In 1981, a community newspaper in Hertford, England, reviewed Beach Party, a fey and wistful album by the Marine Girls. The reviewer singled out band member Tracey Thorn’s as “a voice with a future — rich, controlled and soulful.”
“I was flattered,” writes Thorn in her new memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen. “I was beginning to realize that singing could possibly bring me something ultimately more satisfying than just playing the guitar.” That epiphany took singer-songwriter Thorn on a musical odyssey that, at its pinnacle, achieved the stuff of pop-star dreams — the critical accolades, the limos, the “addictive” applause. But at its depths, her career collapsed into Spinal Tap farce, with chases through the streets by rabid music fans (in what turned out to be a case of mistaken identity), increasingly dismal hotel rooms and practically empty performances in tiny art galleries and noisy discos. (“There was more noise on the dance floor than coming from us on the stage.”)
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Thorn is best known as one half of Everything But the Girl (EBTG), the duo that effortlessly straddled jazz, pop and indie, and whose career arc spanned the years from British postpunk through to the dance scene of the 1990s. From 1982 to 2000, she and husband and EBTG partner Ben Watt rode the exhilarating — and fickle — waves of pop stardom, stopped temporarily in their tracks in 1992 by Watt’s terrifying struggle with the life-threatening autoimmune disease Churg-Strauss syndrome, and then, several years later, by the desire to raise a family.
The duo’s 18-year stretch is the core subject of Thorn’s very readable autobiography. EBTG’s trajectory can be thought of in three phases. There’s Thorn and Watt’s zippy, five-year rise; a seven-year lull when their music took on a safe, polished air and for a time veered dangerously in the direction of West Coast jazz fusion (the 1990 album Language of Life was even produced by Tommy LiPuma, who has given artists such as George Benson and Diana Krall their impeccable sheen); and finally the duo’s return with “Missing,” the 1994 single that became a hit when U.S. house-music producer Todd Terry issued his now famous remix.
Thorn’s literary voice is as cheekily offbeat as her singing voice is rich and mellifluous. Cannibalizing old diaries, she brings to life the shy 17-year-old who joined a postpunk band (the Stern Bops) at a time when everyone was producing albums in their garages. Thorn embraced the moment but wanted more. “People in the late ’70s and early ’80s were very anti records being overproduced,” Thorn tells TIME. “There was this philosophical mind-set that considered it selling out … I just couldn’t buy into that. I reached a point of thinking, ‘This wasn’t meant to be the end point! This was a revolutionary starting point! That doesn’t mean you’re never allowed to get any better!'”
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Thorn — who since 2007 has released three solo albums — manages to make her bouts of self-doubt funny (starting with Stern Bops rehearsals, where she sang from inside a wardrobe). She also reveals the touching intersections of her domestic and musical lives — like the time she was at the school gates with other mothers and George Michael sped by in his car calling, “Tracey! Tracey! Hi, how are you?” Or when she had “a long and heartfelt chat” with Liam Gallagher about his yearning to be a father. “It was all he wanted to talk about.”
So what, if anything, got left out?
“There is a great moment with any book where it has to go through the legal read: someone goes through with a pen and marks every time you’ve mentioned someone having a drink or smoking a joint and asks, ‘Can you say this about this person? They may now be in a position of authority.’ They check everything.” Thorn laughs. “It was mostly cleared.”
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