The musician on rereading her teenage diaries and why she’s now a fervent fan of Jack Reacher
Tracey Thorn began her career as a singer and musician, before becoming best known as half of Everything But the Girl, with her lifelong partner, Ben Watt. She then became a solo artist, and a writer of three bestselling books: her 2013 memoir Bedsit Disco
Queen, 2016’s Naked at the Albert Hall and Another Planet, published last year, which traces her years growing up in London’s suburbs, and is out in paperback on 6 February.
How does writing about the 1970s world of Another Planet feel now?My own kids can’t imagine how we ever survived when I tell them about staying in all evening waiting for a phone call from someone, who you’d then arrange to meet under a clock tower in a nearby town, only to have the bus cancelled and not be able to get there. The thing that strikes me now is how locally rooted our lives were. Without the internet, we had no access to other people in other places, so we did a lot of dreaming and a lot of fantasising. The rest of the time, we just tried to avoid dying of boredom.