![]() Watt was so trepidatious that initially, he says, he “refused to call it EBTG. “‘We’re in this house together, we’re both musicians, no one even needs to know that we tried.’” For Thorn, it was just about the joy of collaborating. Watt was hesitant, deterred by the potential pressure. We’re not getting any younger, you can’t just put this off for ever.” If we don’t do it now, or soon, maybe we’ll suddenly realise it’s too late. Towards the end, there was the feeling: ‘What are we going to do next? Are we going to do a project? Are we going to carry on living the life we’re living?’ I started to think: I’d love for us to at least try something with EBTG. A full two years of living a very quiet life. “We didn’t live like that for long, but lockdown went on for a very long time for us. “It was difficult, because we had kids coming and going,” Thorn says. Thanks to his struggle with the rare autoimmune disease Churg-Strauss syndrome, Watt was “on that list of people who got the letter from the government telling them what to do”, Thorn recalls: essentially, stay six feet away from everyone, and even isolate from your family if they’re socialising. ![]() Thorn thinks its appearance might have something do with lockdown, of which the couple had an extreme experience. Fuse was announced – nonchalantly again – by Thorn, on Twitter, late last year. “This is my work, I’m going to finish it, you can hear it and make helpful comments, but you’re not part of it.”Īnd yet, here we are, in a tiny London record company office, unexpectedly discussing the first EBTG album in 24 years. “We sort of became quite strictly independent of each other,” says Thorn. “It’s a big enough drain being parents to three teenage kids, and then to work together, it just all seemed too much.” “When you’re bringing up a family, there’s just a lot to deal with,” offers Watt. Eventually, both started making low-key, critically acclaimed solo albums – Thorn released four, collaborated with John Grant and German house duo Tiefschwarz and embarked on a parallel career as an author Watt, tired of “being an A&R person and doing licensing agreements for co-productions”, made three albums in the folky vein of his pre-EBTG solo release, North Marine Drive – but the question of working together again was scrupulously avoided. She spent the next four years a stay-at-home mum, “happy as a clam” while Watt became a DJ, producer, club owner and boss of the deep house label Buzzin’ Fly. Everything But the Girl in the early 90s. So EBTG turned U2 down, made one more album – 1999’s Temperamental – did a few shows and that was that. ![]() Moreover, she wanted herself and Watt, a couple since their teens, to start a family. It was at precisely this point – when the call came from U2 – that Thorn pulled the plug on EBTG, with the winningly nonchalant phrase: “Actually babe, do you know what? I think I want to stop now.” Always equivocal about the anxiety-inducing task of performing, Thorn was filled with “stomach-churning horror” at the thought of appearing in front of 60,000 U2 fans a night. Then U2 asked them to support their US stadium tour, news the duo received while staying in an Australian hotel room so sumptuous it had enough space for a grand piano and offered breathtaking views over Perth. The singer Karen Ramirez covered another old EBTG song, I Didn’t Know I Was Looking for Love, in the style of Missing and scored a Top 10 hit. Roni Size and Reprazent sampled them on their Mercury prize-winning debut album, New Forms. Soon you couldn’t move for singer-songwriters plying their melancholy trade over drum’n’bass breaks or house beats: everywhere from Olive’s No 1 single You’re Not Alone, to Dido. Their ensuing album, 1995’s Walking Wounded, was both their most successful, and curiously influential. Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn had been dropped by their label after the release of their 1994 album, Amplified Heart, only to see a Todd Terry remix of its track Missing belatedly become a vast global hit: No 2 in the US, double platinum in the UK, topping the charts for weeks around Europe. Fifteen years into their career, they had executed a remarkable turnaround in fortunes. In early 1997, Everything But the Girl were at the height of their fame.
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