The return of Everything But the Girl: ‘A 24-year break is great way to stoke expectation’

When Everything But The Girl last released new music, the world was worrying about the millennium bug. In January, the shock announcement of their ninth studio album, Fuse, caused many people of a certain age to break their own little corners of the internet. They simultaneously shared one of their strongest ever singles, Nothing Left to Lose, resurrecting one of the most singular acts in British pop.

Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt met at Hull University in 1982. They eventually married in 2009, but had kept their relationship a secret for years as their popularity and profile grew during the 1990s. Conversely, they kept hush about making music together again while recording Fuse, code-naming the project with an amalgamation of their first names, TREN.

Thorn and Watt have respectively released solo material in the intervening years. ”Both of us enjoy our solo projects and the freedom of working on your own, but it’s also exhausting,” Thorn says on a Zoom call from their home in London. “When we started again, I really enjoyed the liberation of realising you don’t have to come up with every single idea yourself. It’s great to have another person in the room who has good ideas and can make your ideas better.”

For me, lockdown was about putting the brakes on, so re-emerging from it was an opportunity to do something completely different

—  Tracey Thorn

Initially, they felt they were creating something “incredibly new”, but admit it unmistakably sounds like Everything But the Girl. “There is just something about the combination of the two of us when we work together,” Watt says. “The way I hear harmony and the economy of my arrangements and the space I leave for Tracey. I’ve got so used to her voice over the years.”

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The duo recorded Fuse with Bruno Ellingham, whose credits include Massive Attack, Spiritualized, Portishead and Elbow, in Riverside Studios, Bath, but also on an iPhone. “A mixture of low fidelity and high fidelity is the way to record these days,” Watt says. “For example, hiss used to be something you’d never allow on a record, whereas it can be quite characterful when used in the right context. During lockdown, I was putting my iPhone on the piano and hitting record before I had anything on my mind to play. Three or four of those iPhone-recorded motifs ended up on the album.”

Thorn calls Fuse “a coming out of lockdown” record, as opposed to the rather hackneyed concept of a pandemic album. “For me, lockdown was about putting the brakes on, so re-emerging from it was an opportunity to do something completely different,” she says. “We realised that if we kept deferring Everything But the Girl it would never happen. We’re not getting any younger, and I thought I might wake up one day and really regret it. For years, we’d casually say, ‘We might do it next year.’ And then we wouldn’t.”

Watt’s health was a consideration. “It’s no secret that I was shielding a lot during lockdown because of an auto-immune condition (Churg-Strauss syndrome) that I’ve had for a long time,” he explains. “After lockdown, my travelling was still severely compromised, so the idea of going back on the road with the trio I’d put together for my solo stuff suddenly got a lot more complicated, not to mention Brexit and new regulations. I started looking at what we could do more locally, so I came around to thinking doing Everything But the Girl was a brilliant idea.”

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Everything But the Girl retreated from the limelight after turning down a support slot on an American U2 tour. “As you get bigger your responsibility to be an entertainer as opposed to being a creative musician gets greater,” Watt reflects. “It becomes more like cabaret and tailoring your set with the hits. We stopped at the peak of our career. When Tracey went off to look after our kids, I wanted to go to the dark corner of a 200-capacity club where no one could see me. I’d been on the stage, but I wasn’t getting enough out of it. I found being in a dark club and playing records to people and being in complete simpatico with them to be far more rewarding.”

With those [Instagram] posts, we told a backstory and it really clicked with people. They see themselves in what we do

—  Ben Watt

Both Thorn and Watt are published authors. Tracey has written a series of best-selling memoirs, while Ben penned Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness. “I think the books and the lyrics come from somewhere completely different,” Thorn offers. “I think you engage with a completely different piece of your brain. I’m not a fiction writer, so I imagine perhaps something similar happens when writing fiction. When I’m writing non-fiction, I’ve already a very clear idea what my story is. It’s more about coming up with the best way of telling it, with a few jokes along the way.”

In Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried To Be a Pop Star, Thorn recalls how proud she was to sit at a table with Massive Attack at the Brit Awards in 1995. “I felt that ours was the table to be on, with Massive and Tricky and Björk,” she writes. “The rock kids seemed to be in a dreary rehash of the past, still repetitively harking back to the yawn-inducing ‘60s, while we were a group of people who were looking forwards.”

[ Tracey Thorn: ‘There’s no such thing as closure’ ]

Thorn acknowledges they still don’t fit into any movement or predominant trend. “I always think we’ve always been a little bit on the edge of things,” she reflects. “I think you can tell from our records that we listen to contemporary music and know what’s going on, but we create something that doesn’t fit in and is unique to us.”

Consequently, they’ve inspired a plethora of melancholic electronic pop, from Olive to The xx. “In the early ‘80s, when people started writing about us in the music press, we were always the non-rock band who were slightly at odds with the other stuff in those papers,” Watt says. “We were slightly androgynous. Some people wondered if we were a couple, or brother and sister. Our ‘80s records don’t sound like ‘80s records.”

They’ve taken extended breaks between records before, albeit not as long as 24 years. “Amplified Heart was the comeback record for us because we did it after Ben’s illness,” Thorn says. “It seemed like such an abrupt and awful end. We didn’t think we’d ever make another record together again, but we were defiant and determined to make one.”

Amplified Heart features their signature song, Missing, which became a worldwide hit in 1995 after Chicago house producer Todd Terry did a remix. “It elevated our career to another level, which we were incredibly grateful for because you don’t tend to get your big break a few years in,” Thorn says. “The youthful cockiness of thinking we were the best band in the world had long been knocked out of us.”

[ Tracey Thorn: Record review – Everything but the Girl singer, older, wiser, better ]

The continued existence of Everything But the Girl defies the typical firework trajectory of a pop career, where the popularity of an act dramatically rockets but just as quickly wanes. “Robin Millar, who produced our first couple of albums, tells a great story about talking to Seymour Stein, the head of Sire Records, after we got signed to his label in America,” Watt says, speaking before Stein’s death on April 2nd last. “Seymour couldn’t get his head around us, so Robin told him to be patient because someday we’d have a really big record, but it mightn’t be until our fifth, sixth or seventh album. Seymour wanted a Talking Heads or Madonna. Robin was proven ridiculously right, because Missing was on our seventh album.”

Uniquely for an act in the streaming era, Everything But the Girl don’t perform live. “We don’t want to do the heritage trail, play the arenas with old hits, or have to end every set at every festival with Missing,” Watt says. “We just wanted to make a contemporary record that sounds like us.”

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They’re thrilled by the reception to their reunion so far. “The outpouring of emotion to the announcement of the new record and the sequence of very personal posts we’ve been putting on Instagram since November has really opened our eyes to the depth of feeling people have for the band,” Watt says. “I think people have often felt emotional about our music, but they don’t know much about us. With those posts, we told a backstory and it really clicked with people. They see themselves in what we do.”

Nearly a quarter of a century is a decent absence to make the heart grow fonder. “Having a 24-year break is great way to stoke expectation,” Thorn agrees. “As I said to Ben, we can only do this once.”

Fuse is out on April 21 on Buzzin’ Fly