LP disponible le 12 novembre 2012.
Born in 1962. Formed indie girl-group the Marine Girls while still at
school. Fell in with Ben Watt to form Everything But The Girl in 1982.
Toured and recorded as EBTG for twenty years before taking time off for
family. Re-appeared in 2007 as a solo artist. Loves gardening and disco.
Eats mango and dark chocolate. Bookworm. Twitter specialist. Released
'Love And Its Opposite' on Strange Feeling in 2010.
Why a Christmas album, and why now?
T.T. / I've always wanted to make a Christmas record. Every year, when the Christmas albums start appearing in November, I get jealous and wish I had
one coming out. Last year when that happened AGAIN I made a resolution, to get recording in January to be ready for the following Christmas. And so
that's just what I did.
How did you select the tunes?
T.T. / I was ill in bed just before Christmas last year, and so it was a perfect opportunity to do a bit of song research. I got my laptop and searched for every Christmassy, wintry, snowy, seasonal song ever written, and tried to work out which ones I thought I could do justice to. They're not all strictly *Christmas* songs, but if they mentioned winter, or snow, or even just being cold, that was good enough for me.
Who's on it?
T.T. / It was produced by Ewan Pearson, it's got me singing and playing some guitar and piano. Ben plays guitar and piano on a few tracks. Leo Taylor (Adele, Hot Chip) plays drums, and Steve Pearce, who worked a lot with EBTG years ago, is on bass. One song features the Watt Family Vocal Choir, which is basically me, Ben and all three kids, gathered round one mic and doing our impression of carol singers. There is also a special guest appearance by Green from Scritti Politti singing a duet with me.
Any essential ingredients in terms of the instrumentation?
T.T. / It's quite varied, I just wanted to do each song in a way that suited it. So some tracks are quite sparse, with just piano and vocal, or a simple small band arrangement. Others have drum machine and synth parts and so sound a little more electronic. There's a full, lush string section on two of the songs, and a brass band on another. The brass band were told to imagine that it was a freezing cold Saturday afternoon on a British High Street, just before Christmas, shoppers all around, sleet starting to fall. That was the idea.
What was it like recording a Christmas album in the spring?
T.T. / I won't lie, it was a bit discombobulating. Hard sometimes to get into the spirit. Not sure whether we were putting too many sleigh bells on,
or not enough.
Any Christmas tips?
T.T. / Make lists. Lots of lists.
No Christmas is complete without a ...
T.T. / ... lovely new Christmas album by one of your favourite singers. Strange Feeling Records is an imprint of Buzzin’ Fly Records Backtracking, it is hard to find a decade recently where Tracey Thorn's voice and songwriting has not been influential. Fresh out of school in the UK in the early 1980s, she formed the cult girl band Marine Girls, whose two-album career of edgy teen love songs has influenced lo-fi indie bands ever since. Among noted Marine Girls fans you'll find Kurt Cobain (Nirvana was reportedly rehearsing ‘In Love’ before Cobain's death). In 1982, she followed it with her own eight-song mini-classic, ‘A Distant Shore’, which catapulted her to the top of the UK indie charts. Throughout the 1980s, she shared writing with partner Ben Watt in the British duo Everything But The Girl (EBTG). In the '90s, she co-wrote EBTG's global smash ‘Missing’ before delivering lyrics, melody, and vocals for one of the decade's seminal ballads, Massive Attack's ‘Protection,’ and contributing centrally to EBTG's best-selling electronica crossover albums ‘Walking Wounded’ and ‘Temperamental’. After a self-imposed hiatus to start a family she returned in 2007 with the glittering folk-disco of ‘Out of the Woods’ and followed it with the starkly beautiful ‘Love And Its Opposite’ in 2010.