An extract from an article today about EBTG (link below).
I
so recognise in myself and others the bit about youth manifestos and bollocks!
On the other, they were very much a product of the bolshie, anti-commercial post-punk environment in which they both had first come to attention – Thorn with the ramshackle Marine Girls and Watt with the oddball drone of his 1981 solo single, Cant. Their approach was stringent, even by the standards of the time: on their debut album, 1984’s Eden, they wouldn’t allow the drummer to hit the snare drum on grounds that the sound was “too rockist”. Backing vocals were also banned for fear they would sound “too glossy, too high production, potentially vacuous”. “You have to remember,” says Thorn, “that we were students making up bollocks. It wasn’t a clear manifesto in many ways, it was lots of different manifestos … manifesting themselves.”
Taken from
Everything But the Girl on their unlikely return: ‘This life came into our music. We didn’t have control over it’
They went from leftist outsiders to huge dance-pop stars, then walked away when stadiums came calling. Back after 24 years, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt explain how lockdowns led to a new album – and why they’ve embraced Auto-Tune
