Everything but the Girl

EVERYTHING BUT THE GIRL

Formed: 1982, Hull, England

Members: Tracey Thorn, vocals (born Hertfordshire, England, 26 September 1962); Ben Watt, backing vocals, synthesizers, guitars, all instrumentation (born London, England, 6 December 1962).

Genre: Rock

Best-selling album since 1990: Amplified Heart (1994)

Hit songs since 1990: "Driving," "Missing," "Wrong"

In the early 1990s, the jazz-influenced pop band Everything but the Girl had a small, devoted following, even though the duo's music verged on the easy-listening genre. In the mid-1990s, with the release of Amplified Heart (1994), they crossed over into the mainstream with a carefully constructed mix of acoustic elements and electronic flourishes. With Tracey Thorn as the duo's warm, honeyed vocalist and Ben Watt as the mixing and arranging master, Amplified Heart sold more than half a million copies within two years of its release in the United States.

Watt and Thorn began performing together after they met as students at Hull University. In 1984 they signed to Blanco y Negro, a label started by Mike Alway, a friend of Watt's who had produced solo albums for the duo in the early 1980s. The pair released a single, "Each and Everyone," which reached the top thirty in the U.K. Many reporters characterized their collaboration as not only musical but romantic, and though they initially tried to keep the arrangement ambiguous, they eventually revealed their romantic relationship.

After a few releases of jazz-inflected pop (Eden, The Language of Life, Worldwide ), Thorn began lending vocals to the U.K. trip-hop band Massive Attack, and Watt became more heavily involved in deejaying in London dance clubs. Unsurprisingly, the band's 1994 album Amplified Heart began to show evidence of their movement toward electronic music yet remained firmly rooted in strong songwriting. The album's unexpected hit "Missing" hit the charts after Todd Terry remixed it, adding muscular backbeats to what became a top-five hit in Britain and the United States and number one on the Billboard dance chart. With its forlorn, pining refrain "And I miss you / Like the deserts miss the rain," the song could be heard on dance floors across the United States and Europe.

Amplified Heart is a landmark album for Everything but the Girl, remarkable because it was recorded after Watt's near-death battle with Churg-Strauss syndrome in 1992 (as recounted in his critically acclaimed book Patient ). Amplified Heart is a personal chronicle of the ups and downs in a romantic relationship, a hopeful testament to love's ability to help people cope through adversity.

Two years later the band released Walking Wounded, which found them tinkering further with electronic programming and drum and bass noises, though Thorn's warm vocals prevents it from veering off into a cold, detached direction. The album sold more than 1 million copies in the U.K. In 1999 their ninth release, Temperamental, found the band knee-deep in electronic music with an after-hours, jazz-lounge vibe. Temperamental shows how the band has honed its sound, undergirding the synthetic patina of electronic music with solid songwriting skills.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

The Language of Life (Atlantic, 1990); Amplified Heart (Atlantic, 1994); Walking Wounded (Virgin, 1996); Temperamental (Atlantic, 1999); Back to Mine (Ultra, 2001); Like the Deserts Miss the Rain: A Retrospective (Rhino, 2003).

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

B. Watt, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness (New York, 1997).

carrie havranek