Everything And The Night - Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn - Interview

Everything But The Girl is now doing for club music what they did for sophisticated pop: piercing the heart of the matter. On their new album Temperamental, they're taking the groove a step further, finding emotional dimensions in the after-hours sound

It may be the loneliest time ever: the wee hours of the morning, after most people have gone to bed but before the sun has risen. It's a time nightclubbers call their own, as they leave the crowd of the dance floor to make their way down empty streets. Temperamental (Atlantic), the ninth studio album by Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn, is set in this after-hours milieu of neon intoxication. Ever since the life-changing events of '93 and '94 - when Watt nearly succumbed to a rare disease, just before Todd Terry's remix of the single "Missing" vaulted the band from being cool sophisticates into international pop stars - Watt has been "walk[ing] the city late at night," as the album's first line says. In '98 he started a London club party, Lazy Dog, where he's a resident D J, pursuing deep-house 12-inches the way he once hunted punk singles. Watt brings the beats of the underground to Temperamental's night-owl ruminations, sung in varying degrees of presence and echo by Thoro. To get their thoughts on this new direction, we spoke individually with each member of the duo.

Ben Watt

EVELYN MCDONNELL: Have you always been a club person?

BEN WATT: In my teens and twenties I went to 'all the seediest rock clubs you can imagine, and jazz clubs. I just never went to discos. I bypassed rave culture completely. It's mostly through the deejaying lately that this nocturnal existence has opened up to me. I used to drive up to my DJ gigs and drive home and would therefore have to remain fairly sober, and the activities of most people on the streets at night are almost cartoonlike in their extremity.

I just became more and more intrigued with the way we go out to dance and drink with each other, and yet so many of us end up going home alone. There seemed to be a really interesting tension between the community spirit of the night, and the way the city can be quite an alienating place. Simple lines like "Are you on your own?" are pregnant with meaning. On the one hand you're asking, "Are you lonely?" and on the other hand it's just a straightforward pickup line. All that seemed to appeal to the Everything But The Girl frame of mind. [laughs]

EM: Have you been attacked for being an interloper in the dance scene?

BW: Well, of course. We come from the other side of the tracks. We're a pop band and we're moving underground. There was a terrible period in the middle of the album where I couldn't work at all. I felt the usual self-doubt crap, like, I'm a fool and a charlatan. Who do I think I am programming house beats? I was a nightmare to live with and just carried on deejaying, trying to get it out of my system. I found I was walking the city a lot late at night. And I was articulating a lot of what I felt inside, that mixture of alienation but a desire to connect.

EM: Temperamental sounds more underground than the last couple EBTG albums.

BW: I think the sounds are deeper and fatter and they're coming off the dance floor. I wanted to put that in-your-face quality on a pop record. I really hope there's a front door on the album, that the songs and singing make the beats accessible. It presents a really vivid landscape for the hang-ups we all have.

EM: Amplified Heart captured a couple expressing their sides of a love affair. Temperamental seems more like a breakup album.

BW: No. The impetus behind the lyrics is that they're acknowledging the kind of depressions we all feel, the realities we all go through, and the dead ends we all reach in relationships, but in the end what I hope they all say is, "You have no choice but to get up and go on." In that sense, the songs are actually quite optimistic. They're deeply realistic. Amplified Heart seems to be very much a record that inhabits the head. It's about people trying to come to terms with something heavy, but in an internal way. And Walking Wounded is like the first tentative steps: You' re out there with your burden around your neck but you' re recognizing that everyone else has had shit thrown at them as well. Temperamental is going one step further. It's saying now I can actually stride out and take part in life again.

Tracey Thorn

EM: Everything But The Girl first came into the whole trip-hop dance scene through Massive Attack's approaching you for vocals, so obviously your voice is somehow naturally fitted to this music. I've always thought you have a kind of ghost in the machine quality - that you're singing the soul of this mechanical music.

TRACEY THORN: I like being the human voice in that context. When you've done acoustic music for a long time, you reach a point where you feel everything's coming from the same place. It's more interesting to set up this tension between the music that's being generated electronically and a voice like mine, which is almost completely without any kind of artifice, It's a very simple voice, and I think if it works then that's perhaps why.