Tracey Thorn - Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star

Published by Hachette Digital ISBN: 978-1-40551-398-2

Copyright Tracey Thorn 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

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For Ben

And all the effort that it took to get here in the first place

And all the effort not to let the effort show And all the effort not to let the effort show

Downhill Racer, from Temperamental, 1999

M y story spans a full thirty years. I was only sixteen when I bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year or so later, I formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls and began playing gigs, and signed to an indie label and started releasing records.

Then for eighteen years, between 1982 and 2000, I was one half of a group called Everything But The Girl. In that time we released nine albums and sold around nine million records. We went on countless tours and promo trips, had hit singles and flop singles, were reviewed and interviewed to within an inch of our lives.

Ive been in the charts, out of them, then back in again. Been signed, dropped, re-signed, mixed and remixed. Ive seen myself described as an indie darling, a middle-of-the-road nobody and a disco diva. As Bono once sang: Theres nothing you can throw at me, that I havent already heard. The career Ive had has been one thats existed mostly on the margins, outside of the genre-specific accounts of the period. I havent always fitted in, you see, and thats made for some uncomfortable moments over the years. But its also forced me to face up to the realities of what a pop career is, and to realise that there are undoubtedly thrills and wonders to be experienced, but just as often there are doubts and mistakes. Moments of boredom and shame. Trivial irritations and petty humiliations. 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 Ive spent months, instead of seconds, with my past life flashing before my eyes. Its been strange, and disconcerting; it has made me confront what Ive 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 Ive heard David Byrne singing just over my shoulder, How did I get here?

Or even, on occasion, My God, what have I done?

March 1997

I m in a hotel in Perth, Australia. To be more specific, Im in the air-conditioned penthouse suite of a hotel in Perth, gazing through the huge wrap-around windows at the limitless expanse of blue sky and ocean beyond. In the centre of the living room, next to the mushroom-coloured leather sofa and the shagpile rug, stands a white baby grand piano. Its a pure 1970s luxury rock n roll hotel-room setting, beyond parody.

Ben and I have come out here a few days before the start of our latest sold-out Australian tour, to acclimatise and get over jet lag. In other words, lie on the beach, get a tan and lounge around in penthouse suites with baby grands. And now were sitting here, languidly waiting for room service or something, when the phone rings. Its our manager in London.

You wont believe the conversation Ive just had, she says. Ive had a call from U2s management office. Youve been offered the support slot on their American stadium tour!

This too is beyond parody. Its the kind of moment when you expect to be shaken awake any minute by your mum and told to get up for school.

Ben covers the receiver with his hand while he tells me the news. Were both laughing and shaking our heads in disbelief. Have they muddled us up with someone else?

What dyou reckon? he says to me. Should we do it, or what?

I cant really think what to say. I wish it wasnt up to me, but I know why Bens asking. Its not a foregone conclusion at all, you see, and Ben knows me well enough to have guessed this immediately.

I look around the room at the view, the grand piano, everything.

Its a top moment, obviously. And Ill be able to dine out on it for ages. But heres what I say

I d always kidded myself that it was punk that got me started.

It was certainly the answer I gave in interviews when I was asked about the beginnings of my musical career. I even had a box of punk singles upstairs that seemed to support my claim, and if, when I did the sums and realised I was only thirteen when many of them were released, it ever gave me pause for thought and made me wonder whether Id actually bought some of them after the event, well, that wasnt anything I was going to own up to.

Its not that the punk version of my story is a complete lie; more that its a compression of a story that begins just after punk. Its a simplification of a truth thats a little more complicated than journalists tend to like answers to their questions to be; an acknowledgement of the fact that, if they were confused by my liking for punk, it would hardly have made matters easier to start trying to draw fine distinctions between punk and its immediate aftermath, or to define the precise delineations of post-punk.

In terms of chronology, a year or two either way might have made all the difference. If Id been born a couple of years earlier or later, I wouldnt have been thirteen when punk happened, and everything that followed it might have just passed me by. Maybe being thirteen when it all began was the reason for everything. If Id been born a couple of years later, I might simply have been too young to have been attracted to something so ostensibly dangerous and threatening. A couple of years earlier, and I might have been a year too old to have been so completely taken in by what could have seemed a mere fad, a musical novelty aimed at impressionable, easily scared children and their easily scared parents.

As it was, in 1976 I was almost too young. But not quite.

I grew up in the suburbs, in Brookmans Park, a little satellite town about twenty miles north of London. It was once a proper village, and during the war had been considered just far enough from London to be safe for evacuees. And so for my parents it represented an idyllic escape from the blitzed London they had both grown up in. In the early 1950s they had left Kentish Town and headed out to safety, away from the bomb sites and the terraced streets now riven with sudden gaps, to a classic little semi on an unmade road, with potholes that my mum filled every morning with the sweepings from the coal fire.

By the 1960s when I was born, Brookmans Park was still clinging to its green-belt status, while gradually and unavoidably merging into the rest of the homogeneous sprawl that surrounded London. By the 1970s, once I had outgrown the innocent attractions of fields to play in, shops near enough to walk to and quiet roads to ride your bike on, it represented for me everything that was suffocating and inhibiting about smalltown life. Near enough to London that you could almost see it if you peered hard enough down the railway line, it was just far enough away to bear no resemblance, and like other modern suburbs it turned its back resolutely on all that the city seemed to offer or threaten, depending on your point of view.

But growing up in a place like Brookmans Park meant that I was hardly at the epicentre of punk when it began. I wasnt really there when it was all happening, so why is it that my memory has fixed that moment in my mind as being the starting point and the reason for everything that followed?