It's a great rock'n'roll story. There they are, plodding along, playing to ever more "selective" audiences, when their record company ring them up and say "you're dropped". Half expecting it, they shrug their shoulders and gird themselves to return to the indie ghetto from whence they came. While all this is going on, some hot-shot producer has got his hands on what should be their last album, liked one of the tracks a lot and decided to re-mix it. The resultant song, Missing (Todd Terry re-mix) becomes one of the biggest selling global singles of 1995 and suddenly the acoustic bed-sit duo of Everything But The Girl find themselves reborn as dance floor heroes. There is certainly no other band over the last 20 years who have reinvented themselves to the same extent. Having ritually set fire to their acoustic guitars, they became a full-on drum'n'bass outfit, replacing their plangent minor chords with breakbeats and managing to switch their fan base from one generation to another in one bold move.
The break was so complete that maybe they should have changed their name. And while this jury is still out on their new, electro-friendly sound, the previous incarnation of the group is still fondly remembered. Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt met while students at Hull University and took their name from a furniture shop (yes, a furniture shop). Early albums like Eden, Baby The Stars Shine Bright and the majestic Idlewild highlighted their beautiful compositional skills and although they were very much an album band, they did have the odd hit fluke single, as in their definitive version of I Don't Want To Talk About It. Following That Re-mix, they moved to the Virgin label and brought out the Walking Wounded album - which, along with Tracey Thorn guesting on Massive Attack's Protection - raised their credibility in the dance world. They're back now with a new album - and they're still getting jiggy with the dance sound. "I was proud of the new ground we broke with Walking Wounded," says Ben Watt, "but I saw that we wanted to get to the next level - similar grooves and detailed songs, but finding room for deeper, fatter sounds and beats. Regular DJ-ing opened my ears to such possibilities."
He says the new sound is a mix of "deep soulful house, hard jazzy drum'n'bass rollers and sweet funk and hip hop". Fair enough. The one thing, though, that did remain constant in their sound over the years was the use of Tracey Thorn's remarkable vocal skills - but this time out, even this was on the negotiating table.
"When it came to the vocals, I encouraged Ben to experiment with my voice more," says Tracey. "New sounds, dubbier ideas, but without losing sight of that intense one-to-one feeling we got on Walking Wounded. We made use of spoken word, falsetto, vocal filters and tiny fragments of my voice as percussion. After I had sung the lead vocals, Ben would often trawl through my ad-libs and old takes, and sample additional notes and sounds, chopping them back into the tune for new counter-rhythms. Sometimes he would find vocal samples from other singers which I would mimic or sing along to. The original was then removed, leaving me, but sounding somewhat different. All this kind of stuff became sort of backing vocals. It was a new approach for us."
The lyrics for the new album, which were predominantly written by Ben, were a reflection of his new DJ-ing life. "I was out in the city so much," he says, "at night in midweek clubs, coming home alone from DJ-ing, during the day record-shopping, watching people, feeling changed by what I saw, absorbing. It spoke to me a lot. A lot of my lyrics explore this, I think."
Traditional Everything But The Girl fans should approach this album with the same caution as Walking Wounded. While obviously fragments of their whole sound can be detected deep down in the mix and Tracey Thorn's voice sounds as great as ever, this is intended for a club crowd and the "sad indie loser" stuff just doesn't get a look in. Give it a go on a listening post and make your own mind up.
Temperamental by Everything But The Girl is on the Virgin label.
