Tone Glow 186: Everything But the Girl

An interview with the UK duo about forgiving yourself, the complications of performing live, and making their 2023 album 'Fuse'

Everything But the Girl

Photo by Edward Bishop

Everything But the Girl is a UK duo made of Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt. During the early 1980s, Thorn was part of the punk band Marine Girls, and both she and Watt released solo albums. They started collaborating in 1982 and released their debut 7-inch, Night and Day, in 1982. Since then, the two have released a multitude of albums, singles, EPs, and compilations that saw them traversing different genres, simultaneously expanding their sonic identity while fleshing out varied ideas and moods. Early in the band’s career, an unsuspecting kiss-off could be couched in bossa nova’s sunny disposition, or smooth sophisti-pop instrumentation would reveal a longing for everlasting romance. Later, trip-hop became the sound of forlorn desperation while drum ‘n’ bass was the site of a self-loathing confessional. In 1999, they released their then-final studio album Temperamental before going on a decades-long hiatus. The band announced their reunion in 2022, and would release their newest album, Fuse, in 2023. Everything But the Girl are playing three intimate live shows in June—more details here. Joshua Minsoo Kim spoke with Thorn and Watt on March 15th, 2023 to discuss the evolution of their sound, working unencumbered, and the making of the newest Everything But the Girl album.

---

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is how getting the life you want requires the sacrifice of an older one. That’s something I sense from the arc of your career, through the transitions that occur from album to album. And both of you of course made solo albums prior to Everything But the Girl’s debut LP. Were there any points at which you felt it was difficult to go from one style of music to the next? Was there ever a sense of sacrifice?

Tracey Thorn: No. I have to say that “sacrifice” is not a word that has ever occurred to me in that context. Honestly, as artists, you’re looking at the last thing you did and by the time it’s out there in the world, you’re seeing all the things that are wrong with it (laughter). I know that’s what often spurred us on to make the next one—that we’re filled with a sense of insight into how we might have done this differently. At the beginning of a project, you’re usually fired up with a strong sense of belief that this time you’re gonna really nail it (laughter). So that sense of movement and progression from one record to the next has come from a moment of excitement, of clarity of vision, like, “I’m finally gonna do this right.” So I’ve never thought of it as a sacrifice, no.

When you first started making music as Everything But the Girl, what do you both feel like you were able to bring to the project that the other person couldn’t?

Tracey Thorn: On a very basic level, just our particular skill set. I think Ben would say, “Tracey’s a good singer, she’s got a really distinctive voice, and that’s a really strong asset for any band to have.” And I looked at Ben and thought, “This guy plays the guitar a whole lot better than I do.” (laughter). That’s not to say either of us gave up those things—Ben carried on singing and I played bits of guitar—but I’m talking about the very beginning, when we first met at university. We identified something in each other… and that’s how bands form, isn’t it? You’re looking for someone who can make up for your weaknesses, who can be strong in an area where you’re not strong, or who can balance out the thing you instinctively do with what they instinctively do differently.

Ben Watt: I think that’s an accurate distillation of the beginnings. Even though we came from different musical backgrounds and tastes, in many ways, we ended up with a very similar idea of how music should sound. We had a common interest in things like minimalism, economy of arrangement, music that was soulful and direct, that used words in an emotional way but was not overly sentimental—we wanted dry, honest appraisals of the subject matters we were talking about. And that was really of interest to me. So while we came in with these two different skill sets, we merged on a common path quite quickly—it felt familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

What were the different types of music you were into?

Ben Watt: I grew up with a musically advanced family background. My father was a jazz musician and all my siblings were half-brothers and sisters who were nine, ten, eleven years older than me. So, I grew up almost like an only child in a house full of adults. My dad was playing a lot of jazz and my older brothers and sisters were playing sophisticated music of the ’70s like Steely Dan and Lou Reed and James Taylor. I was a kid, listening to this spill out of everybody’s bedroom, and then when I was a teenager I got into people like John Martyn and Brian Eno. When I met Tracey, she’d grown up in a house that had jazz playing, but she also came from a much more pop and disco background as a teenager. That was new to me. Those two worlds really came together and are very much the backbone of the sound we did.

Tracey Thorn: We joked when we first met that Ben had more albums than me but I had more singles (laughter).

Ben Watt: That’s probably true!

Tracey Thorn: And there is something in there. He had quite an interesting, eclectic record collection, which I was immediately fascinated by. It attracted me; I wanted to know what these records were that I was flicking through. And likewise he said, “My god, you’ve got this huge box of singles! Who buys so many singles?!” (laughter). But I guess I had a more pop take on music—I thought the single was where everything was encapsulated.

I’m immediately thinking of “Each and Every One,” which is something that I don’t think could’ve been made without both of you coming together. And this desire for dry lyricism comes through, too. Of course you had the “Night and Day” single beforehand, but I’m wondering—were you specifically thinking of how to present songs as singles versus songs in the context of an album?

Tracey Thorn: I don’t think so. I think we recorded all of Eden (1984) before we had a clear sense of what might be the single. It was just once we finished it that we thought “Each and Every One” should be the one. It’s got such a strong, distinctive sound and this incredibly hooky intro. But in pop terms, it’s really unusual—you’re starting with a really sophisticated horn arrangement, but it’s really catchy. It sort of just rose to being the single. When we came to our own work, I don’t think we were ever that schematic about it, of planning singles in that organized way.

Do you feel you were schematic about albums, though? Were you thinking a lot about sequencing and how albums would be presented as their own standalone work?

Tracey Thorn: We always had strong ideas about those things, and even though those ideas shifted from album to album, once we embarked on a project, it seemed important to have some sense of what the palette of instruments were that we were going to use, as well as the stylistic presentation.

Ben Watt: From the music to the artwork when it hit the shops, it was all part of the process.

You mentioned that each album felt like a chance to fix things, so I’m curious what happened from Eden to Love Not Money (1985)? What was on your mind at the time?

Ben Watt: You have to remember that we were 20 years old (laughter). We were kids, basically. We were easily riled by criticism, we were bullish and opinionated, we thought we were right—typical 20 year olds. One of the things that alarmed us when Eden came out, because we thought we made it in isolation—we made it in Hull, away from London—was that when we came back down, we found ourselves lumped in with a lot of bands in a scene that we felt we had nothing in common with. This was Matt Bianco and these early ’80s bands from the jazz-pop scene. We thought, fuck that, we don’t want to be a part of that.

Tracey Thorn: And a year had passed since we’d recorded it. There was such a long delay between us recording it and it coming out, and that’s because we changed record labels. We finished it in 1983 and it came out in 1984, and when you’re that young and in those pop cultural terms, a year felt like a hundred years. We were out there giving interviews for an album that we felt like we’d moved on from, and I think we had some anxiety that this new jazz thing could be a fad. We didn’t want to get boxed in. Love Not Money is one of those albums where a band is in transition. There’s still jazziness in there, but we’re also showing influences from other things we were listening to. If Eden had come out at precisely the moment we recorded it, I think it would’ve been a different experience for us.

Ben Watt: Yes. People always go on about the bossa nova and jazz on Eden, but songs like “Another Bridge” and “Frost and Fire” were obvious stepping stones into Love Not Money. And Love Not Money also has some complex horn arrangements on it, like on “Shoot Me Down” and “This Love (Not For Sale)” in particular, which would’ve sat really easily on Eden. It’s easy to write this shorthand that Eden was our jazz album and Love Not Money was our guitar album, but there are overlaps if you look in detail at what we were doing.

How often were you thinking about your stylistic changes as a rebellion to what others were saying about your music?

Tracey Thorn: I think it was true at the beginning.

Ben Watt: When we were younger.

Tracey Thorn: I think we grew out of it. It’s much easier to feel that pressure when you’re younger. And when we were young, these were our years of reading music press and it being our Bible—it mattered to us a lot what those people said. When you’re young, you’re working so hard to create an identity, present an identity, and have that identity be understood. There’s a lot going on. And you can be very sensitive when you’re young to any tiny misunderstanding. When I look now I think, “God, we were so well received!” (laughter). We were so lucky to make such an impact with our first couple records—it’s not a given, and one shouldn’t take it for granted. We were, as young people are, overly aware of any tiny criticisms. But as you get older, you grow through that process and become better able to steer your own ship and not be so subject to those winds that blow at you.

Ben Watt: We’ve barely had a manager in our entire career. We had a brief period at the end of the ’80s where we had one and then we stopped, and then we had one around the time of Walking Wounded (1996), largely because things just got very big that we needed somebody to help with the administration. But we’ve never really taken advice from anybody. Even now we don’t have a manager—we just make our decisions, live or die by them, and move on.

I was listening to your new album, Fuse (2023), and was really struck by “When You Mess Up” and the idea of forgiving yourself. It reminded me of “Blame” from Temperamental (1999) and how that song is about loathing yourself. How do you feel like the last 24 years have affected your ability to forgive yourself?

Tracey Thorn: I wrote the lyric on “When You Mess Up” fairly recently. It’s pretty much about this stage I’m at now and interpreting it as another one of those transitional moments of life. We’ve hit a certain age: our kids have grown up and have recently left home, and I’m a woman and have gone through my menopause a few years ago. This song was me looking at myself and identifying that those points of life can make you feel very uncertain about yourself and where you’re going next. It reminded me a lot of the feelings I had as a teenager—again, that uncertainty. I begin the song with, “You seem so young again,” which sounds like it might be the opening to an upbeat, positive lyric (laughter) but the next line is, “I think that’s because you’re in pain.”

To me, that feels like a really true thing—that we idealize youth as a time of optimism and happiness, but a lot of the time, young people experience a lot of emotional uncertainty, turmoil, and self-doubt. I thought it was interesting that feelings like that do recur through your life. I was at this stage where I was approaching 60 and feeling some of those same things again: I’m not quite sure who I am, I’m not sure what I’m doing next. But from the perspective that I’ve reached now at this age, what I can do is look at myself in a more forgiving way. I have the ability now to step back and say, “It’s okay to feel like this, don’t beat yourself up about it. Don’t beat yourself up about having a drink or thinking you’re being too loud. You’re allowed to fuck up, everyone fucks up.” So that’s the interesting thing—the contrast between being older and younger. There are points of connection where you feel the same, and there are points where you realize that in some ways, you really have matured and learned things from those intervening years. You can tolerate those feelings of difficulty.

Ben Watt: If you reflect on how something you’re experiencing now reminds you of something in the past, it usually has absolutely nothing to do with a song you’ve written—it’s just something that happened in your life. I don’t feel like we’re constantly referencing anything that was written when we were 23 or something. That’s not how I think about my life, so sometimes it’s quite hard when journalists draw lines between songs that we’ve written. All I can ever say is that I respect the person I was when I wrote that song and the thoughts I had at the time. They were honest, and they were things I clearly felt very strongly about, but I don’t always know that I can connect with that person now, you know?

Is it hard to revisit these older songs, then?

Ben Watt: It’s not hard in that it’s upsetting or annoying, it’s just that I don’t think I can give rounded answers; it was a long time ago, and it’s hard to remember how you felt.

Tracey Thorn: That’s true—it feels quite remote sometimes. Actually remembering what you were thinking is difficult, and I kind of feel that it doesn’t matter. Once your songs are out there, it’s more what they end up meaning to other people who listen to them, and if the person who wrote it can’t quite remember what they meant, it doesn’t really matter—the work is there and it takes on its own meaning, it takes on multiple meanings for different people who listen to it. And at that point, I think those multiple meanings are what remains alive, while the versions of us who wrote it can feel dead and gone (laughter). I can’t even remember what they were thinking!

I know Fuse came about during quarantine. What sort of feelings arose during this time to write the songs that make up the album? There are a lot of tracks that feel like you’re unconcerned with consequence, where you’re really going for it.

Tracey Thorn: We started working toward the end of the lockdown period, so it was this feeling of coming out of isolation. And that’s perhaps why there is this recurring theme of wanting to seize the moment, to live in the present, to really live life. It’s coming out of that feeling—life’s been almost on hold for two years, it’s been in this frozen state, and in these lyrics I get the feeling of wanting to come back to life, to desperately connect with people, of wanting to have vivid experiences, of emerging.

Ben, how were you trying to capture this “emerging” feeling while making sure that the sound felt new and contemporary?

Ben Watt: The first things I started working on were very atmospheric, ambient, experimental drone-based music. It was something that I was working on a little bit during the pandemic. I was in isolation a lot of the time because of my autoimmune condition; there were periods where I couldn’t really interact with the family. I actually developed a big interest in ambient music during the pandemic and started a public playlist called “Air Gap” where I put all the stuff that I really liked into it. I started experimenting a bit with that myself. In addition, I was doing these piano improvisations into my iPhone where I was deliberately not trying to write anything specific but just play.

Those two things became the first things we used for the new project. There were really no beats at the beginning. “Interior Space” was one of the first songs we worked on, as well as the music for “When You Mess Up.” And that’s where a lot of the character of the record started to develop. Later, as we got more confident, we started to add more beats and it was like we were climbing up the tempo. “Caution to the Wind” was the penultimate track we recorded, and we thought we could do one better, which is when we did “Nothing Left to Lose.” But the origins of the music lie in something much more fragmented and atmospheric and nebulous. I think it lends a character to the record, whether there’s a beat or not.

What sort of new perspective did you have about ambient music? Earlier you mentioned Brian Eno as an artist you listened to as a teenager, and of course he made pop music back then too, but I’m curious what was new about this period of listening that shows up on this record.

Ben Watt: Just the lack of beats.

Tracey Thorn: And the lack of vocals a lot of the time. There’s an enormous contemplative thing, do you think?

Ben Watt: I do.

Tracey Thorn: We started in this mood of being quite experimental and not knowing whether we were actually going to make a full Everything But the Girl album that we would release to people. So the starting point is this quiet contemplation, this “let’s just play around with the music.” The first couple tracks were these seeds that we planted, and then our confidence grew and we got excited about the project. It started to blossom in our mind that, “Oh, this is really starting to sound like an Everything But the Girl record, and if we are really going to make a whole album, we probably need to raise the bar a little bit.” Inevitably, with anything we do, we want to be able to sit it alongside the other records we’ve made and for it to look respectable. We need to make a record that’s at least as good as where we left off. So that became a challenge, and we got excited—if we’re gonna make a record, we’ve got to make a really good one.

What qualifies something as an Everything But the Girl record? I know that these songs were initially going to be under the name TREN [for Tracey and Ben], but what led you to realize that this was going to be an Everything But the Girl album? Are there specific markers for that?

Ben Watt: I think the good thing is that we don’t really know (laughter).

Tracey Thorn: We kind of know when we hear it.

Ben Watt: But we try not to think about it too much because I think it would be inhibiting. All I do know is that we did two or three weeks of work at home with me piecing things together on a laptop, coming up with some ideas, and then we went into the studio with our engineer, Bruno [Ellingham], to record some of Tracey’s vocals. And that day, when we heard Tracey’s voice through the big speakers over this music, we suddenly went, “Okay, this sounds like Everything But the Girl.” We weren’t really aware of it at the time. Tracey had just been singing over my shoulder at home, testing some melodies into an iPhone. It was all very demo-based at that point and, in some ways, theoretical. But once we put the mic up and put Tracey’s voice properly over the music, it seemed to take on a life of its own. That’s when we realized it wasn’t gonna be TREN.

Tracey Thorn: When we’ve tried to analyze it, I think we can say [Everything But the Girl’s sound] has something to do with how Ben hears melodies and chords and voicings, and the space that he leaves in an arrangement so there’s room for my voice. So without us really even knowing, we started making this music and we could see that it had this strong identity. It felt like the decision was made for us, like the music was saying, “You can call this what you like, but it’s an Everything But the Girl record—who are you gonna be fooling if you pretend it isn’t?” (laughter).

Are there specific vocalists you’ve looked to or have been inspired by with regards to how they interact with the instrumentation around them, with how their vocals are placed in an arrangement?

Tracey Thorn: It’s hard when you’re doing your own vocals because you have to put the people you’re inspired by out of your mind. You worry about borrowing too much or, worse, being inhibited by thinking that you couldn’t live up to them. I mean, there are people who spring to mind but I’m not gonna name them! (laughter). You take the inspiration at an earlier stage, but then you put it away and let the work you’re making organically absorb those ideas. I worry about jinxing things by being too literal in naming references.

Ben Watt: And the key to working is to be unencumbered. I feel very strongly about this. You have to put all those hindrances—those thoughts that might hold you back, that might make you doubt yourself—you have to shelve them somehow. You have to work with a drive and a belief so you can get the best out of yourself. It’s like the way a sports coach will say, “Don’t think about it! Don’t think about the technique, just hit the ball and enjoy it!” And I think that’s what making music is about: You’re just trying to hit the ball and enjoy it, because that’s when the best stuff comes.

I can list lots of things that I was listening to in the run-up to making this record, but at the end of the day, it’s about how you distill it and how you make it your own that’s of real interest. I could say to you that when we were writing “When You Mess Up” that I wanted the voicings to be quite dissonant, so the actual chords are all about fourths and sixths. They’re quite ugly notes, and Tracey often lands on an unresolved note in the melody. I could tell you that I’d been listening to Chick Corea and McCoy Tyner in the weeks leading up to it because McCoy Tyner was a big one for fourths—he would always stack fourths in his piano playing. And there’s some simple piano pieces by Chick Corea where he does exactly the same, and that might have been in my mind when I was writing the chords for “When You Mess Up,” but at the end of the day they became very simple distillations and very much us.

Are there specific strategies that you’ve both employed throughout your career to feel unencumbered?

Tracey Thorn: We both like to work quite quickly. We try to get into that flow, where you’re caught up in the process, and not have too many moments when you step outside of that and critique what you’re doing, where you try to fix it and think about how things could be better. We try and get the work done in as free and quick a way as possible in that flow, and then save the critiquing for afterwards when you’ve actually got something down.

Ben Watt: One of the reasons we work with Bruno is that he works incredibly fast. He can work Pro Tools as fast as we can think, and we can really throw things down, have new ideas, edits, do this or that. In contrast, when I’m actually writing, I work with quite a low-tech setup at home. I don’t like to be encumbered by too many choices, so I actually have a primitive setup on my computer. I don’t have a ton of plug-ins, I don’t have a ton of choices that can distract me. I just get the basics down as quickly as I can, and if they sound good, then I just think it’s working. Of course it could work in a different way if I were to agonize about it for three weeks, but if what I have works, let’s just go with it. And that’s an important attitude to have, especially in an age when there is so much choice.

Tracey Thorn: We know people who have spent years in the studio apparently working on a record. And you can do that, you can stay there every day tinkering, but it can become so paralyzing. What you originally asked was, “What are the strategies?” And I do think that this thing of keeping the momentum going is really important.

Ben Watt: There was a funny time when we were working on “Run a Red Light.” I was trying to describe to Bruno the kind of snare I wanted and he said, “Hold on a moment” and opened up this folder on his computer that had something like 749 different snare drums on it (laughter). Bruno would have quite happily gone through all 749 of them and I said, “We are listening to the first 15 and I will pick one.” (laughter). I found one that I felt suited the song and Bruno said, “You don’t want to check any more?” I said, “I don’t—that one will do, it does the job.” That’s pretty symptomatic of how we approach a lot of things. And most of our records have been done pretty quickly.

So you wouldn’t characterize yourselves as perfectionists, then?

Tracey Thorn: I think we are, but we’re just quick to be decisive. That’s not to say we don’t tinker with things later, and with what we’re talking about, it’s about getting the work made first and then the finessing of stuff comes afterwards. I think it’s important to not get into that mindset when you’re right at the beginning of the process, before you’ve even got anything recorded, agonizing about every single approach. I love doing vocals in as few takes as possible and capturing some of that freshness that you inevitably get. “When You Mess Up” is a first-take vocal, and there are things wrong with it, but I just sang it and Ben said, “That’s so good. It sounds like you’re singing those lyrics for the first time.” And it’s hard to fake that, you know? You’ll say, “What was that emotion I got? Let me do that again.” But the first time you do it, you might not even know what the emotion is—you’re just focusing on getting the words right, and what you get can be quite magical.

There is always a track on every album that turns into a struggle. And I can remember tracks on different albums, but again, I’m not going to name them (laughter). These are the ones where you don’t think you’ve nailed it and go back and fix it again and again. And it probably sounds fine—to the listener, it’s probably not identifiable. A lot of artists have that feeling, where they remember the one that was a struggle and you have complicated feelings towards it.

Was there a specific song like that for this album?

Ben Watt: I knew you were gonna ask that! (laughter).

Tracey Thorn: And actually, I’m sitting here thinking about it and I don’t think there was one.

Ben Watt: We were quite ruthless. Once we realized that it was becoming quite serious, that it was becoming an Everything But the Girl record, we had eight tracks recorded and did a listening session with Bruno. He was really excited because he thought we only had two more to do. Me and Tracey were at the back of the room and he turned around and said, “So, that sounded really good to me,” but we had already decided that there were only four that were any good (laughter). So we dumped four songs, and we had done vocals and backing vocals and full arrangements already, but there was something about them that we felt wasn’t strong enough. So we did six more, but that’s making a record, isn’t it?

I wanted to ask about “Karaoke.” Was it based on an actual encounter you had?

Ben Watt: A few years ago, I flew to San Francisco and I was starting one of the solo tours that I did during the past few years. It was a tight schedule and I had to be ready for action the following morning. I was really worried about jet lag because it’s an eight-hour time difference. I had a friend in America who I met out there and his idea to shrug off my jet lag was to go to an all-night karaoke bar so I wouldn’t fall asleep. And that’s exactly what happened. I had never been in a karaoke bar before and it was really vivid.

The story I tell in the opening couple of verses is exactly what happened. The place was empty, a couple of guys tried to come up and sing Elvis Presley and it didn’t go down too well, then the regulars arrived. This girl got up and sang “Spotlight” and brought the house down. All she was doing was singing along to a backing track in a karaoke bar, and I still remember it now as one of the best gigs I’ve been to. Just that moment, that feeling in the room when everyone was whistling and cheering—it was only like 90 or 100 people in the bar, but it was a great feeling.

I showed the lyric to Tracey and I knew it was unfinished, but it got her thinking about singing in general—why do we do it? She wrote this meditative chorus. Like, do we sing to heal people? Do we sing to make them dance? Why am I even singing to you? I’m here in the dark with a microphone, what is my purpose here? It was good—it was a co-write.

Tracey, do you feel like the reasons you’re singing now and on this record are the same as when you were singing 25 or 30 years ago? How have things changed, how have they stayed the same?

Tracey Thorn: The thing about “Karaoke” is that I’m asking questions rather than drawing conclusions. I’m kind of trying to answer myself. I sing, “Do you sing to heal the broken hearted?” and I go, “You know I try.” (laughter). As Ben said, it’s a meditative section, it’s pondering those questions without suggesting there is one overall answer or that I even have a unified theory of why I sing now or why I sang in the past. I think it’s something I return to and explore quite regularly. And obviously for me it’s a powerful image to use. I like the images in that song, of standing in the dark or in the light. What does the microphone mean? As a singer, I’ve always thought that you have a fairly emotional relationship with your microphone as it’s an important part of your work.

I suppose I’m just throwing all these ideas out there again without any firm conclusions, but at the end of the day, I’m really saying, “Why do any of us sing? Why do any of us go to a karaoke bar?” And I suppose by extension we could say, “Why do we listen to music at all?” It’s something we often do in our lyrics—our songs don’t really have a message they’re conveying. What we like doing is posing questions in as simple and economical a form as possible. Listeners go away and one particular line may resonate with one listener while another does for someone else, and people make their own meanings.

Ben Watt: Quite often what we’re expressing is mixed feelings, or ambivalence. And that’s perhaps why people feel invited into the songs. They feel they’re being asked to come up with an answer themselves—they’re not being told one.

I’m reminded of how in the late ’90s, Everything But the Girl was asked to tour with U2 but you guys said no. And it’s really moving to hear, Ben, that this girl singing at the karaoke bar was one of the best gigs you’ve been to. Are there any plans to tour, and if so, would you want this to be done in more intimate venues over larger ones?

Tracey Thorn: We don’t have any plans to, at all.

Ben Watt: And I think you’ve touched on one of the reasons why we gave up when we did. We got to a point where we could clearly play to thousands of people a night, but we weren’t really enjoying it that much. Something seemed to be missing in the relationship between us and the audience. We’ve been talking the last 20 minutes about some of the qualities in our music—issues of ambivalence, subtlety, the reticence, the delivery, the fact it’s not in your face, the fact it’s not two-dimensional. And all those things don’t go down well in an arena. You have to be much more cartoon-like, really, and it’s not something we’re good at.

This, in part, explains why I’ve enjoyed the past five or ten years with my solo stuff because I can play small clubs with 200 people. I’ve loved it just for that reason. Realistically, it’s not something Everything But the Girl could do because it would disappoint so many people, and it brings its own problems and issues. It’s very complex for us—what we actually want to get out of live performance and what our fans want from us. Then there’s the whole thing about playing a back catalogue, which is something we’re not that crazy about but it’s what is expected of you these days. You always have to do a heritage show, you’ve gotta play all of your hits, and preferably exactly as you recorded them (laughter), which is even more dispiriting. I’m always jealous of jazz musicians who are never expected to play the same every night. So there’s lots of complicated things for us in playing live, which is why we swerved it. It’s why we focused on making a great studio record and said, “Let’s not get hung up on how we perform it live.”

Was that something you thought about a lot with the older albums then, about performing specific songs live?

Tracey Thorn: Sometimes, yeah. And often, we would get to the end of recording an album before that thought would occur to us. I remember finishing Baby, the Stars Shine Bright (1986) and thinking, what the hell… how are we doing this one? (laughter). With the late ’90s records, and like others at the time, when electronic music was taking off more, a lot of people had to come up with solutions for what the drummer was going to do, how you were going to trigger samples and loops, how many keyboard players you were gonna need. And a lot of people came up with solutions, and we did find a way of touring with those records, but you ended up with a fairly complicated experience whereas when you’re in the studio, you have the freedom to just create the music in the exact way you want it to sound.

Ben Watt: We don’t have to do the stage play version of it now (laughter).

Tracey Thorn: We only made the film (laughter).

Everything But the Girl’s Fuse can be purchased and streamed here. Their live EP, At Maida Vale, can be heard here. Everything But the Girl are playing three intimate live shows in June—more details here. More information about the band can be found at their website.

---

Thank you for reading the 186th issue of Tone Glow. I want to be addictive, I want to be secure.

If you appreciate what we do, please consider donating via Ko-fi or becoming a Patreon patron. Tone Glow is dedicated to forever providing its content for free, but please know that all our writers are paid for the work they do. All donations will be used for paying writers, and if we get enough money, Tone Glow will be able to publish issues more frequently.