THE thing about Everything But The Girl is this: they could always be relied upon to come up with a charming set of bedsit folk rock anthems every couple of years. From their debut album Eden (1984) right up to Amplified Heart (1994), they were always plucking merrily away on their acoustic guitar strings, out wimping Morrissey in the lyrical department and coming over like the sulky, over educated, middle class brats that we grew to know and love. Turn your back on them for one moment, though, and what do they do? They set fire to their acoustic guitars, reinvent themselves as a Jungle act and start using words like "hip" and "groovy" in their conversation. Where did it all go right?
"The change in direction has been a gradual process," says an unrepentant Ben Watt. "We wanted to put the past to bed because we found ourselves backed into a corner musically and really quite bored with what we were doing.
Despite the odd fluky hit single (I Don't Want To, Talk About It), EBTG remained a quintessentially cult band throughout the 1980s. Named after a furniture shop (yes, a furniture shop) in Hull, they were never going to set the world alight or break musical barriers with their slow, moody sound but that wasn't the point - EBTG were all about quality acoustic music and we loved them for it.
Not enough people loved them and when Amplified Heart failed to do the business, in a retail sort of way, their record label dropped them (they're now signed to Virgin). This, combined with Ben's life threatening illness and Tracey Thorn's fruitful collaboration with Massive Attack, prompted the guitar burning incident and the hitherto experimentation with different beats.
While all this was going on, a Todd Terry remix of Missing (off the Amplified Heart album) was becoming a massive worldwide hit just to put it in perspective, Missing outsold the sum total of all their previous 22 singles. "We had never experienced anything like the success of Missing and to be honest, I thought if, anything was ever going to happen to us, it would have happened years before Missing," says Tracey. "For us, having such a hit of a single was a completely new experience.
A slight dancy beat behind the melodies would have been acceptable to many, but Jungle? EBTG's latest offering, Walking Wounded, is coming down with the drum'n'bass sound and while once they only found themselves being written about in indie fanzines, they're now featuring in all the cutting edge dance magazines.
"I don't think Walking Wounded is either a completely drum'n'bass record or that even the tracks we've done are drum'n'bass," says Ben. "They are pop songs influenced by drum'n'bass. I have to keep saying that, because I have a whole record collection of authentic underground Jungle releases that are, real hardcore drum n bass and they are different to what we are doing which, as I said, is pop.
"I think people have been aware of the whole Jungle concept; it's been a word that's been bubbling around in people's vocabulary now for a year or so," he continues. "It's a word that people feel they ought to drop but they're not quite sure what it means. I think we've given it a public face and people are saying: `Well, if Ben and Tracey are using it, then it's probably okay' and we have given it a pop face. We've taken the sound overground. At the same time there will be people running in the opposite direction with Jungle, trying to get it underground again - which is a good dynamic to have.
Tell us about working with Massive Attack? (Tracey and Ben wrote and played two songs on their Protection album.) "It was very brave of them to ask us, says a very honest Tracey. "If you look at them from the outside they're so hip and cool and everything. But they take risks all the time and they took a risk with us. Once I realised that about them, I just came to really respect them for it and think, well, it's great that they're exploding people's preconceptions about what they should be doing, so I think they gave me more confidence in that way.
The phone call from Massive Attack, and the resultant broadening of their musical outlook, came at a time when EBTG were lower than low: three years ago Ben was diagnosed as having Churg Strauf Syndrome, a rare auto immune disease and the couple's relationship (they are an item in real life) was under siege. Ben had to go through four life saving operations and have most of his small intestine removed (hence his eight stone weight). He now contains the illness with drugs, but will have to live with the threat of a recurrence all his life.
"Going through the illness and recovering from it can, in retrospect, be seen as a kind of a catalyst for change, although it was quite hard to see it like that at the time," he says. "But now it does seem very much that way and that it did pave the way for what's come since. Missing was the first tentative step to kind of try and collate everything that was good about our past and put it together with something that pointed gently to the future."
AS a result of his illness, Ben suffered from post traumatic stress syndrome. "It was really compromising my relationship with my family, my friends and with Tracey." He has just completed a book about his illness which will be published in September.
In more ways than they could possibly imagine, EBTG are perfect examples of the current "post rock" age. Would they ever use this dreadfully clumsy phrase to describe where they're at now?
"I do feel we've been led to this point, this whole post rock phase," says Ben, "and we've been led there by the likes of Massive Attack, Portishead, Bjork and Tricky. The parameters of music are a little wider and indeed a little weirder than they were in the slightly constrained rock days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, so maybe people's hearts are, just a little bit more open and receptive to sounds like Jungle."
"Besides," says Tracey, "it's better than being unhip and ungroovy.
