Everything But The Girl & Tracey Thorn

(Translated from my original Italian text by ChatGPT and Piero Scaruffi)

Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn began their careers in humble circumstances during the 1980s. Marginalized singer-songwriters who kept alive the torch of Nick Drake’s existential folk-pop, they ultimately found in Everything But The Girl the ideal vehicle to reach the large audiences in need of intimate and relaxing music.

Watt had been a twilight singer-songwriter who, after the single Can't (Cherry Red, 1981), came to attention with the EP Summer Into Winter (Cherry Red, 1982), which included an Aquamarine performed as a duet with Robert Wyatt. North Marine Drive (Cherry Red, 1983), accompanied only by a saxophone, served up a series of melancholy, rarefied ballads (On Box Hill, the title track) that resurrected precisely Drake’s claustrophobic surrealism (from which the single Some Things Don't Matter was taken).

Thorn, too, had debuted as a singer-songwriter, with the spartan mini-album A Distant Shore (Cherry Red, 1982), for acoustic guitar and voice alone, in which she offered her self-portrait as a Small Town Girl and sang the typical adolescent dilemmas, at a time when she was a member of the Marine Girls, an all-girl group that, in the wake of the Raincoats—but in a far more naïve and almost self-conscious manner, and using only acoustic instruments—proposed a folk-rock updated to the sensibility of new wave. Their Holiday Song and especially He Got The Girl from Beach Party (Whaam, 1981) are very poorly arranged songs, yet lyrically lost in the contemplative purity of the adolescent microcosm. The single On My Mind and Don't Come Back (from Lazy Ways of 1983) also hinted at the abilities that shine in the very pale single Plain Sailing.

The two joined forces (in every sense) and formed Everything But The Girl, under which name they began to play an increasingly sophisticated folk that effortlessly absorbed soul, jazz and Latin folk, and focused on the tenderest and simplest emotions—almost the exact opposite of the punk rock and synth-pop then in vogue. Not by chance, their first single, in 1982, was a cover of Cole Porter (Night And Day).

But after another single, Each And Everyone, from Eden (Blanco Y Negro, 1984), along the same lines, songs such as When All's Well, Heaven Help Me and Ugly Little Dreams, on Love Not Money (1985), aimed decisively toward chart-bound pop-soul.

Baby The Stars Shine Bright (1986) established them with a professional sound. Come On Home, Don't Leave Me Behind and the other ballads on the album are even arranged with a symphony orchestra.

Idlewild (Sire, 1988) in effect coined what would remain their classic style, that of Love Is Here Where I Live, Apron Strings and These Early Days, a compromise between the skeletal harmonies of their beginnings and the over-elaborated sound of the previous album.

The duo’s progression toward an increasingly commercial and ever softer sound culminated with Language Of Life (Atlantic, 1990). The duo erected sensual harmonies on the elegant but simple foundations of the previous record (Driving, Take Me). But it is significant that success smiled only on the cover versions.

Old Friends and Twin Cities keep Worldwide (Atlantic, 1991) afloat, but the duo has by now exhausted its resources. Thorn’s romanticism (Understanding, British Summertime) is more cloying than that of Petula Clark.

Instead, Amplified Heart (Atlantic, 1994) was rewarded with great popular success; its introspective ballads (especially Missing, in the old Philly-soul style that would become their biggest hit, and We Walk The Same Line) recall Fleetwood Mac. By shedding a sound that was perhaps too lavishly arranged, the duo arrived at a format that was at once more personal and more atmospheric.