Tracey ThornBesprekingen

We’re of similar ages and backgrounds, and Tracey brought vividly to life the shared culture, boredom and longing of being a teenager in a small town in the 70’s. What was less appealing was the scorn she feels for those, like her parents, who don’t share her outlook and her desire to live in London.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book that rightfully puts Lindy Morrison back into the history of The Go-Betweens. I loved Lindy’s raucous personality and fierce and fiery spirit. I also really liked Tracey Thorn’s writing style (this is the second book I have read by her), her thoughtful drawing of Lindy’s life and work and her own comments on the music industry. Totally skewered the mansplaining of music history and art.

Short but sweet, Everything But The Girl singer Tracey Thorn manages to pack a lot into her memoirs! Based on the uneventful entries in her teenage diaries, Tracey considers growing up in 70s suburbia, with an interesting history of the commuter village where her parents settled, and her bid to escape woodland and semi-detached houses for the freedom of London. She talks about her relationship with her parents, including her father's death and an attempt to understand her mother's life after having children of her own, but also muses on broader subjects like class and feminism. Funny but also touching in places, I read the whole book in one setting - only 200 pages, granted - and now I'm listening to her albums!

Tracey Thorn goes further back into her childhood than her first book covered, and it's really well told.

This is a quite self-made book about western views on singing. Or, rather, Thorn's views on singing. The fact that she has been a fairly famous singer for a bunch of years does play a part in this, as does her interviews with other famous persons, e.g. Kristin Hersh and Romy Madley Croft.

Where Thorn excels, is in her personal mini-monographs that are often encased within single paragraphs, as here, about experience and influence:

It’s also true that we can be negatively influenced by people, or strain to avoid taking on too strongly the imprint of another, for fear of drifting into mere imitation and unoriginality. Bob Dylan talks in his book, Chronicles, about how intimidated he could be in the early days by hearing others who seemed more authentic than him, and how inadequate that could make him feel. He’d been learning and playing all of Woody Guthrie’s songs, and feeling pretty good about himself as a singer of these songs, when he suddenly heard the recordings of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who’d been singing the same songs for years. Dylan describes being devastated by this – ‘I felt like I’d been cast into sudden hell’. Far from being inspired by the sound of someone doing what he was trying to do, he felt paralysed, and realised that in fact he would have to run a million miles from the very person it seemed he could learn the most from. All he could do was try to ignore Elliott – ‘It would be hard not to be influenced by the guy I just heard. I’d have to block it out of my mind… tell myself I hadn’t heard him and he didn’t exist.’ In other words, influence can sometimes be terrifying – not inspiring at all, but crippling.

A lot of the book is about popular, western ways of singing, mainly in a crowd-fronting way, but also about the need for singing, to begin with.

I loved to read about Dusty Springfield, not only because Thorn found her through my favourite song of Springfield (perhaps bar "Magic Garden"):

Who is your favourite singer? It’s a question I’m often asked, not surprisingly, and my answer is usually the same: Dusty Springfield.

[...] I do know the first time I heard her. Elvis Costello was presenting a radio show, playing a selection of his favourite records, and as was usually the case with anything like that on the radio, I was taping it onto cassette. This was 1980, or maybe 1981. He had already introduced us to another of her signature tunes, ‘I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself’, when he performed it on the Live Stiffs Live album in 1978, and that had been a revelation, opening my eyes to the possibility of liking Bacharach and David as well as punk; a difficult but heady idea, and one I would have to come back to later. Now on this radio show he played ‘I Don’t Want to Hear it Any More’ from Dusty in Memphis, and for the first time I truly heard that voice – that smoky, husky, breathy, vulnerable, bruised, resigned, deliberate, sensual voice.

Some of the interviews in this book are truly interesting. I love Kristin Hersh's comment here:

KRISTIN: I have one rule in the studio: ‘no singing’, meaning ‘no faking’. Which probably pertains to guitar parts as well: no chops, no imitating, no telling the song what to do. A real vocal is a textural expression. Maybe the kind you croon to your baby, maybe the kind you yell when you drop something on your foot, but it must be determined by the song or it will never resonate with the listener. And if it’s embarrassing? So much the better!

Some of Thorn's personal memories are also interesting, funny, and illuminating, slight as they may at first mean:

I was in the loo at a nightclub once, years ago, when I was recognised as I washed my hands. It can’t have been that long after ‘Missing’ was a hit as the request made of me was not for an autograph, or even a photo, but for me to sing a few lines of the song to prove that I was really that Tracey Thorn.

And because I’d presumably had a few drinks – I must have done or I would have run a mile in the opposite direction – I agreed, and standing there at the sink I took a deep breath and sang, ‘I step off the train, I’m walking down your street again, and past your door, but you don’t live there any more.’

The girls stared and squealed at me, and grabbed each other, and the thing they said, which I took as the ultimate compliment, was: ‘YOU SOUND JUST LIKE YOU!’

I knew what they meant, of course I did. That my voice really was my voice, the authentic sound that came out of my mouth, not some product of studio trickery and fakery. There’s a naivety to this response, really, the idea that someone’s voice can be manufactured for them in the studio – which is simply not as true as people think – and an old-fashioned regard for the virtues of vocal authenticity. But there’s an important point to be made here, a timeless truth, which is that however much vocals can be manipulated, or fixed, or homogenised, finding your own voice – your unique, personal sound – is still the key ingredient in becoming a singer.

All in all, a funny, probably helpful book to the everyday singer, but I couldn't help but feel that I wish that more stones had been turned while researching this book; it is very western and poppy, but if that's what I'd had in mind to begin with, it'd have been better.

An autobiography that was really finished in 2007, but has dragged along somewhat. Not plotting, just being relevant and to-the-point just like Tracey Thorn's music. No fiddling around, really.

Violent lifestyle swings from luxury to squalor and back again – sometimes within minutes. If you like those kinds of stories, stories where the lead characters seem to blunder through life, much as you do through your own, then you might like this one. The experience of writing it has sometimes been very like drowning, except that I’ve spent months, instead of seconds, with my past life flashing before my eyes. It’s been strange, and disconcerting; it has made me confront what I’ve done with my life, take a close look at who I once was and how that has a bearing on who I am now. And so often I’ve heard David Byrne singing just over my shoulder, ‘How did I get here?’ Or even, on occasion, ‘My God, what have I done?’

It covers her life in chronological order, being mostly about music. Listening to it, delving into it. Becoming and being a fan of The Smiths and Morrissey - including her and Ben Watt's correspondence with the man - and becoming bigger and bigger, up to getting dropped by WEA just before "Missing" sold 3 million copies, and the life thereafter.

From the start, Thorn covers her punk beginnings in laudable style, basically telling stuff, e.g. what she did after acquiring an electric guitar:

I don’t have an amp, or even a lead, and if I’m going to be really honest, I’m not certain I even realised you needed one. I had never paid any attention to what happened behind and around guitar players in bands, and so I think I imagined that the point of an electric guitar was that you plugged it into the electricity socket in the wall and somehow a loud noise came out. I still have a lot to learn.

There is a lot of internal thoughts, but none are really ranting nor boring. At times, I wished Thorn had actually delved more into detail, which I rarely think is the case with music autobiographies.

And, upon meeting her love and ETBTG 50%-er:

‘D’you know who I am?’
‘I think you’re probably Ben Watt.’
‘That’s right. Have you got your guitar with you?’

...and:

After that first evening in Ben’s room, we spent most of our waking hours together. After playing Solid Air to me, he turned up a couple of nights later on my doorstep with a bottle of wine and a Bill Evans record and that was that, really.

And with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain:

The unlikely nature of this enduring aftershock of ours was brought home to me some fourteen years after our split, when I was appearing on Later … with jools Holland, performing with Massive Attack. Also on the show that night was Courtney Love with her band Hole. Widely regarded at the time as something of a loose cannon, she was the focus of all attention in the studio that day, and when the bands gathered on their respective sets for the filming there was a sense that all eyes were on her, mine included. Just before the cameras started rolling she looked across to our stage, put down her guitar and strode across the empty central area to crouch down next to me where I was sitting. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you’re Tracey from the Marine Girls! Kurt and I were both huge fans of your band.’ (Kurt was not long dead at this point.) ‘Y’know, my band, Hole, we do a cover of one of your songs, called “In Love”.’ More or less speechless, I managed to mumble something polite in return, before she strode back and the show began. Fast-forward to May 2010, a full twenty-seven years after the demise of the Marine Girls. I was back on Later … with jools Holland, this time performing as a solo artist. Also appearing on the show were the current incarnation of all things hip and New York, LCD Soundsystem. I was sitting at the side of their stage, watching them set up to do their song, when a member of the band looked up and saw me, made his way over to where I was sitting and said – yeah, you guessed it – ‘I just have to tell you, I have always been such a huge fan of the Marine Girls.’

The whole unlikely story only finally became real for me when Kurt Cobain’s Journals were published in 2002 and I was able to see for myself, in his own handwriting, our appearance in his many lists of favourite bands. There are the Marine Girls on page 128 and page 241, while on page 77, in a list of his all-time favourite songs, are two of mine, ‘Honey’ and ‘In Love’. Most incredibly, on page 271 Beach Party is listed as one of Nirvana’s Top Fifty albums, along with the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Public Enemy.

Funny on record sales, gold discs:

Selling 100,000 records means you get a gold disc, those trophies so beloved of the ageing rock star with acres of Cotswolds wall space to fill. The discs themselves were huge, framed artefacts – a piece of twelve-inch vinyl sprayed either gold or silver according to how many you’d sold – but here’s the hilarious bit: it wouldn’t necessarily be your own actual record that had been sprayed gold – just any old piece of vinyl. You would know, for instance, that your album had five tracks on side one, but there it was, a piece of ‘gold’ vinyl, with seven clearly separated sets of grooves on that side. You might have earned the prize for selling an admirable number of copies of a fairly quirky, uncommercial British pop record, but there on your wall you might well have a framed and gilded copy of The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden.

On the start of describing Ben Watt's all-consuming illness:

We were at the lowest point of our entire career, the point at which it may have looked as if it was all over. We’d had a reasonable run at it, all told. The band had lasted eight years and made six albums. The last one had been a bit rubbish, and we were running out of steam. Luckily, Ben decided to contract a life-threatening illness, and in doing so, saved us.

After having children at first:

We tried to come up with a compromise: play festivals instead of touring. That way we could reach a large audience in a short space of time, reducing the travelling and the time away from home. So we played at the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, and then the Montreux Jazz Festival, taking the girls with us and staying in a beautiful hotel overlooking the lake. That little trip was actually quite enjoyable. It was only spoiled by the fact that I began to feel sick the morning after the gig. On the way home, at the airport, I felt worse – sick and faint. It passed as the day wore on, but the next morning I woke up and felt sick again. Eight months later, our son Blake was born, and that gig at Montreux in July 2000 became the last gig I did.

All in all, highly recommendable.

Tracey is a likeable and witty writer, describing her passion for music developing in the punk era. She describes the music she developed, how she met and worked with Ben in 'Everything but the girl'. It's very insightful about the music business.

Beautifully written (as you would expect from a woman who managed to get a First in Eng Lit while juggling two bands, a solo career, and touring). This is wry and understated, and Tracey comes across as level-headed and self-aware as she remembers her youth and almost nerdy passion for making music, and the highs and embarrassing lows of being a pop star.

Earlier in 2014, I read Viv Albertine's Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. and enjoyed it very, very much - in fact, it was and remains my favourite book of 2014. In reviews and interviews, it was often compared to Tracey Thorn's Bedsit Disco Queen, so I was keen to read that as well.

And I enjoyed it, but not as much as #clothesmusicboys. Partly that's because Viv Albertine came of age musically in the 1970s, the same decade in which most of my ongoing music interest began; Tracey Thorne is the best part of a decade younger, and the music genres she has passed through are of less interest to me.

But it's also because Viv Albertine has led (for both good and ill) quite an extreme life, and her autobiography reflects this - whereas Thorne is a much more reserved and contained character, and so her autobiography is much less dramatic. For all that, it's still a very worthwhile read.½

An utterly delightful memoir by Tracey Thorn, the lead singer of Everything But The Girl. Tracey has always presented an opaque, cool front to the world, letting her song lyrics hint at her life but here she takes us back to the teenager growing up in suburban Hertfordshire, needing to become involved in the post-punk music scene in London but unsure of how to go about it. Gaining some indie success as part of The Marine Girls, Tracey went to study at Hull University and within a few hours of arriving had met fellow-record label artist Ben Watt. They bonded over music and started the band Everything But The Girl (taking the name from a local shop) and were soon gaining mainstream success while still at University.

Tracey shares the successes the band achieved but also the quandary of how to keep both afloat in the never-constant flow of the pop world while staying true to your vision. EBTG had highs, they had lows but more through happenstance than design kept finding opportunities for success. Thorn also shares her offstage life with Ben Watt and the awful experience in the 1990s when Ben was crippled with an illness that left them facing an unknown future.

Warm, involving, insightful and full of humour, Tracey's book is one of the best autobiographies of recent years.½