However, rather than get stuck in a bossa nova groove, Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn - who’d formed the duo while at Hull University in 1982 - eagerly moved into new territories, with six more albums that took the duo out of the ’80s with explorations of indie guitar, electronica and thoughtful pop as they went.
By the mid-’90s they reached their creative stride with the albums Amplified Heart and Walking Wounded (the former being boosted by DJ Todd Terry’s clubland hit remix of Missing). The creative dynamic shifted yet again with the album Temperamental, made immediately after Thorn had given birth to the couple’s twins (in her own words - stated in her excellent autobiography Bedsit Disco Queen - being reduced to “a guest vocalist on someone else’s album”). And then, nothing - until the release last Friday of Fuse, EBTG’s first album of original music since that 1999 release.
In the intervening years, Watt busied himself with DJing and random music projects, while Thorn released solo albums and collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack, as well as commenced her side career as a highly entertaining author - all while the couple raised their three children. “We probably made a conscious decision at some point that if we want the kids to stay sane, we want the family to stay together, you know, something’s got to give,” Watt explained to the New York Times last month. “I think we decided we would carry on working on our own solo paths for a while. It was almost like an escape valve from everything else.”
Their absence as a duo loaded the dice for when they started creating together three years ago, writing and laying down basic tracks at their Hampstead home. At first, they wanted to keep quiet their return to making music together: “We deliberately didn’t tell anyone that we were dong something, because we were both thinking that it might come to nothing - and that’s fine,” Thorn told the NME in January. “We’ve both been busy over the years with our own solo stuff, and it felt a bit perverse after so long to not even try.”
 |
| Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop |
Initially, they considered calling themselves ‘TREN’ (conflating Tracey and Ben), instead of restoring their band name: “It’s not going to be a small deal to come back [as Everything But The Girl] after this length of time,” Thorn explained earlier this year. While that worry is understandable, not pigeon-holing themselves with the jazz of Eden gave them a free pass to take their music wherever they wanted it to go. “We’ve never been a particularly nostalgic band,” Watt said in their NME interview. “We’ve always been known for making a different record every time. Sometimes that’s meant going against the mainstream, but we just try to keep ourselves interested and keep things contemporary.”
Fuse won’t be the first album conceived during lockdown, but like so many home projects started during that surreal period in all our lives, when sourdough loaves and LEGO Technical kist sprouted on kitchen tables, Covid-19 came with the Watt/Thorn household noticeably emptier. With all three of their children having fled the nest as adults, and Watt having to self-isolate due to being diagnosed, in 1992, with Churg–Strauss syndrome, an autoimmune condition, there was a void to fill. The couple started exchanging snippets of ideas with each other, without having any particular plan as to what they’d become.
“I started to put things on my phone,” Watt told the New York Times. “I just tried to improvise without thinking too much about actually writing finished work. I would just sit there, with Voice Memo on the piano, and play and hope that I captured something. When Tracey came to me and said, ‘Shall we work together?’ I had these fragments and ideas of chord movements, improvisations, and some voicings that we hadn’t used before — slightly spiky, fourths and sixths rather than thirds and fifths. For people who’ve made music together for 20 years, to find a new note to land on was a lot of fun.”
But, still, there wasn’t any immediate intention to release it. They didn’t even tell their children they’d made it. “We wanted to come back with something modern-sounding,” Watt told the NME. “We’re not out there on the heritage trail doing ‘best of’ tours or playing arenas. We just wanted to make a piece of work that would sound great now in 2023. That was the driver.”
Fuse isn’t, though, a lockdown album per se. “It just struck us that the time was right after 23 years of waiting,” Watt said. “It’s hard to put a finger on why. We didn’t go into the studio with any plans. We knew there was a bit of pressure because it was the first thing we’d done in ages, but we just wanted to be a bit playful and experimental to see what happens. There wasn’t a masterplan.”
 |
| Picture: Everything But The Girl/Edward Bishop |
Watt and Thorn have flirted with genres throughout their career. Fuse draws together many of those strands, but in a delightfully, contemporary way. Atmospheric, even downbeat songs are interwoven with more upbeat numbers - some even danceable - with Thorn’s voice a slightly deeper, more sonorous register than I remember of old. This adds to the album’s reflective, grown-up lyrics, such as When You Mess Up’s admission of imperfection, the life-assuring healing of Karaoke, and Nothing Less To Lose making a statement of repeated vulnerability.
While the couple say that Covid didn’t influence their writing, even with the context of Watt’s underlying health, it’s easy to see - if not lockdown’s impact - its influence. “When I look back at the lyrics,” Thorn said in one interview, “I can see that there’s a lot of urgency...about trying desperately to make contact with someone. I’m sure that comes out of this long period of being unable to do that — feeling very cut off from people, feeling isolated.”
What does come across from their publicity round is that Fuse is not album they needed to do, or felt compelled to make, but found themselves doing. “It kind of astonished us,” Thorn has said. “I remember the end of [their final day of recording], we looked at each other and basically went, ‘Oh my God. It sounds like Everything But The Girl. It sounds like an album!’ Afterwards I said to Ben, ‘That’s the most fun I’ve had in a very long time.’”
The hope is that, even if Fuse came about by circumstance, Thorn and Watt enjoyed themselves so much that it marks the return to regular record making by them as a duo, who remain one of music’s most enduring and likeable partnerings. Thorn, too, is one of the ‘good ones’ on Twitter - if there can be such a thing as the platform descends into into a festering bin fire of extremism - engaging friends, peers and followers alike with the kind of conversation that made it a fun place to find yourself in the first place. As 60-year-olds, parents of grown-up children, and artists who’ve proven themselves to be comfortable out of the limelight as much as in it, you can’t help but finding Everything But The Girl likeable. Fuse marks an equally likeable return.
No comments:
Post a Comment