Tracey Thorn, musican and writer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 November 2018

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Tracey Thorn, musician and writer, is best known as one half of the duo Everything but the Girl. Brought up in Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire, she bought her first guitar, a black Les Paul copy, when she was 16 and her first band was called the Stern Bobs. Shortly after, she formed her own all-female band, Marine Girls, before moving to Hull University to study English. On her first night there, she met her future husband, Ben Watt, and they went on to form Everything But the Girl. Between 1982 and 2000, they sold more than nine million records and toured Europe and America. Despite their success, Tracey did not always enjoy performing live. At 35 she left the pop world to look after her twin girls, who were followed by her son Blake. She took about seven years out to be a full time parent, but since then she has come back to song-writing, recording music and writing: her first memoir Bedsit Disco Queen was a best seller, and she has a fortnightly column in the New Statesman. This year Tracey was presented with the outstanding contribution to music prize, at the AIM independent music awards. Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.8	I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast.
0:08.3	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take
0:12.8	with them if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.0	This is an extended version of the original Radio 4 broadcast and for right reasons the
0:21.2	music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:24.1	I hope you enjoy listening.
0:30.9	Music Radio Music
0:45.6	My cast away this week is singer and writer Tracy Thorn.
0:49.1	As one half of the band everything but the girl, a solo artist and now as a columnist and author,
0:54.7	she's known for her subtle scrutiny of bittersweet subjects which don't often make it into pops
0:59.8	songs or under the pages of a book, teenage life in the suburbs, mother daughter relationships,
1:04.8	the menopause and babies who refuse to go to sleep.
1:08.0	Her 40 year career as a musician has been both successful and unconventional.
1:13.1	As a frustrated teenager growing up in the suburbs she read Jameen Greer's assertion in the female
1:18.3	unique that nobody wrote songs for bored housewives and thought why not.
1:23.3	She started off a wannabe punks singer so shy she delivered her first vocal performance from
1:28.4	Inside a Wardrobe. She would become a pop star who studied English literature at night school
1:34.0	and just after scoring her biggest ever hit set her career aside to bring up three children.
1:39.6	Now she combines a musical career with her writing still fascinated by the power afforded to those
1:45.3	who choose what deserves to be in either sense of the word recorded. Writing she says is always
1:51.8	about knowing who's in charge. Tracy Thorn welcome to Desert Island Discs.
	...

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