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 latest book is Naked at the Albert Hall.
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.
My youngest, aged 17, breezed off to catch the train to the Fringe, relaxed and insouciant, “It’ll be fine, Mum”.
From Joshua Gamson’s The Fabulous Sylvester, I learnt of the birth of the San Francisco gay scene and the counterculture of the late 1960s.
I know protesting doesn’t change anyone’s mind, but it’s about sending a message.
This current spell of weather has locked me into a full-on revival of that glorious year of pop.
No music ever sounds as good as in the back of a cab speeding across the Thames in the dark, lights blurred and rushing towards you.
On that album cover we look like the epitome of hunger, but we also look hip, and we knew it.
We blunder on, doing our best, accepting our differences. Good days, bad days.
Jake Shears’s memoir, Boys Keep Swinging, is a current example, packed with sharply told stories and proper moments of insider insight.
Fame, and social media, can flatten us out, making us cartoon-like, when actually we wish we were that simple.
