere of near-hysterical
adulation, and fled each gig in a bus chased by fans shouting
our names and thumping on the sides. After one show, we
had to wait on the bus for one member of the band, who had
met a girl earlier in the evening and sloped off somewhere
with her. The crowd around the bus started pushing it and
shouting; there were faces pressed against the glass, ugly and
distorted. We felt they didn't know what on earth they
wanted from us, or what they might do next. We were
becoming nervous when finally our errant band member
returned, sheepishly apologising and furtively brushing mud
from his knees.
On a day off, Ben and I went for a stroll around Florence
and found ourselves being pursued by a shouting mob of
teenagers, whose numbers swelled on each street corner as
they picked up passers-by. We sped up, trying to escape, but
they kept up with us. It was like the Keystone Kops meets an
episode of The Monkees. Halfway across the Ponte Vecchio,
they got close enough that we could hear their voices.
'Hey! Matt Bianco! Matt Bianco!' they were shouting.
This was too much. We stopped in our tracks and wheeled
about to face them. With forty kids bearing down on him,
Ben stood his ground and shouted, 'We are NOT fucking
Matt Bianco.'
Already I was realising that being a pop star, even a minor
one, could be a strangely schizophrenic existence, veering from
ego-boosting episodes of public acclaim and recognition to,
well, the exact opposite, in a very short space of time. An element
of almost ritualised humiliation seemed to be part of the
process, and outside the enclosed and self-referential world of
the TIME and the indie scene there were often bizarre and
hilarious juxtapositions. We appeared on a Dutch TV show
where the other musical guest was Father Abraham and the
Smurfs. A while later, we were in Rome doing a TV show,
where our fellow guests were Charles Aznavour and a troupe
of Spanish dancers on stilts. I began to think it was going to
take some effort to maintain a normal sense of self-esteem,
neither unhealthily high nor too low.
Since I'd left Hull a year ago, my life had changed enormously,
and what had been a small-scale, part-time endeavour
was now very definitely a career. I had learned about the
schedules involved in making records -- that singles were supposed
to be released four weeks before the album, for instance,
as a kind of fanfare. This was news to me: it hadn't happened
like that at the indie level. There were videos to be made too,
and they, like singles, were supposed to be promotional tools
rather than interesting works of art. We made our first three
(for 'Each And Every One', 'Mine' and 'Native Land') with
the director John Maybury, who came from an art film background
and would go on to work with Derek Jarman and
direct the biopic of Francis Bacon, Love Is the Devil. 'Each And
Every One' is a simple black-and-white film of us playing the
song, but I was unused to having a camera in my face all day and chose to 
ignore it, staring fervently at the floor for the
duration of the song.
The video for 'Mine' was filmed in a stupefyingly hot
studio, where my make-up melted and had to be reapplied
throughout the day, till by the evening it was inches thick on
my face and made me look like Jackie Stallone. Then a bright
,
light shining from behind me made my ears go red and
translucent on film, so I had to have thick gaffer tape plastered
over the backs of them. Yes, I did feel very glamorous, thank
you for asking.
By the time we came to make the video for the first single
from Love Not Money, called 'When All's Well', it was suggested
that we consider working with someone who actually
made pop videos for a living. Tim Pope was chosen, who'd
had great success with his witty and wacky videos for The
Cure. The lyric to the song goes: 'When all's well, my love is
like cathedral bells', and so here's what his idea for the video
was. 'Tracey will be performing the song inside an enormous
cross-section of an upturned bell, while Ben will be down a well:

Yes, I know But the idea went down a storm in the record
company offices, and at great expense a film set was duly
constructed, with the bell and the well as required. What
could we do but turn up and obey instructions? If in the finished
version we look a little uncertain as to what on earth
we're doing, I ask you to search your conscience and tell me
if you could have done any better.

Do you want to get on in this cowering country now?
Do you want to get on, get on
Or would you be happy just to get by?
The small thoughts of a small-town girl
Grew up and wanted to change the world
Will heaven echo back my plea
Or cast it as a curse on me?

Do you want to get on in this beautiful country girl?
Listen hard to what the big folks say
And you'll believe anything
If you believe what they say of this world
From the orchard to the foundry
From farms to the city night
Everyone cracks if the price is right
Ideals soon begin to fail
God must know by now
This love is not for sale

'This Love (Not For Sale)', from
Love Not Money, 1985
C

oming of age as I did, as a music fan in the late 1970s,
meant that your politics were pretty much inevitably left
wing. It was a time of marches and rallies, benefit gigs, slogan
badges. At the age of sixteen I went from knowing nothing
about politics to being a marching, chanting, fully paid-up
lefty in the space of about six months. I probably wasn't
entirely clear at the time how Rock Against Racism or the
Anti-Nazi League had started, but there were some events that
had swiftly passed into rock's political mythology. Hadn't Eric
Clapton said something unpredictably awful about supporting
Enoch Powell? And wasn't there some business with David
Bowie and a clumsy Nazi salute, or was it just a wave to the
camera? I didn't know the full details, but you'd have to have
been extremely dim at the time not to sense which way the
wind was blowing. Many of the groups I liked -- Gang of Four,
Scritti Politti, the Mekons, Delta 5, the Au Pairs -- were explicitly
left wing, and through their songs and interviews
introduced me to concepts and political theories which I was
often simply too young and inexperienced to comprehend
fully. Nonetheless, I agreed with every word.
This politicisation seemed to be the norm, and would continue
to seem so well into the 1980s. Even as musical styles
changed, and many of the old punk battles were left behind,
for those of my age the ideals of the late 1970s remained a
driving force. We weren't to know it, but years of being in a
political wilderness lay ahead of us. Mixing pop with politics
would become increasingly difficult, and even seem irrelevant
to a later generation, our level of commitment appearing to
them to be somewhat quaint and hysterical.
In the mid-1980s, though, the battle lines were still clearly
drawn. I found my diary for 1985 and, true to form, there are
the stickers on the inside cover to sum up the year. Dig Deep
For The Miners; Meat Is Murder. It may have been Thatcher's
decade, with vacuous social climbers such as Duran Duran
sometimes held up to represent the whole period, but it didn't
feel like that at the time. While the lovely Durannies revelled
in their own dim-wittedness -- 'There are plenty of bands
catering for people who want to hear about how bad life is ...
We're not interested in that . .. One of the perks of this job is
getting rich,' said Simon le Bon -- those of us who still remembered
punk held firm to the belief that the purchasing of yachts
had NOT been our sole reason for deciding to form a band.
John Harris writes in The Last Party that throughout the 1980s
there was a strong political counterculture, and that although
the edifice of Tory propaganda may have seemed impregnable,
'ranged against all this were both those who had been excluded
from the Thatcherite dream, and an ever-present constituency

of refuseniks'.
I often feel that I barely recognise 'The 1980s' as a decade,
in the form that it is now remembered and repackaged for glib
TV programmes. I would later see the decade reviled, and then
revived, but in a manner that bore almost no relation to the
years I had lived through. Events which many of us had shied
away from, or sneered at, or at least had reservations about,
from the Royal Wedding to Live Aid, have now become the
unchallenged and unchallengeable iconic moments of the
period. It's not possible to say that you watched not a second
of the wedding, and that you were dismissive of Live Aid,
without sounding like a complete killjoy outsider, but many of
us simply lived an entirely different set of experiences, which
seem to have gone unrecorded and unwritten about, so that it's
as though they never happened. Scenes which I never witnessed
in my life -- yuppies chugging champagne in City wine
bars, toffs dancing in puffball skirts to Duran Duran -- have
now become the universal TV shorthand used to locate and
define the era.

In place of the supposed ambition and Greed is Good ethos,
within the world of the alternative band we still adhered somewhat
piously to the altruism of the benefit gig. In the
mid-1980s we had our own causes, and the benefit gigs were
many and various. In 1984 I had sung vocals on a track called
`Venceremos' with Simon Booth's Working Week, in support
of Chilean opposition to the Pinochet regime. In January 1985
we appeared at a benefit gig for Nicaragua, and later that same
month we played with Orange Juice and Aztec Camera at a
benefit for the striking miners.
Mostly, it's true to say, it was the usual suspects who turned
out for all the causes, though we once appeared at a miner's
benefit at the Royal Festival Hall on the same bill as Wham!,
who appalled the ideologically sound audience by committing
the cardinal sin of miming. Inexperienced in the mindset and
prejudices of the politically right-on, they may have believed
that turning up for free in support of striking miners was proof
enough of their authenticity, but that night they discovered
how easy it was to earn the disapproval of your comrades on
the left.
We got a name for being part of this lefty wing of pop,
along with Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, and so on, and at the time
we were all fired up with the belief that it was perfectly reasonable
to try and infiltrate the pop marketplace with leftist
politics. When I was interviewed by Smash Hits in 1985 and
asked what was the last book I read, my answer was The British
in Northern Ireland: The Case for Withdrawal. In Smash Hits!

Red Wedge was officially launched in November 1985, and
was an attempt to fuse all of this somewhat disparate political
activity into the one supposedly common cause of ousting the
Thatcher government and getting Labour elected. Neil
Kinnock was trying to modernise the Labour Party, following
the landslide defeat of the 1983 election, and realised that one
strand of this process would be to try to reconnect with the
youth vote, and to marshall some of that highly motivated
activism which was clearly prevalent among young rock fans.
Red Wedge was intended to be more than just an earlier version
of Blair's Cool Britannia marketing ploy, and the
organisation was actually given its own office at Labour Party
HQ on Walworth Road in south-east London. There were no
cocktail parties, but there were fully minuted meetings, at
which strategy and theory were discussed and argued, sometimes,
it must be said, by people who might have been more
secure in their opinions on guitar amps.
It was well intentioned and earnest, in keeping with the
spirit of the times, and was the product both of the idealism
which still permeated political thinking and the desperation
which many of us felt in the face of the apparently unstoppable
dominance of the right. There was a Red Wedge tour in
January 1986, and a long-held, much-discussed plan to release
a Red Wedge album, which never came to anything, and
everything culminated in the activity around the 1987 election,
during which we played at several gigs aimed at winning
specific seats.
How prosaic our ambitions seem now, by comparison to
today's pop stars and their lofty pronouncements. Far from
trying to end global poverty with one wave of a hand, we were
simply trying to get a local official elected to a safe seat in
Leicestershire. And even that was beyond us. Backstage at that
particular gig, Glenys Kinnock loaned me her little red rose
badge to wear as I went out onstage, but her token of good
luck landed on stony ground. The complete failure of the
movement to have any impact on what turned out to be yet
another humiliating Labour defeat was totally demoralising,
and Red Wedge disbanded in 1988.
But in all that time, nothing I experienced could rival, for
sheer strangeness and for highlighting the possibly irreconcilable
differences between pop and politics, a meeting Ben and
I were invited to along with Geoff Travis and Simon Booth.
It was nothing to do with Red Wedge, but was the product of
a moment of inspiration from someone -- who, for God's
sake? -- who suggested that what was really needed was ... A
Song for Labour! Choosing a current hit with a relevant lyric
must have seemed, in those purist days, a little too much like
advertising, so instead it was announced that entries should be
sent in on cassette and a meeting would be held to listen to
them and choose the winner. Like a kind of socialist
Eurovision Song Contest.
We duly turned up, along with Simon and Geoff and several
others, and there, representing the top brass of the Labour
Party, was Eric Heifer, Old Labour personified. It's hard to
remember now, in these post-Blair days, what proper old-style
lefties were sometimes like, and how properly out of date they
seemed to our younger generation. Heifer was a hugely masculine
presence from the moment he entered the room,
glowering with ego, female minions scampering behind him.
I began to bridle at his immediate and unquestioning dominance
of the proceedings, and sure enough, as we started
listening to the catastrophically hopeless offerings, no one else's
comments got much of a look-in. After a somewhat generically
apocalyptic reggae number, Heifer looked completely
bamboozled but floored all of us with his declaration that: 'We
certainly don't want that kind of country and western thing.'
Was he being humorous? I really don't think so. The idea that
we would approach this with any degree of irony did not seem
to be an option, and keeping a straight face was becoming difficult.
Finally, after we had all listened to a seemingly endless
collection of really extraordinarily incompetent songs, he flew
into a sudden, though possibly not unexpected, temper.
'LIVERPOOL!' he bellowed, apropos of nothing.
'That's where the only bloody good pop music comes from,
and ever has come from! I want to hear all the entries from

Liverpool!'
The room fell silent, no one sure whether this was a)
entirely serious, or b) open for discussion. It was intolerable.
He had completely hijacked the whole thing, and having
thought in our innocence that we had been invited in order to
make competent musical suggestions and be listened to, we
were outraged by this chauvinistic high-handedness. I'd been
biting my tongue for the best part of an hour, but this was
really too much. I stood up and yelled back at him, 'All right
then, and while we're at it, I want to hear all the entries by
WOMEN!'
Momentarily taken aback, he peered at me in mild irritation,
as if one of the ladies had suggested he try a different kind
of biscuit. Who on earth was this strange-looking girl, and
who'd invited her here, and what the hell was she on about?
There was a brief stand-off, then he drew breath and pulled
himself up to his full height, chest puffed out authoritatively,
and announced the compromise that only served to prove how
irrelevant and time-wasting the whole thing was: 'Fine -- the
motion is passed. We will hear everyone from Liverpool, and
all the women!'
Who would be born into a man's man's man's world?
But what do children care
For grown-ups' despair?
A house can hold both boy and girl.
But every mother's son grows up
And daughters imitate
And the burden of a careworn world

Is his to bear

Hers to wait

As the open world of a tomboy girl
Closes on a growing wife
From a childhood clear

Through teenage years
That always seem to be more
Trouble than strife

From the hot dark of night

To the cold light of day
From the cradle to wife to grave

Unless I stand in the way

As the open world of a tomboy girl
Closes in with growing strife
For my own sake I'll comfort take
In the knowledge that I'd never make a wife

You hear them talk of women's ways with hatred
And it cuts me like a knife

Poor men, so much to bear
The children and the trouble and strife
The open world of a tomboy girl
Is the best of life

From a childhood clear

You end up here

In trouble and strife

'Trouble And Strife', from Love Not Money, 1985
-
E

ven before Red Wedge had got started, we found out that
earning a political reputation could bring unexpected
results when, in the middle of 1985, we were invited to go and
play in Moscow. Initially we were somewhat flummoxed. After
all, it was a bit like the kind of thing my dad might have said:
'All right, if you want to be a bloody communist, why don't
you all bugger off to Moscow!' We weren't sure that Moscow
was where we wanted to be at all, but it seemed like too interesting
an opportunity to pass up.
In July 1985, Moscow was hosting the 12th Festival of
Youth and Students. 'I've never heard of that,' you may be
thinking. 'What on earth was it?' Your guess is as good as
mine, quite frankly. All I know is that there were 'delegates'
from all around the world, representatives from youth groups,
unions and political organisations, all there to have meetings
and discussions and workshops and rallies. From each country
there were also musical delegates, to perform at what was supposed
to be a huge, week-long party. I may be wrong, but I
think that the job of selecting Britain's musical representatives
had fallen to All Trade Booking, the live-music wing of
Rough Trade. And in their wisdom they selected Everything
But The Girl and our natural musical allies, reggae band Misty
in Roots.
Also on the trip with us was Sean O'Hagan from the TIME, and I'm indebted to 
the piece he later wrote in the paper for
any clear recollections of the trip at all. To say the experience
was a strange one would be an almost criminal understatement.
Mikhail Gorbachev had only been in power for four
months, and it was too early for his glasnost policy to have
yielded any significant or noticeable changes. The country
may have been poised on the brink of sweeping and radical
reforms, but to our eyes it still seemed to be operating in an
almost parodically oppressive manner.
For a start, Moscow seemed to have been cleared of all its
inhabitants under the age of forty -- anyone, in fact, who may
have been interested in witnessing the appearance of some
Western pop or reggae groups. There were dark rumours
swirling around the city concerning the apparently forcible
relocation of all its young people during this two-week period.
Having believed, in our naivety, that we were coming to make
some kind of symbolic connection with communist youth, we
were confronted with the full, dreary daily reality of living in
the Soviet Union. Nothing unexpected, or threatening, or
even FUN! should be allowed to take place, if at all possible.
We had been determined to bring back reports of a thriving
society with which to deflect the 'Evil Empire' cliche current
in the West in the mid-1980s, but blimey, they didn't make it
easy. If the authorities had actually been in league with Ronald
Reagan they couldn't have done much more to undermine
our idealistic faith in the possibility that the Soviet Union was
A Good Thing.
The whole trip was more or less a joke. We played gigs to
rooms full of middle-aged party officials, went on sightseeing
trips with clearly censored and near-mute translator-guides,
were followed round our hotel and in the streets by
anonymous-looking, green-suited men and were fed an
enervating diet of watery cabbage. I'm not making this up. It
was probably a mistake to have gone vegetarian just before we
went (bloody Morrissey), but even so, the food on offer
seemed almost comically frugal. Could it really be true that in
a modern communist society there was nothing to buy in the
shops, and nothing to do, and nothing good to eat? Well, er,
yes, apparently
In his piece for the TIME, Sean described the incongruity
of some of the gigs we played -- the first one being in the
Hermitage Gardens.

In the end, against all the odds, it sounded just fine and a
little bit of history was made. Halfway through Everything
But The Girl's set, the British contingent in the audience
leave their seats and start dancing, to the astonishment of the
staid, but appreciative, Russians present. The security guards
scratch their heads, Ben and Tracey exchange a relieved grin
and Nick Hobbs, who knows about these things, claims that
this is the first time an audience in Russia has danced in the
aisles ...

But it was downhill after this show. The next 'gig' we played
was at the Olympic Village complex, up in the Moscow hills,
where we performed alongside a German pomp-rock group
called Enno and a Russian group, Zemliana (People Who
Inhabit The Earth!). In between the band performances, two
men sat on the stage and had a debate about 'music and the
state'. Then we played at the Sovin Centre. Before we went
onstage a magician performed, in top hat and tails, pulling
doves out of thin air. Then a woman in a pink evening gown
came on to introduce us, her long speech in Russian referring
to two famous names of English pop: John Rotten and Tracey
Thorn.
We all got extremely drunk every night, as did the entire
population, apparently, because there was simply nothing else
to do; and when even that palled, we set up our equipment in
the foyer of the Hotel Cosmos one night and played an
impromptu gig for anyone around. As it turned out, it was the
best show of the whole trip, the only one remotely resembling
what you might call a gig, with people smoking and drinking
and actually enjoying themselves.
The last show was supposed to be a triumphant appearance
in front of 12,000 people in Gorky Park, and we hoped it
would make up for the preceding non-events. But it was not
to be. Our set seemed to start out all right, and for once the
equipment was of quite good quality and the audience could
actually hear us at normal volume. Then fate dealt a cruel hand
as the heavens opened and a torrential downpour began to
soak the PA, which had been set up right at the front of the
stage, unprotected by the overhead canopy. We'd only done
four songs when we were told that we would have to leave the
stage immediately or risk electrocution. It was a bitter blow.
That final failure was emblematic, really, of the yawning gulf
between East and West at the time; the unpreparedness of the
Russian organisers for the realities of staging the kind of pop
events with which they simply had no familiarity. And our
own unpreparedness for the true state of what was in reality a
crumbling, hollow edifice of a society. We hadn't anticipated
that, and didn't really know what to do with the information.
All in all, it was a dispiriting experience. Sure, there were
some rowdy nights in the foyer of the Hotel Cosmos, and we
discovered more varieties of vodka than we had hitherto suspected
might exist, though getting hold of this vodka wasn't
straightforward, as it had to be purchased during the day from
a semi-secret location -- a US hotel, was it? -- and involved
some complicated currency transactions, all of which seemed
fantastical and farcical.

One of our party visited the famous GUM department
store, hoping to choose a hat to take home as a souvenir, and
made the discovery that there really was just the one hat to
choose from. Ben and I learned that it was illegal to share a
hotel room if you were unmarried, but got away with it
anyway, half expecting each night to be dragged from our bed
and arrested. Was it possible that our illicit relationship could
send us to the gulag? Were there still gulags? We didn't know;
we joked about these things, with no real concept of how serious
any of it was, or how serious we should be about it. I felt
anxious much of the time, while also feeling embarrassed
about the anxiety. As if I was stereotyping an entire nation --
more than one entire nation, in fact -- even though it was
behaving fairly stereotypically.
But the general feeling was one of discomfort. We were out
of our element, and out of sorts. It was too much like a
parody -- someone genuinely did ask if they could buy Ben's
Levi's -- and also unreal, like going back in time, or through the
looking glass. A Russian sound engineer told me I sounded
like Patti Smith, and we had our photo taken in Red Square
with Misty in Roots, plus an Aeroflot pilot and his young son
who simply wandered over and asked if they could join in. But
these events, in their strangeness, took on a hallucinatory and
vaguely threatening quality, like being in a dream over which
you had no control and in which you could find no familiar
landmarks.

The highlight of the trip, and the one moment when true
human contact was made, was when we visited the flat oflegendary
Russian rock critic Art Troitsky, whose mother fed us
garlic potatoes, salad, pickled cucumber and Glenfiddich
whisky. We probably weren't supposed to be there; it was all
a bit hush-hush, again in a way we weren't sure whether or not
to take entirely seriously, but their hospitality was genuine and
heart-warming, and crossed all the boundaries.
But we were glad to get home in the end, and guilty at feeling
so glad.
Sean O'Hagan wrote his piece for the TIME when we
returned, and it ended up as the front-cover story, with a
Soviet propaganda-style cartoon of me and Ben looking like
Lenin and his girlfriend, the implication being that we were
still flying the flag for the good old USSR.
'What was it like?' everyone wanted to know.
The only honest answer was that it had been very interesting
and everything.
But God, you wouldn't want to LIVE there.

Pr" I
Look down over people smiling
Waving handkerchiefs to the sky
Clouds hang over hills and mountains

Moscow airport says goodbye
Behind the Iron Curtain, across the Berlin Wall
No news, no word can reach us

There's no one there at all

I'm flying over Russia

Looking where no man can go

I'm flying over Russia
Looking down on Russian snow

Through the frosty window
Looking at the guards below
Just how happy are they?
That's something I'll never know
Now the hills and valleys
Give way to icy plains
I see the rising smoke

From the eastern border trains

I'm flying over Russia

Looking where no man can go

I'm flying over Russia
Looking down on Russian snow
But we don't know

And the Russian snow
It never shows

What only Russians know

!wonder do you believe
The lies that you're sold
!wonder do you ever
Dream of being free
They tell us you have to
Do what you're told
Well, so do we

'Flying Over Russia', from Beach Party, 1981
I t's January 1986, and the ICA are organising another Rock
Week. This time, instead of being asked to perform, Ben and
I are invited to book the bands for one of the nights, and this
is who we choose: our favourite band from Hull, Diskobolisk;
Irish band Microdisney, who write strikingly melodic songs
only to have them roared at the audience by the slightly terrifying
Cathal Coughlan; and Primal Scream. Yes, that's right,
Primal Scream. At this point, they are not the louche rock 'n'
roll hedonists that you know and love. They are basically
Bobby Gillespie in his immediately post-Jesus and Mary Chain
days, playing shimmery 1960s Velvet Underground pop.
Bobby, standing up to play the drums and looking as though
he's just absconded from Andy Warhol's Factory taking all the
outfits with him. He's wearing skinny black leather trousers,
which no one has worn for years, and he can only get away
with this because he has apparently no hips. From the neck up
he is all floppy fringe and dark glasses.
What the band represent is an idealised notion of a perfect
pop sound, and it consists of a classic Spector drumbeat, a wall
of chainsaw guitars, a tambourine and then on top, where
Ronnie Spector's voice should be, Bobby Gillespie's utterly
wet and weedy singing. It's fabulous in its self-delusion: you
can almost will yourself into believing, as Bobby apparently
does, that he sounds like all three of The Shangri-Las, when
in fact he just sounds, and looks, like they'd eat him for breakfast.
I'm
standing watching them with my best friend Lindy
Morrison, the drummer with The Go-Betweens.
'He's GORGEOUS!' she shrieks in my ear. 'Such a BOY!'
I know what she means. He seems so young and frail and
vulnerable. We feel almost protective towards him. Clearly he's
never going to be able to survive out there in the world, and
not many people are ever going to get into this band.
Ha ha ha.

There was a new tendency, from the Jesus and Mary Chain
onwards, to reference the past in citing musical influences,
which simply hadn't been the case during the punk and post
punk years. Simon Reynolds talks of the Mary Chain
pioneering what he calls 'record-collection rock', where the
influences were worn so blatantly on the sleeve that you felt
you were being invited to admire the reference points as much
as the actual records being made. The crop of 'Creation bands'
were constantly namechecking bands from the 1960s, and
seemingly drew on the same list of influences: the Byrds, Love,
the Velvet Underground.
I wasn't immune to this tendency, and was myself beginning
to look backwards, partly in the hunt for new musical inspiration
and partly in a search for female role models. The indie
scene was boy-heavy at this stage, more so than when I had
started out. Back then, even if there hadn't been many local
girl bands, there were plenty of examples within the post-punk
world to encourage and inspire, from Poly Styrene and
Siouxsie through to The Raincoats and Delta 5. I tried looking
beyond the confines of alternative music, but I couldn't
find many women in the mainstream who seemed even to
come from the same planet as me. I needed to widen the
search. Homing in on the non-rock aspects of the 1960s, I
cited women like Dusty Springfield and The Shangri-Las,
opting for the camper end of pop production where a swooning,
melodramatic hyper-emotionalism could be found. I
began at this point to envisage myself as a kind of classic torch
singer -- not a failed rock singer, but a successful version of
another tradition entirely, the female pop diva.
I was also becoming entranced by the history of Hollywood,
a place where women had both dominated and, in many
instances, been crushed. The life stories of people such as
Marilyn Monroe and Frances Farmer seemed to offer startlingly
vivid encapsulations of the fates that could befall women who
aimed high, who played by the rules or broke the rules, and
whose options were limited. I had my hair cut in a black bob
in homage to the rebellious Louise Brooks, and felt at this point
that there were more women outside rock than inside it who
I identified with, or whose stories excited me.
The exception to this was Lindy Morrison, the drummer
with The Go-Betweens, who had become my closest friend.
Ben and I saw a lot of both Robert Forster and Lindy, who
shared our situation of being a couple in a band, and we spent
a lot of time talking music with them and with the whole
crowd of Australians who seemed to have invaded London to
take advantage of the indie music scene. In many ways, these
Aussies were more rock 'n' roll than us -- our friend Peter
Walsh from The Apartments once said of certain members of
this scene that they were the kind of people 'whose idea of fun
is to arrive in a cab and go home in an ambulance' -- but Lindy
and Robert were a great couple. Robert was tall, handsome
and taciturn. Nose in a book all day long. A flamboyant dresser
who, when we all visited a local village fete one Saturday
during a holiday in Sussex, rummaged through the jumble stall
and found a long flowing cape, which he bought and put on
there and then, to the astonishment of the assembled villagers.
He wore it throughout the rest of the holiday, as evidenced by
a photo I still have of him wearing said cape and sitting cross
legged under a tree in an English garden on an English
summer's day. The episode was soon immortalised in his song
'Bow Down', with the lyric: 'You live with a prince You live
with a cape You see things my memoirs won't say'.
And as for Lindy, well, she was a sheer force of nature, an
Amazonian blonde ten years older than me, unshockable, confrontational
and loud. She was a great role model to me --
super-intelligent and well read, and unquestioningly feminist
in her views. Being the only female member of a rock group,
she moved in even more exclusively masculine circles than I
did, and we took great comfort in sharing with each other the
tribulations of being a woman in this world, often feeling like
the men were just talking among themselves about the whole
business.

The Go-Betweens carried the distinction of being seemingly
the best-reviewed band of all time. Never had any of us
seen such consistent adoration poured forth in the music press.
It was almost beyond a joke. What wasn't a joke was the
depressing lack of correlation between the band's reviews and
their record sales. We sat around discussing this endlessly. For
some reason we now felt under pressure to have hit singles, to
compete in the pop marketplace, rather than exist somewhere
else entirely. In the early 1980s this kind of ambition had
seemed new and positive, and was born of a genuine belief that
those of us from the post-punk generation were poised to take
over the charts and reinvent the rules of pop music.
But that takeover hadn't happened, and instead we were all
left somewhat adrift, without a clear alternative home to
inhabit and still battering at the doors of the charts, doors
which, much of the time, remained resolutely shut. What
started as optimism hardened into a kind of despairing cynicism,
and was a pernicious mindset which did none of us any
good in the long run.

Along with this new gang we were also absorbing a new set of
influences. Our watchwords of the moment were Spector, The
Shangri-Las and the album Dusty in Memphis. Peter Walsh
from The Apartments moved into our flat for a while, and
introduced us to his old Charlie Rich records. A kind of
supper-club sleaze crept into the brew, and again the thinking
was resolutely anti-rock 'n' roll. And with all this in mind, in
March of 1986 we started recording our third album, Baby, the
Stars Shine Bright.
The making of it reflected the fact that the way Ben and I
made records was beginning to settle into a pattern, in which
we fulfilled quite different roles and contributed different
amounts at different stages of the process. The songwriting was
shared, and for this record I wrote lots of lyrics about fame and
its destructive qualities, and how it had burned various iconic
women. Once my songs were finished, I took a back seat. It
was a while now since I had played much guitar on record, and
for this album there wasn't going to be a lot of guitar anyway.
Ben knuckled down and wrote an album's worth of huge pop
string arrangements, spending hours constructing elaborate
settings for the songs, while I went up to the Everyman
Cinema in the afternoons to watch Sunset Boulevard, Mildred
Pierce and In a Lonely Place. For the recording, we went into
Abbey Road Studios with a whole orchestra and backing
singers, and I imagined this was the way Dusty had recorded.
Producer Mike Hedges, who would later go on to work with
the Manic Street Preachers, was brought in to do a full Big
Production number on it, and it was a million miles from the
Marine Girls in a shed in a way that was both thrilling and
scary.
It was a grand gesture of a record. Slightly manic in both
intent and delivery, it is both a wonderful thing and absolutely
barking. Geoff Travis, who was now our A & R man since
Mike Alway had left Blanco y Negro, came in to the studio to
listen to one of the first finished mixes, and at the end he
turned to us and said politely, 'Well, it's very good, but is there
possibly a little too much going on in there?'
We spluttered defensively and had a bit of a row about it.
After all, as far as we were concerned, that was the whole point:

to make a big-sounding record for once, inspired by an era of
pop melodrama, the antithesis of our previous understatements.
We were tired of being accused of tastefulness; we wanted to
be vulgar.
A couple of years after the making of Baby, the Stars Shine
Bright, we did an interview with David Quantick for the TIME where he 
cheerfully describes the album as having been 'completely
insane', and we fairly cheerfully agree. It surprised
people, but then we were already falling into the habit of doing
that. They hadn't expected Love Not Money after Eden, and
now they certainly didn't expect this. I was proud of that;
proud that we were finding ways to break out of the boxes you
inevitably get put into, and that we had the guts to defy categorisation
even at the risk of losing a guaranteed audience.
In fact, the album was a reasonable success, despite having
no real connection to any current pop sound, and the first
single 'Come On Home' was very nearly a hit, being played
incessantly on Radio 1 for a couple of weeks but getting stuck
at number 45. Given that by now we were concerned about
such things, this was disappointing. We would have liked a hit,
and it would have eased things a bit at the record company,
who were probably starting to worry. We certainly weren't
turning out to be what they'd thought we were.

The culmination of the whole escapade was a concert at the
Royal Albert Hall, where we played with the band and a complete
orchestra behind us. It was loud and over the top, and the
strings filled the whole enormous space in a suitably climactic
kind of way.
When I was eleven I had appeared in my primary school's
production of the musical Hansel and Gretel. Since you ask, I
played Hansel, never having been a particularly girly girl.
Someone provided me with a pair of genuine lederhosen,

which were stiff and scratchy, and the resulting photo of me in the local 
Hertfordshire paper is a horrifying kind of paedophile
fantasy. Despite these setbacks, it was my introduction to the
experience of being onstage and, somewhat surprisingly, I
loved it. I clearly remember the moment at the end of the performance
when we came to the front of the stage to take a
bow, and the whole hall full of parents whooped and clapped
as hard as they could. I had never experienced that before, and
it was a revelatory moment. I had tears in my eyes, and I
thought, This is a good moment, this should be the end, really,
credits rolling.
That was a bit melodramatic for an eleven-year-old.
Clearly I had watched too many Bette Davis matinees with
my mum on Sunday afternoons, and I had a somewhat cinematic
take on moments of emotional impact. But now,
standing onstage at the Albert Hall, singing in front of a full
orchestra and a huge crowd, I was reminded of nothing so
much as that moment on the stage of the school assembly
hall. A slight detachment, looking down on myself inhabiting
this particular time and space, but also a complete sense
of engagement. I was in good voice, and felt like I was
singing from somewhere deep inside, and we were making a
big noise for once, which was enveloping the room, and the
crowd seemed spellbound and entirely mine. It felt like an
obvious ending. Cue the swelling orchestra, and ... The End.
Credits.
I went backstage and hugged everyone, gushing about how
it was one of the best nights of my life, then a few minutes later
crept back on to the stage to collect something I'd forgotten.
Already the audience had gone, and the room was empty.
Roadies were dismantling everything, joking and swearing,
and out in the hall bits of litter were being gathered and stuffed
into plastic bags. All the lights were on, and in the flat glare the
room seemed suddenly vast and meaningless. Whatever had
happened there a few minutes before was over, the atmosphere
evaporated, the space simply dead and neutral, waiting for the
next night, the next thing to happen and fill it with some substance.
I looked around and wondered, did it mean anything,
then, when it was so quickly gone?

I'm getting too used to this way of life
Fame is a baby, she rocks me at night
Far from the cold and the brash city lights

We purchase from sorrow a moment's respite

And each time you smile
I know I would follow you a country mile
For all that I'm chasing is worthless and vile

I was a backwater girl, home most nights
That was before I saw my name in lights
Stardom and squalor were not dreams of mine
But I've seen the Hollywood sign now

And, oh, how it shines

But when you smile

I swear I would follow you a country mile
Please save me before I do things that aren't worth
my while

'A Country Mile',from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, 1986
PART THREE
I t's 1987, and I think the wind is beginning to change.
Nothing has really gone wrong yet, but there's starting to be
a chill in the air, like the first evening at the end of summer
when you catch yourself shivering a little and begin to need a
cardigan. The days are getting shorter, and the nights are drawing
in.
It's 1987. I'm twenty-five years old. Who am I, though?
What am I like? I'm a pop singer, in a fairly successful group.
We've made three albums, and been in the charts and on the
telly. I have gold discs. Am I a pop star? I don't think so; the
word 'star' is too big. Madonna is a pop star. Michael Jackson
is a pop star. The word 'celebrity' isn't in use, certainly not for
people like me. There isn't celebrity news everywhere -- no Heat magazine, no 
reality TV with fading stars being taunted
for our entertainment.

Basically, I'm a bit famous. I get recognised from time to
time, though never enough to be a problem.
I live with Ben, who I've been with since I was nineteen.
We are very domestic. It's fair to say I am not a particularly young 
twenty-five. I am a vegetarian. I don't drive.
My sister has a child now, a little boy called James, and I visit
a lot and fall completely in love with him. He is the first baby
I've ever known, and I am besotted. I want a baby. But I am
a singer in a pop group. We make records and go on tour quite
a lot. It's hard to see how that life could incorporate a baby.
Ben doesn't want a baby. We get cats instead. It's not a great
idea because a) I am allergic to the cats, and b) one of them is
mental, and sits on top of the kitchen door waiting for Ben to
walk through, then jumps on his head, claws fully extended.
We think the cat has issues.
I play tennis quite a lot, with Lindy, though at the end of
the year The Go-Betweens will return to Australia, and our
friendship will eventually fade away. I read a lot. Rebecca
West. E. M. Forster. I think I'm a bit bored.
I've begun to lose touch with the indie scene, the world I
came from and which I took so much to heart. I think it's
become a dreary and unimaginative wasteland, all shambling,
jumble-sale pop, which seems to have descended into a mere
parody of the amateurism and naivety of the Marine Girls. I'm
twenty-five, and I have lost patience with bands who write
songs called 'The Day She Lost Her Pastels Badge'. The
Smiths will split up this year, and they leave a hole at the heart
of something I once loved, but might not be able to feel the
same about again. Perhaps that particular moment has passed.
I'm twenty-five now.
I am writing songs, though; lyrics that are more like short
stories than pop lyrics. Perhaps they ought to be short stories.
They don't really have choruses. Maybe I'm just not very good
at choruses. Ben is experimenting with synths and keyboards.
He buys a drum machine and starts getting into the finer
details of how to programme it. I don't know how to operate
the drum machine, or how to turn the synths on, and I'm not
bothered enough to learn.
There is some disagreement about what our next record
should sound like. We keep changing our minds. I still write
all my songs on a guitar or at the piano, and so when I play
them they sound a bit like my songs have always sounded. But
Ben is writing songs with a more modern sound, using his
new synths and the drum machine, and I like these too. We
veer between these two possible extremes before making a
record, Idlewild, which incorporates a bit of both. Maybe it's
another 'bizarre hybrid'.
When it's finished we go up for a meeting at WEA --
the major label who finance Blanco y Negro -- to discuss its

marketing strategy, release schedule and musical merits, or
lack thereof.
My diary records label boss Rob Dickins's verdict on the
album: 'He says it is too miserable, not enough fast songs, too
many gloomy lyrics.' (Right, off you go then, Leonard Cohen.
That's enough of that, Portishead. Thank you, Mark Eitzel,
but will you please stop whining ...)
We are three albums into our career, and so are in danger of
losing the simple power of newness which lets you get away
with doing what you want, defying critics and record-company
bosses. At WEA, the voices of dissent are getting louder.
Rob Dickins had been frustrated by Eden, which he had
thought would be more like Sade's Diamond Life in both sound
and sales figures, and now he has lost patience with a band
who are clearly not the straightforward pop proposition he had
been led to believe they were. Plus, I don't think he likes me.
I think he thinks I am a pain. I'm told he is just awkward
around women, and that it's not personal. He is one of those
men who thinks he's HILARIOUS, and he can say what he
likes and no one minds because he's HILARIOUS.
This behaviour makes us feel undermined, and it chisels
away at our self-confidence. I arrive at the meeting wearing a
hat I've just bought from Kensington Market. He sniggers at
me, 'You going to a wedding, Tracey?' Then he tells us everything
that's wrong with the record we've just made. Ben and
I are floored by the level of disapproval being beamed at us,
and are stumped for an answer. After all, what is the right thing
to do when confronted with such a bad review from your own
record company? Do you go away and start again? Or stick to
your artistic guns, hoping that the world at large will feel differently?
We leave the meeting, stumble into a bar next door,
drink two bottles of wine, cursing and ranting, and stumble
home.
And here you come to the heart of the problem. For the
next morning, instead of telling WEA to fuck off, we capitulate
and write two more up-tempo, 'poppy' songs to try and
rectify the situation.
Now, I'm not saying you should never listen to your record
company, or that no one ever knows better than the band
themselves, but in this instance, IN THIS INSTANCE, that
really was not what we should have done. And what's more, it
didn't even work. All it did was to further muddy already
muddied waters, and left us with a record which we felt we
had slightly betrayed before it was even finished.
And the arguments continued. Sensing a chink in our
armour, WEA began to push harder. Our choice of single was
outvoted. We wanted 'I Always Was Your Girl', but they
thought it was 'too sophisticated, too strange'.We let them
have their way, and felt that we had surely bent over quite far
enough.
No. Not far enough. The song they had chosen to be the
single was deemed not quite finished. We should 'add an introduction,
some backing vocals, a stronger middle eight and an
outro'.

Even the album sleeve ended up being a compromise, and
the gorgeous, grainy photo of a bridesmaid that I had seen in
a gallery exhibiting the work of photographer Richard
Haughton was declared too obscure and replaced with a photo,
in the same style, of me and Ben.
This is absolutely standard record-company behaviour, and
they would argue that it is all necessary and reasonable when
you're trying to maximise the commercial potential of bands
you've invested in. However, such behaviour also feels like
manipulative game-playing when you're on the receiving end,
and it takes nerves of steel to withstand it. In calm moods, you
argue that you're being amenable and open to compromise.
Other times you curse yourself for being a pushover, and
wonder whether along with your copyright you have also
signed away your self-respect.
If I had a time machine and could go back in it, to this particular
point, where the self-doubt and anxiety was beginning
to set in and it felt like the walls were closing around us, I
know exactly what I would do. I would invent Twitter.
I firmly believe that Twitter might have been my salvation.
For instance, I could have come home from that depressing
meeting at the record-company office and tweeted about it
and got it off my chest, and you would all have tweeted back
at me with supportive comments, witty put-downs and
descriptions of similar experiences in your own workplace. We
would have bonded over it, and I would have felt less alone
and more like there were people out there who understood
what I was on about and wanted me to keep going on about
it. Just laughing about it would have defused its corrosive
potential. Twitter is the arena in which we share all the shit,
and laugh it off, and are made stronger. But back then,
although I knew there were people out there who liked and
bought our records, I couldn't see or hear them; I didn't know
exactly what it was they thought or wanted. They were numbers
on a spreadsheet, invisible, anonymous. Back in 1987, I
couldn't have imagined such a thing as Twitter. These were the
days when fan letters were the only means of communication
between me and the listener. They were often lovely, and I
tried to reply as often as possible, but still, it was not really a
dialogue, and certainly there was no way for me to communicate
en masse and share stuff with people who bought my
records. Instead, Ben and I had to fight these battles alone, not
always quite sure which battles were worth fighting.
Idlewild was the record where it all began to get more
difficult. WEA wanted a commercial pop record, and we had
written something else entirely, a quirky oddity, full of lyrics
deliberately written from a very female perspective and avoiding
any obvious pop-song subject matter. There are a couple of
relationship lyrics (the wilfully anti-romantic 'I Always Was
Your Girl' and 'Love Is Here Where I Live'), but there are also
songs about growing up in the suburbs (`Oxford Street'), about
female friendship (`Blue Moon Rose'), about having babies
('Apron Strings') and about my two-year-old nephew (`These
Early Days'). It was all very grown-up, which was both its
strength and its weakness. The s'ingle, 'These Early Days', had
been reworked to within an inch of its life, and yet still proved
too awkward for the airwaves. I spent a day optimistically listening
to Radio 1, straining to catch a single play, but all I heard
every hour, on the hour, was the new Kylie Minogue classic,
'I Should Be So Lucky'. In such a climate, it should have been
no shock that we failed to get on the playlist. It seemed, in fact,
like a near miracle that we ever got any airplay at all.
Among our fans, though, Idlewild has always been a firm
favourite, and it was critically well received at the time, getting
good reviews in Q magazine, Record Mirror, the Guardian and
the TIME, while the Independent commented that 'it is a relief
to find anyone in their twenties these days who wants to sound
like an adult'. Along with good reviews, it entered the chart
at number 13, so despite failing to have anything approaching
a hit single, we were by no means 'over'. And yet, and yet. You
could feel the atmosphere of band in decline that was starting to
surround us. You could almost smell it. Our power was
waning, and with it our self-confidence.
We became acutely aware of how well our contemporaries
were doing, as my diary from February 1988 records:
'Watched Aztec Camera on Wogan -- Roddy is number 41 this
week ... Prefab Sprout went down from 44 to 49 -- Morrissey
went straight in at number 6.'
We weren't supposed to care about this kind of stuff, and in
interviews we would have strenuously denied having any
knowledge of anyone else's chart position. But in truth, I think
we could probably have placed all our peers and rivals to
within a place or two of their current chart status, and given
an estimate to the nearest ten thousand of their current album
sales.
And if our career was beginning to look a little shaky in the
UK, in the rest of Europe it was definitely on the wane and
we'd completely failed to live up to the early promise of Eden and Love Not 
Money. Commercially we had slipped even further
than we'd realised, as we were about to discover when we
attempted to tour. Instead of the pop-star tour of the Italian
tents we'd done in 1985, this time around we ventured out
into Europe as an acoustic duo, being unable to afford to tour
with a band. We were booked to play small but bizarre
venues, in an attempt to reinvent ourselves as a kind of arty
alternative to compensate for the obvious lack of commercial
credentials.
So we played a jazz club in Paris, a cafe in Munich, an arts
centre in Bonn (where we were supported by a documentary
about Mexico) and a cafe in the botanical gardens in
Hamburg. At an art-gallery gig in Rome, we performed in a
tiny but very brightly lit room to an audience of about sixty
journalists and TV people, all of them too cool to respond in
any way at all. After about forty-five minutes they started wandering
into the next room to get more free drinks, and I think
for the first time ever we ended up playing to half the number
of people who had been there when we began.
The last gig took place, disastrously, in a disco in Stockholm.
A disco in Stockholm is not necessarily the ideal venue in
which to perform acoustic versions of subtle introspective
songs about childhood. It went badly. There was more noise
on the dancefloor than coming from us on the stage. Backstage
we had a huge row, and glasses were smashed.
In Italy we were particularly traumatised by the sudden disappearance
of our former status and all the trappings it had
brought. The limos and Hiltons which had previously been
booked by the record company were no longer forthcoming,
now that we were on a small-scale tour without a hit record.
We had never had it explained to us that there was quite such
a strong correlation between record sales and record-company
expenditure, and we were shocked to discover how far we had
slipped in such a short time. Arriving in Rome, there was no
car to meet us and the hotel room we found ourselves in was
damp and smelly, with a hole in the wall behind the wardrobe.
Frustrated and demoralised, Ben kicked out at a metal suitcase.
We would spend much of the next forty-eight hours in a
rancid Italian health clinic, where eventually Ben had his
broken foot strapped up by a chain-smoking 'doctor', while
fag ash dropped onto his leg.
It was, to put it in a nutshell, all becoming a bit Spinal Tap.

So many things about this life actually turned out to be a bit Spinal Tap. It 
isn't a cartoonish satire at all but in fact the most
accurate film ever made about what it's like to be in a band --
any kind of band. Being on tour was always a bit Spinal Tap. During the UK tour 
for Idlewild, for instance, we drove after a
gig from Loughborough to Norwich. As my diary records, we
'all got drunk in the van -- I had to stop to pee in a field and fell
over and stung my hands really badly on stinging nettles'. A
couple of gigs later, we had a day off in the Lake District and
drove up into the hills with the band: 'Pearce and Sanger were
hilarious, like two lads from the remand home who've never
seen the countryside before, running about in leather jackets
and trainers, shouting at sheep and smoking in the fresh air.'
And when you're kept up late every night, of necessity, and
you're stuck in a Travelodge on the outskirts of a town you
wouldn't perhaps choose to spend a night in, let alone on the
outskirts of, and you're a bit wound up and want to wind
down -- what do you do? You drink copious amounts of whatever's
going and behave like a bit of an arse.
I always loved this slightly raucous side of being on tour, and
the camaraderie of being part of a touring gang. I was quite
often the only girl, sometimes spending weeks crossing
America on a tour bus watching the boys play with their latest
gadgets, or pretend to read a book, or try to make a cup of tea.
Everyone in a band had seen the film Spinal Tap and recognised
themselves in it, and it became like a kind of glue that
bonded you with your band members. The characters and
one-liners from it became staple parts of every backstage scene
or tour-bus conversation. If you started a ballad at a sound
check, someone would surely comment that it was in 'D
minor, the saddest of all keys'. Every town on the US itinerary
would be dismissed as being 'not a big college town', and
if someone read out a bad gig review you'd all respond in
unison: 'That's just nitpicking, isn't it?' We never actually supported
a puppet show, but we did go to Belgium to appear on
a TV telethon raising money to send doctors to Africa, at
which we couldn't help noticing that three people in the front
row were asleep.
But what makes the film a work of genius is the fact that it
identified the fundamental truth about the whole business of
rock 'n' roll, or just showbusiness in general perhaps -- which
is that beneath the pomposity and delusion and ludicrous self
aggrandisement, it is eventually a levelling experience. Whether
you were a successful headline band or the measliest support
act, you'd still have to experience many of the same discomforts
and indignities. And you'd veer between extreme versions of
your apparent status in a way that could be disconcerting, to say
the least.

At the conclusion of the Idlewild tour we went to Ireland,
first playing in Dublin where we were treated like royalty, and
were sent champagne and flowers by Bono, who apologised
for not being able to make it to the show We did a cover of
'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' by way of a
thank you.
The next night we were in Belfast, playing a gig at the
notorious Europa Hotel, or Fortress Europa as it was nicknamed
in those days. The stage had been set up in the carpeted
conference room, making it feel less like a gig than a corporate
presentation. My diary tells what happened.

A few lads came down to the front of the stage at my side
and howled at me unremittingly to 'play fucking "Sean"
[a song from Love Not Money, which we didn't intend to
perform] and on Ben's side there was a very odd couple
baying for autographs. Even while Ben was actually
SINGING a song the bloke was standing up, only inches
from his face, shouting, 'Ben, Ben, have you got a pen?'

It could all go from the sublime to the ridiculous, you see, in
less than twenty-four hours. You couldn't help wondering
much of the time if in fact you were as brilliant as some people
said you were, or as awful as others thought. After all, it's such
a fine line, isn't it, between stupid and clever.
From the top you can see so far into the distance
Look, it's downhill all the way from here
And getting there is quicker, let go and you just slide
Shouldn't take more than a year

I could almost like you

Now it's nearly over
Now you're feeling hopeless
Now you're looking older

I heard what you said and I recognised those feelings
I know how hard it is to watch it go
And all the effort that it took to get here in the first
place
And all the effort not to let the effort show

I could almost like you
Now it's nearly over
Now you've shown some weakness
Now you're looking over your shoulder

Who's gonna come and find you?

Who's gonna come and find you?

If you can ride the backlash
There's still time for a comeback

You don't have to lie down and die

But Lazarus, he only did it just the one time,
He couldn't face another try
I could almost like you
Now you're falling over
Now you're feeling hopeless

Now you're looking over your shoulder

Who's gonna come and find you?
Who's coming up behind you?

'Downhill Racer', from Temperamental, 1999

B

en got picked up in a taxi from our flat once, a few years
ago. He was carrying a guitar case. As they pulled away,
the driver slid back the window.

'You in the music business, then?'
Ben nodded, non-committally.
'Yeah, I picked up someone else in the music biz from your
block the other day. That skinny bird who sang that Rod
Stewart number.'

Ah yes, that Rod Stewart number.

In June 1988 we released a cover version of 'I Don't Want
To Talk About It', which had been a hit for Rod Stewart
in 1977 and the very record which kept the Sex Pistols'
'God Save The Queen' from the number-one slot in Jubilee
week. This should perhaps have given us pause for thought,
but to counter its notorious place on the dark side of
musical history was the fact that it was a genuinely great
song, and had been written by the drug-addled Danny
Whitten of Crazy Horse and so had a kind of pre-punk
credibility.
There was also the fact that Rod Stewart had been a heroic
figure at home when I was growing up. My brother Keith, ten
years older than me, owned those 1970s records he made with
The Faces and his early solo albums with grimy-sounding titles
like An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down, and Gasoline
Alley. There was a laddish bravado about Rod in those days,
combined with an essentially British rock 'n' roll camp glamour.
Keith would go off to watch Arsenal at Highbury with a
satin scarf tied round one wrist, possibly wearing something
tartan somewhere, along with the red and white, and in my
mind Rod seemed to merge with the heroic figure of Arsenal's
Charlie George, both of them pure terrace dandies, epitomising
the blokey flamboyance of early 1970s fashion. Orthodox
opinion has it that by the late 1970s Rod was all over. That the
rot set in with Atlantic Crossing and it was downhill from there,
as the grit got sacrificed in favour of a banal tartiness, all
boaters and blondes, streaked hair and silly blazers, LA and
champagne. Less football terraces, more Footballers' Wives.
I hadn't quite bought into that interpretation of Rod's
career, having always liked Atlantic Crossing, and in 1977 I still
liked the Rod who released 'I Don't Want To Talk About It'.
There was a certain degree of family loyalty involved here, a
feeling that, for the Thorn household, he was One Of Ours.
To me, doing a cover of a Rod Stewart song had connotations
way beyond those of simple commercial potential.
So we recorded a faithful and respectful version of the song,
acoustic guitar and some strings, vocal up high in the mix -- a
classic ballad single. On its release, the record leaped out of our
hands and on to the Radio 1 playlist as if magnetically
attracted. This was something we had never achieved before,
the playlist committee usually rejecting our new releases on the
grounds of their being too fast, too slow, too obscure or simply
too lacking in choruses. Simon Mayo played the single and
declared it would be number one ('failure looms ahead, surely'
I wrote in my diary), and after a couple of weeks of near
constant airplay, it entered the chart at number 23.
A chart position of number 23 brought us our first ever concrete
offer of Top of the Pops. This time there was no agonising,
no debate -- we were on it like a shot. Who remembered any
more whether The Clash had ever appeared on the show?
Nobody, that's who. We were the last group in the Western
world who hadn't been on, and finally it was our turn.
We turned up, and I experienced the exact same disappointment
that everyone feels who has ever appeared on Top
of the Pops. The studio seemed smaller than it looked on the
telly, it was poorly lit and entirely lacking in any pop glamour
whatsoever. It was like going back to your primary school and
realising how small and dowdy it all was, when in your
memory it loomed as something huge, influential and vivid.
There was no need for a soundcheck as such, there being no
actual live element to the performance, so we simply did a
couple of camera rehearsals and waited in the dressing room
until it was our turn to go on. Then, we were ushered back
into the studio, now brightly lit and filled with aimless-looking
teenagers. We mimed our song, as everyone did in those days,
and wondered whether the kids in the audience were really as
bored as they looked -- if, in fact, they'd even heard of us -- and
stood back and watched as they stared with the same dumb
blankness at The Communards, Eighth Wonder and Glenn
Medeiros, who was, inexplicably, number one.
Following this appearance, the single did what it was supposed
to do and climbed seventeen places to number 6. The
next week it climbed again, up to number 3. We did Top of the
Pops again, this time with S-Express and Ziggy Marley, then
got the train down to Teignmouth in Devon to film the Saturday morning kids' 
show Get Fresh, where we sang the
song again and judged the fancy-dress competition.
The single stayed at number 3 for another week, then
slipped to number 8. At one point we sold 45,000 singles in
two days, which was more than 'Each And Every One' had
sold during its entire release. As the proud new owners of a
genuine hit single, we were immediately granted admission to
a kind of secret pop-stars' club, being invited to the Prince
after-show party at Camden Palace. These were the days when
Prince was revered as pop's greatest live performer, and, unable
to reign himself in to just one sell-out show a night, he used
to do a second, smaller show somewhere else afterwards. We
went to the big main event at Wembley, and then on to the
second gig in Camden. Boy George was there, dancing to acid

EVERYTHING'
I BUT THE GIRL




207

house in a pair of dungarees, and Mica Paris was down at the
front of the stage being handed the mic by Prince to sing 'Just
My Imagination'. As we left, we were chased along Camden
High Street by paparazzi for the first time in our lives.

I'm not going to pretend it wasn't fun. If we had occasional
qualms about having had to resort to a cover version in order
to infiltrate the charts, these were dispelled by reassurances that
we had nonetheless made a good record. I bumped into Alan
McGee from Creation on a staircase somewhere, and he
stopped me to say he loved it; and Sounds made it Single of the
Week, describing it as the 'best single since the Patti Smith
comeback'. The best part was the moment each Sunday
evening when we got the week's chart placing, an hour before
it was announced on the radio. I'd immediately ring my family
to tell them the news, and there'd be shrieks of delight from
the other end of the phone, then all the lines would be
blocked for an hour as they called every last relative around the
country to spread the news.
But all I will say is that it's a mixed blessing, having a huge
hit with a cover version of a well-loved ballad. It takes you
places you may not wish to go, and once you've gone there it's
quite hard to come back. What I hadn't realised was how
quickly the record would be snatched out of our hands and
seized upon by an audience who loved it but perhaps hadn't
even heard of me before, and what that would feel like. I was
happy that it had brought us a bigger audience, but the flipside
was that it had brought us a somewhat different audience. We
had unwittingly steered ourselves perilously close to becoming
housewives' favourites.
Sometimes even I couldn't quite see how the record we'd
made had led us to such a place -- after all, we'd recorded a
good version of a cool Crazy Horse song, and yet, through its
popularity, it had somehow changed our entire public image
and apparent intent. Nick Hornby writes, in 31 Songs, that
after his books became popular, his work 'overnight seemed to
go from being fresh and original to cliched and ubiquitous,
without a word of it having changed. And I was shown this
horrible reflection of myself and what I did, a funfair hall-ofmirrors
reflection, all squidged-up and distorted -- me, but not
me.'
After 'I Don't Want To Talk About It' was a hit, Ben and I
went to a gig at ULU (the University of London Union) one
night, to see Galaxie 500. A couple of studenty Beavis and
Butthead types recognised us and nudged each other.
'Look, I-don't-wanna-talk-about-it; chuckled one, and his
mate quipped back, `I-don't-wanna-hear-about-it; and they
both snickered, right there in front of us.
Had we suddenly become people who were not supposed
to be at a Galaxie 500 gig? Who didn't fit in there any more?
Jesus, were we the enemy now? This hadn't been the point.
How on earth had THIS happened? There were moments
when I found myself wondering, 'Was this really what we
meant when we said we opposed all rock 'n' roll?'

Come hell or high water
You just do as you please
Waste your time when you oughta
Be charming the birds from the trees
A voice straight from heaven
So you like to believe

And who cares if it's only
Your poor self you deceive

You look in the mirror

And what do you see?

Too much care and scheming
Too little beauty

Come hell or high water
You never will be

A goddess or a genius
A drunkard at twenty-three
And all that you yearn for
Is attention I guess
Come hell or high water

You deserve nothing less

'Come Hell Or High Water', from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, 1986
H

ow quickly a pop career goes by. Leaves behind its beginnings
and transforms into something you never imagined,
never planned for, perhaps never wanted. It was only 1989.
Only five years since I'd left Hull University, wrapped in glory,
the indie darling. Now the overwhelming feeling I had within
the UK music scene -- no longer being part of an indie band,
not part of the rave culture, nor happily existing at mainstream
level, above such concerns -- was that of isolation.
It was the Summer of Love. All around me young people
were heading out to the countryside to take drugs in fields and
dance around in cagoules to loud, repetitive beats.
And what did we do? We headed out to the countryside
and ... bought a little cottage.
Did anyone mention the word retreat?

In a time-wasting fury of DIY mania, we ripped up carpets

and threw them from the upstairs windows, stripped off wall
-
paper and painted bare walls chalky-white, disconnected the
cooker and replaced it with an oil-burning stove and water
heater that never really worked. I decided to take on the
garden as my project and spent whole days, until late into the
evening, struggling to clear beds choked with sticky goose
grass and stinging nettles. It took me back to my childhood
spent playing in the fields around the village, finding dandelion
clocks and the papery seed pods of honesty. I knew
precisely nothing about gardening, and would rip away at
bunches of ground elder till they broke off in my hand, not
realising they had an underground root system, which would
ensure they came back bigger and stronger by the next morning.
Having cleared an area of a few square yards, I filled the
space with whatever was in flower down at the garden centre,
then left the plants to fend for themselves, till within a few
weeks they had wilted, or starved, or been smothered by the
weeds which, reinvigorated by my turning of the soil and dispersing
of their seeds, had now returned with a vengeance.
After we'd finished with the inside of the cottage, and had
removed anything that smacked of suburban modern comforts,
we sat down in our newly minimal space and looked out of
the window. And got up to rearrange something, and sat back
down again. And watched as it got dark at three o'clock in the
afternoon.
'Jesus,' I said, 'it's very quiet, isn't it?'
Ben was pacing about a bit.
'What time does the pub open?' we wondered.
This clearly wasn't going to work. It took us about half an
hour to discover that we weren't cut out for the country life
at all. The silence at night spooked us, and we couldn't sleep
without the soothing sound of traffic. When a solitary car
would amble down the lane late, and its headlights sweep
across our bedroom curtains, I would sit bolt upright in bed,
waiting for the smash of the downstairs window as the
inevitable axe murderer broke in. It seemed to be dark more
or less all day long, and if we arrived for a weekend it would
take us most of Saturday and Sunday to get the place warmed
up. What had we been thinking? We were townies, through
and through; we just hadn't realised it.
Pretty soon we'd sold the cottage and come back to London
full time.

But still I couldn't decide what to do next, or how to fill the
time while I tried to decide.

I took another very un-rock 'n' roll decision and applied to
study for an MA in Modern English Literature at Birkbeck
College. I went up for an interview, at which they eyed me
suspiciously.
'So, you say you're in a pop group?' A little glance off to the
side, a suppressed smirk.
'Ye-e-es, that's right. But it doesn't take up all my time, and
this is a part-time course ... '
'And do you ... go off on ... tours?' Barely keeping a
straight face now
'Well, yes, but I can read on the bus.'
By October 1988, I was spending Monday evenings in tutorial
sessions, talking about Yeats and Pound, Leavis and
Empson, Foucault and feminism.
None of these projects or diversions solved the problem,
though, or answered the basic question that was nagging away
at us both -- how we should make another record. And there
was no doubt that we would make another one. The dilemma
was fundamentally a musical one, and could only be answered
in those terms. We'd lost our place within the UK music scene,
partly because it had moved away from what felt instinctive to
us, but also because we'd drifted into making careless mistakes.
And now we felt rejected, misunderstood and blameless, and
extremely sorry for ourselves. And so, like many before us,

feeling scorned in Britain we went to America to feel forgiven.

It was different there. As an English band you always felt glamorous
anyway. It was only a slight extension of the way in
which all English people are made to feel -- smart and sophisticated.
When
we toured there, I always felt I was regarded as cooler,
cleverer, classier than I was at home. And in the late 1980s we
were still seen as being part of a pop avant-garde, experimenting
with and updating classic elements from jazz and soul
and stripped-down songwriting. Having not had any hits in
the US also meant that we were not at all mainstream. Given
that we now felt we were widely perceived in the UK as being
a bit naff, this was enormously appealing.
We decided it was time to return a phone call that had first
come in a few years ago. Souljazz producer Tommy LiPuma,
who had worked with a catalogue of greats from Horace Silver
and Miles Davis through to Randy Newman and George
Benson, and who had recently contributed production to
Aztec Camera's Love album, had said long ago that he had an
interest in producing us. At the time it hadn't seemed the right
thing to do, but now we took a leap of faith, contacted him
and asked him if he wanted to hear some demos.
Tommy, who came from the old school in the strictest
sense, said that he wasn't interested in hearing demos, he just
wanted us to come out to New York and play him the songs
we had. We obediently got on a plane and went to meet him
at his Upper East Side apartment, which oozed Manhattan
class, with fine art on the walls and a huge wine fridge in the
kitchen. From there, we all went to a downtown studio, where
he led us into a small recording room containing just a piano
and a mic.
'OK,' he said, 'just play me what you got!'
Fuck, this was just like the Brill Building come to life! We
were Leiber and Stoller! We were Gerry Goffin and Carole
King!
We spent the whole day round the piano, hammering out
every song we'd written in the last year, till I had no voice left
and no idea whether I was any good or not.
'That's terrific,' said Tommy. Now we just pick the ten best
and get started.'
So it was as simple as that? Apparently so.
This was a whole new approach for us, a kind of Tin Pan
Alley tradition of record-making. We were the 'talent', in the
sense that we wrote the songs and sang them, but beyond that
we were not expected to come up with much else in the way
of making the record. It was decided that we would record in
LA, using classic studios like Sunset Sound and Ocean Way.
The song arrangements were written for us by Larry Williams
and Jerry Hey (both of whom had been instrumental in creating
those Quincy Jones--Michael Jackson records), the band

was put together for us and consisted of Omar Hakim on
drums, John Patitucci on bass and Larry Williams on keyboards,
with Ben playing guitar and piano. We simply gave
ourselves up to the experience, happy to have been relieved of
some of the burden of decision-making.
As for these musicians we were working with in America,
they knew little of our background, or the esoteric British
scene we'd emerged from, and why on earth should they?
They could not have begun to comprehend how convoluted
our ideas were about this record we were making, or about
records in general. Though fairly diluted by this point, I still
carried around a certain amount of attitude that was basically
grounded in a punk sensibility When Larry Williams, for
instance, found out that we had recorded at Abbey Road, he
was immediately impressed because it fitted us into a Great
Tradition of record-making.
'Oh wow, guys,' he'd say, 'Abbey Road. The home of the
Beatles!'
'God, I HATE the Beatles,' I replied.
There was a stunned silence.
'You ha-a-ate the Beatles . . . ? ' he faltered. Clearly this
wasn't a stance he had ever encountered before, whereas I had
grown up around people who thought there was no greater
fun to be had than dissing the Rolling Stones, or saying Bob
Marley was crap. A certain iconoclasm was in the very air I
breathed back home, but here it seemed it just didn't translate.
If we'd thought that we might be about to recreate some
classic 1970s grooves, though, we soon found that we were
sorely mistaken. These guys were all fully locked into the
rhythm and production ideas of mid-1980s US jazz--soul
fusion, and thought the 1970s were old hat, while many of the
current innovations seemed to them to be a mere flash in the
pan. A bit too trashy, too 'pop' even, to appear on a serious
record. Hip hop and house beats were for kiddies, while they

were going to show us how to make a record for grown-ups.
Starting work on a track in the studio one day, Ben tentatively
suggested that he'd always heard it with a kind of swung
beat, which he thought would sound great played in real time
by a real drummer. They burst out laughing, and began to play
the rhythm he'd suggested.
'Shit, man, that's a boogaloo!' they chuckled.
'People gonna say, "That's hysterical! You got Omar Hakim
playing a boogaloo!"
Whatever a boogaloo was, clearly it wasn't cool.
Another time, they started up a cabaret-style version of a
current popular beat. Again, they obviously thought it was
pathetic.
'New Jack Swing?' they declared. 'No° Jack Shit!'
And we were on their turf, after all. We had come here
specifically to buy some of what they were selling. There
didn't seem to be much point in flying all the way out to LA
and then demanding we make the same record we could have
made back home. So for once, we kept our mouths shut and
let ourselves sink into what was actually an extraordinarily easy
and enjoyable experience.
We were innocents abroad, in many ways. We decided it
would make sense if we stayed at the same hotel as Tommy
LiPuma, so we checked into the Four Seasons Beverly Hills
and stayed there, in a luxurious corner room with a wraparound
balcony and a view, for eight weeks. Being in a hotel
meant that we had to send our clothes off to the hotel laundry
service, and at the end of the first week I asked to see a
running total of the bill, just to keep a check on things. The
laundry bill alone was equivalent to the entire recording
budget of my earliest records.
For the next eight weeks there were dinners every night in
fancy restaurants. Anyone who happened to be in the studio
was invited along. Tommy would order the wine and we
would all drink it. We learned about Californian chardonnays
and Caesar salads and grilled swordfish, when these things
were unheard of in England. Ben hired a car and drove us
through Laurel Canyon every day to the recording studio, and
at night would drive it back to be valet-parked at the hotel. On
a weekend off we drove up to the San Ysidro Ranch in Santa
Barbara, where Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had got
married, and stayed in a bougainvillea-draped cabin with a
wood fire burning. Another weekend, we flew out to the
Grand Canyon and stayed in a hotel right by the rim, overwhelmed
by the vastness of the landscape outside. I took
photos of the view and of cactus flowers that looked like birthday
candles on a cake, and in the clear desert air the damp and
chill of England seemed a long way away.
In LA, in the hotel pool in my bikini, I was Joni Mitchell
in the photo on the back cover of The Hissing of Summer
Lawns. The hotel smelled of lilies, and every time we wanted
to leave we called down to reception for the car to be brought
to the door. It was impossible not to be seduced by the
California sun and the luxury lifestyle.
Back in the studio, it seemed Tommy only had to pick up
the phone and any musician we wanted would come along to
contribute. We needed a sax solo on one song and I said, 'We
sort of need someone who plays like Stan Getz.'
'Stan, it's Tommy here: he said into the phone. 'Listen, I got
a song I want you to hear ... '
And I was very much 'just the singer'. I played not a single
note on a guitar or piano, and so long hours were spent sitting
in the control room while the tracks were recorded. Then,
when the record was being mixed, I realised that I couldn't, as
I would do in London, pop home for a few hours and come
back to hear more finished results. I've never been able to sit
in the room while a bass-drum sound is laboured over for six
hours, and have always thought that I could offer more by
returning with fresh ears and being the one to say, 'But the
vocal's too quiet!' or, 'What have you done to the piano? It
sounds like a hurdy-gurdy.' Here, in LA, I had to retire to the
lounge while Ben sat in on a lot of the mixing. I learned to
play Super Mario Bros., and in the evenings Joe Sample would
tap on the door and come and sit with me, having had a row
at home.

But the whole project was expensive, and who on earth did
we think was paying for all this? I certainly never gave the
matter any serious consideration. I knew enough to realise that
ultimately we ourselves paid the full costs of any recording
budget. But I hadn't stopped to think that being away from
home meant that all these extra expenses -- every hotel room,
every breakfast, every car-parking bill, every bottle of wine --
became part of the recording budget. When we got back
home, we had two things under our arm: a fully realised,
immaculately performed and produced modern American
soul--pop record, and an enormous bill, which we were going
to have to sell a lot of records to pay off.
I know you'd rather talk instead
About the things inside your head

But everything, everything that I overheard
Tells me you just don't have the words

'Cause you never learned to speak the language of life
And here you are a grown man
Who can't talk to his wife

And the children you don't understand

You think you've come on pretty far
Still got the job, the house and the car
But there's one thing, one thing that you never get
A grip on life's sweet alphabet

'Cause you never learned to speak the language of life
And here you are a grown man
Who can't talk to his wife

And when things get out of hand

And the kids you don't understand
Love is a foreign land
Over words you have no command

It's not that you don't care
Admit it, baby, and you're halfway there
'Cause you know, you know that you feel much more
Than you ever have the words for
'Cause you never learned to speak the language of life
And here you are a grown man
Who can't talk to his wife

And the children you just don't understand

'The Language Of Life', from The Language of Life, 1990
C

oming back to England, I knew we wouldn't be in for an
easy ride. We could see ourselves to be part of a pattern
that included groups like Scritti Politti, Prefab Sprout and
Aztec Camera -- contemporaries of ours who'd all started out
making somewhat ramshackle records at an independent level,
but had then gone on to make the leap into glossily produced
pop music. But would anyone else see it like that? Or would
they just hear an overproduced AOR album, a sell-out of all
our supposed realist values?
The answer to that question was a bit of both.
To British ears, The Language of Life sounded like a very slick
piece of work indeed, but those who liked it homed in on the
strength of the songs contained somewhere within all that
sumptuous production. Q magazine gave it four stars, declaring
that 'there's not a duff song on the album'. Smash Hits liked
it too, awarding it nine out often, 'full of brilliant songs'.
Andrew Collins came to interview us for the TIME, and he
too focused on the fact that the best aspects of the album were
our songs, and more specifically the caustic lyrics to a couple
of them. He made his point quite forcefully by contrasting the
lyrics of my song The And Bobby D' with a cover we'd done
of Womack and Womack's 'Take Me'. 'Lyrically speaking,' he
wrote, 'the former is complex, original, inspired and provocative.
The latter is shite.'
We were lucky to get off as lightly as this with the TIME, to
be fair. By now the acid-house revolution, and the Madchester
scene it had given rise to, was no marginalised alternative fad,
but dominated both the rock press and the charts. Andrew
Collins had turned up for that TIME interview wearing baggy
dungarees and a smiley badge, and I remember thinking,
'Bloody hell, the game's up if this is how they dress at the TIME now' In the 
UK we were more out of step with the prevailing
musical mood of the times than perhaps at any other
point in our career, and what this meant was that the record
was doomed to be disliked by anyone under the age of about
thirty.
In the US the scene was different, and The Language of Life was seen as being a 
hip English update of a tradition that
stretched from jazz through funk and disco and into the highly
polished soul records of the 1980s made by Luther Vandross or
Anita Baker, or produced by Jam and Lewis. The single
'Driving' was highly regarded among many in the US dance
scene.
Feeling cold-shouldered by the British press and public, we
turned gratefully to an audience in America that seemed to
be welcoming us with open arms. Up until now we'd largely
been played on 'college radio' in the US, and as such were
part of the alternative scene, which afforded such respect to
British bands of varying styles. American radio has always
been a bizarrely Balkanised world, with a set of categories
and definitions that are incomprehensible to outsiders, and it
was simply taken as read that you had to inhabit one or other
of the various ghettos on offer in order to get any airplay at
all.

Top radio', which to us in the UK really meant all radio,
meant something very specific indeed in the US (HITS!) and
was entirely out of our reach. And by the beginning of the
1990s the world of college radio, which had formerly been our
home, was now the domain of the new grunge movement,
which sounded suspiciously like heavy metal and was exclusively
American. British alteina-pop suddenly sounded fey and
over-conceptualised to American ears -- the very qualities
they'd always liked in it before -- and was suddenly not so welcome.
In among all this we found ourselves being offered a
new radio home, within a new format called New Adult
Contemporary, or NAC, which would turn out to be a very
scary place indeed.
Some of the stations had previously been what was
described as 'Quiet Storm', playing slow, subtle soul records.
Others had been part of the 'New Age' format. Now they
were rebranding themselves as a genre that was supposed to
attract a stylish, high-end type of consumer, offering soothing
sounds for stressed-out professionals, playing what Ben
describes as 'an ambient jazz lite soup of Michael Franks, Earl
Klugh, Kenny G, Donald Fagen and Enya'. 'Driving' duly
became a massive airplay hit on the NAG radio format, while
also sneaking onto a few Urban stations, like New York's
WBLS. At the beginning of a promotional tour in the US,
we'd been encouraged by our management to attend a music
biz convention at which the future of NAG radio was being
discussed. Someone made a short speech about how the
format needed to be rebranded. 'What we need,' he said, 'is
an injection of hip new talent like ... like ... ' and he cast his
eyes around the room before alighting on us sitting sheepishly
at the back. 'Like Everything But The Girl!' An entire roomful
of smilingly sincere bearded men stood up and applauded us,
and by the following Monday morning 'Driving' was smeared
thickly over the whole of NAG radio like jam on toast.
No, no, wait -- this wasn't what I meant either. I wasn't like
Enya, for God's sake! Couldn't people tell the difference?
Didn't they know there was more to records than just what
they sounded like? There was what they MEANT. And we
meant something different from Enya. Or at least, we meant
to.
You could begin to get a bit impatient with us at this point,
I think. Christ, I feel impatient with myselfjust thinking about
it. There's an element of randomness, chasing one idea after
another with diminishing commitment and no real goal in
sight. If the goal was just commercial success, then we had certainly
found some ways in which to achieve it. But, crucially,
they weren't the right ways. The swanky LA lifestyle was all
well and good, but the trouble was, nothing seemed to connect. The success we'd 
managed to come by in the last couple of
years had been seemingly at our own expense, in that it left us
feeling impoverished.
Was I just unnaturally, indefensibly picky about it all? Along
with the Smiths, we'd been tagged as `miserabilists' by the UK
press back in the mid-1980s. Could that be true, after all? Was
I just a misery who couldn't enjoy even the good bits when
they were thrown at me? Was it all there on a plate, and I was
just too damn fussy to get stuck in and enjoy it? Was I my own
worst enemy -- or the only one who could possibly save the
situation?

ITEM:
POSTCARDTRACEY
D'.51

I
'Pith AE k

WARNING:
PLEASE DO NOT FOLD













You told the world,'Be free, love life'
Tell me, is it true you beat your wife?
You see, me and Bobby D don't get along that easily
You told the world,'Skip rules, have fun'
Knocked her from here to kingdom come
How many girls have you had today?
And how many bottles have you downed today?
And while you're on the skids, who's minding the

kids?

Go to sleep, Bobby D, here's a kiss,
Don't worry your pretty head about this

Me and Saint Jack K never had too much to say
It's easy driving with your feet
With some good ol' girl in the passenger seat
Watching the road all day
'Oh honey, what funny things you do say'
But while you're out of your head
Who's making the bed?

Go to sleep, Bobby D, here's a kiss
Don't worry your pretty head about this
Go to sleep, Saint Jack K
Don't worry your tiny head today
A saviour and a seer? Maybe
But he never meant that much to me

Sure, I'd love a wild life

But every wild man needs a mother or wife
The seven seas you roam
And who's waiting at home?

W

hen Lady Gaga performed on The X Factor in 2009
wearing a tight, reflective leather cat costume and danc
ing
inside a giant ten-foot bathtub, she was briefly interviewed
afterwards and asked what advice she had for the contestants.
'Be yourself,' she answered, without a moment's hesitation or
a flicker of irony.
Being yourself, and being able to reveal your real, authentic
self to an audience, have become glib mantras of the
modern pop industry, most often heard in those very circumstances
where artifice and concealment seem most in
evidence. And yet, there remains something true and elusive
in those two words, and it was the very thing I struggled with
most throughout many years of being a performer. Not at the
moment of songwriting; not at the moment of singing in
the studio, where I was always happy and comfortable; but
at the point of performance -- whether that was in a TV
studio, or on a film set making a video, or onstage in front of
an audience.
I wrestled constantly with the problem of how to be myself,
and whether or not that self would be good enough; whether
it could ever compete in a world of bigger and brasher selves.
Since the days of singing from inside the wardrobe I had never
learned to enjoy being looked at. Being listened to was OK,
but the public gaze, so empowering and enriching to the natural
extrovert, to me was kryptonite.

When we were touring in 1990, after The Language of Life album came out, I 
began to go into a complete decline about
it all. We were playing at large, seated venues -- Nottingham
Royal Concert Hall, Edinburgh Playhouse, Manchester
Apollo -- culminating in three nights at the Royal Albert Hall,
but the tour was plagued by sound problems. The audience
who had come to these gigs wanted the live show to sound
EXACTLY like the CD, and were disappointed. There were
shouts of 'Turn the drums down!' and, more often, 'Turn the
vocal up!' One night, at Preston Guild Hall, the sound was so
bad that people asked for their money back at the end of the
night, prompting us to postpone a few gigs and start again with
a new sound engineer.
All this was simply rocket fuel for the self-doubt and neurosis
which were taking me over. I'd never been able to hear
myself onstage at the best of times, and now the swaggering
drums and lush keyboard arrangements on many of the songs
were completely drowning me out. The sound engineer out
front had my vocal cranked up to eleven, but it would help
him enormously if I could only sing louder. I couldn't,
though, not for any sustained period of time, and so the upshot
was that I felt inadequate onstage.
I'd suffered from stage fright since those days of throwing up
at the Moonlight Club with the Marine Girls in 1981, but the
doubts about my vocal abilities had become almost paralysing.
This level of self-criticism had begun, really, during the making
of The Language of Life, where the recording sessions threw me
into the company of musicians with whom I felt I simply
couldn't compete, and compared to the other singers they'd all
worked with -- Michael Jackson! Chaka Khan! Anita Baker! --
I thought my inadequacies must be glaringly obvious. The
punky spirit I might embody in conversation went out of the
window when I was put in front of a microphone, and now all
I could hear were my limitations. A vocal range which barely
spanned a hand's width on the piano seemed laughably
meagre, and while I'd defended Morrissey in the past for those
three notes his career depended on, I was beginning to forget
all that and was turning into my own worst critic.
Up onstage in front of an audience is a place where neurosis
meets narcissism, and these two competing forces were
fighting a constant battle inside my head every night.
look, they love me, I'm fabulous and I have a gorgeous
voice ... '

'Oh, shut up, they're bored, and you're out of tune.'
'But that girl down there, she's crying, my singing is so
moving.'
'Yeah, but you're tired, aren't you? Your voice is going to go
in a minute ... '

I couldn't shut those inner critics up any more. When we
got to the US to tour, we had Kirk Whalum on saxophone,
and in the middle of the songs he would step forward to play
searingly raw, deep soul solos, tearing the place up and, in
many US cities, bringing the crowd to their feet. Then I'd take
the mic for the next verse with a sinking feeling of 'How do
I follow that?'

Along with the vocal anxiety, I'd also lost confidence in
what I looked like and what I meant. There seemed to be a
dearth of female role models with whom I identified. The late
1970s indie scene I'd sprung from had been full of women
who were great examples of how you could be a) quirky
looking, and b) an unconventional performer and yet still get
on and form a band. Among my heroines had been Siouxsie
Sioux, Pauline Murray, Poly Styrene, The Slits, The
Raincoats, Lesley Woods and Alison Statton. Women like Patti
Smith and Chrissie Hynde were a godsend to someone like
me, who was a natural tomboy in appearance, and at the
moment when I was trying to forge a self-image they seemed
to beam the empowering message that you didn't need to be
'pretty' or take your kit off in order to get attention.
But the 1980s had become a very much more conservative
decade. The female icon you were supposed to revere above all
others was, of course, Madonna, and no one could have seemed
more alien to me. A shiny, brash, Teflon-coated embodiment
of AMBITION, she was absolutely a version of feminism but
not the one I felt I'd signed up for, and the pouting and flirting
of songs and more particularly videos like 'Material Girl' and
'Like A Virgin' left me cold. Manipulating men, using your
feminine wiles 'to your own advantage', above all exploiting a
simplified version of your own sexuality was suddenly the name
of the game again.
But I didn't want to be a cartoon woman. I didn't want to
be an Iron Lady, or a Sex Kitten, or a Diva, or the Madwoman
in the Attic. If I'd been nineteen at this moment, I think I
would have been full of a defiant self-confidence that would
have fired me up to resist this rebranding of female performers.
But I was at a low ebb as it was, and so it all conspired to
make me feel out of step with the times, still banging the same
drum and ranting on like an old harpy.
Self-doubt is common among performers, I suppose, and
can be a positive spur, pushing you to do better, to want more;
the antidote to complacency. But it becomes crippling when
it veers off into paranoia, and by 1990 I was rapidly turning
into someone who shouldn't have been anywhere near a stage.
It was the place where I was perhaps least myself, where I
could not be 'the real me' at all. During this last year, as a kind
of diversion from the semi-detached feelings I was beginning
to have about the music business, I'd been a part-time student
at Birkbeck University. By the end of the US tour I was ever
so slightly on the verge of a nervous breakdown, so when we
got home I switched off the whole internal drama about being
a pop star and got on with writing my thesis on Samuel
Beckett's Trilogy. From the outside, it may have looked as
though I regarded myself as being too good for this silly pop
world. In truth, I felt I was probably nowhere near good
enough. And that was crushing.
Frances, keep your mouth shut dear
We don't want the neighbours round
With their ugly little schemes
They make the pretty world go round
And there's a place in it for every one of us
I'll keep the home fires burning
Only don't make a fuss

And if you're not impressed
With the wares life has to show

You can take them or leave them
They choose their own fate who say no
There's some ugly little dreams
For pretty girls to buy
It's enough to make you mad
But it's safer just to break down and cry

It's a battlefield, Frances

You fight or concede
Victory to the enemy
Who call your strength insanity
What chance for such girls?
How can we compete
In a world that likes its women
Stupid and sweet

I bet you rue the day
The angels gave you your share
Of bright cornflower-blue eyes
And golden hair

There's a lot of ugly little dreams
For pretty girls to buy
It's enough to make you mad

But it's safer just to break down and cry

'Ugly Little Dreams', from Baby, the Stars Shine Bright, 1986
'Don't confront me with my failures

I had not forgotten them ...'

I

imagine all artists can look back at their work and admit that
there are low points. It doesn't take an enormous amount of
soul-searching to own up to the simple fact that some records
are better than others. Often this signals the beginning of an
inevitable decline, which is really the normal trajectory of a
pop career. Pop careers, after all, are normally fairly short-lived
affairs. There's some good stuff at the beginning, maybe a
period of commercial success, then some not-so-good stuff,
then really bad, then it fades into silence.
Because I had a long career by pop standards, I think the
shape of my graph is different. And now, in 1990, I was right
at the bottom of that big dip in the middle, which perhaps
started sometime around Idlewild in 1987 and which I would
not fully climb out of until 1994. I'm not really talking about
commercial success here, either -- after all, The Language of Life sold over 
half a million copies -- I'm talking about the records
I made, and even more about the pleasure I got from making
them. Something was missing, and it was this: it was the feeling
that I was expressing what I intended to express, and that
I had an audience with whom I was in sync, who understood
me, got from me what they wanted and what I wanted to give.
It was the feeling of belonging.
I hadn't belonged anywhere for a few years now. Ben and
I just existed inside our own little bubble. I wasn't part of any
scene, and for quite a while hadn't even tried to be. As a band,
we probably meant more in the US now than we did in the
UK, and that was strange, not having a comfortable foothold
in the country I lived in. Having to go abroad to feel loved
made home feel unwelcoming and alien. Like a lot of groups,
we were Big In Japan, and would play much bigger venues
there than we could in England. Strange, sedate early-evening
gigs, where we'd perform on freezing-cold air-conditioned
stages to neatly groomed young professionals who adored us
but had no apparent means of showing it. Their responses were
confined to a code of behaviour which seemed designed to
quash any outpouring of spontaneity or joy. So at the end of
each song they would clap hard and rhythmically, but in
unison, which made it sound insincere and forced. The
applause would stop as abruptly as it started, leaving long
silences between one song and the next. Where an audience's
response should be like a gust that buoys you up and sustains
you through the performance, these audiences seemed, however
unintentionally, to drain the very lifeblood out of the
evening. The gigs would be cold, stillborn affairs, where nothing
went wrong, but nothing of any value happened, or
seemed as if it could happen.
But I was caught now, in the machinery of a career in
motion. There was more to it than just the two of us, making
up our own rules as we went along. There was a manager,
with a manager's office, and musicians to pay, and a record
contract to fulfil, and expectations to meet, and so I simply
moved forward with the impetus that all this had created.
Where once I had written songs and recorded them because I had to, and couldn't 
get them recorded fast enough to keep
up with myself and everything I wanted to do, now I was in
danger of making records simply because I had to; it was what
I did, it was the day job. And in this kind of fatalistic mood,
in early 1991 we started recording the next album, Worldwide, working again 
with Jerry Boys at Livingston Studios where
we'd recorded Idlewild. It came out in September of that year
and was our sixth album, and in many ways it was absolutely
invisible. I imagined there were lots of bad reviews lurking
somewhere, but when I went to dig out the press for that
period I could find none. There were simply hardly any
reviews of it anywhere at all; it was just ignored. And the truth
is, it really isn't a dreadful record, just a not-good-enough
record.

I didn't completely believe in it even at the time, and I'd
spent weeks in the studio making the thing. We were by now
so out of step with any UK audience that we didn't even tour
with the album. It wasn't successful enough for us to play the
concert halls, and our ageing audience seemed unlikely to be
prepared to come and stand up at small clubs or university gigs
drinking warm beer and sticking to the greasy carpet. We were
trapped in a complete limbo.

Despite all this creative paralysis, I don't think I was actually
personally unhappy at this point. I'd finished the MA at
Birkbeck University, and was considering carrying straight on
with a PhD. I had some discussions with my tutor there, and
began to make some provisional notes with the idea that I
might write a thesis on Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music
of Time. Life was becoming perhaps more domesticated than
ever: Ben and I moved into a new house in London, for the
first time a house with a garden, and I set about learning how
to grow things properly, instead of just attacking the outside
space with all the skill and discernment of an out-of-control
combine harvester, which had been my approach up to now.
Of course, this domesticity was part of the problem -- a life
apparently free of conflict, while enjoyable to live, provided
little in the way of raw material to inspire the kind of lyrics I
was best at writing. Contentment replaced urgency like a
warm blanket which I tucked around myself, comforting,
snug, but deceptively stifling. If I complained of anything, it
was of boredom. Too much of the time I was bored, possibly
because I was being boring.
But how little I knew. How ironic it is to complain about
such contentment, given what was about to come. It was the
calm before the storm, and we were of course entirely ignorant
of how abruptly this calm was about to end. Aside from
the musical impasse, there was another problem we were trying
to ignore -- the fact that Ben was feeling increasingly unwell.
He was suffering from asthma, which seemed to be getting
worse, and between January and May 1992 I can count around
twenty doctor's appointments in the diary. We were trying to
soldier on, imagining that somehow we would manage to sort
out both Ben's poor health and the health of our musical
career. We agreed to fly out to Portugal in July to support
Elton John and then we planned to go to America to play as
an acoustic duo, promoting an album of covers and acoustic
tracks which was being released. Instead, during June, Ben's
health took a turn for the worse, and by the end of the month
he was in hospital and all the touring was cancelled.
We were at the lowest point of our entire career, the point
at which it may have looked as if it was all over. We'd had a
reasonable run at it, all told. The band had lasted eight years
and made six albums. The last one had been a bit rubbish, and
we were running out of steam.
Luckily, Ben decided to contract a life-threatening illness,
and in doing so, saved us.
What is it that I think I need?

Is there love in me that wants to be freed?
Or is it selfishness and ego
We carry with us everywhere that we go?

And this feeling that life's incomplete
Do you feel that too?
Do you want what I want?

And if I should start to cry

And I can't begin to tell you why
And I stumble when I begin
It's 'cause I don't understand anything

And people say that we're so close
How can there be something that I don't know
Oh, but even though I share your bed
Baby, I don't get inside your head

And this feeling of some mystery
Do you feel that too?
Do you know what I mean?

And if I should start to cry

And I can't begin to tell you why
And I stumble when I begin
It's 'cause I don't understand anything

'I Don't Understand Anything',
from Amplified Heart, 1994
PART FOUR

0

n a morning in June 1992, Ben went off for another
doctor's appointment to try and get to the bottom of the
mysterious symptoms that had been plaguing him for months.
He'd been suffering from asthma. But asthma that got worse
and worse, and was untouched by the strongest asthma drugs
available. Endless visits to the GP, and then to specialists,
seemed to offer nothing in the way of a concrete diagnosis.
Then the strange and sudden hot flushes began. And when
they were accompanied by equally strange and sudden excruciating
pains, a doctor finally took some notice and suggested
that a visit to a cardiac specialist might be a good idea.
After Ben had been gone about an hour, he phoned me
from the clinic where he had just had an ECG. 'They think I might be having a 
heart attack,' he said calmly. `D'you think
you could come over?'
I tried not to overreact, but my own heart was suddenly
hammering inside my chest. All the anxiety I'd been suppressing
for months was unleashed in a single moment.
'Don't move: I said, 'just stay where you are and I'll be right
there.' I thought that if he stayed still he'd be safer, that any
movement might be hazardous. He'd sounded relaxed, though,
so maybe it wasn't really as serious as it seemed. I jumped in
a taxi and crawled through London traffic to the clinic, only
to find that the doctors had become concerned about him in
the meantime and, not wishing to have him drop dead in the
corridor, had packed him off in an ambulance to Westminster
Hospital.
I hailed another taxi, restrained myself from yelling, 'Follow
that ambulance!' and raced after him.
Arriving at Westminster Hospital, I asked at reception for
the Coronary Care Unit. It was upstairs, left out of the lift,
down a long corridor, through some swing doors, right into
the next corridor ...
I couldn't find it. The hospital seemed huge, and if you
looked closely at the gloomy corners and curtain-less windows,
slightly decrepit. Everyone else there knew where they
were going. Or they were patients in wheelchairs who had
nowhere to go, and just seemed to be killing time in doorways,
like extras waiting to be called into action.
Then round another corner and through some more doors,
and there he was, sitting on a bed, with his chest shaved and
nurses sticking heart-monitor patches to him. Suddenly it all
seemed very real, and at once entirely unreal, like being in an
episode of ER and not being able to get out.
Over the next ten days Ben experienced a lurching descent
into what was an obviously serious, though as yet undiagnosed
illness. It wasn't a heart attack, or apparently a heart condition
of any kind. Nor was it an acute gall-bladder infection. It
wasn't AIDS, or a rare and strange parasitic infection. He got
gradually sicker, then suddenly much, much sicker, and meanwhile
every invasive test, all involving needles, pain and fear,
came back with inconclusive but alarming results, all pointing
at some kind of unidentifiable multi-system disorder. Doctors
scratched their heads and said they were baffled, which is really
the very definition of what you don't want doctors ever to be.
Surgeons arrived -- the mechanics of the medical profession
-- and called time on all this namby-pamby tests business,
declaring that it was time to operate. 'Open this man up,' they
said, 'and let's see what's going wrong.' And so one morning
Ben was wheeled off to the operating theatre for exploratory
surgery. Unable to sit by his empty bed waiting, I took myself
for a walk, pounding mindlessly along beside the river, crossing
and recrossing the Thames at every bridge, looking at my
watch every thirty seconds. Finally I deemed it long enough
since I'd left and returned to his room, where I found two
nurses matter-of-factly stripping his bed and sweeping the personal
items from his bedside table into a plastic bag.
One of them turned and caught sight of my stricken face.
'No, no!' she cried. 'It's not what you think. He's been taken into intensive 
care. Sit down, I'll get the doctor.'
So not actually dead then, but in intensive care. That was
nearly as bad. The doctor arrived and gave me a synopsis of
what had happened. They'd found a lot of internal damage to
Ben's intestines, caused by a rare inflammatory condition, and
he would require a lot of further surgery and medication if he
was to recover.

On telly, people always ask the bluntest questions. They say,
'How long have I got, doc?' or, 'You can tell me straight,
doctor, is he going to die?' I couldn't bring myself to be that
direct, so I asked, 'Could this kill him?'
That sounded suitably hypothetical. After all, almost anything could kill you.
'Well,' the doctor replied, 'yes, it could, but,' more brightly
now, 'we're here to make damn sure it doesn't!'
Later, I sat with the surgeon who had operated and tried to
ask again, brutally this time.
'Is he going to die tonight?' I was crying as I said this, which
can't have made it easy for him. With the benefit of hindsight,
I know now that he thought this was a distinct possibility, if
not a probability, but all he said to me after a pause and a deep
breath was, 'He's a very, very sick man.' From a surgeon, I
think that comes as close as you'll ever get to an admission that

things are bad.
Later that night I blagged some Temazepam from one of the
nurses, went off to the relatives' room and fell fast asleep.
Another nurse came in and shook me awake very early the
next morning. Again I felt sure Ben was dead, but she was just
asking if I wanted a cup of tea.
It would be a long time before I could get over that state of
appalled expectation, and break the habit of holding myself
braced for bad news at any minute. In the end, it simply became
too exhausting to sustain that level of anxiety. It faded, or hardened,
or settled somewhere inside me, and I got used to living
with the possibility of disaster without being overwhelmed by
it. As Ben lay unconscious in intensive care, I sat beside his bed,
doing jigsaw puzzles and reading P. G. Wodehouse novels,
gratefully losing myself for hours in the comforting world of
stories where the worst disaster that could befall a young chap
was the unexpected arrival for lunch of a fearsome aunt. I'd
burst out laughing at inappropriate moments, then look up
guiltily to see if anyone had noticed.
In the evenings I'd sit and talk to whichever nurse was on
duty Often it was Martha. She'd hand me cups of tea, and hold
my hand for a bit if I was crying. And patiently listen while, for
the first time ever, I talked to a virtual stranger about Ben and
me, and what we had together, and everything it meant.
I-::-
251


When Ben wrote Patient, his book telling the story of his illness,
a few people commented to me that one of the reasons
it was so moving was that it was a great love story, as much as
it was a story about an illness. And it was a story that hadn't
ever been told before because we'd always found it impossible
to talk in public about our relationship, or to describe to journalists
what it was like living and working together for all those
years.
We often used to say in interviews that to us it just seemed
normal because it was all we'd known, and that was true.
Though, of course, there was nothing very ordinary about our
relationship. We'd met aged nineteen and started living
together, and formed a band together, and so had spent an
awful lot of our time together ever since. An awful lot of our
time -- more than is normal. And so people wondered. Did we
hate each other, really? Was it all a front? Or were we, actually,
just a bit weird? There were no stormy bust-ups in the press,
or tempestuous public rows, so people often assumed our relationship
was a bit too good to be true. But in reality, we'd had
as many ups and downs as any other couple.
There was a trip to Japan in the late 1980s when we were
sleeping in separate hotel rooms, not getting on well at all. In
the hotel's bland conference room, we sat next to each other
all day giving interviews to earnest, smiling Japanese women
dressed like newsreaders. We put on a united front and acted
normal, but upstairs we were tense and bickering. In the
middle of one night there was an earthquake. Waking up in a
gently swaying hotel, at first I wondered where Ben was. Then
I remembered, and thought, 'Oh, great. After all these years
we're going to perish fifty yards away from each other in a
Japanese hotel.' I went out and groped my way along the corridor
to Ben's room. The experience had, quite literally,
shaken us up a bit, and we had a word with ourselves.
Often in interviews we would be asked: 'What's the secret of
your success as a couple?' and it would be impossible to answer.
Sometimes we'd make a joke: 'Well, I'm extremely vain and
shallow,' one of us would say. 'And I'm exactly the same!' the
other would finish. Or we'd give some long-winded, serious
reply till the interviewer's eyes glazed over. We were wary of being slushy, or 
sleazy, or just plain boring. The ever-present
danger was that we'd give Too Much Information, and that
however much people might imagine they wanted detail, it
would actually prove to be a bit creepy and intrusive.
Recently, though, I was asked by a magazine to fill in a
questionnaire about my favourite films, and while I was rack
ing
my brains for an answer I remembered an anecdote that
says something about the two of us.
On one of our first dates, back in 1981, we went to the
cinema, but when we got there we couldn't agree on what to
see. So Ben went into Screen One to see the gothic
Deliverance-style horror flick Southern Comfort, while I went
into Screen Two to see the girly option, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. We met up 
outside afterwards, and had our date. My point
being that perhaps the only secret of success in any relationship
is to agree to differ.
Accept that you are not the same.
Grasshopper.
And we were different, in so many ways. One Sunday afternoon
recently, Ben dug out the box of his old family photos.
There were his parents through the 1960s and 1970s, all boho
jazz glamour. His dad in sharp, tailored suits, always with a
little ciggie. And his mum, who is half Romany Gypsy, doing
the full 1970s exotic actress look, channelling Liz Taylor, who
she in fact interviewed many times while doing celeb journalism
for She and Cosmo. Headscarves and hoop earrings. Tanned after only two days on 
holiday. Bottles of wine on the
Formica tables. Showbiz pals -- Trevor Howard, Billie
Whitelaw, Brian Rix. Everything about his family seemed to
be verging on the extreme, a bit larger than life. There was an
uncle who'd committed suicide. Half-brothers and a sister who
were triplets. Strange Gypsy ancestors called things like
Woodlock and Ezekiel.

Compared to the box of my family's pics, the contrast could
not be more striking.
My parents look cool too in their 1960s clobber -- shades,
narrow trousers, neat hair. But there's a basic and insurmountable
culture gap, a yawning gulf between the grooviness
of Ben's snaps and the small-town conformity of mine. Kaftans
in Tangier versus windcheaters in North Wales.
By the time I met Ben's parents in the early 1980s, a little
of the glamour had worn off. A few too many gins before
dinner made evenings unpredictable and stormy. Ben's dad
enjoyed confrontation, and one of his opening gambits to me,
aged only nineteen and used to grown-ups who were conventionally
polite and inhibited, was to fix me with a steely if
inebriated stare and demand: 'So, Tracey, how long have you
been a socialist?'
My parents, on the other hand, couldn't quite cope with
Ben's forthright stance in the company of adults. Still adhering
to old-fashioned rules of decorum, they expected him to
sleep in the spare room when he first came to visit. Finding
him in my bedroom, my mum wasn't impressed, and spoke
to him in a tone he wasn't used to. He responded by writing
a letter, which arrived a few days later. 'If you think I intend
to use your house as a knocking-shop', it began, before continuing
in the same spirited manner. My parents had the good
grace to be amused, but really he was a little too much for
them. It would be a year or more before they met again, and
allowances had to be made on both sides before the permafrost
thawed.
After a few years together, we probably became more alike,
and found we'd developed that communication shorthand that
couples share. We could make decisions in the studio or
onstage with just a nod and a wink. Message understood.
The weird hours and crazed obsessiveness of making records
were also things we shared, so there was no partner back home
demanding attention or questioning the need to be in the
studio ALL night. On tour, we would watch other band members
fall into a slump of loneliness, missing partners back
home, feeling torn between the freedom that travelling offers
and the duty not to enjoy it too much -- a constant battle
between solitude and guilt. They'd go back to hotel rooms
alone and we wouldn't have to, and that was cool.
We were lucky, too, in being a showbiz celebrity couple
before there was really a celebrity culture. Or perhaps we were
only ever a minor celebrity couple. We once glanced over the
desk to check our reservation at a restaurant, only to see the
words 'semi-VIP' next to our names.

Nowadays, pop music inhabits the tabloids on a daily basis,
and entire magazines devote their energies to snatching pictures
of you with sick down your front. That didn't happen in
our day. There was barely even any paparazzi. We kept our
heads down as much as possible, and stayed under the radar
most of the time.

To journalists who liked us we were 'the Damon and Justine
of their day'. Or Sonny and Cher.
For those who didn't, we were smug marrieds; the Richard
and Judy of pop.
Much of the time interviewers were too nice to ask really
probing questions, and the music press would falter at any hint
of intrusiveness, lest they be seen to be gossipy and trivial. In
the 1980s the TIME was a deadly serious publication, with the
sales figures to prove it.
An early Paolo Hewitt article was one of the exceptions. He
came along to interview us in 1984 with the intention of
trying to find out what we were like as people, and get a sense
of our relationship. We completely stonewalled him and were
humourless and earnest. The article makes me cringe now. He
was trying fairly harmlessly to get us to admit we fancied each
other, but we were too wrapped up in our right-on sexual politics
to talk about such a thing, so he came to the conclusion
that we were more friends than lovers.

Nothing could have been further from the truth. Like any
self-respecting new couple, we had spent the entire previous
year in bed, but it didn't seem cool to tell that directly to the TIME. We gave 
off the opposite impression -- of being coy and
sexless, and having a slightly suspect brother--sister type relationship,
like the White Stripes.
We'd never succeeded in conveying to the media any sense
of what we were really like. It was both a strength and a weakness
to have been so elusive. It meant that we'd avoided the
pitfalls that await those who try to live their lives in public. But
it also meant that our story seemed to be lacking in the drama
and passion that would have entertained the public and probably
made us more popular. The glamorous version would
have been more Burton and Taylor, the archetypal couple held
up to represent true love; an enviable larger-than-life style of
romance. Not only had we never divorced, we'd never even
got round to marrying each other. Nor had we got round to
having babies. And now, as Ben lay at death's door, it seemed
as though we might have left it too late to do any of those
things. I felt a nagging sense that we had wasted time, and that
I'd missed countless opportunities to shout from the rooftops
about how much I bloody loved him, as if it was somehow
crucial that the world know that.

Ben spent nearly two weeks in intensive care, some of that
time kept artificially unconscious so that his body could rest
between further bouts of surgery. He'd finally been diagnosed
with Churg--Strauss syndrome, an auto-immune disease which
had caused vascular inflammation. Much of his small intestine
had been irreparably damaged, and had to be removed bit by
bit, in a series of operations. During the first couple of days,
when he was fighting peritonitis, there was a distinct possibility
that he could take a sudden turn for the worse at any
moment. The doctors told me that if this happened, and the
infection suddenly swamped his system, he would die very
quickly. I sat and numbly watched the glowing LED readouts
of his temperature and heart rate, knowing that an increase in
either could spell disaster. Little bleeps and alarms would suddenly
go off and I'd jump out of my skin, until a nurse would
come by and flick at a drip line with her fingernail. The alarm
would reset itself, and a kind of sickly calm would settle over
the room again.
After the extreme danger of the first few days, Ben's condition
stabilised and, though it would still be weeks before he
came home, with many relapses and recoveries in between --
surgery on a huge abdominal abscess, then a bout of septicaemia
that nearly killed him -- life began to settle into a kind
of routine. I spent the first week or so sleeping in the relatives'
room, but then went back home and spent part of each day
travelling backwards and forwards between Hampstead and
Westminster. I did nothing else at all but get up, dress, travel
to the hospital, sit by Ben's bed all day, go back home, eat a
takeaway and go to bed. Whole days would pass when I'd
barely speak to anyone, and I would forget to eat, till by the
end I had lost nearly as much weight as Ben, and the two of
us looked like a poster campaign warning young people to Just
Say No.
'Cause we walk the same line

Now I don't have to tell you

How slow the night can go
I know you've watched for the light
And I bet you could tell me
How slowly four follows three
And you're most forlorn just before dawn

So if you lose your faith, babe
You can have mine

If you're lost I'm right behind
'Cause we walk the same line
When it's dark, baby
There's a light I'll shine
If you're lost I'm right behind
'Cause we walk the same line

And I don't need reminding
How loud the phone can ring
When you're waiting for news
And that big old moon
Lights every corner of the room
Your back aches from lying
And your head aches from crying
'Cause we walk the same line
When it's dark, baby
There's a light I'll shine
If you're lost I'm right behind
'Cause we walk the same line

And if these troubles

Should vanish like rain at midday
Well, I've no doubt there'll be more

And we can't run and we can't cheat

'Cause, baby, when we meet what we're afraid of
We find out what we're made of

We Walk The Same Line',
from Amplified Heart, 1994
B

en wrote in his book about the glamour of being an
extremely ill patient, and the same holds true to a certain
extent for the partner by the bed. Films and TV shows like ER abound with 
images of the suffering husband or wife sitting
beside the wired-up patient in intensive care. There is a clearly
defined role to be played, and it brings with it the consolations
of sympathy and attention. I felt quite important while Ben
was in hospital. For a start, I was needed -- anyone who has
been in hospital for any length of time will recognise the fact
that with a regular and assertive 'visitor' beside you, you're
much more likely to get a fresh pillow, a drink of water or a
wheelchair to get you to the loo, than if you're on your own
trying to get the attention of a harassed nurse. In hospital, I was
also the one the doctors talked to, the recipient of all the difficult
news and appalling information. Often this was because
Ben was unconscious, or drugged, or just too ill to take anything
in, and so I was the one in a fit state to receive the latest
update.
But that important supporting role changes outside the walls
of the hospital. There are no saintly images to sustain us once
we get home; there is no glamour attached to the grinding
boredom of recovery. In many ways, living with a depressed
and traumatised convalescent is a far more difficult and lonely
experience.
In the immediate aftermath of his illness, after he had come
out of hospital, Ben retreated into himself, often not speaking
for hours, and when we did speak it was to replay the events
of the previous months, over and over again, clutching at
meaning, gruesomely fascinated by the extremity of what had
happened. I had kept a diary much of the time, just to get it
straight in my own mind, and I suppose in an attempt to
impose some kind of order on events that had spiralled so far
out of control. I would fill him in on all that had happened
while he was in surgery, or sedated, and tell him the things the
doctors had said to me, and what they'd thought his chances
were. He both did and didn't want to know everything, and
was drawn towards every detail only to find that it then added
another layer of horror. For a long time he seemed distant and
strange to all our friends. Some thought he had maybe
changed for the better, and for a while we mistook that
detachment for a new calmness and acceptance of life.
Zen Ben, we called him, as he seemed to have lost some of
the furious drive and competitiveness which had always
spurred him on. But we were wrong: those aspects of his character
hadn't gone away, they were just suppressed by other
concerns, and the reason he seemed not to connect with
things or people was that for a while he cared about nothing
except the narrative replaying inside his own head. He was
self-centred to a degree that I suspect is common in anyone
recovering from a trauma. Flashbacks: the word is in common
parlance now, but I don't suppose many of us understand what
the word really entails, and how debilitating it is not to be able

to switch off images inside your head that you'd rather forget.
After a while I welcomed the re-emergence of his old,
sometimes slightly manic self-motivation; that fighting spirit
was, after all, what had kept him going in hospital -- and now
had him roaring up the M1 in a new sports car when he could
barely walk, and would in a little while have him going back
on tour despite brief hospitalising relapses.
'I'm gonna be the sickest patient ever and make the biggest
recovery' seemed to be his motivating philosophy, and it was
amazing to witness, if a little hard to share.
'You haven't changed at all,' I'd say. 'You were mad before,
and you still are. Aren't you supposed to have discovered some
inner peace?'
He'd laugh, somewhat ruefully, and shake his head, and go
back to wondering about himself.

Ben had been in hospital for nine weeks over the summer of
1992, finally coming home over the August bank holiday
weekend. In October he had a relapse and was back in for a
few nights, then again in November. These relapses were terrifying
in themselves. Sudden agony; ambulances called. Was
this going to be the pattern for ever?
I wondered if we were going to have to resign ourselves to
a semi-invalid lifestyle, never venturing too far from home,
certainly never too far from medical help. Ben's diet was
incredibly compromised, and so it was easier for him to eat in
our own kitchen than anywhere else. Life shrank a bit, became
confined to quarters. I became protective of him, ever anxious,
a little fretful. It was like a foretaste of old age.
Yet below the surface, something was stirring. Physically we
were weakened, had been dealt a near-knockout blow But at
the same time, a kind of mental steeliness had developed in
both of us. When we talked about music again, I was aware of
a new kind of determination creeping into the conversation.
The change wasn't immediate by any means, but if Ben's near
death experience had taught us anything, it was perhaps the
somewhat obvious lesson of not wasting time and energy
doing things we didn't want to do, or didn't believe in. We had
spent the last few years chasing something intangible -- a level
of success, perhaps, that was forever out of reach? An idea of
ourselves that had formed in someone else's imagination, not
our own?
And we had lost the ability to make our own decisions and
stick to them. Instead, we had begun to believe more in other
people's versions of what we were and what we should be
doing. None of this had made us happy, nor had it led us to
produce good records. If Ben's survival, and being given a
second chance at life, meant anything at all, then surely we
should wipe the slate clean of all that rubbish and try to settle
for ourselves what it was that we wanted.
For now, though, we had to wait until Ben's gradual physical
recovery could catch up with our sense of being on the
brink of something new At this stage, the idea of recording a
whole new album seemed laughably implausible with the state
we, and our career, were in, so instead we compiled a Best Of
collection, in order to regroup and buy ourselves some time.
One small step at a time, we thought. Songwriting was proving
difficult, so we recorded a cover of 'The Only Living Boy
In New York', and the one song we had managed to write
since Ben had come home, 'I Didn't Know I Was Looking For
Love' (which would end up being a big hit for Karen Ramirez
in 1998). Adding these two songs to the compilation meant
that at least we had a record under our belts again, and could
dip a toe back into the waters of being an actual functioning
group who did things like touring and making videos.
The making of videos wasn't something I usually looked
forward to. It had, in fact, become an absolute millstone round
my neck, and we'd made a fair number of shockers since The
Incident With The Well And The Bell. It had been a long
time since I'd had the confidence to insist to our record company
that I knew better than they did, but that was all about
to change.
Having fallen in love with the early films of indie New York
film-maker Hal Hartley, who had dance routines set to Sonic
Youth tracks in his coolly funny, literate movies, we decided
he'd be great to work with, and so Ben faxed him and asked
if he'd be interested in making a video for 'The Only Living
Boy In New York'. He got straight back in touch expressing
his enthusiasm, but with two caveats attached that were never
going to endear him to the record company:

1 He had never made a pop video before, nor had he
ever wanted to;

2 He could not in all conscience film a lip-synched vocal
performance, so there would be no shots of us singing
in the video.

I thought that was all fine. WEA blew their stack, but for
once we brazened it out. Summoning up all our courage, and
trying to dispel all our fears about travelling, we flew to New
York, reasoning that if Ben were to fall ill he would at least be
within reach of top-notch hospitals. With a cast of actors
dressed as 'poet--thug' characters, we filmed a kind of
hammed-up, choreographed performance of the song without
ever opening our mouths. It was the first video we'd made and
liked since about 1985.

Later that year, we would do a gig at the Everyman Cinema
in Hampstead, where we screened Hal's film Simple Men then
performed an acoustic set, with the video Hal had made for us on a permanent 
loop in the bar. The money raised we donated
to the cinema, and they bought a new screen with it.
Afterwards, whenever we went to the cinema, I would look up
at the screen like it was one of those benches on Hampstead
Heath that commemorate someone who used to sit there.
'There should be a plaque under the screen: I said to Ben. 'In
memory of Ben and Tracey, who liked to look at this view".'
Don't say one thing one day
Then something else the next day
I'm trying to keep up with you
It's hard enough when you speak clearly

But when you're confused
It's like a goods train running through these rooms

I'm reading more into your words
Than you have put into them

And that's my problem

But you tied these knots
Now you undo them

You undo them

Oh, and think before you speak my darling

'Cause with your troubled mind
You're like a goods train running through my life

We all walk through this world alone
We keep ourselves untouched, unknown
You look up to the sky above you
Read this there -- I love you

You know I love you love you love you love you

But with your troubled mind
You're like a goods train running through my life
And when you're down
You bring me down too

And, babe, that's something

I would not do

I know it's hard, yeah I know it's hard
And, baby, that's something I don't disregard

But with your troubled mind

You're like a goods train running through my life

'Troubled Mind', from Amplified Heart, 1994
I t's the summer of 1993, and Ben and I are sitting in the homely,
country kitchen of Dave Pegg, bass player with the legendary
Fairport Convention. We've come out to Oxfordshire on the
introduction of our live sound engineer, Rob Braviner, who has
worked with Fairport for years, and the idea is that we are going
to rehearse a couple of songs and then appear with them at their
annual Cropredy Festival, which is really more of a kind of
souped-up village fete than an actual proper rock festival.
The band all seem to live in the same small village. It's like
folk music's Stella Street. So we find ourselves sitting in Dave
Pegg's kitchen, with pints of beer in front of us, and I can't
help noticing that in the corner of the room is the computer
from which Dave seems single-handedly to run their career --
booking gigs, organising their festival, selling their merchandise.
The whole shebang is run from home, like a little cottage
industry, completely independent of any interference from
record companies or the obvious trappings of the music business.
Do they even have a record company? I don't think so,
and there is no visible manager, either. Yet they still connect
with a huge and devoted audience, and seem, after all these
years, genuinely to be doing it for the love of it. I follow them
into the barn next door, and rehearse for a bit, reverentially
trying to fill Sandy Denny's shoes on the standard end-of-set
'Who Knows Where The Time Goes'. Then we stop, and go
and drink Guinness in the pub down the road.
This, I realised, was how you could carry on making
music without constant compromise and meddling. Fairport
Convention were not of my punky generation: they were
dyed-in-the-wool, ale-drinking, jumper-wearing old folkies,
but they were as DIY and indie as anyone I'd ever met. It was
inspiring. It was all starting to come back to me now, like I'd
been asleep for a long while and had woken up, struggling to
remember who and where I was.
And so, while some people will claim that Massive Attack
saved my life, and others might say that it was Todd Terry, I
also want to let it be stated for the record that Fairport
Convention played their part, too, and were instrumental in
bringing about a huge change in our attitude which in no
small part contributed to everything that happened next.

The juxtaposition of events is lovely, though; you couldn't
make it up. One day I am onstage in a country field in front
of a crowd of bearded, real-ale folkies, euphorically singing a
Sandy Denny anthem as the late afternoon sun dips behind the
trees and hedgerows. And then, almost the next day, or so it
seems, there is a phone call from Massive Attack asking me to
collaborate and sing on their second album. To say this comes
as a surprise would be putting it mildly, but it transpires that
there is some method in their madness, and they are looking
to make a sideways move from what Geoff Travis describes as
the 'Motown reggae' of their first album. They are, in fact, in
273

the process of inventing trip hop, and reaching out to a 'rock'
audience as a way out of the Brit soul-group ghetto, which
had consigned so many before them to one-hit-wonder status.
All this will only become clear long afterwards. Another message
comes through to me saying that they are big fans of my A Distant Shore album, 
so I say OK, why not send me a tape
of some stuff'?

A cassette duly arrives as Ben and I are leaving the house
one day, and I pick it up off the mat and take it with me. In
the car I stick it on, still expecting something frantic and
grandiose, along the lines of 'Unfinished Sympathy'. Instead,
the first track slowly begins.
And it goes BOOF CLACK diddle-iddle-ick ... (pause)
BOOF CLACK diddle-iddle-ick . .. (pause), at the approximate
pace of a snail. A stoned snail at that. It carries on like this
for six or seven minutes, then stops. I look at Ben. I've just had
my first introduction to trip hop, and the track I've heard is
'Protection', though without any title, or vocal melody, or
lyrics, or indeed any indication as to where those things might
go. There is no real beginning, middle or end. I'm not sure
whether I have ever heard a piece of music this slow and
empty before, and when the next one starts in just the same
mood, I realise that a whole new thing is happening here.
I carry the tape around with me for a while. At first I can't
get anywhere with it. Then it starts to seep into my brain,
insidiously digging in under my skin until I know it so well it
feels like a part of me.
A few days later, I put on the Massive tape again, get out
some paper and a pencil and almost in one go write the entire
song, 'Protection'. It starts off with the story of a girl some
friends had told me a few nights before, then moves on to deal
with my protective feelings towards Ben since his illness.
Within about ten minutes I've written the whole thing, and
will never change a word. When I send the tape back with the
vocals, it's exactly what they wanted, and I'm summoned.

Encountering Massive Attack is both a hilarious and a daunting
experience. They exude all the confidence and insularity
of a true gang, speaking in an apparently private code much of
the time. Despite possessing bona ride gang-style nicknames,
they choose to ignore these and all address each other as 'Jack'.
It's all quick-fire repartee and banter. Lots of in-jokes and
piss-takes, private remarks and snide one-liners. By the time of
this second album, the original members of the old Bristol
Wild Bunch sound system who had mutated into the Massive
Attack of the Blue Lines record have been whittled down to
just three: Daddy G, Mushroom and 3D, plus producer and
original Wild Buncher Nellee Hooper. But as an outsider,
what are you supposed to call them? Do I call 3D by his real
name, Robert, or do I call him 3D, or Jack? And is Daddy G
to be called Grant, or Dad, or what? In the end I take my lead
from other outsiders, and end up calling them D, G and Mush.
It all seems to go down OK. I kind of wish I had a nickname,
too.

Journalists meeting Massive Attack at this time experience
the same slight disorientation as I do. Simon Reynolds writes
about his encounter in Melody Maker

Interviewing Massive Attack is a bit like being a supply
teacher drafted in to supervise an unruly class. Mushroom
is the superficially docile but slyly subversive pupil ...
Daddy G is the intransigent type at the back of the class ...
And 3D? Well, he's the closest to teacher's pet, goodnaturedly
attempting to answer questions. All this is
accentuated when Mushroom actually asks for permission
to go to the toilet!

Nellee and 3D seem to be the driving forces behind the
recording process; Nellee, a somewhat raddled pixie-like creature,
exudes an atmosphere of imminent debauchery, as
though he can't wait to conclude this recording session and get
back to the real business of ... well, God knows what. 3D
appears to be the most serious about it all, and is the aesthetic
brain of the band, producing all the artwork and seemingly
trying to steer the creative ship. He's earnest and committed,
but changes his mind a lot; it's a bit like working with Paul
Weller. Daddy G is the calming, fatherly figure in the background,
saying little whenever I'm around, but clearly an
important and steadying presence.
Mushroom, on the other hand, is a complete enigma. I get
the feeling he's suspicious of me, perhaps unsure about why
I'm here. Was he party, I wonder, to the choice of me as singer
on this track? I later find out that 'Protection' is one of his
tracks, so it's perhaps not surprising that he feels possessive of
it, and I'm not altogether sure he's bought into this concept of
genre-bending juxtapositions. Would he prefer Mary J. Blige?
He seems to be under the impression that I am Mary Hopkin,
and have lived in an isolated croft in the Orkneys knitting my
own muesli for the last ten years. I try to make conversation
with him at one point by asking if he likes the new Craig
Mack record, and he squints at me even more suspiciously, as
if I'm deliberately trying to confuse and upset him.
Musically, they seem to be pulling in different directions, but
for the time being this is creating a dynamic tension that is productive
at least as often as it is destructive. Crudely speaking,
Daddy G brings the reggae input, Mushroom the hip hop and
3D seems to want to be The Clash. The disagreements are spectacular
-- and I only witness a fraction of them -- and ultimately
the centre will not hold, but for this brief period it just about
works. The tension between them all is personal as well as musical,
and again seems to stem from the kind of playground
relationships they are locked into. Laura Lee Davies interviews
them for Time Out and experiences a typical scenario:

In the middle of Naples airport, Mushroom and 3D ... are
squabbling. The cause of their disagreement is a glossy football
magazine Dee has just bought ... Mushroom tells me
that Dee wants him to fold it very carefully and bend it the
other way every ten minutes so that it won't crease.

Can these guys really be the saviours of modern dance music?
Maybe so. Out of all this childlike behaviour comes the album Protection, which 
will change everything for a lot of people,
myself included.
This girl I know needs some shelter
But she don't believe anyone can help her
She's doing so much harm, doing so much damage
But you don't want to get involved, you tell her she
can manage
Now you can't change the way she feels
But you could put your arms around her
I know you want to live yourself
But could you forgive yourself

If you left her just the way you found her?

I'll stand in front of you, and take the force of the blow
Protection

You're a boy and I'm a girl, but you know you can lean
on me

And I don't have no fear, I'll take on any man here
Who says that's not the way it should be

And I'll stand in front of you, and take the force of the
blow

Protection

She's a girl and you're a boy
But sometimes you look so small, you look so small
You got a baby of your own
But when your baby's grown
She'll be the one to catch you when you fall

And stand in front of you, and take the force of the
blow

Protection

You're a boy and I'm a girl

You're a boy and I'm a girl

Sometimes you look so small, you need some shelter
You're just running round and round, helter skelter
And I leaned on you for years, now you can lean on me
That's more than love, that's the way it should be
Now I can't change the way you feel
But I can put my arms around you
That's just part of the deal, that's the way I feel
I'll put my arms around you

And stand in front of you, and take the force of the
blow

Protection

You're a girl and I'm a boy

You're a girl and I'm a boy

'Protection', from Protection, 1994
S

ome writers carry a notebook with them at all times; you
never know when you might need to jot down a sudden
idea, a great line that comes to you. Waking in the night with
the best ever album title in your head, which has just come to
you in a dream, you need to have that notebook right there,
on the bedside table, to capture it before it's lost. Some songwriters
try to enforce a kind of work ethic that has them sitting
down at the piano every morning, without fail, facing the
silence and the blank page, trying to get something down, get
some work done every day, in order to keep the creative juices
flowing. Or to prove that it really is a full-time, demanding
job, requiring hours at the coalface like any other, and not just
the occasional besotted moment of inspiration where a song
alights on you as if from above, no effort required. I always
mean to do all these things, but never quite succeed. I can't
seem to control or coerce this writing business -- the ideas
either come or they don't -- and there are long periods of
silence when, far from lyrics welling up in my brain and
demanding an outlet, simply nothing comes at all. My head,
as I've said to Ben on occasion, is just 'empty, like a sieve'.
During the years when I 'retired' from music, between 2001
and 2006, I wrote not a word. They were the baby years, and
I was happy and content, absorbed beyond reason in the minutiae
of every single day. But there was simply nothing
interesting to say about that time, and I didn't have the energy
to think about anything else. Writing vanished from my life.
I honestly thought I might never write anything again, but
then, strangely, the germination of this book set about reminding
me who I used to be and where I'd come from, and why
I'd spent all those years writing and recording songs. It triggered
in me the desire not to let that person disappear for ever,
and so I shelved the book without finishing it and returned to
songwriting instead. But still, even now, the writing ebbs and
flows; a song might appear almost without warning, the silence
descends again, and nothing I do can force anything into life.

In 1994, though, I was in full flow and so was Ben. Having
finally unlocked the pent-up emotions of the last year, we had
each written a flood of songs, which came in a rush like tears
held back after a sudden shock. They were raw lyrics, uncensored
outpourings from the insides of both our confused heads.
With an urgency that came from their needing to be written,
they sounded less detached and mature than anything we had
written for a long time. Like in the old days, we were making
a record again because we NEEDED to.
As well as the inspiration provided by the seismic events of
the previous couple of years, we were musically inspired by the
collaborations with both Fairport and Massive, and so settled
on the concept of creating a kind of modern--retro hybrid. A
combination of acoustic, woody instruments, with lots of
crunchy-sounding analogue samples. The resulting album,
Amplified Heart, was our seventh, and we recorded some of it
at Livingston Studios, with Jerry Boys engineering, and a band
consisting of Dave Mattacks from Fairport Convention on
drums and the legendary Danny Thompson on double bass.
An arrangement was written for us by Harry Robinson, who
had written the strings for Nick Drake's 'River Man'. At the
same time, we were also recording tracks with John Coxon,
who at the time was famous for having produced Betty Boo,
but who would go on to form drum-and-bass duo Spring
Heel Jack. Once again, there are elements of the 'bizarre
hybrid' in this approach, same as there ever was.
With John we recorded the songs 'Get Me' and 'Troubled
Mind', both songs stripped to their acoustic bones, underpinned
by stuttering, scratchy drum samples. And we had an
idea for another song, too, which we'd been playing at home
over a loop of the rhythm track from Raze's 'Break 4 Love'.
We hadn't got a whole song yet, just a few lyrics that I had
found scrawled in a notebook at home. 'I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again ... ' It needed some kind
of lyrical conclusion, a hook to hang the whole thing on.
When that came later, it formed a simple chorus -- 'And I miss
you Like the deserts miss the rain' -- and the song took its
place on the album.
In August 1994, after Amplified Heart had been released and
we'd done some touring, 'Missing' was finally released as a
single. Progressive house duo Chris & James did a mix for the
UK clubs, and a more alternative version was provided by our
Blanco y Negro label-mates Ultramarine.
The Chris & James mix got a respectable amount of play in
UK clubs, but the single stalled at number 69 in the charts. I'd
long since stopped thinking of ourselves as a hit-single group,
and though it had worried me for a while, I was now far less
concerned. Hell, I had my own plans now; I felt like we'd
seized back the means of production. We booked a tour, of
clubs not concert halls, playing as a revved-up acoustic duo,
deliberately visiting every tiny dive you could think of. The
Moles club, Bath, Liverpool's Lomax, King Tut's in Glasgow.
Looking at these tour dates, you could have been forgiven for
thinking, 'Poor old EBTG, what a comedown, eh? Albert Hall
a few years back, now it's the Old Trout in Windsor ... ' I
didn't see it like that at all -- I was having a whale of a time,
feeling nineteen again, eyeball to eyeball with a wide-awake,
enthused crowd, steaming in front of me in some sweaty dive.
Fired up and running on adrenalin, I had a crusading zeal to
seize back my career, and it felt like I'd rediscovered the rawness
of what I'd always done. Both newly skinny and
crop-haired, we'd returned to our roots.
This is from an article I wrote at the time:

Halfway through our current tour of small clubs, we've finished
our set at Manchester University's Hop & Grape and
are about to leave the stage. From the front row, a fan
extends his hand and I cheerfully reach down to shake it.
He grips hard and doesn't let go; instead, he pulls me down
towards him. This is not a handshake, I realise, but a confrontation.
Looking at him closely now I can see that he
sports a kind of ageing-Ted-meets-Morrissey look of quiff,
sideburns and denim, and that he is perilously drunk. 'I've
driven all the way from High Wycombe,' he hisses, managing
to make this sound at once like an act of devotion and
also a kind of vague threat. 'And I want you to play "I Don't
Want To Talk About It": I'm trying to free my hand and
smile, and Ben is trying to leave the stage, and the audience
is stamping and cheering. 'Thanks,' I mutter at him, 'yeah,
yeah, sure, OK.' He lets me go. We weren't intending to
play it, but now I feel somehow obliged, even intimidated.
We come back on and do our usual first encore of
Robert Forster's 'Rock 'n' Roll Friend', and then I whisper
to Ben that we should play 'I Don't Want To Talk
About It'. He's surprised, but begins the song. As we start
singing, I remember how much I love it and I'm almost
grateful to the guy for asking for it, and I look down to the
front row, hoping to be rewarded by his gratitude, and of
course, he's gone ...
Our next gig is at the Lomax, a new club in Liverpool.
We arrive early in the afternoon for a soundcheck, and lying
on the stage is a set list left behind by some previous band.
Their song titles include 'Suck Me Dry' and 'Bend Over
Bitch'. This is hilarious, in a daunting kind of way -- what
kind of psychotic crowd do you get in here on a Saturday
night?
In the end, of course, what we get is an EBTG crowd,
good-humoured and attentive, and it's a great gig. There are
two bars at the club, one up on the balcony and one downstairs,
so inevitably there's a constant low murmur and some
background noise of glasses shattering, but not enough to
bother us onstage. Some of our fans, though, can be fiercely
protective of us, and when we come back for our encore we
are just about to start the song when someone yells, 'Shut
the fuck up while they're playing.' The crowd falls silent,
half laughs and looks at us for our response. Ben creeps
towards his microphone. 'Sorry' he whispers, 'we'll be as
quiet as we can.'

This DIY cottage-industry approach extended into our next
tour of the US as well. Instead of trying to tour with a hired
band and fill concert halls, we set off again as an acoustic duo,
to play in small clubs using in-house sound systems, travelling
much of the time in a self-drive van, just me and Ben, our
sound engineertour manager and one roadie. No PA or
equipment; a few guitars and suitcases in the back. It wasn't a
glamorous way to tour, but it kind of suited the zealously combative
mood I was in. The gigs themselves were fairly extreme,
too, partly due to the proximity of the audience in such small
venues, who were sometimes casual observers and sometimes
scarily manic fans.
In one town, the posters put up around town called us the
'legendary British duo', presumably in an attempt to whip up
some ticket sales. It felt like quite a lot to live up to, but for
some of our US fans, who'd seen a lot less of us over the years
than their counterparts in the UK, we did genuinely seem to
have a status that went way beyond what we were used to.
When we played at the Magic Bag in Detroit, an old 1920s
converted cinema with posters of Miles Davis and Kurt
Cobain in the dressing room, the show had apparently sold out
in a few hours on the day the tickets were announced. When
we went onstage the audience were beside themselves, and the
air of devotion in the room was palpable. One man in the front
row gasped audibly at every introduction. Another guy, who
looked like Allen Ginsberg, nodded sagely to himself at what
he considered to be good chord changes. Couples linked arms
on the ballads. A girl mouthed every lyric. Another fan leaped
to his feet and punched the air when we began 'Driving'.
Their combined focus was at once disarming and uplifting in
its concentrated intensity.
Afterwards a crowd built up outside, and people were shouting
in the side alley. Someone banged on the door to the fire
exit. I was too tired to stay and talk to fans this time, so we got
a taxi to pull up right outside the back door and bundled in and
raced off with people hammering on the roof. Unbelievably,
two cars managed to follow us back to our hotel, which was
half an hour away via freeways and multiple junctions. On the

-Tamer recording artists from England
yt
ever . 0 ..
but the girl
saturday sept 17 with vests

tickets at ticketmaster and track records or cad 280-4,e1,1
951

doors 8: '60pm stio Ti 10prn _Z 951doors 8: 30pm stioi:,-; 10prn
poriTscope 9
porryscope
forecourt outside the hotel, they pulled up behind us. A guy
with every record we have ever released under his arm jumped
out of the still-moving car and approached us. For a moment
I was quite scared.
'Hey, Ben. Hey, Tracey. Will you sign a few things? Oh,
Christ, I can't believe this is happening. Pinch me, someone.
Lord, will you pinch me.'
'It's OK. Take it easy.'
'You should know for every sleeve you sign, I will have a
frame made and hang it in my shrine.'
'Your what?'
'Shrine. To Everything But The Girl. It is just beautiful. Are
you going into the hotel now? I saw you in 1990. Some
people tonight have waited ten years. Are you? Upstairs? To
your room? Oh, Christ, I can't believe this is happening.'
It was all a very intense experience. We were like a band at
the beginning of their existence in terms of the scale of the
work we were doing, and yet behind us was the accumulated
baggage, good and bad, of a long and convoluted career.
Where that baggage used to weigh me down, it now seemed
something I was strong enough to carry, and none of the mistakes
of the past could touch me any more. At the end of the
tour we treated ourselves to a first-class flight home from Tom
Bradley International Terminal at LAX. It was my birthday,
and somehow Ben's mother had managed to hack into the
British Airways computer system and a birthday greeting came
up on the screen when we collected our boarding passes. The
cabin crew presented me with a cake and a congratulatory
bottle of Krug.
When that summer sun comes down
When the season comes around
There will be no end in sight
We will be besieged by light

When we shake off winter's chain
We will see the point again
Right now we are just keeping afloat
But soon we'll be swimming
Soon we'll be swimming

It's all over so let's go on

There's nothing left so let's go on
We can't keep on, so let's keep on
There is no reason so let's make our own
Let's make our own

When the hurricane dies down
And everything lies on the ground
There will be no end in sight
We will be besieged by light

It's all over, let's carry on
It's all over, let's carry on
Right now we are just keeping afloat
But soon we'll be swimming, swimming
Soon we'll be swimming
'Swimming', from Love and Its Opposite, 2010
0

nce upon a time, and quite out of the blue, when I was
least expecting it, I had a huge worldwide hit single.
And I'm going to tell you how it happened because it is a
strange story, with unlikely twists and turns, and it says something
yet again about how peculiar and unpredictable and uncontrollable a career in 
the music business can be.

The story begins in late 1993, with the recording of the
album Amplified Heart. The song 'Missing' was released as a
single from the album and, like most of our singles, failed to
be a hit. The remixes we'd had done had got a certain
amount of club play, but nothing to set the world alight. For
the US, though, Johnny D at Atlantic Records wanted to get
a new mix done, one that could move an American dance
floor. He approached Todd Terry, legendary house DJ and
remir, who came up with a version of the track that
changed almost nothing from the original except the rhythm
track. Todd himself says of the mix: 'I didn't have to do a lot.
They use a lot of melody flavour with the vocals, which
makes my job much easier. They did the production; I just
made it dance.'
It was added to the US release of the single, along with all
the other mixes, and again, nothing much seemed to happen
and we carried on with our new plan of working like maniacs
in the sure and certain knowledge that something brilliant
would ultimately come of it.
Perhaps to test this new self-confidence of ours, WEA, the
company who had bankrolled Blanco y Negro all these years
and had been the major label behind everything we did,
decided to drop us. Having heard Amplified Heart, and then the
tracks I'd done with Massive Attack, and the remixes of
'Missing', they decided in their wisdom that our career was
over, and -- not entirely against our will, it must be said -- let
us go, just at the moment when our self-belief and drive was
probably at its highest point ever.
As Oscar Wilde might have said, you'd have to have a heart
of stone not to laugh.

At the beginning of 1995, I found myself in New York doing
promotion with Massive Attack. There were some interviews,
a live radio session -- well, I was live. The boys sat in the control
room bickering, and watched me sing over the backing
track -- and an album release party. It was a glamorous little
trip, New York was snowy and we stayed in the Philippe
Starck redesigned Royalton Hotel, where my minimalist room
made me feel lonely and rudderless, and inspired me to write
the song 'Single'. At the release party we were feted and fussed
over, and I had the slightly strange experience of feeling like
a 'new' singer with a 'new' band.
But Massive Attack still didn't know what to make of me,
or what on earth I stood for.
One day we were all in a taxi, heading off to a photo shoot,
when Daddy G leaned over and said, 'Trace, I was out last
night and I heard a remix of one of your songs by Todd Terry.
Did you know he'd done that?' He looked a bit concerned.
'Well, yeah,' I replied, and then explained that, contrary to
their unwavering impression of me, I had heard of the notion
of remixes, was not opposed to them and yes, had willingly
agreed to the Todd Terry remix of 'Missing'. And liked it.
They were surprised, but nodded politely.
'Well, it sounded good,' said G. 'You know, bit of a dance
floor hit.'

In April, Ben and I decided to up sticks and go and spend
some time in New York ourselves. We rented a huge but
completely knackered loft apartment down in Tribeca. It had
a standard NY heavy steel door, with bondage-style locks
and bolts studding it from top to bottom. Inside was one
huge dusty space, bereft of furniture, a slightly grimy kitchen
at one end and then off that, one small, windowless bedroom.
We started working on some new songs, believing that
the last album had run its course now, and set about recording
new demos, gathering ideas for the next record -- moving
on again.
And it was while we were in this flat in New York in 1995
that we began to get the first intimations of something happening
with our old single 'Missing'. The same single that I
thought was long dead and buried, months having passed since
it was remixed and sent out to clubs and radio stations.
Unprompted by any record-company promo machines or
advertising, DJs around the world had started playing the Todd
Terry mix and it was going down a storm. It had apparently
become some kind of hit in Italy, but I couldn't quite get the
full etails. An airplay hit, or just in the clubs, or what? I made
a few phone calls, but no one was sure.
Then I opened up Billboard magazine one day, and there it
was in the US club charts, largely on the basis of the massive
amounts of play it was receiving in Miami. Ben called up
Atlantic Records -- still our label in the States -- to see if they
knew what was going on, but our main contact there at the
time was someone who had little connection with the dance
department, so he was somewhat dismissive of the frivolity of
a Miami dance hit, and the idea of it having any serious significance
was pooh-poohed.
We couldn't ring up WEA in the UK to see what they
knew because they'd just dropped us. We no longer had a
record deal, so how could we possibly be having a hit?
Gradually the full picture emerged. Though some people at
Atlantic seemed unaware of its bubbling-under status in the
US, Johnny D in the dance department knew every DJ who
was playing it, and how often, and probably deserves more
credit than anyone else around us for spotting the potential of
this record early, and refusing to give up on it long after it
might have seemed reasonable to admit defeat. He made us
realise that the song really was taking off in a big way, and
wasn't just a weekend sensation but was on its way to establishing
itself as a true anthem.
Back in the UK, our ex-record company began to sit up
and take notice. We were now officially an unsigned band outside
the US, but WEA still had the rights to the track, and,
never ones to look a gift horse in the mouth, the label who
had so recently dropped us decided to set about rereleasing it
throughout Europe. By June it was number one in Italy, and
remained so for weeks. Other European countries followed
suit. In October 1995 it was rereleased in the UK by WEA,
who presumably at this point were feeling a bit sick. They
owned the song but they no longer owned us, and we were
looking dangerously like being on the verge of a late comeback.
You probably don't need me to tell you that 'Missing' was
a hit -- though it was a hit of spectacular proportions. Eleven
weeks in the Top Ten in the UK. Number one in Italy,
Germany and across Europe. And then in the US it began to
pick up radio airplay across the board, spreading like a virus
throughout the whole of America, gradually emerging as a
fully-fledged pop hit. By November it was number 23 in the
US pop charts, then it crawled upwards -- 14, then 12, up to
10. Then another leap up to 4, then 3, then up to 2. Could we
really do it? Have a number2One single in the US?
No, we couldn't. It stopped at number 2, only making it to
number one on the airplay charts.
But it had broken more or less every rule of pop marketing
and strategy, and proved that even the modern, ultra-controlled
music business was still subject to the subtle and unpredictable


whims of public taste. By the end of its extraordinary second
life, 'Missing' had sold around three million copies.

With the benefit of hindsight, the track looks and sounds like
a predestined hit, something that was always meant to be, but
it's salutary to remember that it didn't strike everyone that way
on first hearing. I think it's interesting, too, that it took an
American remixer to find in 'Missing' the elements that crystallised
into its success, where British remixers had wrestled
with its `songiness'. In the US, where rave culture had nothing
like the same impact as it did in the UK, a whole
generation of DJs had a lot of love and respect for our single
'Driving' and The Language of Life album, and to them
'Missing' seemed like a natural development of what we'd
already been doing rather than a complete volte-face.
In retrospect, its mega-success conferred upon it near
mythical status, and inspired my favourite ever piece of EBTG
hyperbole in a review by James Hunter in Village Voice, which
I quote for you here in full:

Fifty or sixty weeks ago, EBTG released 'Missing', a track
from Amplified Heart, as a single. Todd Terry masterminded
a charging remix. Miami radio started playing the shit out
of it. Across the country, slowly but surely, the track continued
to build. And for the past few weeks, the single's
been at or near the top of the American charts.
It's not a good thing. It's a great thing.
Originally, 'Missing' was rage rearranged as calm, rain re
imagined as sand ... A woman takes a train to her ex-lover's
house. He's gone -- 'disappeared somewhere', she fears, 'like
outer space'. As Thorn's voice remains moored and intact,
full of her radical midrange rationality, she wonders, 'Could
you be dead?' What Terry put back into the song was the
founding panic, the hell of abused sleep and liquor cabinets
that put the woman on the train in the first place. He gave
the part to a kind of loud post-disco tech shuffle, an ongoing
beat of changing volume that sounded like a new
character called Trouble who shows up at the ends of the
verses, just before the And I miss you' choruses, kicking
over seats, cursing at the conductor ... The Remix EP
proves that behind tonal modesty can lay stuff so devastating
that it could level the forces of distorted guitars.

I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again
And past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
Now you've disappeared somewhere
Like outer space
You've found some better place

And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain

Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead
Of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout
Down to me

Where I always used to be

And I miss you
Like the deserts miss the rain
Back on the train

I ask why did I come again
Can I confess

I've been hanging round your old address
And the years have proved
To offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone

But I can't move on

And I miss you

Like the deserts miss the rain

'Missing', from Amplified Heart, 1994
(
0

f course, 'Missing' being such a success means that everything
will be different, and I will be treated with a level
of respect bordering on reverence. I will no longer be expected
to perform at humiliating and ridiculous promotional events;
instead, I will take part in occasions which are worthy of me
and which showcase my talents in an appropriate manner.
With all this in mind, in the summer of 1995 we go to Italy
to appear at one of their regular TV pop extravaganzas --
Testivalbar'. These are uniquely Italian phenomena, song contests
at which pop groups from all over Europe who have
current Italian hits are gathered together to mime them in
front of a huge, screaming teenage audience. It's like a pop festival,
but drained of any performance, substance or meaning.
I've appeared at several of these over the years -- San Remo and
Saint-Vincent, for example -- with fellow guests ranging from
Mandy Smith and Simply Red to Patsy Kensit and Kim Wilde,
via Bros and Nick Kamen. Often I have shared dinner tables
and backstage areas with these acts, who have usually been
charming company. For me, it has sometimes been a dispiriting
experience, consisting of being half recognised while
performing a song that isn't quite a hit. Now, though, I have
a single, 'Missing', which has been number one in Italy for
weeks, and is being referred to as disco per l'anno'. Surely
things will have changed, and this year the festival will prove
to be some kind of reward for all the years of indignity? Surely
I'll discover what it's like to be a real pop star?
In fact -- and it's possible to find this vaguely reassuring -- it's
all much the same as it ever was. The location this time is the
curious medieval hill town of Marostica, where the stage for
the whole show has been set up in the chequerboard central
square, beneath the ramparts and in the shadow of the
portcullis Our dressing room is hung with pikes and staffs and
shields, with a chunky oak table for make-up. After hanging
around for a while, we go down to the stage to rehearse, entering
from beneath a neon-lit arch, which makes the stage
resemble Bournemouth pier. I am miming, of course, and Ben
has a Korg keyboard to 'play', despite it having no mains cable
attached, while I have a Fender Telecaster with no guitar lead.
The camera rehearsal is always the most undermining moment
of the day, when self-doubt can overwhelm all sense of your
own value or purpose or desire to live, and today, pretending
to sing and play the guitar while a fag-smoking stage manager
stares blankly at me, is no different.
Also on the show with me is the current Italian pop star,
Irene Grandi, who is performing her hit, the improbably titled
'Bum Bum'. She makes a much better show than I do of actually
enjoying herself, and wanting to be in this environment,
cavorting happily round the stage in a suitably skimpy outfit.
In the break between rehearsal and performance we go to a
pizzeria for dinner, and finally some hint of my current fame
in Italy reveals itself. I am gradually recognised by the waiters,
then 'Missing' comes on the radio to confirm their suspicions,
and soon the whole place has degenerated into an orgy of
gawping, autograph-collecting and Polaroid-taking. Some can
think of no response other than to point at the radio and back
at me, while I smile and nod and feel stupid.
Later, after a torrential thunderstorm almost causes the
whole event to be cancelled, momentarily raising the awful
possibility that we might have to return tomorrow to repeat
the whole day, we finally get to go on and perform the song.
And yes, there is a sense that the crowd do genuinely know
and love this song, but still I feel I am curiously peripheral to
their experience of it. Their excitement is about the record,
not about us -- which is as it should be, really -- and proves that,
in the most basic and obvious way, we haven't changed at all.
Our huge images are projected onto an enormous screen, and
the lights bounce and reflect off the illuminated pink castle,
while Ben pretends to play and I pretend to sing.
On the way home Ben comments that, although it's called
a festival, it feels less like appearing at Glastonbury and more
like being on Jeux Sans Frontieres.
I

t's June 1995, and I'm about to experience my first ever
Glastonbury. I have never been to the festival, and as a band
we have never performed there. In fact, since that disastrous
late-1970s visit to Knebworth, I don't think I've been to a festival
at all. For my generation they have held none of the allure
they do now, in my mind being for ever associated with hippies,
boring old farts, long hair, mud, prog rock and guitar
solos -- everything I hated and was bent on destroying. I've
always thought gigs should be things that happened at night,
after dark, in cities, preferably in front of a crowd of no more
than a few hundred. And that bands should be viewed, ideally,
one at a time, close up, with a drink in your hand and someone
else's cigarette smoke in your face. But here I am, it's the
mid-1990s and festivals have had their comeback and are now
a fixture on the live circuit, deemed suitable even for a band
such as ourselves. Or Massive Attack, who I am also booked
to be appearing with, on the Friday night, in the dance tent.
Ben and I arrive at the site in the middle of Friday afternoon.
In the backstage area I meet up with 3D, Mushroom and G
and the rest of the Massive crew, and we sit around drinking
beer in the afternoon sunshine. It feels to me nothing like
being at a gig at all; there's a sort of holiday, campsite atmosphere
which I simply can't associate with the idea of bands and
performance. As the light fades, we all make our way to the
dance tent and the band begin their set. The tent is huge and
packed with bodies -- a thousand people? two thousand? -- and
is midsummer-steamy, like being in the garden as a child and
sweating it out in the confines of a small cave instead of enjoying
the fresh air. The air is hot and thick with the smell of cut
grass and damp canvas.
The pattern of Massive Attack's gigs is that various singers
come on at points throughout the set to perform their songs.
Horace Andy is there, and Deborah, who sings the Shara
Nelson hits, and then halfway through I come on to sing
'Protection'. As I walk onstage I realise that the volume in this
space is ear-splitting, and the sound seems to swirl aimlessly
around inside the tent, coming and going in waves, gathering
momentum like a whirlpool. I open my mouth to sing the first
note of 'Protection' and the vocal level in my monitors has
simply vanished, or been swallowed up in the volume both on
and off the stage. There is simply nothing there -- I am singing
as if special earplugs have been designed to filter out the sound
of my voice. Being an experienced veteran, I do what you
must never do in these circumstances and fly into a complete
panic, shooting desperate glances at the monitor man to the
side of the stage. He is aware of the problem, and shoots desperate
glances back at me while he tries to fix it, managing to
blow me backwards with a howl of feedback from the monitor
in front of me. It soon becomes clear that there is nothing
much he can do, and I am left with no audible vocal to work
with onstage. All I can hear is the sound bouncing back at me
from the walls of the tent, with a two-second delay, and so I
simply carry on, hoping and praying that I am not too far out
of time or out of tune. As the song finishes I take my bow,
leave the stage and burst into frustrated tears.
Luckily, we are due to return tomorrow to perform as
Everything But The Girl, so there may still be time to redeem
things. We are booked to play an acoustic set on the main stage
at midday, and so, having spent the night at a hotel in Bristol,
we return and are shown to our 'dressing room', a kind of
workman's hut standing on wooden duckboards. Inside is a
table spread with Ben's standard post-operative food supply --
a roast chicken, some white bread, a bit of salad and a bottle
of brandy I am wearing a long, sleeveless thin cotton dress and
turquoise Mary Jane shoes. But it has turned out to be a cold
morning, and I am underdressed. My confidence has been
shaken by last night's events, and I need to warm up.
Thankfully I have recently discovered that brandy is a miracle
cure for the stage fright I've always suffered from. At first, just
a medicinal nip before going on worked wonders. Then that
wore off a bit, so now a little more is needed. It is only eleven
in the morning, and I haven't eaten yet, but I slug back a
couple of large brandies anyway, and hey presto! I feel much
warmer and braver.

At that moment, Jeff Buckley appears unexpectedly in our
cabin.

In New York in April 1995, we had done an acoustic gig at a
little clubcafe in the East Village called Sin-e, for the sole
reason that Jeff Buckley had, in 1993, released his first EP of
live recordings made there. After it was released, and following
tip-offs from Geoff Travis, we went to see Jeff play live in
London, and at first I had mixed feelings of awe and impatience.
He was so good, but he could be so self-involved
onstage it was almost impenetrable, and the self-love was off
putting. Then he'd open his mouth to sing, and you were lost.
I think he took his shirt off at this gig, too, and that may have
played a part in the rapture. In 1994, his first album Grace was
released, and confirmed everything.
Out in New York I wanted to play where he had played,
and so we booked a gig at Sin-e, which really was just a cafe
where they pushed the tables back and you set up in a corner
of the room. We lugged our own gear down there, turning up
with a couple of guitars and a tiny amp, and set up and played
to a packed and amazed room, with the pavement outside
crowded with those who couldn't get in, noses pressed against
the windows, watching from the street.
Our friend Valerie had a small hairdressing salon in the East
Village, and Ben wandered down there one day to get a haircut.
By magical coincidence Jeff Buckley, who was also friends
with Valerie, was in there at the same time getting a trim.
Valerie introduced them to each other and they started chatting,
and soon discovered that we were all booked to play at
that year's Glastonbury. Jeff suggested we team up and do a
song together. Sounds like a great idea, said Ben, and thought
no more about it. When he came home and told me about the
encounter, I made a mental note to accompany him to his hair
appointments in future.

And now, without warning or preamble, at eleven o'clock in
the morning here is Jeff Buckley standing in front of me in my
workman's hut of a dressing room, and he has come to remind
me that we have agreed to do a song together. We are due
onstage in about half an hour.
'Bloody hell, isn't it a bit late now?' I ask. He doesn't think
so. With a kind of gauche enthusiasm that makes him seem
like a spectacularly gorgeous younger brother, he produces a
guitar and begins to throw ideas at us. We swap titles of songs
we might all know, and uncover a shared love of The Smiths.
At random, we settle on 'I Know It's Over' from The Queen
is Dead album, with its awful, prophetic lyric: 'Oh, Mother, I
can feel the soil falling over my head ... '

We run through it a couple of times in the dressing room,
trying to work out who should sing which bits and when. It
sounds OK, but then I am, frankly, a bit pissed.
Suddenly it's time to go onstage, so out we go, in broad if
somewhat cloudy daylight, in front of the just-waking-up
Glasto crowd. It is one of those chilly summer days, a stiff
breeze blowing the grey clouds about. Set lists are flapping at
your feet. You're wishing you had a fleece on. By late afternoon,
when Polly Harvey appears in her pink catsuit, it will be
a fine day, but for now we have to contend with the gloom. I
do my best to connect with the audience, who are several
miles away from the stage, but it does feel as if it is falling a bit
flat. Then, like the magical moment when Paul Weller joined
us all those years ago at the ICA, Jeff Buckley, this year's heartthrob
hero, comes onstage and the mood lifts. Never one to
shy away from a song's potential for emotion, if not downright
melodrama, Jeff attacks the vocal as though his life depends on
it. Together, the two of us howl our way through The Smiths
number -- 'It's so easy to laugh It's so easy to hate It takes
guts to be gentle and kind' -- crashing into each other's ad-libs,
wandering in and out of tune and hilariously stepping on each
other's toes. At the end, the audience look more startled than
anything, but it has at least woken them up. A great, if chaotic
moment, entirely true to the spirit of Glastonbury.
Later that afternoon, Jeff is onstage with his own band, and
we are watching from the wings. At the end of one song he
looks over to us, catches Ben's eye and starts beckoning him
onstage with furious jerks of his head. It's the scene at the end
of Spinal Tap when the band reunite onstage! Ben picks up a
guitar, gamely ambles on and plugs in.
'OK,' yells Jeff, 'we're gonna do "Kick Out The Jams".
One-two-three-FAWH!'
Now, Ben may well be the only guitarist in rock music who
had never heard MC5's punk anthem, let alone played it. Still,
he's nothing if not a quick learner, and after about eight bars
he has sussed it and is off and running. Jeff's set is one of those
being filmed for TV broadcast that day, and watching at home,
one of our friends sits bolt upright to get a closer look at the Zelig-like 
moment unfolding on screen in front of her. Is that
Ben there, on the telly, onstage at Glastonbury standing behind
Jeff Buckley, playing an MC5 song? Before she can get a clear
view, the camera swings back to Jeff, and by the next song Ben
is gone.
M
'issing' had been a huge hit. My career was saved ...

hooray!
From here on it should be easy, no?
Well, no, of course you have realised by now that it doesn't
work like that, and that the moments of success, when you glide
along with swanlike grace, conceal the same frantic amount of
paddling going on beneath the surface as ever before.
I'd had a hit single before, remember -- admittedly, not on
this scale -- and it had led me nowhere. By now I was old
enough and wise enough to know that one hit did not last for
ever, and you were only ever as interesting as your next record,
not your last one. This time, though, that very fact seemed less
like a daunting recipe for disaster and more like a challenge,
which I at least had a chance of rising to. We were still racing
along with that second wind in our sails, full of purpose and
direction, an entirely different band from the one we'd been a
few years earlier. People said that at this point we 'reinvented
ourselves', and that the reason for the sudden about-turn in
our fortunes was that we completely and utterly changed in a
way that could not have been foreseen. But that sounds so calculated
and opportunist, it just doesn't ring true. And even the
word 'reinvention' had become a trite cliche, often seeming to
refer to nothing much more profound than the notion that
Madonna changed her hair colour every time she had a new
record out. Did that really constitute reinventing yourself?
It wasn't so much that we turned from an acoustic band into
an electronic one, as that we turned from a band with no confidence
back into a band who believed in themselves. And
while it's true that we changed, what also happened -- and this
is the most overlooked factor in the story -- was that the world
changed, again, and like the magical lands at the top of the
Faraway Tree, the music scene swung around and landed back
at our feet.
By the mid-1990s grunge had finally died, and dance music
had experienced something of a post-rave comedown. 'Missing's success came 
about in part because it brought a
moment of melancholy and heartbreak back to the dancefloor,
a combination many people had always loved but perhaps forgotten.
With artists like Massive Attack and Tricky, Portishead
and Bjork came an evolution in expectations of electronic
music with beats. It could be melodic and heartfelt, as well as
experimental. Slow and moody. Atmospheric. All the things
I'd always been good at.
The press were also beginning to employ new terms like
'sleazy listening' and `loungecore', which sounded a whole lot
more hip and, well, hardcore than easy-listening background
music. Music that might formerly have been defined sneeringly
as 'dinner-party music' was suddenly being redefined as
'chill-out'. All these changes meant that suddenly, me doing
what came naturally was regarded in a very different light.
In 1995, just before 'Missing' really took off, we had left New
York and come back to London, lured by Ben's growing sense
that the drum-and-bass scene was the most exciting thing he'd
heard in years. As soon as we got back, Ben started going to
the club Speed, which LTJ Bukem had started in 1994 at the
Mars Bar. He was totally enthused by what he was hearing,
and one night he persuaded me to come along too. I was
apprehensive at first -- Will we fit in? Will we get pointed at? --
but at this moment, just before the huge success of 'Missing',
we were still quite anonymous and so were able to get back to
being participants in a music scene, part of the crowd, rather
than famous representatives of something else entirely. We
queued up at Speed and weren't really spotted. In fact, if I got
recognised at all at this point, it was for being the singer with
Massive Attack. I was surrounded by a new generation who
only knew me for the good stuff I'd done recently There was
no history or baggage weighing me down. It was fabulous --
a completely clean slate.
We got into the club early and sat drinking beer, and got up
to dance while Doc Scott was DJing. It was mostly blokes, I
noticed, but the atmosphere wasn't laddish, more muso.
Everyone was pretty dressed down: jeans, hoodies, cool trainers.
On the dancefloor there were a few high-speed breakdance
experts, but most of the rest of us were doing a kind of halftime
skinhead skank. It was a bit like being at a postmodern
Specials gig. It wasn't a rock gig, and it wasn't a rave -- it felt like
something new again. Strange and yet familiar, it felt possible.
Ben in particular was completely inspired by what he was
hearing because alongside the beats, in the acres of empty space,
he could hear room for a big fat vocal like mine. At home, in
the basement studio of our house, he began working on new
tracks, almost writing in reverse, creating the mood first and
writing the song later. The guiding ethos was `electronica with
songs' -- and although today that sounds like a fairly commonplace
idea, in 1996 it was less so. John Coxon, who produced
some of the Amplified Heart album, including the original version
of 'Missing', had by now formed drum-and-bass duo
Spring Heel Jack with Ashley Wales (who, in another extraordinary
example of the wheel coming full circle, had played in
a band called Crazy About Love with the teenage Ben). They
sent us a piece of music they had created and Ben wrote a song
over the top of it, in much the same way that I collaborated
with Massive Attack. The track was 'Walking Wounded', and
would be the follow-up single to the smash hit 'Missing'.
One thing this approach did mean, however, was that I really was not involved 
at all in the creation of the music. For
a technophobe like me, there was no appeal in trying to get to
grips with sequencing and programming, the creation of music
in an electronic context. I loved the results, but had to take a
complete back seat when it came to the making of this sound.
The fact that I didn't entirely mind says something about
where I was at this point. We were in the middle of a career
high point, and though I was excited about it all, I was beginning
to feel a bit less involved, less entirely engaged, than I had
for a while. We'd talked on and off over the years about the
possibility of having children, but various things had kept
deferring the decision. At the end of the 1980s we toyed with
the idea, but decided to carry on touring instead. 'Apron
Strings' was written when the first stirrings of maternal feeling
were aroused by my sister having babies. I had wondered
what it would be like, what kind of mother I'd be, but the
wonderings were vague, a bit idealised. Motherhood was a
theoretical concept to me; children I had almost no experience
of. Then Ben's illness intervened, and after his recovery it was
more the salvaging of our career that energised us than the idea
of slowing down and starting a family.
But it began to nag away at me, a little barely acknowledged
gap at the centre of everything. I hinted obliquely at it on Amplified Heart -- 
'What is it that I think I need Is there love
in me that wants to be freed?' -- but shied away from addressing
it too directly.
Now, in 1995, I was beginning to wonder whether the
repeated deferrals might just go on for ever, and whether we
might agree in theory to the idea of having a family but simply
never postpone our career for long enough to actually get
round to it. This was starting to worry me, and I was feeling
that in the end it might have to be a unilateral decision, that
I might have to put my foot down at some point and say,
'Enough!'
All of this was preoccupying me. And the record we were
making was ultimately more Ben's baby than my own, however
much I loved it.
Still, despite my distraction, I had to admit this next step in
our musical career was exciting. There were no certainties
involved in any of it, no sense of treading familiar ground;
rather, a strong feeling of heading out into uncharted waters.
Just before Walking Wounded came out, I remember thinking
that it could go either way. We might triumph, or we might
fall flat on our faces. We worried that we would annoy some
of the drum-and-bass underground by making a pop version
of a sound that was still so new, but in the end even that never
really happened. When the single 'Walking Wounded' was
released, Mixmag Update acknowledged that 'this record's very
existence is going to upset some people', but they took an
early and decisive stand by making it Single of the Week.
On its release in April 1996, the single entered the charts at
number 6, our highest ever chart entry. No doubt this was
partly off the back of 'Missing', but even so, it's a long time
since any band could take for granted the fact of one hit single
leading to another. The follow-up single, 'Wrong', went in at
number 8, and the album itself charted at number 4.
To our relief, most of the media greeted the whole project
with amazed delight, and we were suddenly press darlings in
a way we hadn't been since the early 1980s. Every magazine
wanted to talk to us again, from Time Out and the broadsheet
papers through to Q and Spin. We were interviewed by The
Face, i-D magazine, Dazed & Confused, Jockey Slut . . . The kind
of magazines who would have killed themselves laughing if
you'd suggested an EBTG feature a few years earlier.
Six years before, we had released an album, Worldwide, which had been 
non-reviewed, considered worthy of no one's
attention, about which there was simply nothing to say. Some
artists might have resented the fact that the very same magazines
who had ignored me back then were courting me,
hanging on my every word. But I don't think I've ever had
much of a sense of entitlement about any of it. And I've always
been able to see, perhaps a little too clearly for my own good,
that there was no point at all in defending records that just
weren't quite good enough. We'd once written a letter to Q
magazine denouncing a Best of Everything But The Girl record
that had been put together without our involvement, because
it consisted of material that just wasn't our best. Q thought this
was hilarious, that a band would actually write in to the letters
page to slag off their own record. Now, we felt no
bitterness at all; it seemed entirely logical to us that the press
liked us better because we had made a better record.
The reviews were resoundingly good, and at the end of the
year we featured in most of the Best of Year round-ups in the
press. We were played on the radio, appeared on all the TV
music shows from Top of the Pops to Later . . . with Jools Holland, and life in 
general became more pop-starry. Having watched
them at home on TV for years, we started getting invited to
awards ceremonies. In February 1995 we'd been to the Brits
with Massive Attack, when 'Protection' was up for a couple of
awards, and though it was the height of the Britpop Oasis vs
Blur battle, I felt that ours was the table to be on, with Massive
and Tricky and Bjork. The rock kids seemed to be trapped in
a dreary rehash of the past, still repetitively harking back to the
yawn-inducing 1960s, while we were with a group of people
who were looking forwards, and I felt proud to be part of it.
By 1996, 'Missing' was up for Best Single at the Brits, and later
in the year Ben would be nominated for Best Producer at the
Q awards, and we attended as nominees in our own right.
I'd been to events like this a few times down the years --
the infamous Brit Awards presented by Sam Fox and Mick
Fleetwood, for instance, where I embarrassed myself by mistaking
one of the penguin-suited heads of our record company
for a waiter and ordering a glass of wine from him -- and they
were always strange affairs. Though there's been an attempt in
recent years to Hollywoodise the presentation of the Brits,
turning them into a pale approximation of the Oscars, it doesn't
really work. It somehow goes against the grain of British sensibility,
especially the music-biz sensibility, to be so slick and
stage-managed. I've been to the MTV Awards in New York,
and the event runs like clockwork: you are terrorised into being
in your seat on time and at all times throughout the show, and
it is boring in the extreme. The Brits, on the other hand, can
be guaranteed to produce some moment of loutishness, unpredictable
bad taste, drunken rebellion or sheer amateurism.
Every year the event moves a little closer to blandness and
becomes less likely to throw up moments of absurdity like the
Jarvis Cocker incident or the brilliant sight of Bjork and Polly
Harvey performing 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction'. But those
aspects are only the public face of the whole show anyway.
When you're actually present, the most bizarrely memorable
moments are usually the unpredictable encounters with other
pop stars.
One night, at just such a ceremony, I had a long and heartfelt
chat, before either of us had kids, with Liam Gallagher
about his deep and unsuspected yearning to be a father. It was
all he wanted to talk about, and while onlookers may have
thought he was slagging off Damon Albarn or offering me a
line of coke, he was actually saying to me, 'I'm desperate to
have kids. Desperate.' In fact, I think he may even have said,
'I'm mad for it.'
Sometimes these meetings could be joyous, and leave you
with an anecdote you couldn't wait to share. Like when Thorn
Yorke came and told me that back in 1985 he'd been thrown
out of an EBTG gig for DANCING. Other occasions were
shudder-inducing catastrophes. Like the time I found myself
sitting next to Lenny Kravitz. I was wearing a dress covered in
little sequins, and at this point Lenny still had those long dreadlocks.
He was joking with the person next to him, swinging
his head flamboyantly as he laughed, and -- you can see what's
coming next, can't you? -- he threw his head round towards
me, and his dreadlocks got stuck to the front of my glittery
dress. He was caught fast, with his head slightly bowed before
me, more or less in my lap. Picture the two of us, embarrassed
beyond words, fumbling and fiddling to get his hair free. We
coughed politely, turned aside and never spoke of it again.

But I should stress again: this really isn't the pattern of most pop
careers. Some fourteen years after our first release together, 1996
was our biggest year ever both critically and commercially.
It reminded me of a conversation producer Robin Millar
had told me he'd had many years before with Seymour Stein
from Sire Records.
'I don't know when it's gonna be,' Robin had told Seymour,
'it could be their second album, or it could be their seventh or
eighth album -- but one day, Everything But The Girl are
gonna make a really successful record.'
Seymour's response was a clear indication of the way the
music business was going at the beginning of the 1980s. 'I
haven't got time to wait for eight albums: he declared. `Gimme
success now! Gimme Madonna!'

Robin had been uncannily prescient. Walking Wounded, which went on to sell 1.2 
million copies, was our eighth album.

My greatest stroke of fortune was to be given success when I
was old enough to enjoy it and not take it for granted, or fritter
it away, or be contemptuous or arrogant or supercilious
about it. And I was lucky to have achieved my greatest success
with a record I was proud of, and finally to reach a place where
I felt understood and liked for who I really was. All the doubts
that had set in from around the time of The Language of Life --
were we just the kind of people who couldn't enjoy success,
perhaps couldn't enjoy ife? -- were answered now. It turned out
it was possible after all, and I saw it, and it was good.
At the same time, being that much older prevented me from
being dazzled, and I knew only too well that there were limits
to the fulfilment that success and acclaim could bring. It was
great; it was certainly better than not having success and
acclaim. But it wasn't everything.
We'd been working pretty much solidly for the last three
years, recording, touring, promoting. If it hadn't been for our
resurrection I don't imagine we would have carried on at such
a furious rate. After all, without the new motivation and direction,
we would have been in danger of turning into our own
tribute band, hauling ourselves round the country year after
year to play songs we'd written back in the days when we were
young and inspired. That would never have appealed to me,
any more than taking part in those gruesome revival tours
appeals to me now. But becoming unexpectedly cool again
was a blast, I have to admit. In terms of my public persona I
felt reinvigorated, young again. I'd stayed skinny -- had in fact got skinnier, 
thanks to Ben's illness and the resulting trauma --
so I could get away with wearing the same kinds of clothes.
Many of our fans were younger than us, which kept us on our
toes and energised us.
But still, dragging ourselves out of the deep dark hole we'd
fallen into had been time-consuming and exhausting, and
though I felt rejuvenated, I wasn't actually getting any younger.
I was thirty-five years old, and though I'm loath to reduce
myself to a magazine cliche, my biological clock was ticking
as loudly as Liam Gallagher's. My friend Lindy Morrison,
some years older than me, had reached a point in 1990 when,
as she says, 'I was desperate to have a baby. I had it tattooed on
my forehead, DESPERATE TO HAVE A BABY!'
By 1997 I was in exactly the same state, and I think it was
only because I was working in an almost exclusively male
world that those I was surrounded by didn't notice or couldn't
read those words that were printed on my own forehead. What
looked like the opening move in a whole new career actually
felt to me like the endgame.

March 1997, and I'm in a hotel room in Perth. I've just been
told by Ben that we've been offered the support slot on the
upcoming U2 stadium tour of America. U2 at this point are
going through a period of dancefloor-inspired reinvention
themselves, so I can see why they've made the connection, but
it is nonetheless a jarring juxtaposition in many ways. While
U2 might be the most open-minded of musical magpies, I'm
not sure that the whole of their US audience is ready to
embrace UK drum and bass, or tolerate the kind of small-scale,
deliberately minimalist non-performance I would most likely
offer. The thought of stepping onstage in a 60,000-seater
stadium somewhere in the Midwest in front of an impatient
rock audience and attempting to sing 'Missing' at them, fills
me with a kind of stomach-churning horror.
And yet ... Everyone else around us is beside themselves
with excitement at the prospect. This is the kind of opportunity
people pay for, and we have just been handed it on a plate.
If you were being properly ambitious and careerist, you would
regard it as the perfect stepping-stone leading to bigger and
better things, opening doors, propelling you one rung higher
up the ladder. I have never been totally immune to this way of
thinking, nor have I ever been fully able to believe in it. I've got
into the habit these days of always seeing the pitfalls along with
the potential. This time, though, I think Ben really is going to
leave the decision up to me. I think he knows that I'm the one
with the strongest feelings about what has to happen next.

I look around the room, at the view, the grand piano, every
thing.
I'm really glad the phone call came in -- it'll be a good story
to tell everyone later, something to show off about. But here's
what I say.
'Actually, babe, d'you know what? I think I want to stop
now.'
Apron strings hanging empty
Crazy things my body tells me
I want someone to tie to my
Apron strings

Apron strings waiting for you
Pretty things that I could call you
I want someone to tie to my
Lonely apron strings

Your baby looks just like you when you were young
And he looks at me with eyes that shine
And I wish that he were mine

Then I go home to my

Apron strings, cold and lonely
For time brings thoughts that only
Will be quiet when someone clings to my
Apron strings

And I'll be perfect in my own way
When you cry I will be there
I'll sing to you and comb your hair
And all your troubles I will share
For apron strings can be used for
Other things than what they're meant for
And you'd be happy wrapped in my
Apron strings
You'd be happy wrapped in my
Apron strings
PART FIVE
J anuary 1998. Less than a year later.
I'm lying on a table in the operating theatre, about to
give birth to twins by Caesarean section. I've had an epidural,
which has taken hold down one side of my body better than
the other. This will prove to be less than ideal towards the
second half of the procedure, when I'm being stitched up
again. There will be tears, both of joy at the arrival of these,
our first children, and also of pain. It will be the most memorable
day of my life so far, and one I would happily revisit at
a moment's notice.

But the one thing -- THE ONE THING -- that is marring
this otherwise perfect moment, and setting up a memory that
will linger and compete with all the profound and meaningful
memories, is the fact that in the heat of the moment I have
forgotten to bring a CD with me to the hospital. Forgotten to
bring any music of any kind. And then, also in the heat of the
moment, I have agreed that the nurse can choose a CD to put
on. And she has selected some kind of compilation, possibly
entitled One Hundred Songs You Most Love to Hate, so that as my
first child enters the world -- and bear in mind that I am someone
to whom music has always been of some importance -- the
song that is playing is 'Where Do You Go To My Lovely?' by
Peter Sarstedt.

I'd always sworn that I would be a non-neurotic, very laid
back mother. My babies would sleep in a drawer! I wouldn't
obsessively sterilise everything! They'd eat whatever we ate!
And I would get on with my life, exactly the same, just with
a baby strapped to my back. I planned to be a kind of cool,
semi-detached parent, and Ben and I would go back on tour
with a couple of rugrats crawling round the tour bus, raising
free-range children who would just uncomplainingly fit in
with our way of life.
But now I had two actual, real babies to care for. Two small,
premature babies. They'd been born six weeks early, and after
the Caesarean were immediately whisked away in wheeled
incubators to the neonatal intensive care unit. When I next
saw them, they were both hooked up to monitors, being fed
by tubes up their noses, their tiny arms bound with splints to
hold drips in place. Here I was, once again, sitting beside a
bed -- or in this case, two incubators -- in an intensive care unit.
Back to the crazed fixation on pulsing lights and sudden bleeps
of alarms, back to scanning doctors' faces for a hint of untold
bad news amid the positivity, back to washing my hands with
super-strong detergent a hundred times a day till they were raw
and cracked.
I felt responsible for these little people to a degree I simply
hadn't anticipated, and the idea of handing them over to nannies
while I got on with my career was all of a sudden
unthinkable. The experience of Ben's illness a few years earlier
had stripped off an outer layer when it came to my feelings
about those I loved, and there was a fierceness there now, a
kind of fighting spirit that seemed to believe that if anyone I
cared for was in danger or in need, I had to be there, absolutely
full time, and no one else would do.
Even once they were out of hospital, that state of mind
didn't switch itself off, and I found I was turning into the kind
of domesticated, child-centred, stay-at-home mother I'd never
had any time for. I didn't really know what to make of myself;
all I knew was that wild horses wouldn't drag me out of the
house. Meanwhile Ben, devoted dad though he was, had not
had the same kind of epiphany and did not believe that having
children spelled the end of everything else. Not wishing, or
perhaps not daring, to intrude upon my slightly nutty onetrack-mindedness,
he quietly busied himself for a while with
other projects, focusing on the DJing that had become a passion
and starting up a club night, Lazy Dog, which would end
up running for five years. Also reluctant to let the momentum
we had built up over the last couple of records just dribble
away to nothing, he set about beginning our next album, not
really knowing for sure whether I would be participating at all.
Downstairs in the little makeshift basement studio in our
house, he got on with writing and creating music and lyrics.
At the same time, I was totally and utterly wrapped up in the
world of babies, happy as a clam, content to slob around the
house all day in baggy track pants, wander up to the shops with
a pram and then settle down in front of afternoon telly while
I fed them both. After some pushing from Ben, I somehow
produced a few lyrics, though because motherhood had made
me so happy I found I had absolutely nothing to say about it,
so I just ignored the whole subject. Ben, interestingly, wrote a
set of lyrics which were mostly about going out. In the
evenings, after the twins had fallen asleep in their cots, I would
drag myself downstairs, set up the little winking baby monitor
in the corner of the room and record the vocals, having to stop
in time for the last feed of the night at around eleven. I loved
all the music Ben was creating, but I just wasn't in the right state
of mind to contribute much of any value, and in a sense, I
ended up being guest vocalist on someone else's album.
The problems really started when the record was finished,
and I found I had no appetite at all to jump back into the gruelling
schedules of promotion and touring. I conceded that I
would do some interviews at the record-company offices, but
I would give them only a short period of time each day, so that
I wouldn't be away from the kids for too long. The timings in
my diary are very specific, and say things like: 'Interviews at
Virgin, 2-4 p.m.', or 'Photos for US, 12-4 p.m.'. In August,
Ben went to New York for five days without me to cover all
the US promotion. In between times, he was spending hours
on the phone to journalists in every corner of the world, doing
phone interviews for every music paper that now wanted to
talk to us, just when I'd decided I no longer wanted to talk to
them. I was feeling guilty, and committed to a project that
really my heart wasn't in, but I couldn't pull out and leave Ben
in the lurch, so I tried, half-heartedly, to carry on. It wasn't my
finest moment. There was an element of prevarication and
cowardice involved, and when I should have been saying, 'I
don't want to do this any more,' in fact, I ummed and ahh-ed
and pretended it would all be fine. I was desperate for someone
else to tell me I could stop, that it was OK not to want
this, when in reality only I could make that decision.
Instead, I said nothing, and with the girls aged eighteen
months, we set off on a UK tour, taking them with us. It was
a complicated set-up, as any tour where the band are a couple
with twin toddlers is going to be. It wasn't just that it was
exhausting; all tours are exhausting, that's half the fun. But the
family element removed some of the frisson of being on the

road, which at best enables you to live out an almost comically
alternative lifestyle. This was the least rock 'n' roll tour of all
time. We took a nanny along with us to help, but if I was
awake and visible, the girls wanted me. During the day we'd
take them out to a nearby park in whatever town we were in,
then try to make the journey to the next town coincide with
their afternoon nap so that they'd sleep in the tour bus. Then
go to the soundcheck, where they'd run around and shout into
microphones from the stage, being made a fuss of by all the
crew, and eat their tea in the backstage dressing room. Back to
the hotel, where I'd help give them a bath and get them settled
in bed. At that point I'd have to try and turn myself into
someone else. Someone less like a mum with sick down her
T-shirt and more like a pop star. I'd put my make-up on and
get into a change of clothes, race back to the venue and do the
gig. Back to the hotel, hoping not to be woken in the night,
and up toddler-early in the morning to start all over again.
No, it wasn't just the exhaustion. It was more the split
personality thing of having to be two different people at
different times of the day. 'Mummy' in daylight hours, except
when I was also called upon to do my job of soundchecking
for the night's gig. Then, later that night, when the audience
had arrived and the lights were down, I'd go onstage and have
to become someone else, a character I'd never been that comfortable
with anyway -- a singing show-off -- only now I felt
even more of a phoney and a fraud than ever before. It was all
my onstage nightmares rolled into one.
At the end of the UK tour I agreed to do one show in New
York and, not wanting to make the girls travel all that way, but
also not wanting to be away from them for any length of time,
I flew out on Concorde on the day of the gig and flew back
home, on Concorde, the next day. It wasn't really being on
tour, and it wasn't really being at home with the kids. The
record company were moaning that I wasn't promoting the
record, and the kids moaned if I went out the front door. This
couldn't go on. The budget wouldn't stand it, for one thing.
Back in that Perth hotel room I'd said I wanted to stop, and
then I had wobbled and thought maybe it would be possible
to do both -- to have kids and carry on doing music, recording
and travelling round the world. I suppose it is technically
possible -- other people manage it, after all -- but it didn't seem
to work for me. I was doing neither thing very well, and I was
miserable.

We tried to come up with a compromise: play festivals
instead of touring. That way we could reach a large audience
in a short space of time, reducing the travelling and the time
away from home. So we played at the Roskilde Festival in
Denmark, and then the Montreux Jazz Festival, taking the girls
with us and staying in a beautiful hotel overlooking the lake.
That little trip was actually quite enjoyable. It was only spoiled
by the fact that I began to feel sick the morning after the gig.
On the way home, at the airport, I felt worse -- sick and faint.
It passed as the day wore on, but the next morning I woke up
and felt sick again. Eight months later, our son Blake was born,
and that gig at Montreux in July 2000 became the last gig I
did.
The dog days of summer
Heat haze and bad temper
And whole days of shouting
'Would you listen to me!'

See, I'm the one in charge now
What happened to me?

I turned into someone's mother

Really someone should give me a uniform
Or someone should show me where is the door
Or someone should come around and explain
How it is that love forgets to speak its name

And then you turn on the news
And it's somebody else's news

And it's always such bad news
And I'm no good with sad news any more
Gets me running upstairs
To count heads in tangled beds

And someone tears up that uniform
And somewhere gently closes a door
And I'm right here once more
Crying, confessing and counting my blessings
Don't let go
'Cause we'll never know

And even when the sky is clear
And the moon looks really close
Well, it's nowhere near

It's December 2004; four years since that last gig. I haven't
performed at all in that time. Or recorded, or written a song,
or sung. I'm beginning to wonder myself why exactly this is.
After all, it's what everyone asks me nowadays, and I'm not
sure what the true answer is.

'What are you doing at the moment?' they say. 'Haven't
heard anything of you for a while.'
'I've had three kids,' is my standard answer.
Sometimes it's met with immediate and clear understanding.
A kind of, 'How wonderful, but yes, of course you can't combine
that with a pop career!'
Sometimes there's just a sense of amazed bewilderment.
Tonight I'm at an EMI party, where the question seems to
hang in the very air around me.
I'm back in the kind of setting I spent years in. A smoky,
noisy party, surrounded by record-company execs and other
recording artists. Free drinks. Supermodel-style waitresses
slinking through with trays of designer nibbles: satay and sushi.
Wraps and dips. There's bound to be a vodka luge somewhere,
I just haven't seen it yet.
I'm introduced to Moby, who grumbles about the cigarette
smoke and is very charming in a nervous, nerdy way, claiming
to be a long-time fan since the Marine Girls days, and to
have seen an early solo gig by Ben. He disarms me by declaring
that I should record an album of old jazz standards -- the
last thing I want to do. He defends this by saying that he loves
melancholic ballads best of all, and I reply, yes, but there are
always new ones to be written. Hah! As if I've been writing
any.
I spot Neil Tennant across the room and want to say hello
to him. We've met before, and I think of him as some sort of
kindred spirit. Same generation and motivation. The Pet Shop
Boys could probably tempt me back, I think. I'd like to follow
in Dusty's shoes. I sidle up next to him, and he's also charming.
But, like Moby, he immediately asks what I am doing
these days 'with my lovely voice'. 'Shouting at the kids,' I
answer. It's meant to be wryly funny, but comes out sounding
like Waynetta Slob. He looks dismayed.
I tell him I've had the idea to try and write a book telling
the whole story. He reminds me of his review of 'Night And
Day' for Smash Hits, which I have recently unearthed in my
trawl through the cuttings collection. 'It wasn't even in the pile
for review,' he says. 'I dug it out specially.'
While we're chatting, a flash goes off as someone takes our
picture -- I turn to see that it's Erlend Oye from Kings of
Convenience, who comes to say hello and kiss my hand devotedly.
He has recently found a vinyl copy of A Distant Shore and
has been listening to it. He too wants to convey to me the significance
of things I've done. Reminders of my past are
everywhere this evening. Everyone here seems to have a clear
sense that I should still be singing, and cannot quite understand
why I'm not. Momentarily, while I'm actually in their company,
I start to feel the same. Something stirs.
But by the time I'm in the taxi going home, I've already forgotten.
I don't seem to feel any need. I think I'm just fine as
I am. I'm happy. Content. In these driven times of binge
working, I'm left feeling inadequate.

So yes, four years without singing a note. Sometimes when
people asked me about it I said, only semi-joking, that I had
completely retired. I would then rationalise that statement by
arguing that in a long career -- seventeen years -- I had achieved
everything I wanted to achieve; there was nothing left for me
to prove, and I was happy now to leave it all behind. I had
three small children, and they were as time-consuming and fulfilling
as I could wish anything to be. And it certainly wasn't
the case that I was at home with the kids because I had to be.
Ben was there, helping through it all, and the truth is that we
could have afforded an army of nannies. I could have been
back on tour, or out every night, whatever I wanted. But it
seemed that what I wanted was to go to Gymboree and sing
'The Wheels On The Bus', and then come home and have
some lunch, watching Little Bill on the telly.
I have a couple of friends who had kids and felt this way
too. Took their maternity leave, then never went back. Equally,
I have friends who were crawling up the walls by week twelve,
and skipped back to work with barely a backward glance the
day the nanny arrived. And, of course, yet other friends who
had no choice in the matter. They had to go back to work,
and did the juggling that most women do. The last thing I
have ever wanted to be is a poster girl for the stay-at-home
mum brigade, many of whom scare me beyond belief with
their non-stop breastfeeding and organic cupcakes. No, I didn't
feel that I was representing anybody: I just wanted to hang out
with my kids, I was temporarily bored with being in a pop

group, and I had the luxury of being able to make that choice.
Once I had disengaged from the music business, I began to
relish living a more completely anonymous life. The kids
weren't used to me working, or familiar with my identity as a
pop star, and so they would be completely baffled on those
occasions when someone would come up and ask for an autograph.
They would look bewildered and ask, 'What are you
writing on that bit of paper, Mummy? But why, WHY does
that lady want your name written down?' Like all mums, I
sang to my kids at home, so they knew what my voice
sounded like, and once when I walked into a branch of Gap,
pushing Blake in a pushchair, 'Missing' was playing loudly. He
twisted round to look at me, little finger pointing upwards
towards the source of the music. 'Mummy!' he exclaimed in
a tone of pure amazement. 'You are singing in the shop.' When
he started at school, he came home one day and said to me,
'Mum, did you used to be famous?'
'Urn, sort of, a bit,' I replied.
'It's just my teacher says she's got all your records.'
The kids found it slightly confusing and strange, but above
all, just not that interesting. It wasn't who I was to them.
'Tracey Thorn' was someone they didn't know, who seemed
to belong to strangers. Meanwhile, I was Mum.
I turned forty, and realised the life I was living now felt
more grown-up than any life I'd led before, and I began to
look down on the world of pop music with a kind of disdain
born of my newly acquired maternal wisdom. Being at home
all day with the kids, I felt more in control than I had for years.
I wore what I wanted, ate what I wanted, made no effort at all
beyond what was strictly necessary and got on with looking
after myself and the kids. Like a proper adult. And far from
finding it a more boring, constrained or lonely existence, I was
able to make a lot of friends. For the first time in my adult life,
I was living in a mostly female world. For years I had inhabited
the almost exclusively male domain of the music business.
It had been hard to make women friends when there just
weren't that many women around. Now I had a whole new
female gang, and I was defiantly enjoying it.
I wasn't always sure whether these other mums knew 'who
I was', or what my job had been before. Often it wasn't discussed
at all, and so I assumed my anonymity was complete.
But it was sometimes a bit like living in disguise, wondering
whether at any moment my cover would be blown. I remember
when the kids were very small standing outside school,
Blake in a pram, waiting for the girls to come out. I was with
a group of mums, talking about teachers and playdates and
school dinners, when suddenly a huge, gleaming Range Rover
with black-tinted windows slowed as it neared us and then
pulled over to the side of the road. The window whirred
down and a voice called out, 'Tracey! Tracey! Hi, how are
you?' In unison, all heads turned towards the car and the familiar
face that leaned out, the stubble and sunglasses confirming
the almost unbelievable fact that, yes, it was George Michael.
Sometimes it reminded me of those days up in Hull, where
I was a sort of part-time pop star and, in true English fashion,
everyone was too polite to mention it.

But all this time I was playing house, Ben had carried on a kind
of parallel life, establishing himself as a DJ and remixer, then as
a club owner and finally, and perhaps most importantly, starting
his own dance label, Buzzin' Fly, and its subsidiary alt-rock
imprint, Strange Feeling. In 1998, very soon after the girls were
born, he'd set up the club night Lazy Dog at the Notting Hill
Arts Club, and he DJed there on alternate Sundays right
through until 2003. After that he went into partnership with a
couple of friends as club owners, and they first opened up the
tiny basement club Cherry Jam, also in Notting Hill, then
moved onwards and upwards by buying the old Subterania
space and reopening it as Neighbourhood. It felt quite glamorous,
having a partner who was a DJ and club owner; a little
bit underworld. We went down to Neighbourhood early one
evening, before it was properly open, and one of the bouncers
was standing outside. 'Evening, boss,' he greeted Ben as we
went by.
I liked the contrast. Up until now we'd worked together,
done the same job, lived in each other's pockets. But now Ben
had a separate life from me, and I was grateful for the glimpses
of the outside world that he brought into my little domestic
set-up. None of the other mums I knew had a kitchen cluttered
with twelve-inch vinyl that had just come in the post and
needed listening to urgently before Saturday. None of my kids'
friends had to ask their dad to turn the bloody music down
because they were trying to do their homework. And none of
them had to creep round the house till lunchtime some mornings
because Dad was asleep upstairs, having DJed till 5 a.m.
And while many of my friends had understandably reached
the stage in life where their interest in music was waning and
their ability to 'keep up' had hit a brick wall, and the latest
new genre left them feeling defeated and old, I was still in the
curious position of being incredibly well informed about the
current state of music, despite apparently paying no attention
to it whatsoever. I didn't go out very regularly, but when I did
I went clubbing, at whatever club Ben was DJing at, with a
small group of like-minded friends. I remember dancing round
my handbag at the early days of Lazy Dog, before I even had
a mobile phone, with an old-fashioned pager clipped to my
belt in case the babysitter needed to reach me. I'd go to
Neighbourhood on big nights like my birthday and New


DEEP HOUSE MUSIC FORTNIGHTLY SUNDAYS NOTTING HILL ARTS CLUB
21 NOTTING HILL GATE LONDON WTI 020 7460 4459
4P1 11PM E5 DONATION (FREE BEFORE 6PM)
WAS BEN WATT AND JAY HANNAN
APR 2 16 30 MAY 14 28 JUNE 11 25
Year's Eve, and it was still close enough to the heady days of
'Missing' that when I took to the dancefloor I would be
treated like a local superstar, being semi-mobbed and often
dancing euphorically with complete strangers.
Eventually, in 2004, Ben even persuaded me to come and DJ
a couple of times at Cherry Jam, saying casually to me at dinner
one night: 'Come down and play your old Delta 5 records: We
put on a night, calling it A Different Kitchen, and I DJed
alongside Ben, playing a mixture of stuff from the Buzzcocks
and The Specials, through Eighth Wonder, Cameo and Freeez,
to Fonda Rae, Shannon and Evelyn 'Champagne' King.
Because he worked from home so much of the time, Ben
was there to share much of the childcare stuff. From the outside,
it might have looked as though I had given up my career
to take sole charge of the kids while he carried on regardless.
But he was there pretty much all day, every day, and as hands
on as you could wish any dad to be. Bizarrely, there were old
and loyal 'fans' who decided to get upset on my behalf, and
posted vitriolic messages on the EBTG website message board
haranguing Ben for keeping me at home chained to the
kitchen sink while he gallivanted round the world living the
life of a superstar DJ. He was blamed for the demise of EBTG,
when in truth he had always been keener on our trying to
carry on, even with the kids. I had taken the unilateral decision
to 'retire' and he had to make the best of it, carving out
for himself a new job and a new creative life, and he did so
without ever questioning my choice to be at home most of the
time.




Boy, I think you've come home
Open up the door and step inside
So many people who feel the way you do
Whose sweetest dreams have always been denied
Lock the past into a box and throw away the key
And leave behind those days of endless night
Everyone is waiting
Everyone is here
Step out of the woods into the light
Everybody loves you here

Everybody loves you here

Boy, you've been on the wrong road
Wearing someone else's shoes

Who told you you were not what you were meant to
be?

And got you paying someone else's dues?
This is the place for you, just look around this room
Is anybody here made out of stone?
Down among the heretics, the losers and the saints
You are here amongst your own
You've come home

You've come home
Look at this hole inside your heart
No one can ever fill

It's like the Grand Canyon
Look at this gap that's opened up
Between you and the world
It's like the Grand Canyon
Look at this hole inside your heart

It's like the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon
Everybody loves you here
You've come home

p

eople kept asking me to sing, and instead ... I wrote a book?

It sounds like the wrong answer to the question, but in
fact it was just more of a roundabout way of getting to the
answer.

'Why don't you sing any more?' people said, and I realised
that I wasn't sure, but that maybe one of the reasons was
because it had always been a strange thing for me to be doing
anyway -- a job I wasn't really cut out for. I'd never quite fitted
in; none of it had ever quite added up. It had been a career that
often fell down into the gaps, and didn't connect with the official
version of pop's history during the period when I was part
of it. So I thought I'd set about exploring it and see whether,
if I could begin to explain it to myself, it would then be explicable
to others.
And the process turned into an act of remembering.
The more I trawled through my past, reading my old diaries
and listening to the records, the more I began to remember
what it had all been about and what it had felt like, and why
I'd done it in the first place.
People asked, 'Do you miss singing, now that you don't do
it any more?' I'd laugh and answer, in complete honesty, 'No,
not at all.'
Until suddenly, one day, I really really did. I missed it badly,
and couldn't imagine why I had stopped.
So when, at more or less that precise moment, I was sent yet
another request to sing a vocal over a dance track, I was primed
to give a different answer to the usual blanket 'No, thanks'.
These kinds of requests came in all the time. I would be sent
a backing track, which was usually a generic, house-music-bynumbers
kind of affair dispatched in the opportunistic hope
that having me sing on top of it would transform absolutely
any old piece of crap into the next 'Missing' and bingo,
another massive hit.
This time it was different. The track that Ali and Basti
Schwarz, aka Tiefschwarz, sent me was a dark, moody piece
of electro-house that inspired me to write the first song I had
come up with in five years. Ben recorded the vocal for me in
our studio at home.
It felt good. It felt totally familiar, easy. I liked the paraphernalia
of it all, the putting on and adjusting of the
headphones, setting up the vocal level, adjusting the reverb.
I thought, 'I know how to do this and it was like rediscovering
a craft that had lain dormant for too long, like
remembering that you know how to wire a plug or fix an
engine. And the realisation of how much I had missed it was
like a physical pang.
The song, 'Damage', came out in June 2006, and doing this
one small project flicked a switch inside my head back to On.
I came up with the brilliant plan that I would make a solo
record.
Ben was far too busy with his other projects for us to make
an Everything But The Girl record, but more than that, it was
time for a bit of self-assertion again. This was all about me
emerging from a period when I had submerged myself in
favour of others -- the kids -- and so there was a strong element
involved of having something to prove. I wanted to make a
statement, that I was still that girl who'd gone and bought an
electric guitar aged sixteen and formed bands. Having grandly
stated that I was going to do it by myself now, I had to work
out how on earth to put that into practice.
Technology had never been my strong point, so despite
having a fully functioning recording studio in our house,
where Ben had done many remixes and I'd recorded the
Tiefschwarz vocal, I decided I would go nowhere near it as I
couldn't even turn the lights on without asking for help.
Instead, I bought myself a little four-track Tascam cassette
recorder, no more advanced than the one I'd used a hundred
years before to record the first Marine Girls songs, with a
manual only four pages long that even I could understand. I set
it up in the front room with the piano and my desk, and
decided that this would serve as my demo studio. Then I went
onto eBay and bought a harmonium and an omnichord, and
with the door shut I began, very quietly, to write some songs,
and record primitive demos of myself playing and singing
them, with only room for the barest of overdubs and with
maximum tape hiss included.
The record I ended up making, Out of the Woods, was more
of a pop record than those beginnings would ever have led
you to imagine. I realised pretty quickly that I didn't actually want to remake 
A Distant Shore, so I got some electronic producers
on board to help out: Tom Gandey, Alex Santos,
Charles Webster and Martin Wheeler. Ben also said the name
Ewan Pearson to me, and when I checked out his website I
found him referencing both Dusty Springfield and Rufus
Wainwright. 'Sounds like a kindred spirit,' I thought, and
indeed he was, his contributions proving invaluable to the
continuity of the whole project.
A lot of the work was done at one remove, with tracks and
ideas being sent via email, worked on and then sent back. That
allowed me to go on feeling independent, and not have the
sense that anyone else was possibly stamping themselves on the
record too much. Despite all the outside input, I still felt it was
a solo record, and very much my concept of what I'd wanted to
do. A little bit acoustic, a little bit electronica and ten new sets
of lyrics from me -- more than I'd written in a very long time.

In the middle of 2006, with the record half finished, I went to
have a meeting with Virgin (still my record company, despite
the years of silence) to tell them what I was doing. Tony
Wadsworth, the label boss, sat and listened patiently while I told
him that I was making a solo album, but didn't want to tour, or
appear in videos, or do much in the way of promotion. He'd
had the same conversation with Kate Bush when her album Aerial had come out the 
year before, so he must have wondered
why on earth all his female artists were suddenly becoming hermits,
but to his credit he agreed that I could do what I wanted
and they'd put the record out on those terms.
By December, Out of the Woods was finished and ready for
release, and I was halfway back to the old life, filming a video
for the first single 'It's All True', doing an interview with
Sheryl Garratt for a cover feature for the Telegraph magazine
and a photo shoot with fashion photographer Valerie Phillips.
I did press interviews at the super-glamorous, hi-tech EMI
offices in west London, where I spent the day in a glass-walled
corner room while journalists from various international locations
were ushered in and out every half-hour in order to quiz
me about a) my long break from recording, b) my return to
recording and c) the strange absence of Ben. 'He is Missing!'
I quipped.
For the last few years, I'd spent much of the time in a fairly
dressed-down state, and here I was again with a stylist and a rail
of the latest clothes, having my make-up done for me. It was
like a mums' spa-weekend dream come true; not a job at all.
I realised at once that I wouldn't want to go back to it full
time, but that, to dip into, it was the perfect antidote to midlife
melancholy.
I wondered if it would feel strange not to be working with
Ben, but in fact it was liberating to make decisions single
handed, rather than as the result of discussion and mutual
agreement. I had played him nothing until the record was finished
so as not to be overly influenced by his responses, and the
independence we had from each other meant that for the first
time ever we had things to tell each other at the end of our
working day. It was a novelty.
An edge of competitiveness even crept into our conversation,
and often it was as if we were playing a new game called
Competitive Airplay. Ben's first release on his new alt-rock
label, Strange Feeling, was a track by the Figurines called
'Silver Ponds' and as our promotional campaigns coincided, we would have 
conversations at dinner which were very polite and
mutually supportive but with a subtle -- and hilarious -- edge
only detectable to each other.

Ben: So we got three plays on Steve Lamacq this week.
Me: Wow, that's fantastic.

(Pause)
Me: My video is going down very well at MTV.

Ben: Great news!

(Pause)

BACK FOR GOOD351

Ben: So, did I tell you? The band are doing a session for
Xfm.

Me: Fantastic!

(Pause)
Me: Dixon is really playing the Martin Buttrich remix of
It's All True', apparently!
Ben: That's excellent.

Out of the Woods was well received by the press; many of the
reviews seemed to refer to me as cruelly underrated, a kind of
buried treasure of British pop. I thought that was sweet of
them, though if I was a buried treasure I possibly had only
myself to blame, as I had rarely courted publicity or chased
fame, and for the last five years I had quite successfully buried
myself.

And after all this time, many of them were still flattering in
the extreme about my singing:

'Tracey Thorn could sing the speaking clock and it'd send
tingles down my spine'
'Thorn's distinctively sultry alto voice'
'One of the unique British voices, up there with Dusty'
'Thorn's voice is still uniquely, deliciously forlorn'
'Tracey's voice -- for ever one of British pop's better
instruments'

It's what Ben calls 'The Voice of Thorn'.
Only he and I are allowed to make the kind of jokes we
make about my voice. Only he knows how totally self
deprecating I can be, how mixed my feelings. It is a voice
which inspires reverence in certain listeners, and yet about
which I have so many reservations. I still really think of myself
as 'someone who sings' rather than 'a Singer', and have a very
clear-sighted awareness of my limitations. I know what I can't sing, as well 
as what I can. To be mentioned in the same breath
as Dusty makes me swell with pride and pleasure, but only
momentarily. I'm not Dusty, and I never will be. The End.
And the voice sometimes feels separate from me, something
over which I have no real control, and for which I can take no
real credit. A glimpse, perhaps, of how it must feel to be truly
beautiful and be gazed at and revered for your beauty, a quality
you were simply granted by some gracious fairy godmother,
for which you have not worked or strived and which you did
not create.
But I'm not an idiot. I also know that to have 'a sound', a
distinctive sound, which is yours, not borrowed and not easily
copied, is the most fundamental building block of any life in
music. And so above all I am grateful to be able to open my
mouth and make a noise which is my own. There are many
singers who are 'better' than me, but they are not always
unique. And uniqueness is all in this game.
Above all else, it has been the thing that has allowed me to
survive this long, and to find myself here, in 2007, aged forty
five, on what was effectively my thirteenth album release,
invited to appear alongside a group of female singers mostly
twenty years younger than me to film a short Channel 4 ad.
February 2007
It's nine in the morning, and I'm being driven through the
gates of Pinewood Studios. The driver points out to me a kind
of huge aircraft hangar over to our right. 'That's the James
Bond stage,' he says. We drive past workshops and storage
areas. It's like a small town in here. There's one signposted
Shed 7 -- is that where the band got their name from?
I'm here to do a filmed ident for Channel 4. Idents are those
little clips that get shown in between programmes after the ads,


so that just as you're settling down to watch Ugly Betty you get
a thirty-second clip of someone or other off the telly or the
radio doing nothing much. It gives you a chance to find
the remote so that you can turn the volume down, or race
to the kitchen for a biscuit.
Anyway, the theme of this one is -- guess what -- 'Female
Singers', and I'm here to be filmed both on my own and
then in a group setting, with Corinne Bailey Rae, Mutya,
Lady Sovereign, Natasha _ Bedingfield and Sophie EllisBextor.
I told Ewan Pearson the line-up last week and he
kindly said, 'Well, you are the coolest by a mile.' Ewan; I
said, 'I am the OLDEST by a mile.' I am flattered to be asked,
actually, but I must admit that I do feel a bit generationally
discombobulated.

I film my solo bit first, and it's very straightforward. I sit in
a nice 1960s-looking armchair and stick a cassette into an
1980s-looking boombox. 'It's All True' blasts out into the
studio, the camera pans round me and then whooshes up to
the ceiling, revealing a giant neon figure four. Done and
dusted in fifteen minutes.
The group scene takes a little longer. For a start, that's six
women who have to be ready at the same time, happy with
their hair and make-up. Eventually we all arrive on set, and
there's a bit of skirting round each other. Corinne and I have
the same shoes on, so to break the ice I go over and say hello
and point at our shoes. It could be a ghastly moment but she's
very sweet, even offers to change, but the director tells us that
our feet will not be visible, so we have in fact both lost the
chance to show off the best pair of Christian Louboutin patent
wedges you will ever see.
We're all wearing different styles of headphones, the idea
being that each of us is listening to our own track. The
director says, 'As we film you, you will hear your own track
in your headphones and we want you to move along with
the song a little.'
I gently explain to him that the wires to our headphones
have been neatly clipped off by the assistant director, who was
worried they were getting in the way, so that unless they are
somehow able to beam the tracks into our ears, we will be
hearing only silence. He is taken aback by this technical information,
goes off to have a huddle, comes back and says, 'Well,
we will just have to pretend.'
It turns out, of course, that all the others are basically very
nice. Mutya is a little guarded, Natasha the most primped and
backcombed. Lady Sovereign is the one I warm to. She is
probably the youngest of all of us, and is clearly feeling a little
out of place, but even in her discomfort she's sharp and funny.
We're all in frocks and heels, she's in streetwear, ponytail
scraped tightly to one side. She's twitching and fidgeting,
worried she looks no good, uncertain as to what this kind of
thing means, how it will make her appear. The camera pans
round from behind her, catching her in close-up from the
side.

'Don't film me from the side, man,' she complains. 'I look
like a fucking peanut. This side of my head, man, it looks
BALD.'

'No, no,' says the director, 'you look nice.'
'NICE?' she wails. 'Jesus, I feel like fucking Gollum:
My heart goes out to her in her self-consciousness and self
doubt and inability to go with the flow, her determination to
let everyone know that she is more than this. I remember feeling
like that; trying to act tough, coming over as edgy and
angry because you're trying to deal with the anxiety about
what it all means, whether you're going to be understood or
misunderstood. The constant alertness, and the attention,
trying to dodge the pitfalls.

I'm not so much like that any more, I realise. I'm easier in
my own skin. Finally. But, for so many years, I WAS like that.
I identify with her completely, and at the same time, I feel like
her mum. And I quite like the feeling.

Just this once
Let me tell you you're the sweetest thing
The love in every song I sing
The music in my ears and everything
Happiness writes white

Maybe that isn't true tonight
And things you know you might forget
And other things I haven't told you yet

Close your eyes
Count to ten
Turn around
Back again

Hit the floor
Then once more

I'm still here
And it's all true

We don't need any kind of big parade
Just this once a little serenade

To celebrate this love we've made

We don't need, don't need a big fanfare
This is just my heart laid bare
For anyone who might care

Go away

Round the world

Talk to all kinds of girls
But it's me you won't find
And you're mine

Close your eyes
Count to ten
Turn around
Back again
Hit the floor
Then once more

I'm still here

And it's all true

And it's all true

Tell me do you feel it too?

y

ou may wonder why this book ends where it does, six
years ago in a TV studio with Lady Sovereign. I'd started
writing it in 2005, when I genuinely believed that I had retired
for good from making music. And the very act of writing it
triggered in me the desire to return to music. So when I
recorded Out of the Woods, I put away the pages I had written
and forgot all about them, deciding that, after all, I'd rather
make records again than write books. I went on and recorded
another solo album, Love and Its Opposite. I wrote a gardening
column. I frittered away whole evenings on Twitter. Time
ticked by.
Then, in 2011, as we packed up in preparation for a house
move, I found a box file with MY BOOK scribbled on the
outside. I opened it up and had a look and couldn't believe
how much I'd written. I'd put hours and hours of effort into
it, and then just shoved it away out of sight. Suddenly that
seemed a waste, and as I reread the pages, it seemed to me that
it was a good story and deserved to be told.
But still, the point where it ended seemed like a good place
to end. The story had a trajectory: the early upward curve, the
terrible crash in the middle, the unexpected resurrection, the
inevitable retirement, and the final return. To bring it up to
date would spoil that.
And so, the book ends in 2007, and because of the gap
between the starting and the finishing, there are some
moments in the telling when timings shift about a bit; the age
I say I am 'now' isn't always consistent. I've let the inconsistencies
stand. You're a grown-up, I know you won't mind.
I

want to thank a few people who agreed to talk to me
while I was writing this book: Mike Alway, Geoff Travis,
Ade Clarke, Richard Norris, Jane Fox, Alice Fox, Gina
Hartman, Dave Haslam, Huw Davies. They all appear in
this story and helped jog my memory about things that
happened hundreds of years ago.
I also want to thank Kirsty McLachlan, my agent, for her
invaluable contributions and suggestions. And for being the
first person to read the book.
Thanks to Rowan Cope, my editor, and the rest of the team
at Virago for welcoming me with such open arms.
And finally, biggest thanks of all to Ben, for being there
during most of it, and for letting me tell a story that is half his
as though it were a11 mine.
'Getting Away From It All':

Written by Tracey Thorn. Copyright 0. Used by the author's
permission.

'Marine Girls', 'Honey', 'On My Mind', 'Flying Over Russia',
'Plain Sailing', 'Small Town Girl', 'The Spice Of Life', 'Mine',
'Ugly Little Dreams':
Written by Tracey Thorn. Copyright 0. Licence issued courtesy
of Complete Music Ltd Universal Music Publishing
Limited.

'Each And Every One', 'This Love (Not For Sale)', 'Trouble
And Strife', 'Apron Strings':
Written by Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. Copyright 0.
Licence issued courtesy of Complete Music Ltd Universal
Music Publishing Limited.

364BEDSIT DISCO QUEEN

Ceiling', 'Nowhere Near', 'Swimming':
Written by Tracy Thorn. Copyright 0 SonyATV Music
Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

'Come Hell Or High Water', 'I Always Was Your Girl', 'The
Language Of Life', The And Bobby D', 'Troubled Mind',
'Missing', `Mirrorball', 'Hatfield 1980', 'Downhill Racer':
Written by Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. Copyright ©
SonyATV Music Publishing. All rights administered by
SonyATV Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by
permission.

'Protection':

Written by Robert Del Naja, Grantley Marshall, Andrew
Vowles and Tracey Thorn. Copyright © SonyATV Music
Publishing and UniversalIsland Music Limited. Administered
by the music publishers. Licence issued courtesy of SonyATV
Music Publishing and UniversalIsland Music Limited.

'Grand Canyon':

Written by Tracey Thorn and Alex Santos. Copyright ©
SonyATV Music Publishing. All rights administered by
SonyATV Music Publishing. All rights reserved. Used by
permission.

'It's All True':

Written by Tracey Thorn, Darshan Jesrani, Ewan Pearson and
Klas-Henrik Lindblad. Copyright © SonyATV Music
Publishing, Bug Music. All rights reserved. Used by permission.


• Follow-Ups:
  • [ebooktalk] Re: and finally
    • From: Ian Macrae
  • [ebooktalk] Re: and finally
    • From: Steven Bingham
  • [ebooktalk] Re: and finally
    • From: Shell

Other related posts:

• » [ebooktalk] and finally - David Russell
• » [ebooktalk] Re: and finally- Ian Macrae
• » [ebooktalk] Re: and finally- Steven Bingham
• » [ebooktalk] Re: and finally- Shell

1. Home
2. ebooktalk
3. Archive
4. 06-2013

---

• » Previous by Date
• » Next by Date
• » Related Posts
• » View list details
• » Manage your subscription

---