Everything But The Girl - Love is here where we live

And to think it all began in 1982, with a cover of a Cole Porter classic. “Night And Day” was in fact the debut single by Everything But The Girl, the English duo from Hull formed by singer Tracey Thorn (Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire, 26 September 1962) and Ben Watt (Marylebone, London, 6 December 1962), released by the independent label Cherry Red Records, still very active today although its core business has long since shifted toward reissues and deluxe box sets of licensed material. One of the most celebrated songs in the American Songbook, written for the 1932 musical comedy “The Gay Divorcee” and soon after a cornerstone of the film “The Gay Divorcee” [“Cerco il mio amore”] starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, it has been reinterpreted over the decades by Frank Sinatra, by Shirley Bassey, by the Temptations, by U2 - who recorded an unsettling version for the charity compilation “Red Hot + Blue” - and by Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga.

An unusual way to introduce themselves to the public, even if English pop would later see plenty of readings along these lines - Alison Moyet would make her own two standards, “That Ole Devil Called Love” (from the repertoire of Billie Holiday) and “Love Letters”, both released as singles, while Simply Red closed side A of their second album “Men And Women” in 1987 with a version of “Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye”, also written by Porter. Even Rick Astley, who broke through in 1987 with “Never Gonna Give You Up” and the easy chart-pop of the Stock Aitken Waterman trio, took on an American classic by Victor Young and Edward Heyman (“When I Fall In Love”) with such success that EMI simultaneously re-released Nat “King” Cole's recording to confuse the public and stop the English singer's single from reaching number one during Christmas week.

To be honest, that wasn't really the start of the two artists' long musical journey together, as they had always been linked both professionally and romantically. Married since 2008, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt both already had live and studio experience behind them: there had been the Marine Girls, a cult band active from 1980 to 1983 with Tracey, Jane Fox and Gina Hartman (later replaced by Jane's sister, Alice Fox), contemporaries of the Raincoats and Young Marble Giants, perfectly in tune with the do-it-yourself ethic (remember the early Scritti Politti?) of independently producing and releasing their own cassettes - the band's debut album, “Beach Party” (1981), which Kurt Cobain of Nirvana named one of his 50 favourite records in his diaries, was recorded in a garden shed by Pat Bermingham, who turns up again the following year on Thorn's first solo work, “A Distant Shore”, an acoustic mini-album of eight songs (including a cover of “Femme Fatale” from “The Velvet Underground And Nico”) running 23 minutes in total, made on a budget of £138 and released by Cherry Red. The label also had Ben Watt under contract, another Hull University student, who had already made a mark with two well-received EPs (“Cant” in 1981, produced by Kevin Coyne, followed by “Summer Into Winter” featuring ex-Soft Machine man Robert Wyatt) and a 1983 album, “North Marine Drive”, which features saxophone from Peter King (“The Italian Job”, 1969) and a cover of Bob Dylan's “You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”, originally included on 1974's “Blood On the Tracks”.

The two had little common ground in their listening habits: as a teenager Tracey Thorn moved fairly quickly from chart pop like Diana Ross's “Love Hangover” to punk - Sex Pistols included. So it will be curious, about a decade later, to hear her take on a song by Danny Whitten of Crazy Horse, “I Don't Want To Talk About It”, popularised by Rod Stewart and released in 1977 by Warner Bros. as a double A-side with “The First Cut Is The Deepest”, a move designed to keep “God Save The Queen” from reaching number one, which it otherwise would have done.

Ben, on the other hand, the son of a Scottish jazz musician and a journalist for She and the Daily Mail, was obsessed with Tim Buckley (it's no coincidence that his record label, which took over the Everything But The Girl Warner catalogue, is called Buzzin' Fly after one of his songs), Nick Drake, early Bob Dylan and “Solid Air” by John Martyn. A true gem, the latter, and one guilty of making the two of them fall in love to its sound.

And then there was him, Paul Weller, for whom their admiration was immediately mutual. Having called it a day with the Jam, and launched toward new horizons in trench coats and pullovers with the help of Mick Talbot (formerly of Dexys Midnight Runners) in the pop-jazz alchemy of the Style Council, the Modfather in 1983 was at the forefront of stirring up the new British "new cool" scene, with its sophisticated, retro atmospheres and sounds. It was the year Everything But The Girl shut themselves away in the studio to record their debut, Eden, in just nine days with Robin Millar, who also produced another dazzling ensemble destined for even greater commercial success (we're talking about Sade and “Diamond Life”), and the year that saw the birth of other projects like Carmel (“The Drum is Everything” dates from 1984) and Simon Booth's Working Week - who, for their debut single “Venceremos”, a tribute to Victor Jara, enlisted Tracey Thorn and Robert Wyatt. Tracey is the melancholy, enchanting voice on the version of “The Paris Match” found on the Style Council's “Cafè Bleu”, a song instead sung by Paul Weller himself on the mini-album “Introducing”.

Recorded and mixed in a very short time at the end of summer 1983 at Powerplant Studios, Eden was only released in 1984 due to a legal dispute between their former label Cherry Red and Blanco Y Negro, to which Mike Alway - who had followed Everything But The Girl's career from the very start - had moved. The band playing on the album is first-rate: there's Simon Booth on guitar (previously of Weekend, later known as Working Week), there's a Colombian bassist suggested by Booth himself, Chucho Merchan, as well as Brazilian percussionist Bosco D'Oliveira. Charles Hayward played drums in This Heat, an experimental band on the Rough Trade roster (the duo liked his non-rock approach), while Peter King and Dick Pearce were already known to Ben Watt and, above all, to his father. Tracey and Ben spent the recording days at the latter's parents' house, taking the train from Barnes to London every morning to get to the studio (in the evening, Robin Millar kindly paid for their taxi home).

All the songs were written on guitar in Hull in 1983, when the couple lived in a bedsit with a shared kitchen in Pearson Park. Among the strict rules Tracey Thorn set for herself was avoiding Top of the Pops, a programme she considered sexist because of the girls shut up in cages, and not releasing more than one single from the album. That single was indeed the only one, “Each And Every One”, a charming bossa nova with a timeless melody, in which Tracey's vocal spleen deliberately evokes the saudade of Astrud Gilberto. The one that followed, “Mine”, doesn't appear on any album except for a release for the American market, Everything But The Girl, which retains part of Eden's tracklist.

Songs like “Laugh You Out The House”, the aforementioned “Mine”, “Easy As Sin” and “Gun Cupboard Love” were recorded by and large keeping the same template as Eden, but overall they anticipate the more direct, rougher sound of the live shows (there were several dates in Italy too, in Bari, Naples, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan and Padua), along with the indie-pop leanings halfway between the Smiths and Lloyd Cole And The Commotions – with a touch of Go-Betweens thrown in for good measure – that can be traced in Love Not Money. The band assembled for the occasion featured June Miles-Kingston on percussion (she had already worked with Fun Boy Three), Phil Moxham, who had a past in Young Marble Giants, and guitarist Neil Scott, found through an ad placed in NME. On the single “Native Land”, also left off every European album bar the compilations, Johnny Marr makes an appearance. As a kind of umbilical cord to a past that was increasingly being left behind, the artwork for Eden was created by Jane Fox of Marine Girls. The original pressing didn't even feature the band's name on it.

Love, Not Money

In her memoir “Bedsit Disco Queen”, Tracey Thorn recounts an exchange between Seymour Stein of Sire Records, the Warner-affiliated label home to names like Talking Heads, Madonna and Ramones, and Robin Millar. The producer was convinced that – “maybe not with the first record, but by the eighth” – Everything But The Girl would one day become somebody and achieve the commercial success they deserved; Stein was more anxious, needing hits right then and there. Thorn and Watt released their first eight albums with the small Blanco Y Negro label, within the Warner orbit, which also put out records by the Jesus And Mary Chain. A sort of boutique label bankrolled by a major, which on paper should have been the ideal setup for an elusive, shape-shifting, sophisticated outfit like the early Everything But The Girl (who were also a bit of a nuisance when it came to ignoring the basic rules of record promotion, for instance going on holiday while “Each And Every One” was charting instead of showing up for TV and radio appearances and interviews) but which, in the end, still pushed the pair into making compromises.

Some songs on Love Not Money, their second album, were written on Salisbury Street in Hull, in a flat the couple rented during their final year at university. For the simpler percussion parts, Ben Watt bought a rudimentary drum machine, a Boss Dr. Rhythm. In the summer of 1984, he and Tracey moved back to London and rented a house near Belsize Park to be closer to Camden Town, where they began rehearsing the new material. The songwriting for the album was completed there.

At this point the band was still the same live lineup – June Miles-Kingston remained a fixture, as did Phil Moxham and Neil Scott, who also plays a solo on “Angel”. Like Eden, Love Not Money was recorded quite quickly too, in about twelve days. Although the record is remembered for its politically charged lyrics and heavy use of guitars, Ben wrote two horn arrangements – for “Shoot Me Down” and “This Love (Not For Sale)” – entrusted to Peter King and Dick Pearce. Particularly noticeable is the dynamic compression on Tracey's voice, a stylistic choice made to keep the sung words and the breaths at the same level.

Unsure about its commercial prospects, Sire Records (also responsible for exporting the Smiths to the States, as well as Depeche Mode, Yazoo and Soft Cell) added “Heaven Help Me” and a cover of the Pretenders' “Kid” to the tracklist, both of which also turn up on the cassette edition released for the Italian market. Exactly as had happened with Eden, the B-sides were recorded after the album, specifically for the singles. And in (almost) every case, they point towards the direction taken on the following record. As for the cover art, in 1982 Falling Wall Press had published Humphrey Spender's “Worktown People – Photographs From Northern England 1937-38”. The photographs originally came from “Mass-Observation”, a project documenting the lives of ordinary people, born out of an idea by Charles Madge and Tom Harrison to show, as they put it at the time, “how little we know of ourselves”. “We thought the photos fit the mood of the record particularly well”, Ben and Tracey confirm in the liner notes of the 2012 reissue.

Love Not Money reached the Top Ten in the UK, but not every country where the debut had done so well warmed to the duo's new sound. Italy was a telling case in point, where the popularity of the “most beautiful voice in English pop” (sic) and her partner declined sharply, with a clear reversal of fortune only when “Missing”, in Todd Terry's hugely successful remix, topped the charts and stayed among the ten best-selling singles for several weeks. Back in 1985, the pair could be spotted strolling across the Ponte Vecchio, though there was always a catch waiting around the corner: when a group of kids once surrounded them thinking they were Matt Bianco, it irritated Ben Watt no end!

Stars in the sky (between Bacharach and Jimmy Webb)

You don't change a winning team, well, except when you're Everything But The Girl, where that's apparently always been the rule. Having parted ways with Robin Millar, for Baby The Stars Shine Bright they switched studios entirely – moving to London's Abbey Road, specifically Studio 2, where the Beatles had also recorded – between March and April 1986. For production duties they turned to Mike Hedges, who around that time was working on Marc Almond and the Willing Sinners' “Vermin In Ermine” and “Stories Of Johnny”, and who, in 1996, scored a major hit with his orchestral arrangements for the Manic Street Preachers' “Everything Must Go”.

For the occasion the band was given a makeover. Cara Tivey came in on piano, Micky Harris on bass and Rob Peters on drums – all of them answered ads in the music press, and all three were from Birmingham. Cara had played piano for Billy Bragg, Micky was her boyfriend and Rob their flatmate. “We did a short tour of America and came back full of energy with a clear idea of what we wanted for the new record; Cara Tivey's piano and the Hammond organ were perfect for the album we had in mind”, Tracey recalls. Meanwhile, at home, Ben had kitted himself out with a Yamaha DX-21 synthesizer and a more sophisticated drum machine, the RX-21, and wrote the string and horn arrangements using simple keyboard presets, recording everything onto a 4-track. He then took it all to Nick Ingman, who was sometimes puzzled by such a recurring, swelling use of strings, at times running through an entire song. Some sounds proved difficult to recreate in the move from home demo to final album version: recording the vibraphone and marimba at the start of “Cross My Heart” (one of the finest songs on the record, and in the whole Everything But The Girl catalogue) took an entire afternoon. The microphones were repositioned several times in the studio, and in the case of “Sugar Finney” the electronic drums from the demo were kept, whereas the other nine songs, including the single “Come On Home”, are built around organic instrumentation.

This time the B-sides didn't point towards new directions, but rather danced around the more or less overt influences shaping the duo's third album. There's certainly a lot of Burt Bacharach in the new recipe (paid tribute to with “Alfie”, on the flip side of “Don't Leave Me Behind”), just as it's easy to think of Patsy Cline while listening to “A Country Mile” and “Come Hell Or High Water” – her “I Fall To Pieces” was also covered. Also part of this batch of tribute covers is Elvis Costello's “Almost Blue”, although that only surfaced a few years later as the B-side of “I Always Was Your Girl”. While many, not without reason, also hear echoes of Scott Walker and Dusty Springfield, another guiding spirit this time is songwriter Jimmy Webb, whose “Where's The Playground, Susie?” Tracey and Ben revived. A formidably refined songwriter, author of hits like “The Moon's A Harsh Mistress”, recorded by Joe Cocker and, in Italian, by Ornella Vanoni (“La luna è…”), and Glen Campbell's “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” (also covered by Isaac Hayes and later by Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds on “Kicking Against The Pricks”), Webb is also remembered for the Fifth Dimension's “Magic Garden”, “MacArthur Park” (with Donna Summer's disco version being unforgettable) and “The Highwayman”, a moving song about reincarnation performed by an all-star quartet made up of Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson and Waylon Jennings. Jimmy Webb would also go on to inspire (together with Everything But The Girl's own “lounge” work from this period) “You On My Mind” by Corinne Drewery and Andy Connell's Swing Out Sister (he personally handled some of the orchestrations on their 1989 album “Kaleidoscope World”).

Given the criticism levelled at the artwork for “Love Not Money”, deemed too austere, this time the duo turned to Caryn Gough's graphic design and Richard Haughton's retro-style photography, with 1950s outfits sourced for Ben by Mr. Eddie on Soho's Berwick Street.

It was that Rod Stewart cover that did it...

The opulent arrangements of Baby The Stars Shine Bright later gave way to a more intimate, minimal atmosphere on Idlewild, the fourth album, which saw Ben Watt relying much more heavily on the Yamaha RX-5 in place of a real rhythm section, albeit with help from Steve Pearce on bass. Figuring out which direction to take wasn't easy, since on one hand the pair were drawn to the sound of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis (who, besides their productions for Janet Jackson and Alexander O'Neal in those years, also worked with the very English Human League on “Crash”), while on the other the sound they were chasing in the studio leaned more markedly towards folk. On trumpeter James McMillan's suggestion, keyboardist Damon Butcher joined the fold and became central to making the record. Aside from the percussion parts, almost nothing else is machine-programmed: saxophonist Peter King added a lovely solo to “I Always Was Your Girl”, one of the singles lifted from the album.

Idlewild was recorded and mixed at the old Livingstone Studios, housed in a deconsecrated church in north London. “Dyed In The Grain” and “Hang Out The Flags” were originally on the tracklist too, but to keep Blanco Y Negro happy, who grumbled that they found the whole thing too slow, the songs were dropped and replaced with “Goodbye Sunday” and “Blue Moon Rose”.

The album came out in February 1988. A few months later they decided to record "I Don't Want To Talk About It" as a summer single, and its success (it reached the Top Ten in England and did well across Europe) prompted the label to reissue Idlewild with the addition of the Rod Stewart cover. The B-sides were more eclectic this time around, ranging from "Living On Honeycomb" (recorded in a single afternoon) to "No Place Like Home", which sounds very much like an outtake from Baby The Stars Shine Bright. "Apron Strings" remains one of the album's best-known songs, mostly because the demo recorded in March 1987 ended up in the hands of director John Hughes, who used it in the soundtrack of "She's Having a Baby", starring Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth McGovern.

"Imagining America"

The mid-90s breakthrough is still some way off at this point, but each album nevertheless sells respectably enough. Enough, in fact, to convince Warner to have the following album, The Language Of Life, recorded in the United States with an exceptional name attached, Tommy LiPuma, known for producing records by George Benson, Randy Crawford, Al Jarreau, Anita Baker, but also "Love" by Aztec Camera and, years later, "Kisses On The Bottom" by Sir Paul McCartney. LiPuma was also president of the historic jazz label Verve between 2004 and 2011, and played no small part in the international breakthrough of Diana Krall (he first worked with her in 1995, on her second album, "Only Trust Your Heart", released by GRP Records). Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt were keeping an eye on the new house and hip-hop scenes, but wondered whether it made sense to fold them into their own music. The time wasn't quite right yet, but LiPuma's arrival was nonetheless a godsend — one that came about, as Tracey recounts in her autobiography, almost by chance.

The celebrated Cleveland-born producer was a fan of the duo and had expressed a desire to work with them; within a couple of weeks they found themselves in New York trying to impress him. LiPuma, in fact, didn't want to listen to tapes — the auditions were performed live in front of him, in typical old-school fashion: it took just the time to put together a set-up with a piano, two microphones and a drum machine, and the best songs for The Language Of Life were chosen. Everything But The Girl found themselves working with a star-studded cast of musicians such as John Patitucci, Jerry Hey (who worked with Michael Jackson on "Off The Wall" and "Thriller"), saxophonist Kirk Whalum (he played the solo, two years later, on the version of "I Will Always Love You" sung by Whitney Houston for the "The Bodyguard" soundtrack), Michael Landau, Vinnie Colaiuta and Joe Sample, the versatile and gifted pianist with a flawless résumé (with and without the Crusaders, in the studio with the Jackson 5 on "I Want You Back", with Joan Baez on "Diamonds And Rust", with Steely Dan on "Aja" and "Gaucho", with Joni Mitchell and Natalie Cole). The album also features a cameo from Stan Getz, who adds a touch of class with his solo on the cinematic, heartbreaking ballad "The Road".

Among the songs chosen as singles was also "Take Me", written by husband-and-wife duo Womack & Womack (Cecil Womack and Linda Cooke, daughter of the well-known Sam Cooke), who had topped the charts with the sparkling "Teardrops" (later covered by Elton John and k.d. lang on the former's album "Duets").

The experience of The Language Of Life nonetheless left Tracey and Ben feeling conflicted: on one hand it opened a door in America, on the other it trapped them in a style — it was smooth jazz radio that treated them best — that was pulling them away from their true nature. Once back in England, they realised a new generation of artists was coming up, and the two of them felt isolated.

The following album, Worldwide, saw Everything But The Girl indulge in self-satisfaction for the first time, with sharp, detailed music still underpinned by honest, personal lyrics, and the odd touch of excellence — such as saxophonist Dick Oatts (who had already worked with Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald and would soon work with David Byrne on "Uh Oh") on "British Summertime". The duo initially wanted to title the record "Understanding Understanding", but Blanco Y Negro found it all too strange.

There's a lot of glossy pop on Worldwide, produced this time by the duo themselves and featuring plenty of keyboards and drum machines, though Vinnie Colaiuta, Martin Ditcham and other musicians who had appeared on previous albums are still present. "Understanding" is a clear, affectionate tribute to Marvin Gaye, almost a rewrite of his "Sexual Healing". Overall, though, the album left audiences fairly unmoved (it peaked at #27 in England and quickly dropped off the charts), and critics weren't especially generous either.

As had happened with Idlewild, in 1992 Warner reissued the album in some territories with the addition of a gentle cover of "Love Is Strange", a song written by Bo Diddley (though credited under his wife's name, Ethel Smith) that was a substantial hit for the duo Mickey & Silvia in 1956, and was later revived in 1987 for the "Dirty Dancing" soundtrack.

Also in 1992 came two separate releases: a "Covers EP" for the UK market, featuring four cover versions (the aforementioned "Love Is Strange", Bruce Springsteen's "Tougher Than The Rest", Cyndi Lauper's "Time After Time" and Elvis Costello's "Alison"), and an Acoustic release that brought together the above songs alongside another cover — Tom Waits's "Downtown Train", already covered by Rod Stewart (him again...) back in 1989 — plus new live and acoustic versions of songs from the Everything But The Girl catalogue. A pleasant enough listen, certainly, but one that adds little or nothing to what had already been released up to that point. Japan also got the duo's first compilation, Essence And Rare 82-92, mixing hits, rarities, singles never included on albums (there's also "Night And Day"), along with a few remixes and a version of "Come On Home" already featured on Acoustic.

"I didn't know I was looking for love..."

Partly to catch their breath, and partly to focus on their private life given the serious autoimmune illness that struck Ben Watt, Churg-Strauss syndrome (to which he devoted an entire book, translated into Italian as "Un paziente. Storia vera di una malattia rara"), in 1993 a compilation was also put together for the European market to sum up the journey so far before turning the page. This was Home Movies, which doesn't behave like a conventional greatest-hits set but represents a considered selection of singles and album tracks unfairly overlooked at the time of release (though Love Not Money isn't touched upon at all), such as "Cross My Heart" and "The Night I Heard Caruso Sing" from Idlewild. At the end of the tracklist are also two previously unreleased recordings made with Phil Ramone: a fine cover of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel's "The Only Living Boy In New York" and a lovely original song, "I Didn't Know I Was Looking For Love", destined to become a hit only years later in the version recorded by Karen Ramirez.

Tracey and Ben are particularly proud of Amplified Heart, the 1994 album that marked the end of their contract with Blanco Y Negro: initially a flop, it climbed the charts thanks to Todd Terry's remix of "Missing". The original version of the song has a distinct Fleetwood Mac flavour, and its fame risks overshadowing equally accomplished songs crafted with great care; the duo had in mind the idea of presenting a folk-soul record, and so brought in Danny Thompson (founder of Pentangle, who worked with Nick Drake and John Martyn, longtime passions of Watt's) and Dave Mattacks for half of the tracks, while the rest was completed — on Geoff Travis's suggestion — by producer John Coxon of the Spring Heel Jack project. Coxon brought a breath of fresh air with his electronic beats on songs like "Get Me" and "Troubled Mind", creating a style that would be emulated in years to come (from Beth Orton to David Gray's "White Ladder", by way of Kings of Convenience's "I'd Rather Dance With You" — plenty of people took note).

Blanco Y Negro, however, wasn't particularly impressed by the album and its initial sales, and decided to drop the duo (who in the States remained signed to Atlantic Records); after the success of the "Missing" remix, released once the pair were already off the label's roster, parent company Wea nonetheless saw fit to capitalise on the moment by putting out another "Best of", this time more haphazard and with no input whatsoever from the couple. Among the tracks chosen somewhat at random from their discography, two stand out: two of the three collaborations between Tracey Thorn and Massive Attack ("Protection" and "Better Things") and a Todd Terry remix of "Driving".

"Do you want me back?"

Remember Robin Millar's prophecy over dinner with the Sire Records boss? It was precisely their eighth album, Walking Wounded, that finally pushed the English duo into the world charts, a full fourteen years after that first independent single. Signed to Virgin (in Europe), the pair actually had fairly muddled ideas before going back into the studio: in 1995 they got in touch with sound engineer Brad Wood, who had made a name for himself on the post-rock scene with bands like Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. Some songs were finished off and tried out live at Sin-É, where they ran into Jeff Buckley (with whom they would later appear together at Glastonbury). Yet the success of "Missing" on dancefloors, plus friends' tips about an increasingly prominent new electronic scene, steered the pair in a very different direction. So, after a couple of months in New York (where they wrote "Mirrorball"), Tracey and Ben headed home; decisive in winning Watt over for good was Goldie, with his Metalheadz night at the Blue Note.

Armed with nothing more than a Mac, a fairly unassuming sequencing program and an Akai sampler, the pair finished most of the tracks in their own home studio; only on "Flipside" and "Walking Wounded" do you sense the more expert hand of Howie B.

There are too many songs worth mentioning: the drum'n'bass of "Before Today" has a naive charm, "Wrong" picks up where "Missing" left off on the previous album (it's no accident that Todd Terry handled the single's remix), while the languid "Single" partly retraces the successful path of "Protection" and partly reinterprets the seductive sound of Sade Adu's "Cherish The Day" and of the then-rising stars Portishead. Worth noting: the decision to release the track as a single prompted the Pet Shop Boys to change the title of their own song, from "Single" to "Single-Bilingual", to avoid confusion.

The success of Walking Wounded established Everything But The Girl on the electronic scene and brought the pair an audience very different from the one they'd had at the start. Even U2 asked them to open on their PopMart Tour, though the collaboration never came together. In spring 1998, Ben Watt and Jay Hannan launched the Lazy Dog nights, built around deep house, which over the following eighteen months became a fixture on the London scene for genre devotees; Tracey, meanwhile, lent her voice to songs such as Adam F's "The Tree Knows Everything" and Deep Dish's "The Future Of The Future", later also included on their final album of the '90s (and the last under the EBTG name until the return with Fuse twenty-four years later), Temperamental, again released by Virgin Records. A kind of sequel to its successful predecessor, it actually turned out to be a less impactful and oddly disjointed work: that's because Thorn, having become a mother to twin daughters in 1998, felt less involved in making the record – to the point that she admitted, a few years later, that she'd felt like a guest on someone else's album, specifically Ben Watt's, who oversaw the sound and wrote most of the songs working mainly from home, in his downstairs studio, generating sounds and beats from samplers and synths controlled via a Mac. In place of the old Fostex 8-track, this time the vocals were recorded to hard disk.

Two songs were full-blown collaborations. "Blame" had been written together with producer and DJ Jamie Spratling (J Majik) at his home studio in Hertfordshire, while the already-mentioned "The Future Of The Future" started out as an instrumental, with Ben Watt later writing the melody and lyrics for Tracey to sing. There's a sense of detachment in the lyrics, melancholy and often bleak ("Hatfield 1980" recalls a night out that ended in violence), despite the typically club-ready rhythms.

Like The Deserts Miss The Rain is one of the last of Everything But The Girl's grab-bags of hits, hidden tracks (including a cover of Captain Beefheart's "My Head Is My Only House Unless It Rains") and assorted rarities, released on CD and DVD. As if to seal a decade steeped in dance music, the remix collection "Adapt Or Die" followed. From 2007 onward, Tracey Thorn put out solo work: "Out Of The Woods" is the most accessible, grounded in club sounds with the odd flirtation with electroclash – "It's All True" could have been recorded by New Order – while the later "Love And Its Opposite" and "Record" are more genuinely singer-songwriter in nature.

The twist comes at the start of 2023: for the first time in over twenty years, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn worked together on a record, in total secrecy. Excitement over the comeback was matched by apprehension, but it's actually with great relief that one approaches Fuse, which retains the modus operandi of earlier records like Walking Wounded (their best-selling album, with a million and a half copies sold) or the shakier but still intriguing Temperamental, yet is an entirely new chapter. The third wheel this time is Bruno Ellingham, a sound engineer who had already worked with Massive Attack, Portishead, Spiritualized and Elbow: his help allowed the album to become an inspired fusion of the folk and acoustic soul that never fully disappeared and a more dancefloor-oriented side, more curious about new sounds and the possibilities offered by electronics, with broken, syncopated rhythms, dreamy piano arpeggios captured during demo sessions on an iPhone, "spacious" melodies, and evocative, melancholy lyrics full of messages and vivid characters that nonetheless feel almost painted onto a wall.

It feels strange hearing Tracey Thorn spell out, in "No One Knows We're Dancing", the nocturnal story of Fabio from Turin with his Fiat Cinquecento full of old parking tickets, while Amy, who works in a pet shop, mixes vodka with cola and knows everyone by name inside the club. Not forgetting Peter, whose father is a lawyer working for the European Parliament and lives between London, Paris and Monaco (only New York is missing from the itinerary, which would have made for a playful nod to "Pop Muzik"!). If Kate Bush managed to set the digits of pi to music, Thorn let herself be inspired by a search engine's autocomplete for the verse of "Lost", almost as if to keep us at arm's length and not let the pain of losing her mother come through too strongly. References to ageing also return, specifically to menopause, in the oblique "Interior Space" (“And no, I don’t bleed/ and yes, I am freed/ but what is that worth?/ are we all about birth?”).

Ben Watt, as ever, brings his expertise and deep knowledge of electronic pop trends and club culture over the last twenty years, reviving garage on "Nothing Left To Lose" – in every respect a new "Before Today", with Tracey's voice lovingly worn by time, darker, rougher, deeper, yet still utterly unique, sitting right at the centre of the mix as it weaves through a backing somewhere between Artful Dodger and Royksopp's "49%" – and also lending the intense "Run A Red Light" shades of James Blake, with a piano arpeggio vaguely reminiscent of Radiohead (think "Pyramid Song", for good measure) and an atmospheric close worthy of 10cc's "I'm Not In Love", soundtracking the "carpe diem" of a dancefloor regular doing everything they can to mask their own insecurities ("Forget the morning/ this is the night").

Elsewhere, Ben and his four-decade partner in art and life indulge in eighties throwbacks that are sometimes unusual territory for them (the chord progression underpinning the vocal melody of "Time And Time Again" is the same as Marillion's "Kayleigh") or in pastiches redolent of Goldfrapp and, even more so, of M83 ("Forever" at times sounds like their own personal rereading of "Midnight City").

Tracey plays with filters on "When You Mess Up", as if there were an excitable Mirwais at the mixing desk, and expresses a longing for escape and togetherness after years of disorienting isolation on "Karaoke", which closes out these thirty-five minutes of new music. After all, what's more liberating than stepping up to the microphone, whether to kick-start the party or to soothe a broken heart? Between someone dropping a hint of Bob Dylan and someone else hamming it up over Elvis, why not pluck up the courage like that girl who has the crowd at her feet the moment "Spotlight" kicks in?

Announcing Fuse only once it was already finished, Tracey and Ben were able to reconnect with each other after a long time without working as a team (here Tracey's involvement is total, and you can feel it). Their symbiosis, as you can hear, is still at its peak. And the public has fully recognised as much, especially in their native England, where Fuse is, to date, the duo's highest-charting album, debuting at number three (with Walking Wounded they reached number four).

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