To enjoy all the benefits of our website
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
My amusement at finding myself soundtracking such a happy day coincided with my becoming hooked on a podcast about unhappy couples.
In December, I retreat back into the past.
Drinking bourbon on stage was one of my highlights of the year. It’s not always books and films and songs – sometimes it’s just moments.
Here’s how I described Grease in my 1978 diary: “My God it was so corny. I was really bored cos’ it was so awful. One nice bloke in it (not John Revolta).”
As if all this emotion isn’t enough, the next day I visit the Anne Frank Museum. The experience is much as I expected, sombre and dispiriting.
I don’t want to leave the EU but that doesn’t mean I love it so devotedly that I want to wear its colours on a beret.
This record is the sound of a man whose whole being has been altered, possessed even, by what has happened.
How is it possible that I still keep forgetting, this many years after her death, that I can’t call her with news?
It’s just a shame the place is so far away from London.
This time it’ll be easy – I know what to do, what to expect, have already had two kids “leave home” to go to university, as if that’s really leaving home at all.
