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.
Everything But The Girl’s million-selling critically-acclaimed eighth studio album Walking Wounded will appear on vinyl on November 8 mastered for the first time at half-speed for optimum audio fidelity at London’s Abbey Road Studios.
The record – first released in April 1996 by UK alt-pop duo Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt – debuted at #4 on the UK Album Chart and contains four UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits Walking Wounded and Wrong, and set new a benchmark for the intersection of contemporary electronic music and smart pop songwriting.
The seeds of the album’s approach were clearly planted in the successful mix of folk-soul and electronica on the duo’s previous million-seller Amplified Heart, but it was the subsequent wild global success of Todd Terry’s remix of Amplified Heart album track Missing, and Thorn’s acclaimed contemporaneous collaboration on Protection – the second album from Bristol experimental collective, Massive Attack – that encouraged them to go further.
Watt began frequenting club nights on the burgeoning London drum ‘n’ bass scene in early 1995, and quickly saw a rhythmic connection between Everything But The Girl’s early 80s latin-pop arrangements and the high tempo syncopated breakbeats in the sets of DJs like Fabio, Doc Scott and Peshay.
‘I was immediately inspired,’ he says. ‘It was like a futuristic Brazilian sound. The mix of high-tuned propulsive drums, late-night samples and low sub bass just seemed to leave a big plangent hole in the middle, and in it I pictured Tracey’s voice. I heard the same vibe in the modern deep house and downbeat sound.’
The album was programmed and produced by Watt in 1995 largely in the basement of the duo’s north London home demo studio. ‘Just an Akai sampler, a computer, a synth and guitar, an inexpensive vocal mic, and an 8-track tape machine,’ he says of the process. ‘We were writing in reverse – mood first, then songs, learning and we went along. It just felt like a new frontier,’ adds Thorn. Producer John Coxon of the recently formed drum ‘n’ bass-inspired duo Spring Heel Jack – and with whom the Watt and Thorn had worked on Amplified Heart – was invited to provide a backing track for the album’s title song, and beats specialist Howie B worked on the groove for Flipside. The album was then mixed at The Townhouse in west London by Watt and young emerging engineer, Andy Bradfield.
Lyrically the album built on the raw unflinching stories of love and isolation that peppered the previous album, written in the aftermath of Watt’s near-death experience with a rare illness in 1992. ‘They are very much how-I-feel-right-now songs,’ says Thorn, ‘relatable, in the moment, akin to the music.’
The album was acclaimed on its release. “A career peak … raw, pure and absolutely gorgeous,” said Rolling Stone. “The new incarnation of EBTG is the best yet. It’s just going to take a while for people to catch up,” said NME. Earlier this year, twenty-three years on in a major 9.0 retrospective review Pitchfork said, “Walking Wounded draws on downtempo, drum ‘n’ bass, and trip-hop. On paper, compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format could’ve been a disaster. But words don’t do justice to the emotional multiplicity — hurt but warm, worn but rich — of Thorn’s voice, and how seamlessly she made a home for herself amid Watt’s stark sonic architecture.”
The new vinyl edition has been mastered by long-time Everything But The Girl mastering engineer, Miles Showell, now at Abbey Road Studios, who is one of only a handful of engineers specialising in half-speed mastering that uses new techniques to more faithfully reproduce the sound of original master tapes.
The original 1996 release of Walking Wounded saw Todd Terry’s remix of Wrong and Omni Trio’s remix of Walking Wounded added as bonus tracks, and an expanded deluxe double CD version including a heft of bonus material came out in 2015, but this new vinyl edition is faithful to the original nine-track album sessions and does not include additional tracks.
Walking Wounded, the half-speed master vinyl edition, is released by Buzzin’ Fly/Chrysalis as a 180gm heavyweight pressing on Nov 8. It follows the Amplified Heart 25th Anniversary vinyl edition – a Pitchfork ‘Best New ReIssue’ – released earlier this year.
