Lighting the Fuse - Everything But The Girl return

An enjoyable catch-up with an old schoolfriend recently reminded me of the soundtrack to our teenage years and, in particular, the records we listened to at each other’s houses while under the premise of doing homework. One that stood out was Everything But The Girl’s Eden, their 1984 debut, which arrived amid the cod-jazz revival of the early ’80s (Sade’s Diamond Life, The Style Council’s Café Bleu, Matt Bianco, et al). 

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.

A step back in time

© Simon Poulter 2022

In 1978 Genesis had a hit with the love song Follow You, Follow Me, which marked a sea change in their concert clientelle. At a stroke, the band have noted, there were exponentially more women at their gigs. For the previous ten years, they’d been mostly patronised - again in their words - by men wearing army surplus greatcoats and carrying notebooks in which to record their thoughts about the noodly progressive rock they’d come to consume.

From that moment, Genesis would go on to become one of the biggest pop-rock bands in the world, still rooted in the progressive genre, but with shorter, MTV-friendly songs leading their repertoire. Steve Hackett, who until 1977 had been the band’s highly innovative lead guitarist (he invented the ‘tapping’ technique later made famous by Eddie van Halen and numerous other long-haired headbanging axemen), had left to pursue a solo career, just before this transition in the band’s fortunes. And, yet, for those still attached to the band’s arguably most novel era - with Peter Gabriel as its frontman, replete with his costumes, characters and penchant for lyrical theatricality - Hackett continues to keep the flame alive.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Which is why the crowd queuing outside the Eventim Apollo (the venue better known to old heads like me as Hammersmith Odeon), appeared to be 50 year-aged versions of those earnest young men in their army greatcoats. Paunches were in evidence, while some of those who still had hair had it tied in ponytails, despite expanding bald patches. This meant invariably finding yourself standing next to someone looking exactly like The Simpsons’ Comic Book Man. I do say this from a point of smugness at having a full head of hair.

Once inside, however, with the lights down, such cosmetics count for nothing. Hackett and his band - which includes longstanding keyboard stalwart Roger King, second guitarist Amanda Lehmann, bassist Jonas Reingold, flautist/saxophonist Rob Townsend and drummer Craig Blundell - launched into a first half of songs from Hackett’s early solo ventures, such as Ace Of Wands, The Devil’s Cathedral, Spectral Mornings and Every Day. All very good, but it was, I suspect, the second act of the evening that most punters had come to hear - the 1972 Genesis album Foxtrot performed in its entirety.

Being only 5 at the time it came out, I would have missed the original tour for this album, which included Gabriel’s notorious (and, to his bandmates’ surprise) appearance in Dublin wearing a scarlet dress and a fox’s head (a literal representation of the Foxtrot album cover), commencing the costuming that would become the hallmark of his time as Genesis frontman until his departure in 1975. So it would be fair to say that my interest last night at the Apollo/Odeon was to experience something of the magic of an album that, while not changing the band’s financial fortunes, is still held in the hearts of fans as being one of considerable virtuosity, with a still-young band of gifted musicians writing complex songs about complex subjects.

© Simon Poulter 2022

Opening with Watcher Of The Skies, a tribute to an Arthur C. Clarke novel with a bit of Holst’s The Planets thown in, Hackett introduces his vocalist Nad Sylvan, the gloriously eccentric Swedish singer who, vocally sits between Gabriel and his successor, Phil Collins, but despite his long blond Scandi hair and somewhat theatrical mannerisms, blends into the band canvas, rather trying to take centre stage, as Gabriel would have done in 1975. 

Foxtrot’s first side is worked through in sequence, including the prescient social commentary of Get ’Em Out By Friday (a somewhat dystopian Gabriel song about a 70s newtown in which the idea is floated to have residents genetically shortened so that they fit smaller homes in order to build more of them). There is, too, Can-Utility And The Coastliners, a rare early Hackett composition, losely based on the story of King Canute who, you might remember, ordered the sea to be turned back in response to lickspittle sycophancy, something rock bands will know a thing about. 

To replicate the flip from Side 1 to Side 2 of Foxtrot, there is a mini interval, after which Hackett is provided with a classical guitar and a stool. Performing alone, Hackett plays Horizons, a beautiful, baroque instrumental which, in Hammersmith, underlines Hackett’s status as an under-appreciated classical guitarist (he has produced several albums of classical playing, alongside his rock releases). Faithfully following the album’s track listing, it’s a precursor to one of the most adventurous pieces of music any band has ever pulled off: Supper’s Ready. 

No doubt part-inspired - or at least encouraged - by the 16-minute, eight-song closing medley on The Beatles’ Abbey Road, over the course of seven parts Supper’s Ready romps through a variety of time signatures and themes, starting with the ghostly apparition Gabriel claimed to have seen, through the Lewis Carrroll-esque whimsy of Willow Farm, to the epic conclusion of  As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men's Feet), with its biblical reference to “a new Jerusalem”. Perhaps, on the original record, it appeared more as a collection of songs, but hearing the enture 23-minute suite performed live for the first time in my lifetime, there is an added power to the song that not even the rendition on the imperious live album Seconds Out (during the mixing of which Hackett quit the band) captured.

Many, many years ago, for only my second live review for the NME I saw Sade at the Royal Albert Hall, and was struck by the somewhat clinical, sterile recreation of the Diamond Life album that had propelled her to stardum. Live performances work best when there is some reinvention, either to mitigate the inability to recreate complex arrangements created in the studio, or simply to indulge the artist’s whimsy, and introduce some riffing. Hackett has no need for either. With a piece as intricate as Supper’s Ready - and indeed the entire Foxtrot album - there was no need for embelishment.

© Simon Poulter 2022

This applied, too, to Firth Of Fifth, the grandiose epic on Selling England By The Pound that opens with an extended piano solo - played by Tony Banks on the original, and here faithfully and expertly recreated by King - before the song opens out, heading towards its somewhat legendary guitar solo. I once made a tit of myself when interviewing Hackett, in which I told him that, as a 13-year-old, I’d learned to play the solo, note-for-note, on my Spanish guitar. He was suitably unimpressed. It is still one of the greatest rock guitar solos of all time, though usually criminally overlooked by Jimmy Page’s on Stairway To Heaven, or David Gilmour’s on Comfortably Numb.

Solos are, of course, one of the nadirs of rock concerts. This Is Spinal Tap captured the indulgent absurdity of it, and there is a taste of this with an extended bass solo by Reingold earlier in the show. Blundell introduces the final song of the night with an elongated workout on the drums, but I’ll give him that for two reasons: 1) Craig is a thoroughly decent bloke who recorded a video of encouragement for a friend of mine after she was caught up in the 2015 Bataclan attack and took up drumming as a coping mechanism; and 2) Collins and his co-drummers (Chester Thompson and, briefly, Bill Bruford) would perform a drum duet as a prelude to Los Endos, the closing song of the Trick Of The Tail album whenever it was played live. And thus, Los Endos closes the evening with Hackett and Co in all its grandeur.

I’ve often maintained Trick Of The Tail and Wind & Wuthering, the albums that bore Hackett’s final studio contributions to Genesis, are two of the band’s best, bridging the lyrical and musical flights of fancy of the Gabriel era, and predating the pop orientation that Collins, Banks and Mike Rutherford as a trio went for in the 80s. There have been claims that Hackett’s contribution to the band, over the six albums in as many years, has been diminished. Part of this maybe due to the dominance of writing by Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford, and then the perceived commercial success that Collins’ higher profile led to, long after Hackett had left. But listening back to the albums he played on, his guitar work plays a much bigger role in the soundstage than is ever given credit for. 

In Hammersmith last night, we were given a highly enjoyable reminder. His solo material notwithstanding, I suspect the majority of last night’s punters were there for a trip down Memory Lane. And they would have been richly rewarded. Compared to the disappointing final experience of Genesis, earlier this year at London’s O2 Arena, this felt like the real deal. A wallow, yes, but a thoroughly enjoyable, comfort food-for-the-ears indulgence, provided authentically by the original purveyor. 

The rebirth of cool: the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

In my actual timeline, I am a child of the 1960s. In my self-mythology, I’m a child of the rock-pop era. There is some legitimacy to this claim: I was, after all, born in November 1967, three months after the Summer Of Love and two weeks after Hendrix recorded Little Wing. My childhood was spent in the 1970s, which meant attending the Thursday night ritual of Top Of The Pops, and bopping along to Mud, The Rubettes, Smokie, and being ever-so slightly freaked out by Alvin Stardust clad in full leather, pointing at the camera with a gloved hand bearing a large jewelled ring on the index finger.

It was only later on in the 1970s that I discovered what is now referred to as “classic rock”. This meant that my musical upbringing - until I ‘accidentally’ discovered Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album (well, taped it off my brother’s copy) - was shaped by the Top 40 tunes of the decade as a whole, which meant putting up with Peters & Lee’s Welcome Home and ABBA, and becoming mildly interested in the punky chops of Blondie, The Jam and The Police around the time I started secondary school.

By no fault other than the year I was born in, I turned 13 in 1980, which meant that the 80s were my coming of age, music-wise. This was the decade that began with the Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall at No.1 and ended with a Top 10 that included Jason Donovan, Soul II Soul, Jive Bunny, Madonna, De La Soul and New Kids On The Block. Make of that what you will. My read is that you probably can’t generalise any one era: the 50s might have given us rock and roll, the 60s the golden age of pop (or pop-rock if you prefer), the 70s rock, punk and disco, and so on, but really we’re in broad sweeping statements here.

Recent trundles about the South Coast, listening to the type of "classic hit" radio stations Peter Kay captures so brilliantly with 'Forever FM' in Car Share, reminded me that the 80s were no different. Sure, there was plenty of cheese, but no different then than now or, indeed, any era you pick. The difference, though, between the 80s and now is that - and I’m going to go full card-carrying, cardigan-wearing old fart here - there was some musical integrity, then, about Top 40 pop. You know, real instruments and no Autotune, unlike the software-infested durge coming out of the station we had on the car last week on the Isle of Wight.

So, then, a statement of the bleeding obvious: there’s something for everyone in every decade, and no one has the right to call snobbery over anyone else’s. Rant over, the reason this comes to mind is the reissue this week (and rediscovery in my vinyl collection) of an album that, in one particular way, captured a specific aspect of the 80s. Last week I blogged about the demise of Q magazine and my involvement in the launch of a near-rival in 1986, looking to break into the ‘men’s lifestyle’ market, which was being fuelled by Soho, The Face and i-D magazines, and the convergence of style, fashion and music of the early 1980s. So the reappearance of the Absolute Beginners soundtrack album has randomly evoked a phase of my musical education when the 1980s tapped into the 1950s, and jazz made an unexpected appearance. We had, of course, Sade, whose Diamond Life became a period cliché due to its association with ‘yuppie’ wine bars (though it’s true - you couldn’t avoid the record if you visited such establishments). Plus there were pseudo jazz acts like Carmel, Matt Bianco and Swing Out Sister, along with Everything But The Girl’s Eden album and even The Style Council, with their cod-jazz leanings on their debut, Café Bleu. All of it was, though, eminently cool.

Julien Temple’s 1986 screen musical adaptation of Colin McInnes’s 1950s-set, coming-of-age novel Absolute Beginners just seemed ripe for the time. It was brash, it was bold, it was colourful, it was invariably overblown - and many critics just didn’t like it - but it was, for all its many faults, relentlessly cool. Not quite the commercial and critical dud it has since been painted to be, Absolute Beginners had a certain charm - in particular, its soundtrack. Temple drafted in jazz great Gil Evans to oversee it, and in between pieces of Evans-arranged incidental music, it captured a eclectic, but jazz-themed mix from the likes of Sade, Ray Davies (in a particularly amusing skit as a put-down dad pleading for a “Quiet Life”), Patsy Kensit (on-the-money 80s casting as the film’s love interest) with her band at the time, Eighth Wonder, and even a stormy instrumental by Jerry Dammers of The Specials to accompany the film’s riot scene (a statement on the 1950s Notting Hill race riots). Paul Weller - who’d already written his own paean to the McInnes book with The Jam’s song of the same name - got on the soundtrack with The Style Council’s bouncy Have You Ever Had It Blue.

The standout contribution (inevitably, given my pronounced leanings), however, came from David Bowie. The Dame was at something of a career plateau when Temple invited him to ham it up as vampiric advertising executive Vendice Partners - himself a skit on Soho’s then-status as 80s London’s adland epicentre, replete with an intentionally fake American accent. When the film was released, Bowie was several months on from his barnstorming appearance at Live Aid, a performance in which he’d appeared with a brand new backing band (including Thomas Dolby), having discarded - as he often did - the group he’d worked with on the Let’s Dance album and its subsequent Serious Moonlight tour. Temple’s Absolute Beginners was already in production when Live Aid came around, and Bowie’s theme song for it was recorded at Abbey Road just a month before the self-style “global jukebox” was staged.

Like Queen and other acts who were given a career lift by the charity concert, Bowie’s appearance in Absolute Beginners, and his musical contribution to it, went further in cementing his legend status, but not in any obvious leap or bound. You could argue that he'd left behind artistically interesting, complex music, and that Let’s Dance had sent him fully commercial (with the mid-80s Tonight and Never Let Me Down albums widely considered creative lows). But with Temple’s film, Bowie looked like he was just having fun. As Partners, he camped it up for England, but it was the title song - all eight minutes of it, in its full version - that stood out as, arguably, one of the great entries in the entire Bowie catalogue, and certainly of that period of his career. When I saw him at Wembley a year after the film ca out, on the much-derided Glass Spider Tour (regrettably, my only experience of Bowie live), it was Absolute Beginners’ energy that made the biggest mark of the night. I could wax on further about Bowie here, but as much as we (well, I) still mourn his loss, it’s memories of his involvement in this film - both the comic acting and the impassioned theme song (not to mention another gem on the soundtrack, his cover of the old Dean Martin standard, Volare), that added another chapter - no, paragraph - to the already expansive Bowie story, and to the magic of why few bend a knee to The Dame as much as I still do.

The Absolute Beginners soundtrack, then, snapshots two eras: the 50s the film portrays, and the mid-80s in pop. Just as Live Aid, it’s near-contemporary, captured the crossover between the generations (those of the classic rock era like Paul McCartney, Led Zeppelin, Bowie, The Who, Queen, etc, and those from the more immediate present - Madonna, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, George Michael), Absolute Beginners sliced into a momentary phase of the 1980s, when Soho cappuccinos, Bass Weejun loafers and wearing pastel V-necks over the shoulders - essentially the entire Paul Weller vibe at the time - provided a jazz-infused, politically-minded (anti-Thatcher, Red Wedge et al) interlude to the decade that brought us puffball skirts and red braces-wearing, Bret Easton Ellis-inspired bankers with far too much gel in their hair. But above all, in just the first eight minutes of side one, it brought out a recording by David Bowie that combined so much of his undoubted talent - drama, excitement, luscious chord changes and an impassioned vocal, plus a Bowie trademark that often goes unrecognised: a honking saxophone.