Tracey Thorn

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs Podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast and, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:45

My castaway this week is singer and writer Tracy Thorne. As one half of the band Everything But the Girl, a solo artist, and now as a columnist and author, she's known for her subtle scrutiny of bittersweet subjects which don't often make it into pop songs or under the pages of a book, teenage life in the suburbs, mother-daughter relationships, the menopause, and babies who refuse to go to sleep. Her 40-year career as a musician has been both successful and unconventional. As a frustrated teenager growing up in the suburbs, she read Jermaine Greer's assertion in The Female Eunuch that nobody wrote songs for bored housewives and thought, why not? She started off a wannabe punk singer so shy she delivered her first vocal performance from Inside a Wardrobe. She would become a pop star who studied English literature at night school and, just after scoring her biggest ever hit, set her career aside to bring up three children. Now she combines a musical career with her writing, still fascinated by the power afforded to those who choose what deserves to be, in either sense of the word, recorded. Writing, she says, is always about knowing who's in charge. Tracy Thorne, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you. So that notion of knowing who's in charge, I want to know a bit more about that, if you wouldn't mind. Why is it important? Well, you know, I think when you're writing, especially if you write the kind of songs that I've often written over the years, which are sometimes described as being, you know, confessional or sort of emotionally open, there's that sense that you're revealing yourself, that you're giving something away. But I'm always at pains to stress that if you're the one.

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Doing the giving away or the revealing. You are the one in control. So I suppose, you know, one of the things I'm writing about and talking about in that is how powerful sometimes being able to be a writer is. And you're an established writer now, a columnist for The New Statesman, and you've written one memoir, there's another in the pipeline. What's the attraction of that format? I think you were always a diarist. I was. I wrote lots of diaries when I was young, and then they sort of mutated into the songwriting. I mean, as a teenager, my songs were almost direct lifts from what was in my diary. But then for years, I really just wrote songs, and that's a very

Presenter3:00

you know, minimalist art form, if you like. You really do have to encapsulate what you're trying to say in to short verses and ideally a hooky chorus as well. So it's quite demanding.

Tracey Thorn3:09

So

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But also, you know, pop songwriting has its own rules. So once I came to write prose when I wrote the first memoir, I realized one of the luxuries was I had a lot more space to play with, and you don't always have to make it rhyme, and you're not necessarily trying to come up with a hook.

Tracey Thorn3:25

But

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And tell me about your songwriting. Where and when do ideas come to you? I know that you like to walk quite a lot. Does that help get you in the right headspace? Yeah, I do get ideas sometimes when I'm walking. And nowadays, because like everyone else I've got my phone with me, that's quite useful. I'm often grabbing it and making a note of something. Do you type or are you Alan Partridge style dictating or are you singing and recording? I'm typing. I'm stopping and trying not to walk into the traffic.

Tracey Thorn3:53

I'm typing. I'm stopping.

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and typing things. Trying not to get my phone nicked. I also mentioned shyness in my introduction, and I hope that you're at home with us here on the radio because this is the natural habitat of people who like to show off, but in private. Yeah, I think there's some truth in that.

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You see, I find the recording studio a place where I'm not shy at all, and that's similar, I think. You know, you've got a microphone in front of you, but no one's really looking. I often feel when I'm working in the studio, especially late at night, that there's something almost secret about it. You know, you go off into the vocal booth, especially. You're literally on your own with the microphone and a closed, soundproof door. So there is that amazing feeling that you can actually be very expressive and sort of pretend that no one's listening, because in that moment, no one is listening. It's essentially back to the wardrobe that I mentioned in my introduction. That's a very good point. First ever vocal performance. Yeah. Scarred for life.

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So it's time to turn to your track choices. What place does music have in your life today? It has a huge place in my life. And, you know, I've done what I imagine a lot of people do, which is come up with tracks that have a significance to me and mostly that remind me of, you know, the key people in my life or key times in my life. So with that in mind, tell us about your first track. So this first track basically reminds me of my parents. It's Frank Sinatra singing You Make Me Feel So Young, which was on the Songs for Swinging Lovers album.

Tracey Thorn5:14

So this first track

Presenter5:24

My parents had that album. You know, there wasn't music on a lot in the house, but when it did go on it was slightly ritualistic. Often before Sunday lunch, mum would be in the kitchen cooking, dad would be in charge of the record player. And this would be what often went on. And so it just kind of seeped into my bones, I think.

Speaker 25:46

You make me feel so young.

Speaker 25:49

You make me feel so spring has sprung And every time I see you grin I'm such

Tracey Thorn5:54

Uh

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Time.

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Yeah.

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A happy individual the moment

Tracey Thorn6:02

Moment that you speak

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I wanna go play hide and seek

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I wanna go and bounce the moon, Just like a toy balloon.

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You and I

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Frank Sinatra, you make me feel so young. Tracy Thorne, you were born to Audrey and Dennis in 1962. Tell me about them. How did they meet? They met during the war. Both my parents grew up in London and were teenagers at the beginning of the war, so both had the experience of living through the Blitz. Then my dad joined the RAF in 1944, I think he joined up and was posted for a while out in the Middle East. I think he was out in Jordan.

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And my mum went on holiday summer with a girlfriend and met his uncle at a hotel who said, I have this very lonely nephew who's in the forties and posted overseas and he'd love a pen pal. So they both wrote to him, enclosing a photo.

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And he chose my mum to write back to.

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So they wrote letters for a while, and then he came home on leave.

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And they met up, I think, at Hoban Tube in London. And as she always described it, he came up the escalator to her, sort of standing at the top of the escalator, looking very handsome in his RAF uniform. And he kept her photograph? He did keep her photograph. It was in his wallet when he died last year.

Tracey Thorn7:24

And he cast her photograph?

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By the time you were born, they'd just moved to Brookmans Park, as you've put it, just off the coast of London. It doesn't get much more suburban. What was it like growing up there? Well, basically, it was great when I was a child. It was just countryside-y enough to be like living in a village. We lived in a little semi-detached house right by the shops, right by the primary school, and then there were fields all around. So, you know, I spent my childhood walking to school, walking to the shops, going for bike rides. That was great. I think when I hit my teens, I started to want a bit more excitement, as teenagers do.

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Well, you know, punk rock was happening. I got into that and wanted to go to gigs. And then living in a very conservative suburban small town was not ideal.

Tracey Thorn8:11

Yeah.

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What were you like as as a young kid? What were you like when you were little?

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Um swatty at school, bookish.

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Not sporty.

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I had piano lessons and I did a little bit of acting and drama, but I wasn't one of those kind of, you know, show off kids who's on the table at weddings going, Let me sing a number.

Tracey Thorn8:36

And let's go.

Presenter8:38

I don't think anyone saw it coming that I'd end up going into music because I hadn't been a natural sort of show-off performer. And your parents had Sinatra on before the Sunday lunch, but what about the rest of the time? I mean, you you were interested in books and music from a young age, but was there a lot of that in the house? No.

Presenter8:55

No, there really wasn't. You know, both my parents had had to leave school at about 15. They hadn't gone on into further education. They were both clever, but it wasn't one of those houses where, you know, there were shelves full of books. I suppose I found a lot of that out for myself as I got through my teens. And you were the youngest of three, so how were the sibling dynamics? It sounds like you borrowed your brother's records and your sister's clothes.

Presenter9:19

Yeah, so I've got a brother Keith who's ten years older than me and then my sister came along and then me very close after her. And Keith just seemed to me almost a grown-up. When I was a child he was a teenager and incredibly glamorous with all his big teenage friends all like playing football in the garden and then coming in and playing cards and

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Putting on the faces albums, and my memories are of you know a child with my nose pressed up against the glass just watching it all thinking, This is incredible, he's so grown up. And by the time you got to be a teenager, as you say, you were quite frustrated by the conventional suburban world that you were surrounded by. What's your perspective on that now, I wonder, and on your parents' experience, you know, having moved up from London, having gone through what they went through in the war? Well, I'm much more sympathetic now. Now I'm a parent, I can completely understand why they might have been worried about me, you know, dressing up and going off to gigs up in London. But at the time, I was outraged about them being strict at me, as only teenagers can be outraged. Couldn't believe they were trying to curtail my freedom like this. Tell me about your next piece of music. Why have you chosen it?

Presenter10:31

Uh the next track I've chosen is I'm Still Waiting by Diana Ross, which reminds me very much of Being a Child. It made a real impression on me. I think Tony Blackburn used to play it a lot. And it opens with this amazing line, I remember when.

Tracey Thorn10:39

I'm it

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I was five and you were tan, boy, and

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I just remember thinking this song is about children but taking them seriously. You know, kind of implying that children's feelings can last and can be important. And when you're a young pop fan, feeling that you've been sort of referenced in a pop song is an amazing feeling. So, you know, I took this song very much to heart and it was one of those knew it absolutely off by heart as a child and have never stopped loving it.

Tracey Thorn11:21

I remember when I was five and you were tiny

Tracey Thorn11:27

You knew that I was shy, so you teased and made me cry.

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But I love to then one day came.

Speaker 311:39

Uh

Tracey Thorn11:39

You told me you were leaving You gave your folks the blame

Tracey Thorn11:45

And made me cry again.

Tracey Thorn11:48

When you say little girl

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Diana Ross and I'm still waiting. Tracy Thorne, punk peaked in 1976. You discovered it in 77. By what means, I wonder? Probably reading some outraged piece in the papers. You'd catch sight of a headline saying, must we fling this filth at our pockets? And obviously your instinctive response was, yes, please. And you wanted to find out more.

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You know, I was about 14, 15 when it all started happening and becoming dissatisfied with conventions. And so I often think punk was just there at the right time. It was just something that allowed you to express all manner of dissatisfaction. And it was a suburban movement in a lot of ways. I mean, the Bromley contingent were a very big part of it. Do you think you were instinctively drawn to that because, you know, there was a symmetry with your experience? Well, I don't think I knew that. You see, I thought all of this was happening in the heart of Soho, and if only I could get there.

Tracey Thorn12:39

Larry B

Presenter12:53

that I'd be part of something better. If I'd known that a lot of these people were actually slight outsiders and that you know people in suburban and small towns across the country were having a similar response, you know, I might have felt I belonged to something more. But I just felt this sense of urgency that actually it was a very urban kind of music and it made my desire to get to the city even stronger.

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You wrote that by late 77 my parents were reeling in shock at what had happened to me. How had you changed? Well, outwardly and visibly, not that much. I wasn't a great one for having confrontational rows with my parents. So I did a lot of the dressing up in secret. There was lots of leaving my house looking relatively okay and then arriving at someone else's and getting into an outlandish outfit. What did you wear? Oh, well, you know, plastic trousers and big baggy shirts. You would have to make badges, it was all very DIY. You know, we didn't have fancy Vivian Westwood clothes from Seditionaries. I think we had one pair of leopard skin trousers between us that we just all used to share, sort of pass round. And as long as you had a men's suit jacket and some badges, you know, you could make a start.

Tracey Thorn13:43

What did you

Tracey Thorn13:47

We have to make things.

Presenter14:07

You bought your first guitar at 16 and you've described it as an urban guitar dragging London into my bedroom. Tell me about that. Yeah, I decided I wanted an electric guitar and I could very easily have bought one locally, I'm sure, but instead I found an ad in the back of Melozymaker and went up to London Fields to someone in a tower block and paid 60 quid for this black Lesbo copy about which I knew nothing. I mean honestly it could have been broken. I think I wrote in my diary really good bargain.

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Uh

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I'd really checked it out here and had a thorough examination of it. I just looked at it and went, it's very nice.

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I bought it. How long did it take to master it? Um well, there wasn't much mastering to be done. That was the beauty of it, you know, the classic three chords and you form a band, and that is literally what I mastered. Um I didn't sit down starting to try and

Tracey Thorn15:00

I just

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learn um Jimmy Page guitar solos because thankfully you didn't have to. We might have one coming up later.

Tracey Thorn15:08

Langer

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By seventeen you were in your first band, so you were shy but you obviously wanted to be heard. What was going on there do you think? Well classic ambivalence. I can look back and see that I was clearly very motivated and very driven by something. But it was about being heard. And I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to join in. I think that was one of the brilliant things about punk and post-punk and the whole sort of indie DIY scene.

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It was a moment when music wasn't just presented to you as something that you passively consumed or were entertained by. It sent out this message to you that you should come and join in.

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And I found that really exciting. I hadn't found another sort of hobby that I was mad about, so that filled that gap.

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Tell me about Singing in the Wardrobe. I have to know about that. So Singing in the Wardrobe happened because the first band I was in I was just the rhythm guitar player. So I wanted to be part of it, but not at the front of the stage. But in a rehearsal one day in someone's bedroom, the singer didn't turn up and the boys said to me

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Can you sing, Tracy? Which I didn't know. I had an inkling that I might be able to sing,'cause I'd sung along with Records at Home.

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But I said to them, well, you know, I'll try, but not if you're looking at me, so I'll get in the wardrobe and do it from inside there, if that's alright with you. And I can imagine them now making eye contact with each other and going, uh-huh, yeah, okay. So I did. I took the microphone inside the wardrobe and sang Rebel Rebel by David Bowie. Rebellious thing to do, huh?

Tracey Thorn16:39

Was the blue?

Presenter16:42

See, I was looking for the vocal booth all that time, basically. I was just looking for a small enclosed space with my microphone. Quite right. Tell me about your third disc today. Why have you chosen this one? So this third one is

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Gloria by Patty Smith. When I first heard this, the opening lines of it blew my socks off. And then when I'd heard it a few times, I started joining in singing with her. And just sort of through accident, I do have a very similar kind of vocal range to Patty Smith. It's lowish.

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So I was sort of practicing at home singing along with her and that was pretty exciting.

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Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

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Mild N Pat Thieves

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Wow cord in my sleeve

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Yeah.

Tracey Thorn17:36

Thick.

Tracey Thorn17:38

Heartstone, my sins my own, they belong to me.

Tracey Thorn17:49

But say beware

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Yeah.

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Patty Smith and Gloria. Tracy Thorne, Patty Smith, they're such a role model for many young women at the time. Was she one of yours? Yeah, I mean, as much as how she sounded, you know, it was how she looked on the cover of that album as well. I sat and gazed at that for a long time. You know, she's standing there in that white shirt and jeans, jackets on over her shoulder. You know, she looks.

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Very masculine, but just very androgynous. And that was very exciting. You know, I had always felt I didn't quite fit. You know, there was sort of conventions of how to be a pretty girl in the early seventies and then punk came along and sort of blew all that out of the water and offered

Presenter18:30

All sorts of different ways to experiment with your appearance, which again, which was great fun. And it was even more fun because the end result wasn't necessarily, you know, how can you sort of make yourself look as pretty as possible? It was just, how can you look interesting? In 1981, you formed Marine Girls, an all-female band. How unusual was that at the time? It was unusual. Certainly, there were lots of local bands, but it was mostly boys or bands that had one girl in. And that was the situation I'd been in. And I got a bit fed up with it. It went a bit wrong. And I just had the idea: look, maybe the next thing I do, I'll just do something with a group of girls. And so it started with two other girls I was at school with. And

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We did stand out immediately. We were aware of, you know, the boys slightly sort of looking around going, wait, what? You've done what? You've formed your own band without any of us. And I think we liked that. We really didn't adhere to any of the rules of rock and roll at all. I honestly don't think we knew what the rules of rock and roll were. We didn't have a drummer, for instance, just because we didn't know a girl who had a drum kit. So instead of thinking, well, I suppose we'd better ask one of the boys to play drums, we just thought, well, then we won't have a drummer. So we were bass and guitar.

Presenter19:44

And then various little bits of percussion that we all used to hit, madly out of time all the time. Um and vocals. And y you know, the sound we came up with was quite hard to categorise and it was quite unique. We didn't make a great deal of noise.

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But we used to turn up at gigs where, you know, the other bands would all be making a noise and then we'd have to get up on stage, often in front of a a crowd that was largely blokes, who'd be looking at us a bit arms folded anyway. And then we'd start playing and it wouldn't be very noisy and we wouldn't have a drummer and you'd see them narrow their eyes at us. So, you know, there was a degree of

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Guts involved just to do that really and be quite uncompromising about it. You impressed the noisy boys in the end though, because I think you were in a list of Kurt Cobain's 50 favourite albums. Yeah, I didn't obviously find out until a long time later, but Kurt Cobain was a massive fan. And I think what he recognised as, you know, a natural outsider was that rock and roll sometimes produces people who are actually very conventional in some ways, you know, boys who do follow the rules of rock and roll. And what he saw in us, I think, were fellow outsiders. So this was very much the post-punk DIY era. And as befits that time, you released a cassette, Beach Party, and that was then played by John Peel. And I think that was what led to a deal with the indie label Cherry Red. What sort of home was that? I mean, the indie chart had been invented. Lots of people were setting up small labels, largely because, you know, that format existed. Cassettes were easy to record, cassette to cassette, quite cheap to release music. Yeah, initially we did it entirely ourselves. We took the cassette we'd recorded into a tape copying service and we got 50 copies made and sold them to some friends and to a local record shop. And then I put a small ad in the back of the NME with my home address saying if you want a copy of this and people sent me postal orders to my home address and I would post them a copy of the cassette. And we sold the 50 copies we had made and then made some more. And yeah, gradually, gradually we came to a few people's attention.

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and ended up with the Beach Party album then being re-released by Cherry Red, which felt to us like a big step up.

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In retrospect, we look back and say, well, with Cherry Red you were part of this very DIY indie scene. But that felt to us like the moment we'd gone professional. Yeah, because they had been slightly worried that we'd sold out.

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They would there were profound conversations about whether we were selling out.

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So you know, we were properly kind of DIY at first. And did you have any ambitions beyond that? Or w were you just amazed that it was happening in India? We were just amazed that it was happening. We wouldn't have um

Tracey Thorn22:23

And we would

Presenter22:27

We wouldn't have been thinking about what we were doing and ironically did the stupid thing of signing a very long contract precisely because I wasn't paying any attention.

Tracey Thorn22:32

Very long colour.

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to the sort of professional side of it.

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Tell me about your fourth disc. My fourth disc basically marks the moment when I met Ben, which is late 1981. While I was still in the Marine Girls I went off to university in Hull and coincidentally so did Ben, even though he was actually signed to the same label. We should say your creative partner and your language. My creative partner and Ben Watt. We'd never met and met each other on the first night, quite deliberately because Ben paged me.

Tracey Thorn22:59

My creative partner and what

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in the Union Bar saying if Tracy of the Marine Girls is in the building where she comes reception.

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That was how he found me. So I thought, oh, it's probably that Ben Watt.

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and went off to meet him and yeah, we got on well. So later that night, back in his student room, he played me this record. I think it was the first record he put on. And I hadn't heard it before. It's Solid Air by John Martin. And it was quite a big moment in my life.

Tracey Thorn23:43

Walking the line and you've been living all so late.

Tracey Thorn23:51

Don't know what's going on

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Inside

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I'm telling you that on the highway, living on

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Solid

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John Martin and Solidaire. So Tracy Thorne, Ben would become your bandmate and your partner, and you've described the two of you as being united in feeling isolated in those first few weeks at Hall Uni. Did working together bring you together quickly?

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I think we we felt close together quickly anyway. He was one of those people who I'd felt within a very short time of meeting him, oh, I've known this person forever.

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We started

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work well, when I say working together, it we didn't even know it was that particularly. You know, Mike at at the label Cherry Red suggested that we do a record together because we were there together. So we did a one off single.

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And it was very casual, you know, we weren't thinking we're forming a band. It was the Cole Porter cover. Yeah, so we did a cover of Night and Day. A very romantic choice. Yeah, it was. And we were part of that whole thing that came along in the wake of punk when people were kind of rediscovering all sorts of other forms of music and jazz was one of them.

Tracey Thorn24:52

Yeah, so we could

Presenter25:04

We felt there was something equivalently radical about doing a jazz standard. And so that relationship was coming together, but you've also described a sense of being separated from your parents and that being quite a difficult time on that front. What was going on? Yeah, going away to university did mark a sort of point when I became a bit more distant from my parents. I started living with Ben as well, and they were disapproving of that. And we fell out very badly over that issue.

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I look back now and think there was a period at university when I was quite traumatised by that breach with my parents, but just kind of lived through it because, you know, when you're young, that's what you do. You sort of get on with things. You did graduate with a first, though. What were your plans for the future? Again, I was quite muddled by that stage. You know, we'd started recording together, Ben and I, and there was a plan that this album we'd recorded was about to be released. I sat my final exams and the first single that we'd made each and every one.

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Came out and went into the charts, the proper charts, not the indie charts, you know, it went in at number 28 and the wheat.

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I was sitting my final exam. I sat an exam in the morning, left university, got on a train down to London and we were in the recording studio recording a follow-up. So I had been working really hard up to that point on my exams, wanting to get a first, thinking perhaps that will lead somewhere. Maybe I'll go into journalism or something like that. But then this career in music was inventing itself for me and it just sort of unfolded and I think I just followed that path because it was a path that opened up. So pop success was thrust upon you. How did it suit you when it arrived? Slightly awkwardly I think, although that sounds very ungrateful when obviously it's a career choice that many people would dream of. And I did enjoy loads of it. But as soon as we sort of reached that level, I began to realise that, you know, it wasn't a question anymore of hiding in the wardrobe or pretending this wasn't happening. It really was happening and I just had to get on with it. So I did. And sometimes it was great and sometimes I did suffer lots of anxiety about it all and

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feel that, you know, I wasn't quite cut out to be doing this.

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How well did you understand yourself? Because one of the interesting things is that you do have this constant kind of mix of ambivalence, as you've described, and also these kind of complex contrasts within what you do. You want to be heard, but you're singing from inside a wardrobe, and that has really actually characterised your work. Did you understand that then, or did you just think, I should love this and I don't, what's wrong with me? No, I think when I was younger, I found.

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Those sort of

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contrast between things quite difficult and probably wished that I could fit more easily into a a pigeonhole or other. Now I'm older and I look back, I think that's probably the whole reason you've been successful at all, because what you've done is

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Articulated what a lot of people feel, which is that we are all incredibly complicated.

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It's all very well seeing people on stage who seem to have a sort of gilded life and be natural born performers and loving every minute of it. That can be wonderful and really entertaining and take you out of yourself. But there's equally something

Presenter28:35

you know, very connecting about seeing people who are performing, who are struggling with it in some way, and whose writing seems to articulate some of the mixed feelings you have about things you have to do. So now I can see that it it's a kind of strength, or at least it's a a point of

Presenter28:52

Connection with an audience, I think. Time for some music. What's your fifth disc today? So, this is my slight surprise choice. This will definitely surprise my brother Keith, who this track has chosen for already. This is Led Zeppelin, who he loved growing up. So, again, this is another track that is pretty much the sound of my childhood. This was the sound that used to come out of Keith's bedroom, and I really wasn't sure I liked this at all, but it fascinated me because I just thought, I don't understand this music at all. And I also remember my mum going out to buy his Christmas present on his instructions and asking for the new Zed Lepelin, which went down in family folklore and has always left me with a bit of a soft spot for Black Dog by Zed Lepelin.

Tracey Thorn29:30

Went down

Speaker 229:31

In family folklore.

Speaker 229:38

Hey, hey mama said the way you move gon' make you sweat, gon' make you

Speaker 230:02

Yeah.

Speaker 230:03

Wait.

Speaker 330:03

What's on a trip can't keep away?

Presenter30:16

Led Zeppelin and Black Dog. Tracy Thorne, tell me about doing your MA. I like to imagine you were doing coursework while backstage at Top of the Pops. Please tell me it was like that. It more or less was. I started doing it in about 1990, I think. And actually, that was the time we then went out to LA to record our big American album.

Presenter30:36

I did it at Birkbeck College where you study in the evenings. It's for people who are basically in work. So I thought, well, that's me. That counts. And I went for the interview and described to them what my job was. And they were very suspicious of me and said, well, wh when are you going to do the reading? And I was like, well, I'll do it on the tour bus. It'll be fine, honestly. Didn't you come back? I don't think they believed that I would, but I did. Didn't you come back off a world tour and write a thesis about Samuel Beckett? I did. Yeah. There's a bound copy of it somewhere in the Birkbeck Library, I think.

Tracey Thorn30:55

You haven't done it.

Presenter31:05

But I really enjoyed it. I'd been operating at a more mainstream level. You know, you do an album, you go on to it, you do the promo, rinse and repeat, you do it again. And I was starting to feel a little bit trapped by that. By 1988, you've written that you'd lost your place in the music scene. What happened? You know, we started out as obvious indie darlings because we were doing everything ourselves and operating at a very small level.

Presenter31:30

And then we achieved a bit of success.

Presenter31:33

And then the natural, again, sort of creative cycle, which is that you run a little bit out of ideas. And both of us would be honest and look back at our career at the end of the eighties,

Presenter31:45

sort of turn of the nineties and admit that we weren't at our most, you know, creatively prolific and we weren't any didn't any longer have that sort of newness thing, you know, here's the new band.

Presenter31:58

So that's a tricky time in the career of any band. That's often the point when it comes to a natural kind of end. But then in 1992, Ben became gravely ill very suddenly. Tell me what happened. Yeah, he, I mean, he started just getting sick over a period of months, all sorts of different symptoms, which, you know, he'd go to a GP and it was a bit mysterious. ended up suddenly one day being very ill indeed and doctors thought he was having a heart attack and he was rushed into hospital and was there for I think at least two weeks before they finally found out that he had a very nasty autoimmune disease. So he was in hospital for weeks. He had lots of surgery, was on very heavy medication, was in intensive care and unconscious for some of that time. And then when he finally came out of hospital, quite a long convalescence, he'd lost a lot of weight. I mean he was really skinny and poorly looking when he came out.

Presenter32:59

What was the impact of that experience on you as a couple?

Presenter33:03

I think it it brought us closer together and it pushed us apart at a sort of very deep level.

Presenter33:10

It it gave us that feeling of, wow, we've shared something really extraordinary, extraordinarily horrible, but nonetheless something extraordinary. But on the other hand, Ben especially had a lot of recovering to do, a lot of mental recovering to do, which meant he disappeared inside himself for a while.

Presenter33:30

But for that sort of first year or so after he was recovering, I think we were both sort of recovering but in slightly separate spaces. And then what that led to was actually a sort of resurgence of that creative impulse. We were both I think a bit shell-shocked and in a slightly nerve-jangly state, which ironically was quite conducive to making more exciting music. It was like rediscovering that sort of febrile teenage state when you're living on your nerve ends and

Presenter34:06

You know, can't wait to get your ideas out there. Tracy Thorne, time for some music. What's your sixth disc? My sixth disc is for my sister, my sister Debbie, Shame by Evelyn Champagne King. She'll be leaping to her feet now going, yes, this is our song. We both used to like going to a disco together. Even through the years of getting into punk and joining bands, I never lost my love of going out for a dance. And through that whole period, sometimes you had to look for the records that you could still dance to at parties. And this was one of those records that people used to play even if you were at a party with other kind of rock fans. You'd still bung the song and have a dance. And yeah, if this came on now, I'd still get up. I think you won't be the only one to still like that.

Speaker 234:52

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Tracey Thorn34:55

My home Friday daily

Tracey Thorn34:59

Got me a shame.

Tracey Thorn35:02

Times I think I'm going astray

Tracey Thorn35:06

Still I wanna say

Tracey Thorn35:25

Uh

Presenter35:30

Evelyn Champagne King and Shame. Tracy thought Todd Terry's nineteen ninety five remix of your track Missing was a huge hit. Did its success take you by surprise?

Presenter35:41

Yes, it did. That mix was done really just for American clubs. No one was necessarily thinking that song still had a chance of being hit.

Presenter35:51

And it bubbled around just being a a club hit for quite a while. It was one of those real slow burner hits. And it ended up just being a hit everywhere. But you know, at that point in our career and our lives when we'd long stopped thinking we were going to have hits at that level.

Presenter36:09

So it was at this point, as you say, unexpectedly, you found yourself a semi-VIP? Yeah.

Presenter36:17

Tell me about that phrase. Yeah, we went to a restaurant one night and we'd made a reservation and

Presenter36:22

did that thing when you arrive and go, Yeah, we've got a table book to eight and they're a little bit sort of looking down their list trying to find you. So we leaned over to see, you know, the list they had just behind the counter with our names written on. And there it was, Tracy Don Benoit and the words beside, in brackets, semi VIP.

Presenter36:38

Which I felt really summed us up in a nutshell.

Tracey Thorn36:39

Rennie

Presenter36:43

Better than X V I P. I like the accuracy and specificity of it. You know, there's none of your A list, Z list stuff here. It's very specific.

Presenter36:52

Know your place.

Presenter36:54

So what was your attitude to success and failure at this point? I think we probably enjoyed the success of Missing even more because we hadn't sort of slogged away for it and we didn't have any expectations. And it was really good fun.

Presenter37:10

There is an expectation that musicians will play live. I mean the audience want it, labels definitely want it, it can be very lucrative, but it is something that you don't do. Why? Yeah, I don't do any more. I did do it for a lot of years. You know, we toured all through the 80s and for a lot of the 90s. And I stopped when the kids were very small.

Presenter37:32

Sort of saying to people, well, I can't go on to it at the moment. You know, I've got three very small kids, but honestly, I think I was very happy to use the kids as an excuse to stop. And time went by, and then a bit more time. And I came back to making records again, which has been the bit I always have loved, you know, back to the security of the vocal booth. I mean, we've talked about stage fright, but obviously, there is a bigger conversation about anxiety, the experience of anxiety out there now, certainly than would have been happening when you were younger and when you were performing live. Yes. So then, presumably, you thought it was stage fright. I wonder how you assess your experience and the way you were feeling now. I think, I mean, stage fright is a form of anxiety, and I've been aware as I've got older that I.

Tracey Thorn38:06

Uh

Presenter38:20

I suffer from a much more generalized anxiety than just stage fright, which has been part of my life for a long time. And I've dealt with it a lot better in recent years, having gone for a bit of therapy and in the light of, as you say, people talking about it a bit more, been much more open about it. And that's been great. But again, the thing about the singing live is, you know, I did do it for all those years, even with the anxiety. And if I wanted to enough, I would. But.

Tracey Thorn38:24

Right.

Presenter38:47

Really what I don't have at any more or at the moment is the desire and I I don't want to do anything any more unless I'm absolutely desperate to do it.

Presenter38:58

Time for some more music. Tell me about your seventh disc today.

Presenter39:02

So this song reminds me of the period when I first had children. I had twins and they were born a few weeks early. So I was back to the situation again of sitting in a hospital, this time beside two little babies in incubators, which was a tricky time and stressful in its own way. And I do remember with each of them that there were a couple of moments when, you know, I wasn't allowed to be sitting cuddling them all the time. When babies are in incubators, it's not the right thing to be doing. So there was a bit of sitting, looking at them through the plastic. But there were moments when I was allowed to get out and sit and have a little cuddle and sit in a rocking chair. And I thought immediately, I must sing to my babies. That's what people do. They sing lullabies. But hang on, I don't know any lullabies. What do you sing to a baby? And this song was the first one that popped into my head that I thought sounds lullaby-ish. And I sat and sang it to my babies while they were still in the intensive care unit. And yeah, I think it does work as a lullaby.

Tracey Thorn40:07

Stars shining bright above you

Tracey Thorn40:13

Night breezes seem to whisper I love you.

Tracey Thorn40:19

Birds singing in the sycamore tree

Tracey Thorn40:23

Dream a little dream of me

Tracey Thorn40:29

Say nighty night and

Speaker 340:31

And kiss me.

Speaker 340:35

Just hold me tight.

Tracey Thorn40:36

Right and tell me

Presenter40:38

Hey you

Tracey Thorn40:39

Miss Mm

Tracey Thorn40:40

Yeah

Presenter40:40

File.

Tracey Thorn40:41

Oh, I'm alone.

Presenter40:42

The Mamas and the Papas dream a little dream of me. Tracy Thorne, you had your twin girls in 1998 and then a son in 2001 and stepped away from work for a while. What was it like becoming anonymous? Were you anonymous? I was more or less anonymous. I had this sort of you know weird experience sometimes where I made lots of friends through the kids the way you do going to playgroups and schools and never quite being sure whether people had recognised me and you know being British no one ever mentions things like that.

Presenter41:19

There is that weird thing where people go into that sort of polite thing of thinking, oh well I just won't mention it.

Presenter41:26

So, you're not quite sure whether anyone knows. And then there were moments when the kids first noticed. You know, I remember one of the kids coming home from school saying,

Tracey Thorn41:27

Sure, what

Presenter41:34

When he was really small, it was Blake, I think, saying, my teacher says she's got all your records. Like, what does that mean? What records? And what did you say? I mean, I just gave them a sort of potted version of it. But, you know, kids aren't interested, honestly. To them, I was just mum. That was all they were, you know, quite rightly all they were interested in. What I'd done before was of no consequence. And what about for you and Ben? How has it been negotiating the transitions between different ways of working together and working apart alongside your relationship? You know, first being in a band together, then him releasing some of your solo work. Now, I think sometimes writing on adjacent desks right next to each other.

Presenter42:15

Yeah, we I mean we don't work together anymore and haven't done

Presenter42:20

Really, since we have the kids and

Presenter42:23

That seems the right decision. You know, sometimes I say to people, it was hard enough being a couple and being in a band together and trying to make that work for all those years. But now there's another level of our relationship. We're parents together as well now. And I think, you know, people sometimes casually say, oh, why don't you reform everything but the girl? You know, it would be so great. But to us, that looks like quite a strange life decision. You know, we'd be going back to agreeing to spend every bit of our lives together and make every decision together, all our working decisions as well. And that seems to me like an awful lot of pressure to put on a relationship. And obviously here the two of you are still together, very happily, having got married relatively, relatively recently, after several decades together. What's the secret of your relationship, if there is one?

Tracey Thorn43:07

Yesterday.

Presenter43:14

No, there isn't one, is the honest answer. I think it's very largely luck. There is something about us that suits each other. And through all the other ups and downs and the stuff you have to work on, I just think that that was a sort of lucky meeting. And what about the future for you? You've said I do things that are important to me. What are they?

Presenter43:34

At the moment, you know, I'm lucky enough that I can juggle the two things of music and writing.

Presenter43:40

And I do find music very uncontrollable. I can't make songs come. Often there's a gap of

Presenter43:49

A couple of years or a few years in between records, and then you just have to wait for the next bit of inspiration to strike. Going out dancing has to be on the list as well because there was a tweet.

Tracey Thorn43:57

Yeah.

Presenter43:59

I think about half past five in the morning, a couple of Saturdays ago. Right, that's fine.

Speaker 344:02

Maybe.

Tracey Thorn44:03

Uh

Presenter44:05

Um I can't read the actual tweet itself out on Radio Four at this time of the day, but the radio edit version is everything except going out dancing can get stuffed. Yes. May have been a little tired and emotional when I wrote that. And that was one of those classic accidental evenings where it started very sedately in a restaurant and ended up with some

Tracey Thorn44:08

On radio

Tracey Thorn44:15

I may have been a little tired and emotional when I wrote

Presenter44:24

Cocktails and before we knew it we were in a gay bar dancing, as you are. I don't do it all the time, but I absolutely love it. When when I'm in the middle of it, it's the most euphoric thing. And you know, perhaps as you get older, that's the the moments that are harder to find, those moments of real euphoria, and when they do come along.

Tracey Thorn44:27

In a gay broader

Presenter44:44

You just seized them by both hands. We were still there at the end when the DJ actually finished, played the last record and then it went quiet. And we were the ones on the floor going, NOOOOOO!

Presenter44:56

With that in mind, let's have some more music. Tracy Thorne, your eighth disc. Yeah, this is One More Time by Darth Punk, which reminds me of that period I was just talking about, I think, when the kids were small. Ben was working a lot as a DJ and running his label. So, you know, I lived this very domestic life, but one in which happened to a non-stop soundtrack of dance music. And, you know, the kids grew up with that as their soundtrack, so they all knew lots of these amazing records. And there was a year we went on holiday when Blake was very small, he was about three or something.

Presenter45:28

And he was at that age where all he wanted to do was jump in the swimming pool over and over again, climb out, jump in again, and he would just stand on the edge just going, One more time

Presenter45:38

Then jump in again. So this song reminds me of that period.

Tracey Thorn45:43

One more time.

Tracey Thorn45:58

One more time.

Tracey Thorn46:16

Oh the time I go to sleep

Presenter46:19

Daft Punk and one more time. Tracy Thorne, I'm about to cast you away to our island. How do you feel about the prospect? A bit nervous. That's about most things. I would very much enjoy lying on the desert island beach all day long. I'd like a tan.

Tracey Thorn46:26

The s

Presenter46:33

I'll give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare to read while you're there. You can also take a book of your choosing. What would you like it to be? So I'm going to be really corny and um take War and Peace, because A I've never read it, and B it's very long.

Presenter46:46

Oh, and see, people say it's really good.

Presenter46:49

So I think it would keep me going for ages. You can also have a luxury item. What would you like? A moisturizing lipstick, please. I mean, I would just say lip balm, because I think being on a desert island without any lip balm would be a nightmare.

Tracey Thorn46:57

Coming up.

Presenter47:03

But if I'm going to have some lip balm then I might as well have a little bit of colour in it. Is it just for the way it looks or is lipstick more important than that to you? Anyone who knows me will be sitting there now going, Oh, I am not surprised.

Tracey Thorn47:10

Yeah.

Presenter47:15

Because my lipstick is quite a big part of my life. Alla Dusty Springfield. Always reapply your lipstick before a lead vocal take. It's advice to live by. Isn't it just? And finally, if I had to ask you to save just one of the eight tracks you've chosen today, which would it be?

Tracey Thorn47:24

And f

Presenter47:29

Um

Presenter47:31

It's going to be Diana Ross, I'm still waiting. Just because I can't imagine being on an island and not being able to listen to it. Tracy Thorne, thank you very much for sharing your Desert Island discs with us. Thank you.

Presenter47:53

I'm very much with Tracy Thorne on the importance of lipstick. I do hope you enjoyed that interview. Other singer-songwriting castaways include Annie Lennox, Lily Allen, Paul Weller, Ian Dury, Guy Garvey, Elton John. So many to choose from in our back catalogue and all are available to download via BBC Sounds. You'll also find Alison Moyer's Desert Island discs. She spoke to Kirsty in 2014.

Tracey Thorn48:16

Yeah.

Presenter48:16

Yeah.

Tracey Thorn48:16

Yeah.

Tracey Thorn48:18

Let's talk for a moment about you and Vince Clark then. It was 1981 and as I understand it you put an advert in Melody Maker saying that you were what what did it read, this advert?

Presenter48:23

Saying that you walked in the middle of the morning.

Presenter48:25

I can't remember the exact words, but it was I was looking for a blues band. I was looking for blues musicians to start a blues band. Now, what was interesting about it is I actually knew Vince when I was 11. We both went to the same community Saturday morning music school. So I knew of him, although out of the whole of the Depeche Mode group, he was the one that I was least friendly with. Fletcher and Martin Gore, they were both in my class at school, as was Perry Bemonte, who ended up being in the queue, you know, so it was quite a lot of stuff that was going on with that. But anyway, he knew of me because I'd been playing in bands before him and he'd seen me play out live. And when he'd left Depeche Mode, he had this song Only You. He was looking for a voice, and it was just serendipity. He was looking for me.

Tracey Thorn49:05

The week my number was in the paper. And there you were within months on top of the pop, singing only you. It didn't get to number one, it got to number two. Yes, that's right. And can you remember what you were wearing when you performed? I can remember what I was wearing, exactly remember what I was wearing because

Presenter49:08

Singing

Speaker 249:08

Yeah.

Presenter49:09

It didn't

Speaker 249:09

Yeah.

Speaker 249:11

Yes, that's right.

Presenter49:17

Because a girlfriend of mine had made it from me because I didn't have a job then. I hadn't been given an advance and it hadn't occurred to me to ask for any money. So I borrowed a few quid off my mum and we'd gone down to Basnel Market and bought some material and my mate sort of like you know held it up against me and knocked it up on the sewing machine. And can you imagine in those days? I mean now you get you get midweeks, you get told where your record's going in those days you I see myself sitting on the floor of my mum and dad's house listening to the chart countdown and having no idea if you dropped out if you were going up and it was only by listening with everybody else that you'd find out where your record was. So that was thrilling, thrilling, thrilling.

Tracey Thorn49:50

Somebody once said that if you don't know who you are when fame hits you, then fame will define you. You were only, I think, twenty were you twenty when you hit you?

Presenter49:57

Uh I was twenty, yeah.

Tracey Thorn49:59

How did it how did it affect you?

Presenter50:00

It affected me in the sense that I hadn't realised quite how much I had enjoyed my black sheep status. You know, I had my head shaved and was wearing DMs and army green, so I can understand why anyone would think that I was a threatening individual. And there was like this kind of a space around me that people would leave me to my own devices. But no, I found it really difficult, you know, to suddenly be amongst the beautiful people. You know, where I had, you know, never been particularly good at socializing. Suddenly I'm amongst these urbane types that are well read and are well travelled and are cultured. And I'm still this rather dark, you know, this kind of grunting creature in the back. And, you know, I

Presenter50:44

I ran away from it as quick as I could, and in many ways, that absolutely saved me. It saved me because I never became a part of the industry. I did my job and I went home. Alison Moye.

Presenter50:53

As Tracy explained, she and Ben went to Hull University. Back in nineteen seventy six, Roy Plumley spoke to the man who was the university librarian there for thirty years, the poet Philip Larkin.

Speaker 251:05

Do you write for yourself or to communicate a feeling to others?

Speaker 251:11

I certainly write to be read. There would be very little point in writing something that no that nobody was going to read, but it's not quite communicating in the sense of

Speaker 251:20

Writing a letter to The Times, for instance,

Speaker 251:23

You try to create something in words that will reproduce in

Speaker 251:29

Somebody else who's never met you and perhaps isn't even living in the same

Speaker 251:34

cultural societies yourself.

Speaker 251:37

That somebody else will

Speaker 251:39

Read and so get the experience that you haven't and that

Speaker 251:44

forced you to write the poem?

Speaker 251:46

It's a kind of preservation by recreation, if I can put it that way.

Speaker 251:53

You are not in any way um

Speaker 251:56

quote here, difficult or abstruse poet. Y your poems are very simple and uh this strikes me as being due to a great deal of effort to make them so.

Speaker 252:09

I think that a poem should be understood at first reading.

Speaker 252:15

line by line. But I don't think it should be exhausted at at first reading. I hope

Speaker 252:20

that what I write gives the reader something.

Speaker 252:23

when they read it first, enough, in fact, to make them read it again, and so on at infinitum.

Presenter52:29

Philip Larkin. Next week, I'll be interviewing the award-winning author Kate Atkinson. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 352:49

Why is it that some people pretend to support a football team? It's important questions like that I'll be looking to unravel with the help of top experts, psychologists, and some big sporting names in my new podcast, Don't Tell Me the Score. We'll be dissecting sporting themes like tribalism, the power of belief, and the art of resilience to uncover important answers about life and the world around us. Forget the results, tactics, and clichés about two halves. This is a sports podcast the likes of which you've never heard before. Subscribe to Don't Tell Me the Score with me, Simon Mundy, on BBC Sounds.