Everything But The Girl

eden n. [from the Hebrew ʿēden, which originally meant "countryside", and later also "pleasure, delight"]. – an enchanting place: a wonderful park that's a true eden.; a pleasant, happy state: he lives undisturbed in his eden.

Everything changes so quickly. Reading her diaries from the period, Tracey Thorn realized that in 1976 there was no trace of anything that could have foreshadowed her subsequent, sudden infatuation with the punk scene: just look at the titles of the records she bought at the time, which included David Essex, Diana Ross with "Love Hangover", and the best-selling first "Greatest Hits" by the Eagles. A year later she'd be jotting down the TV appearances of the Sex Pistols, and her collection would come to include the Clash, Elvis Costello's "My Aim Is True", and two singles by the Jam, "In The City" and "All Around The World". Years would pass before she actually shared a stage with that band's frontman, Paul Weller, performing "The Girl From Ipanema" – a choice that caught many by surprise, one that surely surprised the two performers themselves, and that served as a kind of funeral rite for what the Modfather had been up to that point, before his cool turn alongside Mick Talbot in the Style Council.

Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, better known as Everything But The Girl (a name borrowed from the slogan of a shop in Hull, which could be read as "we sell everything but the shop assistant"), were not exactly newcomers to the music business when, in 1982, they decided to join forces both professionally (until 2000) and romantically (to this day). She, who bought her first electric guitar (secondhand) at sixteen, had been in the Marine Girls, had already had press features and magazine covers, and had performed at the Lyceum alongside Orange Juice and the Go-Betweens; after a brief solo album, "A Distant Shore", she began working with Ben, who at the time had a deal with the independent label Cherry Red Records. Watt was the son of a jazz musician, seemed older than his actual age, and had musical tastes that complemented those of the woman who would soon become his partner in work and in life: while she still held onto a punk attitude but was also happy to lose herself in Astrud Gilberto, he was a fan of Joy Division, but also listened to Captain Beefheart, Robert Wyatt, Bill Evans, and the jazz records from his father's collection. The real catalyst, though, was an album: John Martyn's "Solid Air", which Ben loved and played for Thorn one evening over wine. She'd never heard it before, and in that moment she fell hopelessly in love with it.

The choice for Everything But The Girl's debut single was an unusual one: a reinterpretation of Cole Porter's "Night And Day" (a song that would go on to receive other covers over the years, some more faithful and others – like U2's – decidedly turned inside out), which won over Neil Tennant, who at the time wasn't yet the voice of the Pet Shop Boys but a sharp, unforgiving music critic with a past at Marvel. The already-mentioned Elvis Costello (life's little coincidences...) and Martin Fry, both interviewed by Radio 1, also had glowing words for the track. Meanwhile, work began on the duo's debut LP, and in 1983 came a phone call from Paul Weller, inviting Ben and Tracey to take part in the first album by his new outfit: initially the plan centred on "Headstart For Happiness", then on a song called "Run Away With Me". As we know, that November the focus shifted instead to another track, "The Paris Match", which Weller's fans had already heard on the mini-album "Introducing The Style Council": with Watt on guitar and Thorn's alluring, melancholic voice, it became the little pop-jazz gem that opens side one of "Café Bleu" – and yet things didn't go entirely smoothly. Paul, for instance, asked Tracey more than once to re-record the vocal take – the complete opposite of her punk, one-take attitude – because he wasn't satisfied with how she pronounced the word "fire".

Work on "Eden" took just nine days, but it took months before the record actually hit the shelves in June 1984. That's because Ben struggled to extricate himself from his contractual obligations with Cherry Red, the label that was originally supposed to release the album instead of Blanco y Negro – still a boutique label, but this time tied to the Warner giant; the delay was a source of frustration, especially for Tracey, because by the time "Eden" finally came out, the duo had already moved on, chasing new musical infatuations and, above all, sitting on a decent handful of new songs they were already playing live. Warner didn't even understand the artwork, created by former Marine Girls bandmate Jane Fox – delivered as a three-dimensional collage made of crumpled paper, it was later photographed and adapted to include the band's name, which was absent from the original piece.

Thanks to the first single "Each And Every One" (which, by the duo's own choice, ended up being the only one released from the album), accompanied by a video from John Maybury – later famous for the clips for "West End Girls" and "Nothing Compares 2 U", as well as for the 1998 Francis Bacon biopic "Love Is The Devil" – Everything But The Girl became synonymous with "new cool" music, a term coined at the time for acts like Sade, Working Week and Carmel. This was pop music with a sophisticated edge, one that happily flirted with jazz and the Brazilian kaleidoscope running from Jobim to their beloved Astrud Gilberto, but in the case of "Eden" it was recorded according to rather strict self-imposed rules. Tracey herself tells the story in her memoir "Bedsit Disco Queen": Charles Hayward was brought in on percussion, but rule number one dictated a total absence of snare drums, as they were too closely associated with rock. Rule number two: no electric bass. Three: acoustic guitars were banned, as they sounded too much like folk music. At most, a few concessions were made for semi-acoustic guitars. Rule four: no piano, which would have brought to mind the syrupy ballads of the Seventies. Finally, rule five: no backing vocals, which would only have weighed down the final result.

In the producer's chair was Robin Millar, who at the same time was working with Sade on “Diamond Life“, in the very same recording studios (his résumé also boasts collaborations with Nico and post-punk band Weekend, and shortly after he would go on to produce “Working Nights” by Working Week, on which Thorn herself, alongside Robert Wyatt, recorded “Venceremos”). “Each And Every One”, with its groove poised somewhere between a slow samba and a bossa nova, reached #28 on the UK charts. Yet Tracey remained unmoved: “If they ask us to mime the song on Top of the Pops, we'll say no!”. There was no need: they weren't even asked. Armed with a feminist conscience and reading that included Germaine Greer, Betty Friedan and Kate Millett, the singer found the famous BBC show not only too mainstream, but also saw in it an irritating strain of sexism (“there were girls on set locked in cages”, which for her was unacceptable).

In the months between the completion of “Eden” (which reached #14 on the UK albums chart, staying on the listings for twenty-two weeks) and its actual release, Ben and Tracey finished their university degrees. But rather than making themselves available for interviews and TV appearances – incidentally, they quickly earned a reputation among journalists as a “difficult” band – the two decided to go on holiday for a couple of weeks instead.

It was still early days, with just one album out, to think about major tours – in England, performances mostly took place at universities, with a brief stop at the Hacienda thanks to the interest of Mike Pickering, the DJ who years later would found one of the most successful pop-dance acts of the '90s, M People. Elsewhere in Europe, the early EBTG sound was received with enthusiasm, especially in Italy. In March 1985 Ben and Tracey found themselves promoting their music in Bari, Naples, Rome, Bologna, Florence, Milan and Padua; the newspaper “Il Giorno” wrote “here comes the finest voice in English pop” (Ben recalls with less fondness the time a group of kids on the Ponte Vecchio mistook them for Matt Bianco!), but few were prepared for what was already changing in the duo's sound. That they wanted to move beyond English-style saudade was already clear from the B-side “Laugh You Out the House”, almost a tribute to the Smiths' “Reel Around The Fountain” and “Wonderful Woman”. Less bossa, less jazz, more English pop in the vein of the Morrissey/Marr partnership and Lloyd Cole.

Despite their reluctance to promote the record, combined with a look adopted by Tracey that deliberately clashed with the music on offer up to that point (Terry Hall-style haircut, boots and Sex Pistols t-shirts), just four weeks after the release of “Eden” the second single “Mine” hit the shops – not included on the album – and had to settle for a modest #58. Even less enthusiastically received by the public was “Native Land”, single number 3, featuring Johnny Marr on harmonica. In the States, “Eden” was replaced by a self-titled release with a heavily reshuffled tracklist, but plenty of fans still managed to get hold of import copies. Thorn immediately proved to be the ideal chanteuse to paint, in bold strokes, the kitchen sink dramas that filled the record – Morrissey loved those written by Shelagh Delaney, author of “A Taste of Honey”, while she wrote her own, and kept doing so in later work.

The personal is political, across the twelve heartbroken little gems that fill both sides of the LP: thirty-three minutes without a single wasted moment, from the sixties-flavoured Hammond organ that energizes “Another Bridge”, to the brushed drums of “The Spice Of Life”, to the dialogue between Ben Watt's guitar and the saxophone on the delicate “Fascination”. The organ that opens “Frost And Fire” recalls almost the Doors of “Soul Kitchen”; if Prefab Sprout's “Cruel” and “Horsin' Around” barely dip their toes in the surf, “Even So” needs no lifejacket in the Brazilian waters it's immersed in – complete with the kind of castanets that Phil Spector was so fond of. A dysfunctional love story is also entrusted to Ben Watt's voice on “Tender Blue”, which captures a couple in which he's still awake at night “while every silence screams” and she sleeps turned towards the wall, not moving even when he brushes her back, and at a certain point she closes her eyes and ears while the baby starts crying down the hall: musically we're in the territory of the already-mentioned “Paris Match”, but also three years ahead of George Michael's “Kissing A Fool”.

Passion rhymes with tears once again on “The Dustbowl” (“I thought you were everything that kept me sane when everything else failed, now I think you were probably what drove me off the rails”), and it's a genuine feat to stay unmoved after the opening of “I Must Confess” (“You kissed my head while standing in the doorway, and then you said: 'I don't want to see you anymore'”).

Tracey remains a convincing torch singer on the equally brilliant third album “Baby The Stars Shine Bright”, with Broadway musical-style artwork, strings and horns redolent of Tin Pan Alley, and songs that often sound as if they'd slipped straight out of Burt Bacharach and Hal David's songbook (while the B-side of “Native Land”, “Don't You Go”, is a John Martyn song, this time among the B-sides we find Jimmy Webb's pen behind “Where's The Playground, Susie?”, made famous by Glen Campbell); her voice, placed in the hands of an exceptional coach like Tora de Brett, who also taught Liz Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, from here on becomes even more expressive, seductive and assured. From “Idlewild” onwards it's a succession of hits, flops, shifts in direction, flashes of inspiration and retreats into the comfort zone (the cover of “I Don't Want To Talk About It”); after flirtations with Tommy LiPuma and Stan Getz, who graces “The Road” with his sax, came the one with Todd Terry (“and I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain”: raise your hand if you don't recognize it), immediately followed by the jungle and drum'n'bass textures used to dress the hazy melodies and stories of failed or unrequited love told on “Walking Wounded”.

Then came the decision to focus on family and return with solo projects and top-class featured appearances. And yet “Eden” still stands as a sequence of shadowy, romantic gems with very few equals, a record that fifteen years earlier wouldn't have looked out of place next to “Dusty In Memphis”, and twenty years later would have sounded fresh and current alongside the likes of Kings Of Convenience's “Quiet Is The New Loud” and “Riot On Empty Street”, or Junip by José Gonzalez.

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24/11/2019