Artist Interviews

Q&A: Tracey Thorn

By | Published on Wednesday 2 June 2010

Tracey Thorn

Tracey Thorn is best known as one half of the duo Everything But The Girl, but first arrived in the spotlight as a member of The Marine Girls in the early eighties. She then went on to form EBTG with Cherry Red Records label mate Ben Watt in 1982.

Thorn’s first solo work, ‘A Distant Shore’, was also released in 1982, though it wasn’t until 2007 that she released the follow-up ‘Out Of The Woods’. As well as her solo work and EBTG, Tracey has also collaborated with the likes of Massive Attack, The Style Council, The Go-Betweens and Tiefschwarz, amongst others. Thorn released her third solo album ‘Love And Its Opposite’ last month via her now husband Ben Watt’s Strange Feeling Records. We caught up with Tracey to find out more.

Q1 How did you start out making music?
I bought an electric guitar aged sixteen and joined a band as the token ‘girl on guitar’. We were a kind of post-punk pop band, influenced by the Specials and the Undertones. I played gigs at a very small local level for about a year then we split up and I formed all-girl group The Marine Girls with school friends.

Q2 What inspired your latest album?
Just the desire to continue doing the thing I remembered I love, which is writing songs, working on them in the studio, doing the backing vocals late at night.

Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
It varies. This time around I started most of the tracks from scratch myself, either putting down a guitar or piano part, and then we added vocals and other instrumentation. A couple of the tracks we started off with the rhythm section of Al Doyle and Leo Taylor, then built the other instruments on top. But in the past I have often done collaborative tracks where someone else creates an electronic backing track which I then write vocal melody and lyrics for.

Q4 Which artists influence your work?
No idea. In some sense, everything is an influence, in that it pushes you in one direction or another, either towards or away from certain things. I have no conscious desire to sound like anyone else, but these things are often outside our conscious control.

Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Um, I don’t know really. Nothing at all. Why should I say anything? The music is the thing for them to listen to, not what I have to say about it. If they like it or are interested to find out more, then it’s all out there and easily discovered.

Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
I am hopelessly lacking in ambition nowadays when it comes to the commercial success of my records. I used to be much more driven, and it was obviously important in the early days in trying to establish a career. But my ambitions for this record are really just that it be understood and respected wherever possible. For the future, I would like to think that I can continue to work in this very independent way. The more freedom I have, the less explaining I have to do, and I find it very satisfying just to be able to work with people I like and understand, and who like and understand me back. It’s not a grand ambition, by any means, but I think it’s achievable, and it’s what makes me happy.

MORE>> www.traceythorn.com



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