Ben and Tracey back at MOTH Club for three nights in June
Ben and Tracey are back at the MOTH Club in London for three nights in June. After two instant sell-outs in April, they return on Sunday June 8, Monday June 9, and Tuesday June 10. They will perform as a part-acoustic part-electronic duo accompanied by Rex Horan (double bass) and Family Stereo’s Blake Watt (guitar, vocals), playing songs from their 40-year careers as both a duo and solo artists. Tickets (max 2) will go on sale at 6pm BST, this Thu 17 April via DICE (you’ll need the app and an account to complete purchase). Get a ticket link for your preferred night now at the EBTG Linktree page or via DICE.
First shows together for 25 years. Ben and Tracey at Hackney’s MOTH club.
Ben and Tracey decided to return together to live performance for the first time in 25 years this week with two intimate shows at Hackney’s MOTH club in London joined on stage by their son Blake on guitar, and Rex Horan on double bass.
With thousands on the venue’s wait list, the few hundred who managed to get tickets were treated to a setlist spanning their whole career both as solo artists and together as a duo, beginning with their debut single Night and Day and ending with their most recent, Nothing Left To Lose.
Phones were stickered on entry which lent a powerful immediacy to the evening of two 45-minute sets with a 20-minute interval. It was a very special couple of nights.
Ben and Tracey will be back at the MOTH club soon.
Photo: Edward Bishop
Ben and Tracey play two intimate shows at London’s MOTH Club, April 6 and 7
Ben and Tracey play two intimate live shows at London’s MOTH club, Apr 6 and 7. They will perform as a part-acoustic part-electronic duo accompanied by Rex Horan on double bass. No club bangers, no huge arena, just a chilled folk-tronic vibe. Two sets with an interval. Songs from both their solo and duo years. The events are billed simply as ‘Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn’.
Tickets were offered to UK members of their mailing list, and both shows sold out instantly at 9am this morning.
“We loved making Fuse together in 2022, and we wanted to do something else,” says Ben. “And that slowly turned into a conversation about playing live again.”
“When we pictured how, we realised we just wanted to play a few songs – including some we’d never done before – in a small club,” continues Tracey. “Front room, friends and family vibe. If the shows go well we intend to do more.”
EBTG win at Music Producers Guild Awards 2024
Everything But The Girl won Self-Producing Artist of the Year at the Music Producers Guild Awards 2024 on Thursday April 24. The event was held at The Troxy in London.
At Maida Vale out on black vinyl with photo booklet for Record Store Day 2024
At Maida Vale, the 4-track EP capturing EBTG’s BBC session last year, will be out on classic black vinyl on Saturday April 20th for Record Store Day 2024. Hear live takes of Run A Red Light, When You Mess Up, Single and a unique piano-vocal only version of Nothing Left To Lose. The release also includes an 8-page booklet of photos from the day by Edward Bishop. We love how it all turned out. Find a participating store to get yours.
At Maida Vale EP out now digitally
Everything But The Girl’s new At Maida Vale EP is out now digitally. The EP is made up of four tracks recorded in April at the BBC’s famous Maida Vale Studios – Run A Red Light, Single and When You Mess Up, first broadcast on Gideon Coe’s BBC 6 Music show; and Nothing Left To Lose first heard on Jo Whiley’s BBC Radio 2 show. A video of the Run A Red Light performance shot on the day by Edward Bishop can be watched here. All the recordings are versions of tracks on the band’s current album, Fuse, except Single which first appeared on their platinum 1996 album, Walking Wounded. The session was the only live performance that the band did around the release of their new album.
Speaking about the EP, Tracey says: “It was exciting returning to such a famous studio to record these tracks. It was almost 40 years since our first John Peel Session there. The idea was to start by approaching all four as live piano and vocal takes.”
“Nothing Left To Lose was then left stripped back as a complete contrast to the original,” adds Ben. “For the others we added a few one-take overdubs of synth, guitar, drums and backing vocals to capture both the spontaneity of a session but a flavour of the original album arrangements.”
Fuse enters UK Album Chart at No 3
Today ‘Fuse’ entered the UK Album Chart at No 3. Ben and Tracey said on social media: “We are thrilled. Our highest EVER chart position. We didn’t know what to expect when we made it. A leap of faith after all this time. Thanks to EVERYONE who has supported it. It’s been quite the ride. Here’s to the future ??❤️”
Fuse, the new album, out now
Yesterday Everything But The Girl released its new album, Fuse. The response has been incredible from both fans and media. Ben and Tracey would like to thank everyone who has supported this project. Highlights have included a string of high-profile reviews and comments (“Still staking out pop’s frontier after 40 years. It is audibly made by people with a deep love for and understanding of the music they’re inspired by … a comeback worth waiting for.” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ – GUARDIAN; “Triumphant new album … bewitching and soul-baring” – PITCHFORK; “How reunion albums should be done … the blueprint for any alt-leaning electronic act in the pop space … proves how big an impact their music has made on the landscape that has followed” ★ ★ ★ ★ – NME) and a wave of acclaim from fans across social media.
The album is available on coloured vinyl, black vinyl, CD, BluRay (HD audio and Dolby Atmos) and stream. Still need a copy? Go here.
New single, Run A Red Light, with new video
Everything But The Girl have released their brand-new single ‘Run A Red Light’. It’s the third upfront track to be taken from their new album ‘Fuse’, due out next month, and arrives with an accompanying video, directed by Charlie Di Placido, who made the recent ‘Nothing Left To Lose’ video (watched over 1 million times on YouTube). There is also a new photo (above) by Edward Bishop.
“I met a lot of characters during my years in clubland,” says Ben of ‘Run A Red Light’, “and I wrote this song about the guy at the end of the night, who dreams his big moment is just around the corner. All the bravado and good intentions masking the vulnerability.”
“The video is like a dream of the story,” says Tracey. “We’ve found with this record that choreography can express the emotion in our music without having to be too literal. The characters, the clothes, the movement, the direction all just fit. Charlie and his team really get the feelings we’re going for.”
Everything But The Girl have today confirmed details of Fuse, their first new studio album in 24 years, out on 21st April. You can pre-order the album and merchandise now.
The first single – and opening cut from the 10-track album – is Nothing Left To Lose, accompanied by a video from director Charlie Di Placido (Kojey Radical, Jungle).
Written and produced by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn over the spring-summer of 2021, Fuse is a modern take on the lustrous electronic soul the band first pioneered in the mid-90s. Thorn’s affecting and richly-textured voice is once again up front in Watt’s glimmering landscape of sub-bass, sharp beats, half-lit synths and empty space, and as before, the result is the sound of a band comfortable with being both sonically contemporary, yet agelessly themselves.
Speaking about the band’s re-emergence and new album, Tracey says:
‘Ironically the finished sound of the new album was the last thing on our mind when we started in March 2021. Of course, we were aware of the pressures of such a long-awaited comeback, so we tried to begin instead in a spirit of open-minded playfulness, uncertain of the direction, receptive to invention’.
The pair recorded in secret at home and in a small riverside studio outside Bath with friend and engineer Bruno Ellingham. For the first two months, the artist name on the album files was simply TREN (Tracey and Ben), and early takes focussed on ambient sound montages and improvised spectral piano loops recorded by Ben on his iPhone at home during his enforced pandemic isolation – ideas which later blossomed into atmospheric tracks such as When You Mess Up and Interior Space.
Yet, as confidence grew, so did the pulse and rhythm of the album, culminating in the writing and programming of later songs, such as the new single Nothing Left To Lose and Caution To The Wind. Shot through with alternating hope, desperation and vivid flashbacks, the album’s lyrics – sometimes allusive, sometimes richly detailed, capture what it’s like to start again.
Ben explains: ‘It was exciting. A natural dynamism developed. We spoke in short-hand, and little looks, and co-wrote instinctively. It became more than the sum of our two selves. It just became Everything But The Girl on its own’.
The duo’s renewed studio partnership also led to the new album title. ‘After so much time apart professionally, there was both a friction and a natural spark in the studio when we began’, says Tracey. ‘However much we underplayed it at the start, it was like a fuse had been lit. And it ended in a kind of coalescence, an emotional fusion. It felt very real and alive’.
Everything But The Girl broke through on the UK indie scene in 1982 with a stark jazz-folk cover of Cole Porter’s Night and Day. They then released a string of UK gold albums throughout the 80s, experimenting with jazz, guitar pop, orchestral wall-of-sound and drum-machine soul. After Watt’s near-death experience from a rare auto-immune condition in 1992, the pair returned unbowed with the million-selling ardent folktronica of Amplified Heart in 1994. It includes their biggest hit, Missing, after New York DJ-producer Todd Terry’s remix unexpectedly made the leap from heavy club play to global radio success (Number 2 US Hot 100; Number 3 UK Top 40). The sparkling Walking Wounded – emotional songs brimming with ideas from the mid 90s electronic scene – followed in 1996 (Number 4 UK Album Chart). Spawning four UK Top 40 hits, the record became the band’s first platinum selling album. After their final show at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, the pair chose to quit Everything But The Girl on a high.
The intervening years have of course been anything but empty. From 2007 Tracey released four solo albums, a movie soundtrack for Carol Morley’s The Falling, four non-fiction books and wrote extensively for The New Statesman. Ben became an international DJ and remixer, and ran his electronic label Buzzin’ Fly for ten years before returning to his singer-songwriter roots with a trilogy of solo albums from 2014-2020.
Everything But The Girl’s new album Fuse is released on 21st April on Buzzin’ Fly Records through Virgin Music Group, except North America, where it is released on Buzzin’ Fly Records through Verve
