While working on lyrics for Everything But the Girl’s triumphant new album Fuse, Tracey Thorn was struck by a familiar sensation. As disconnected thoughts and sentiments began to surface, she would think, I’m not sure where that came from, but I’m going to go with it. Before she knew it, a St Augustine catechism was sharing space with her own forthright views on sanctimony. “Stuff bubbles up from your unconscious,” she tells me in a goldfish bowl of a meeting room at Virgin Records’ London office.
The mercurial duo of Thorn and Ben Watt have learned not to question a bolt from the blue. The electronic pop outfit have an ear for frequencies that others might pass over as interference, as exemplified by their synthesis of emergent UK genres like breakbeat, downtempo, trip-hop with quiet storm and folk on their classic ’90s albums Amplified Heart and Walking Wounded. With Thorn’s dusky and soulful voice, the duo created a sound that was not quite for the rave but solitary moments of introspection after. It always seemed like Thorn could see things that were invisible to the naked eye, but her impressionistic tales of emotional turbulence could be cut with a self-deprecating wit—an attitude she takes today when discussing “Missing,” the ’90s pop smash that made the duo unexpected dancefloor darlings. “People argue whether it’s a clever or stupid lyric,” she says, smiling. “Deserts don’t miss rain. But as soon as I sang it, we were like, ‘That works!’”
After meeting and becoming a couple while at university in Hull, UK, Thorn and Watt formed Everything But the Girl in 1982 and released their debut album, the bossa nova-inspired Eden, in 1984. A modest hit, it was idiosyncratic enough to prompt lively debate between George Michael and Morrissey on the BBC panel show Eight Days a Week. “I love her voice,” said Michael, of Thorn. “It’s so melancholy and it’s so vulnerable.” Are they out of step with trends, wondered the host. This was the year of “Like a Virgin,” “When Doves Cry,” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” “Yeah,” replied Morrissey. “But that almost becomes an image, the absolute heart of fashion itself.”
In the ’80s, Everything But the Girl roved among genres like jangle pop, quiet storm, sophisti-pop, and cocktail jazz, moving between different atmospheres and treasuring the filmy residue they left. But by the early ’90s, the duo says they had lost a sense of purpose, and an album of polite acoustic covers felt like treading water. As they were weighing up their next musical move, personal tragedy hit. As Thorn puts it in her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: “Luckily, Ben decided to contract a life-threatening illness, and in doing so, saved us.”
Written in the wake of Watt’s hospitalization from Churg-Strauss syndrome, 1994’s starkly honest Amplified Heart stripped their sound to ivory, with folkish accompaniment and the merest wisps of electronics, as if any other embellishment would feel like fluff. Thorn’s singing was at its most intimate and pained; it bore the weight of PTSD like a phantom limb. That depth of feeling powered their aching single “Missing,” which, thanks to its Todd Terry remix, reached No. 2 in the U.S. in 1996. On that year’s Walking Wounded, the duo became the mainstream face of post-rave poignancy alongside Massive Attack, Tricky, and Portishead. The band also set a bellwether for late ’90s pop’s turn to the club as a noted influence on Madonna’s Ray of Light, as well as planting a seed for the xx’s night bus introspection and the drum’n’bass-inspired pop of PinkPantheress.
After releasing 1999’s alluring house suite Temperamental, Watt and Thorn decided to step away and start a family; they have twin daughters and a son. (In 2008, the couple married in a quiet ceremony, which Thorn once joked was “largely our accountant’s idea.”) They also shifted towards solitary creative work, including respective solo albums, book projects, and, for Watt, running the London dance label Buzzin’ Fly. Rekindling their creative partnership as Everything But the Girl after more than two decades necessitated an open mind. “I came into it with not much reverence of what had gone before,” says Watt. The resulting album, Fuse, showcases a mastery of club styles and harnesses new vocal manipulation techniques for some of the duo’s most bewitching—and soul-baring—dance anthems to date.
Tracey Thorn: We started with a more ambient mood, with the more experimental tracks like “Interior Space” and “When You Mess Up.”
Ben Watt: At the beginning there were no beats on the record. I used to work at home in my office by the front door, putting things together on my laptop. One day I put beats on “Forever,” and [looking at Tracey] you put your head ‘round the door from the kitchen. And then our son Blake came downstairs and said, “Dad, is that going on the album?”
TT: We got excited. Our confidence grew. “Nothing Left to Lose” was the last track we did.
BW: That two-step south London feel, for want of a better phrase, is something we’ve not really done before. That’s why we made it the first single, because it felt urgent and fresh.
BW: It’s a throwback to my early days as a DJ, particularly Lazy Dog.
TT: Lazy Dog was in the basement at [West London’s] Notting Hill Arts Club, and it was on Sunday afternoons. Up at street level it’s broad daylight, with normal life going on, and down in this basement it was a proper club.
BW: It was peopled by really memorable characters, people who stand by the booth all night or someone who’s always on the dancefloor, or someone who’s always circulating, making friends. They stick in your mind. I wanted to describe the characters passing through, a bit like a Lou Reed lyric.
TT: It’s a classic example of emotion colliding with the non-organic. Ben wrote the opening line: “I lost my mind last week.” And then he put the phrase “I lost my…” into Google, and up came all these alternatives: “I lost my perfect job,” “I lost my bags.” I started singing them and picking out bits of them. This mad little accidental list of things was revealing something that actually feels quite true.
BW: That is exactly what grief is like. You have to deal with the everyday. You still run out of milk, even when your mother dies.
TT: [Sarcastically] Yes, I have changed, haven’t I? That came from a period where just before then, I’d been in the Marine Girls. We were three naive school girls making indie music, and we got a bit more attention than we might have expected. We got written about in the music press, but often in a patronizing tone of voice. When I got a year or so older, I looked at it and thought, “I used to think that was a compliment, but actually it’s quite patronizing.” I expressed those feelings in a slightly coded way in “Each and Every One,” so people have always interpreted it as a love song. It sounds like I’m singing to an annoying boyfriend or something. And it doesn’t matter, in a way—what comes through is a sentiment of, “I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t like to be put in my place.”
TT: We did see them a little bit. We were in the same studio at Power Plant. We can’t have been in the studio the same days because how could Robin be doing both? But maybe they were doing mixes with someone.
BW: So much of the music in the early ’80s was dominated by quite big synthetic sounds. People started to use Fairlights, and that big Trevor Horn sound. And then there were some bands like us [and Sade] that were eschewing all of that, and going back to traditional elements, and Brazilian grooves. We felt like we were carving out a space.
TT: We knew Paddy from Prefab Sprout, Roddy from Aztec Camera, there were those people you’d bump into, and you were aware that you were written about sometimes in similar circles. I felt like I understood a bit what those people were [doing].
BW: A lot of us did start with a truly independent spirit, making our own records with not really any idea of how to do it. We got thrown into this world of pop, and had to make sense of sophistication. To make sense of 24-track recording studios and record company expectations. The thrust of music in the ’80s was so pop, that the underground almost fell away.
TT: The mid ’80s indie scene seemed so bereft of new ideas, and everyone who was a bit more imaginative was drawn to becoming more and more pop. Which had its own pitfalls.
TT: Sometimes. Having come as we did from a very indie scene, and then finding ourselves on a label, Blanco y Negro, that went through Warners and was trying to have the best of both worlds. It’s not as ideal as it seems. We found ourselves under the usual pressure to deliver hits.
TT: We were doing that live, and I remember a couple of people hearing it and going, “You could record it and put it out.” Hits take you by surprise, so often. You’ve been striving to make them, and then you do a song quite casually and [it connects]. “Missing” was the same.
TT: No one was really watching it, and it took off at an independent level, in certain clubs. In Miami first.
BW: And in San Antonio, in a lot of gay clubs. Italy, Ayia Napa, and a lot of Balearic islands. All these little pockets. Warners had dropped us just after the promo was released, but we were still on Atlantic for America. It was really an underground record. No one was chasing it up; there were no reps on the phone. It took the big brass at Atlantic about four to six months to really wake up to its potential. It was very serendipitous timing as well. The whole progressive house scene had kind of burned itself out. People were just starting to look for vocals again, something a little more soulful.
TT: We were in New York and bought a copy of Billboard, and saw it in the dance chart. We’re like, “What?”
BW: We were deciding whether we wanted to move out there, so we took a sublet in Tribeca. We were talking to [producer] Brad Wood, who’d done Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville. We were about to commit to go into the studio with him, and then some friends of mine rang from London and said, “Have you heard these new drum’n’bass records?” That became a massive turning point, listening to early Alex Reece, Peshay, early Metalheadz. The breakbeats are pitched so high, and the sub-bass is pitched so low, it rattles along with this spectral drive. But there’s just a huge space left in the middle of that music. I thought, “I could put Tracey’s voice right there.” It was like an aural epiphany. So we headed back to London.
TT: It was such a raw period. We’d been through this experience of Ben nearly dying, of being in hospital for months, coming out the end of it. We’d been quite traumatized, but people didn’t really use that word at the time. Neither of us were offered any counseling or therapy, we were sent home from the hospital and left to get on with it. I think [Ben] went through a period of being quite depressed. Out of that came the stirrings of some songwriting, which was necessarily quite raw in its content. But we were excited by it. We’d been trying to deal with it all rationally, and that wasn’t really working. We started dealing with it in a very expressive way, like: We’re going to be honest; we’re going to write these difficult emotions in songs.
BW: I wrote most of [my memoir] Patient first, and that unlocked the songwriting for Amplified Heart. Songs like “Rollercoaster” and “Two Star” came after. We harnessed our favorite bits of what we’d done before, and started to bring in the new ideas. We worked with John Coxon [of drum’n’bass duo Spring Heel Jack], started to work with breakbeats and samples. It was a merging of two worlds—what eventually became folktronica.
TT: Not very well. I’m quite grateful that the biggest success we had came later on, when we’d been through a bit of it, and then we had the slight disappointment of things not being so successful, so then we were excited to have the success come back. We were into our early 30s by then, and we had more of an ability to understand it for what it was. Like, This is lovely, but you can’t necessarily depend on it.
TT: The track inspired something in me because it was quite difficult. It was unfamiliar. There was no trip-hop yet, and we weren’t used to it; it’s super slow. There’s a sample but it’s not what we’re used to hearing. It kicked me out of any kind of comfort zone. I remember singing it to them, and they said, “You’ve started in a weird place, you’ve come in in the middle of the bar.” And I’m going, “Where the hell’s the bar?”
TT: Because a lot of what inspired it was Ben and what had happened to him. When something happens that makes your partner vulnerable, it breaks down expectations of gender roles like “man equals strong, woman equals dependent.” Then it makes you realize: obviously they’re broken down because life doesn’t exist within those strict gender roles. And then it’s just fun. There’s nothing more fun than singing “You’re a girl and I’m a boy.”
TT: The ones that people think are our best albums, are our best albums. It seems obvious to me that Amplified Heart, Walking Wounded, and Temperamental are really good.
BW: The records that really resonate are ones where we’re much more in the moment and giving of ourselves. Amplified Heart is full of that and I think it’s one of the reasons why it hit people quite strongly, because the two records that came before it were…
TT: …more controlled. From Amplified Heart onwards we did a bit more letting go and freeing up. I definitely feel like we’ve captured that on [Fuse] as well, in the directness and urgency in a lot of the lyrics. The lesson we learned those years ago went quite deep.
BW: We were prepared to mess with Tracey’s voice at times, and pitch-change it. Tracey’s voice has traditionally been this sacred thing you’re not supposed to touch, like the diva on the top of the song. We thought we’d make it another texture and bend it like a guitar pedal.
TT: People would be critical of her voice, and say that it was sometimes too harsh. It wasn’t the most beautiful sound. In the past, I’ve been written about as having the most beautiful, perfect voice. But sometimes that can feel imprisoning. As I’ve got older, my voice has got deeper and a little rougher around the edges. I’ve found myself really liking that, because there is sometimes a greater expressiveness and humanity now. The vocal on “When You Mess Up” was the first take I did, and there are some little cracks in there. But we thought that, because the lyric is so vulnerable, to have the vocal be a little bit imperfect is a better way. Beauty can be a kind of prison. You want something more than that.
