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Life for Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt has turned a harmonious full circle, Clara Iaccarino writes.
The route to musical success often involves time spent in the underground scene slogging away in small venues building a following. But Ben Watt of successful UK duo Everything But The Girl (EBTG), believes he's living the muso life in reverse.
While Watt's first musical incarnation was as a budding singer-songwriter in the mid-1980s, he soon hooked up, personally and professionally, with Tracey Thorn of the Marine Girls and together they became EBTG, touring internationally and selling millions of albums.
Now a DJ and producer with his own record label, Buzzin' Fly, Watt feels he's returned to the underground. "I'm really enjoying the way I've kind of lived my life in reverse," he told S while on tour in Australia with the Good Vibrations festival. "I was a mainstream artist and now I'm in the underground. That's really pleasurable for me.
"People say to me, 'Do you really enjoy operating under the radar like this?'. I think they forget that I began my career under the radar."
An album of EBTG remixes is released this week, celebrating 10 years of remixing. With selections made by Watt and Thorn, Adapt Or Die is testament to the duo's staying power. The classics (Missing, Walking Wounded and Five Fathoms) are all there, with Thorn's winsome vocals arcing above the beats. But it's been a while since the songbird has jumped on the mic to lay down new material. Watt and Thorn have three children. After a nightmarish tour with their first-borns (they had twins), Thorn decided to take a long break from the music industry. "She got f---ed up by it big time, trying to be a mother and a performer," Watt said. "She had to make a choice and clearly the family was more important to her. She doesn't have a big ego as an artist, she doesn't have this desire to get back in the spotlight at any opportunity."
But in saying that, Watt is the first to chime: "Never say never." The couple's children are at school and Thorn is thinking about a route back into the music industry as well as penning her life story to date. While negotiations are in the latent stage, German production duo Tiefschwarz have shown interest in recording with her.
"You never know," Watt said. "I can see Tracey certainly getting back into the studio, but whether I can see her going on a world tour is a different case in point."
With Thorn playing full-time mum, Watt revels in the hands-on involvement that comes from heading his own record label. Having experienced the mainstream, he now enjoys the freedom an independent label provides. Buzzin' Fly was awarded best breakthrough label at the House Music Awards in 2004 and Watt was delighted to earn recognition for his team's hard work. "I was really thrilled and that's when it flipped over," he said. "I felt that I'd done something and it had really been recognised for what it was."
A veteran of the music scene, Watt's diverse musical career has incorporated a number of twists and turns beyond the stage, studio and DJ booth. In 1992 he suffered from a rare intestinal disorder called Churg Strauss Syndrome and was hospitalised for about two months, slipping in and out of consciousness. The disorder begins with basic allergies, but soon his immune system was in rapid decline.
"It's the point where the immune system becomes completely hypersensitive and flips out and loses complete control over what it recognises as allergy," Watt explained. "And then it starts to attack body tissue. Basically it started to destroy my own body rather than just focussing on my allergies and that was the point where I became really, really sick."
Watt left the hospital severely traumatised. He said there was no psychological therapy to deal with his state and for the first six months he was "a bit of a wreck". To cope, he began writing down his experiences. He had no intention of writing a book, but found articulating the suffering was therapeutic. "I just wrote and wrote and wrote," said Watt. "Just everything I could remember. I found to name it, I could almost tame it."
Writing these notes freed up Watt's musical expression and his recovery spawned EBTG's musical reinvention. So began an exploration of beats and electronic soundscapes.
Now as DJ-producer-dad, Watt respects his musical roots, balancing family life with club-hopping to uncover new beatmakers. Responsible for the edits on Adapt Or Die, he philosophises about the nature of the remix. "Reinterpretation of pop music is something we're all getting used to in the last 10 years. It's something that's been in jazz since day one.
"Too many people have this Beatles-esque overview that somehow rock music is about definitive versions. If it throws a new interpretive angle on something you thought you knew well, how can you complain?" |
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