FEATURE:
Before Today
The Remarkable Tracey Thorn at Sixty
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ONE of my favourite artists ever…
IN THIS PHOTO: Tracey Thorn with Ben Watt as Everything But the Girl in 1984/PHOTO CREDIT: PA/LFI
the iconic, fantastic, and inspiring Tracey Thorn is sixty on 26th September. One half of Everything But the Girl (with Ben Watt), I wanted to mark her upcoming birthday with a playlist featuring some of her wonderful songwriting and vocals as part of that duo, in addition to some of her solo material. A wonderful producer and talent, I would recommend people buy this year’s My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend:
“The indie pop icon and bestselling author of Bedsit Disco Queen and Another Planet gifts the reader with a window into her friendship with Go-Betweens drummer Lindy Morrison in this characteristically witty and affectionate volume.
In 1983, backstage at the Lyceum in London, Tracey Thorn and Lindy Morrison first met. Tracey's music career was just beginning, while Lindy, drummer for The Go-Betweens, was ten years her senior. They became confidantes, comrades and best friends, a relationship cemented by gossip and feminism, books and gigs and rock 'n' roll love affairs.
Morrison - a headstrong heroine blazing her way through a male-dominated industry - came to be a kind of mentor to Thorn. They shared the joy and the struggle of being women in a band, trying to outwit and face down a chauvinist music media.
In My Rock 'n' Roll Friend Thorn takes stock of thirty-seven years of friendship, teasing out the details of connection and affection between two women who seem to be either complete opposites or mirror images of each other. This important book asks what people see, who does the looking, and ultimately who writes women out of - and back into – history”.
Before coming to a playlist with some of the very best Everything But the Girl and solo cuts, AllMusic provide some biography about one of our very best and most important artists and writers. I hope that Thorn gets a load of love on 26th September:
“One of the most enduring English singer/songwriters, Tracey Thorn began making music with Stern Bops and then, more notably, Marine Girls, a minimalist pop group that released a pair of albums inspired by Young Marble Giants and the Raincoats. While Marine Girls were active, Thorn released A Distant Shore, a relatively moody, if similarly skeletal solo album, on Cherry Red in 1982. Around that time, she met Ben Watt -- who was also signed to Cherry Red -- and formed a partnership as Everything But the Girl. From 1984 through 1999, Thorn and Watt released ten albums that shifted from indie pop to slick sophisti-pop to downtempo club music. Additionally, Thorn appeared on recordings by the likes of the Style Council, the Go-Betweens, and Massive Attack. Shortly after having twin daughters together, she and Watt put EBtG on ice, as Watt DJ'ed and operated his Buzzin' Fly label while Thorn stayed home with the children. They had a third child, a boy, in 2001.
After several years away from music, Thorn began writing again and recorded her second solo album, Out of the Woods, which was released in early 2007. Instead of working with Watt, she collaborated with a number of producers, including Ewan Pearson, Charles Webster, Cagedbaby, Sasse, and Martin Wheeler.
A year later, Thorn and Watt married. Pearson returned as sole producer of Thorn's 2010 effort Love and Its Opposite, released in the U.K. by Watt's Strange Feeling label. In 2012, Thorn released Tinsel and Lights, a holiday album featuring songs by contemporary composers. A well-received memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star, was published in 2013. Following that were a couple low-key releases, including the two-song Molly Drake Songs (recorded with Watt for a BBC 4 documentary about the mother of Nick Drake) and "Under the Ivy" (a Kate Bush cover). Thorn was sought out by screenwriter and director Carol Morley to provide the soundtrack for The Falling, a drama that debuted at the BFI London Film Festival in 2014. Just prior to the film's wider release the following April, Thorn's contribution -- eight short songs -- was issued as Songs from the Falling.
Thorn's career as a writer kept going strong. In 2014, she started writing a column for The New Statesman and in 2015 published Naked at the Albert Hall, a book delving into the art of singing. Her own voice was heard again later that year on a compilation of her work as a solo artist: Solo: Songs and Collaborations 1982-2015. She also appeared as a guest vocalist on John Grant's album Grey Tickles, Black Pressure. She stayed quiet on the musical front for the next few years, only appearing on Jens Lekman's 2017 album Life Will See You Now. She had begun writing songs for another album in 2016, however, and in 2017, began recording them with producer Ewan Pearson, bassist Jenny Lee, and drummer Stella Mozgawa (both of whom play in Warpaint). Along the way, vocalists Shura and Corinne Bailey Rae stopped by to add contributions. The record, simply titled Record, was issued in March of 2018 by Merge in North America and by Unmade Road everywhere else”.
To salute Tracey Thorn ahead of her sixtieth birthday, I wanted to highlight her brilliance. One of the most distinct and remarkable voices the music world has ever produced, I do hope that Thorn releases some more music in the future. It only leaves me to wish her…
MANY happy returns!