They went from leftist outsiders to huge dance-pop stars, then walked away when stadiums came calling. Back after 24 years, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt explain how lockdowns led to a new album – and why they’ve embraced Auto-Tune
, 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.
Watt was so trepidatious that initially, he says, he “refused to call it EBTG. All the files were just listed as TREN – Tracey and Ben. We had to allow ourselves to fail. It wasn’t like we had a master plan. But it quickly became EBTG – this life seemed to come into it that we didn’t have a lot of control over.” Their shared creative intuition kicked back in.
On the other, they were very much a product of the bolshie, anti-commercial post-punk environment in which they both had first come to attention – Thorn with the ramshackle Marine Girls and Watt with the oddball drone of his 1981 solo single, Cant. Their approach was stringent, even by the standards of the time: on their debut album, 1984’s Eden, they wouldn’t allow the drummer to hit the snare drum on grounds that the sound was “too rockist”.
In 1990, The Language of Life offered up ultra-slick soul of the kind made by Luther Vandross. If it wasn’t for Thorn’s voice, you might be forgiven for thinking each was the work of a completely different artist. Thorn argues for a through-line, “a certain continuity in the songwriting, some of our melodic approaches. If there wasn’t an identity there, there wouldn’t have been an audience that’s stuck with us.
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