Tracey Thorn is a musician and writer, best known as one half of Everything but the Girl. She writes the fortnightly “Off the Record” column for the New Statesman. Her books include Naked at the Albert Hall, Bedsit Disco Queen and, most recently, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia
“Concert in San Francisco in the 1990s. Audience complained about sound levels, you replied, ‘You don’t think I’m mixing the sound up here while I’m singing, do you?’ We cheered.”
A new baby is better than any mindfulness app for dragging you fully into the present moment.
You just never know when you’ll need a 12-year-old passport photo, an A-Z of Bournemouth or a Duke of Edinburgh award form, never completed.
I break songs down into small morsels, getting hooked by tiny details, passing moments that offer fleeting glimpses of heaven.
Oh, the things I’d do differently.
As the KGB man tries to flee through a Moscow station, he is thwarted by crowds on their way to a pop concert, and thus I was almost responsible for the end of the world. Possibly.
On the street a woman passes me wearing a badge that reads, “I believe you Christine Blasey Ford.”
No one wants to become a slave to a past self. And there comes a point when glossy black hair is at odds with the increasing lines and wrinkles.
There is sand and pebbles and shells, but also the detritus of hundreds of years, stuff that has been chucked carelessly over the river wall.
My beginnings were as independent as you can get: if you sent a postal order to my home address, my parents’ home address in fact, I’d post you a cassette.
