Good news, everyone. We are still on track for the new EBTG album release in the spring. And we’ll have a first single to share with you in January.
(Behind the scenes pic of last week’s photo shoot by Tracey)
This, and other vintage pics and stories now at instagram.com/ebtgofficial
This week Ben and Tracey quietly announced on social media that they have made a new album due for release next spring. It will be their first for 24 years. They also launched a new Instagram account and posted this previously unseen photo from 1995 by Marcelo Krasilcic. No more details are available at the moment. More news soon.
Everything But The Girl’s best-selling debut album, ‘Eden’ is the latest re-release from the duo to benefit from half-speed remastering at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell, and a fresh 180gm vinyl pressing. Out on Sep 17 2021, it can be pre-ordered now.
Originally released in May 1984, the album spent almost six months on the official UK album chart peaking at number 14 and spawned the UK Top 40 hit, Each and Every One. The label wanted further singles but the duo preferred the album to grow by word of mouth. ‘Eden’ achieved gold album status in the UK and has gone on to sell more than 500,000 copies worldwide.
Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn met at the University of Hull in 1981. They formed Everything But The Girl initially as a side-project, as both had already established themselves on the UK independent music scene as teenagers – Tracey with her lo-fi minimal girl group, Marine Girls; Ben as a young guitarist and singer-songwriter, collaborating with alt-folk icon Robert Wyatt on his debut EP.
In the summer of 1983 the pair – having each released debut solo albums – decided to pool their new songs for ‘Eden’. It was recorded with producer Robin Millar (chosen for his work with Weekend and The Pale Fountains) at his Power Plant Studios in Willesden, North West London.
“All the songs were written on guitar in Hull in early 1983. We were living in one room with a shared kitchen on Pearson Park,” recalls Tracey. “Power Plant seemed very glamorous by comparison. Sade was recording downstairs. We were upstairs.”
The sessions featured a band handpicked by Ben and Tracey: Working Week’s Simon Booth on second guitar, This Heat’s Charles Hayward on drums, and South American musicians Chucho Merchan (double bass) and Bosco D’Oliveira (percussion) plus a clutch of top horn players from the English jazz scene. The line-up was part friends from London, part musicians Ben admired from trips to the Bull’s Head jazz room with his dad when growing up, in particular Peter King (alto sax).
“We were intent on being non-rock,” says Ben. “No clichés. No snare drums, no solid body electric guitars or electric bass. We wanted soft horns, Gretsch guitars, no fuss, a lightness of touch. We were into pop, latin, torch songs, sharp lyrics.”
The album was released on the newly-formed imprint Blanco Y Negro (co-run by Mike Alway and Rough Trade’s Geoff Travis) through Warner, and signalled Everything But The Girl’s move from an independent – Cherry Red – to a major label.
Eden’s artwork – by Marine Girls band member Jane Fox – was delivered as a three-dimensional collage of hand-drawn art and torn paper. Warner (who were marketing and distributing the record) didn’t really know what to do with it. The original version didn’t even have the name of the band on it. In the end it was photographed and printed on ‘reverse-board stock’ – unusual for a major release at the time.
Eden (2021 Vinyl Reissue) is released on 17 September 2021 on Buzzin’ Fly Records, under exclusive license to Chrysalis Recordings.
In case you missed it, Ben has just released ‘Storm Shelter’, a 6-track mini-album and companion piece to his 2020 studio album ‘Storm Damage’, to stream or download.
Recorded during rehearsals for the Storm Damage Tour in January 2020, it is a stripped-back piano-and-vocals set that was due for release last year, before it was held up by pandemic-related postponements and the ultimate cancellation of all his shows.
It contains two covers and four of his songs. The covers, Ten City’s house classic ‘That’s The Way Love Is’ and Sharon Van Etten’s recent synth torch song ‘Comeback Kid’. The remaining recordings are new versions of three songs – ‘Balanced on a Wire’, ‘Summer Ghosts’ and ‘Sunlight Follows the Night’ – from ‘Storm Damage’, and one – ‘Winter’s Eve’ – from my 2016 album, ‘Fever Dream’.
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Last week saw the publication of Tracey’s new memoir, My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend about her long friendship with Lindy Morrison, drummer in Australian art-rock band The Go-Betweens. Partly a biography, partly about female friendship, partly a feminist take-down of male rock stereotypes, it was published by Canongate on April 1. Get a signed copy here. An American edition is published later in the year. The photo was taken of Lindy and Tracey by Ben on Hampstead Heath in 1987.
Ben has been posting photos from his personal archive on his Instagram feed recently. They include a rare polaroid from the Amplified Heart album cover sessions, a shot of the car in which he and Tracey drove to Italy in 1987, and a snap of Tracey in New York at Christmas 1993.
A UK organisation called Two Faced Dance Company has created a dance show called ‘EVERYTHING (But The Girl)’. Be aware, it has NOTHING to do with Everything But The Girl – it simply borrows the words. However, it has been wrongly advertised in some places and made to look like a new concert from us. The dance company has apologised for the confusion – it was not deliberate – and most listings have been corrected but if you have mistakenly bought tickets, please look into getting a refund. Please also ignore any notifications from ticket companies. One of the prominent venues being used is Baths Hall, Scunthorpe. Everything But The Girl currently have no intention to tour.
Everything But The Girl’s ninth and final studio album Temperamental was first released in September 1999, and is reissued on May 8 2020 on double vinyl complete with half-speed mastering by Miles Showell at Abbey Road Studios. You can pre-order it now.
The album debuted at #16 on the UK Album Chart and peaked at #3 in Australia and #65 on the US Billboard 200, and went on to sell over 500,000 copies worldwide. Often seen as a companion piece to its million-selling predecessor Walking Wounded, it once again skilfully merged worlds contemporary electronic dance music and smart singer-songwriting.
While not embraced by a rock press tiring of electronica, Temperamental album was acclaimed in many quarters on its release. “Triumphant after-hours club pop” said Spin in an effusive full-page 9/10 lead review. “Entirely natural, wholly wonderful” said the Sunday Times. “The definitive dance album steeped in all things pop. Sublime and essential” commented Billboard, while Time Out offered, “If EBTG discovered nightlife late, it is one of their greatest strengths. Wide-eyed and wondrous.”
Offering a longer view in 2019 – in a lengthy 20th year anniversary retrospective feature in The Quietus – Michael White said, “After 20 years it has aged very well … I’ve explored the length and breadth of dance music as if it were my job, and I can’t point to another album of its kind that so effectively bridges the divide between the deeply communal sound of the dance floor and the deeply private vocabulary of a mind in trouble.”
Temperamental is re-issued on 180gm double vinyl with half-speed mastering on Buzzin’ Fly Records/Chrysalis Recordings on May 8 2020.
Completing a compelling trilogy of albums since his late-flowering return to solo songwriting and singing six years ago, Ben Watt releases his fourth LP, ‘Storm Damage’ on 31 January 2020, and with it a new sound and fervency.
“I needed a fresh approach,” he says. “The songs came out of an intense period of personal anguish and political anger. Sometimes repeating yourself musically feels disrespectful to the sharpness of your feelings. You have to search for a new way to capture the energy.”
Sonically adventurous, lyrically detailed and engaged, the album – written and produced by Watt – is a personal journey through anxiety and change cut through with an insistent defiance. It forgoes the acclaimed twin-guitar approach of its two predecessors, and boldly shifts focus onto “a future-retro trio” of upright piano, double bass and hybrid acoustic-electronic drums, set against a half-lit backdrop of lone analogue synths, spiralling echo spins and impressionistic ‘found sounds’ adapted from online public-domain recording archives.
“I wanted a timeless-meets-modern live jam – the directness of an unadorned trio capturing the spirit and the samples, synthetics and electronic boom capturing the psychological mood,” he says.
Emotional and inventive, ‘Storm Damage’ is released on Unmade Road through Caroline International.
Check out the singles so far – Balanced on a Wire, Irene (feat. Low’s Alan Sparhawk) and Sunlight Follows The Night – and get tickets for the tour.
Out today. The 2019 remastered vinyl edition of Walking Wounded. Half-speed mastering for optimum fidelity cut at Abbey Road Studios. 180gm pressing. Re-assembled hi res artwork from original photos. Pitchfork 9.0. Get yours here.
