VIA PRESS RELEASE | Everything But The Girl have today revealed their brand-new single “Run A Red Light” and its accompanying video, directed by Charlie Di Placido (Kojey Radical, Jungle) who made the band’s recent “Nothing Left To Lose” video which has been watched over 1 million times on YouTube.
“I met a lot of characters during my years in clubland,” says Ben of “Run A Red Light,” “and I wrote this song about the guy at the end of the night, who dreams his big moment is just around the corner. All the bravado and good intentions masking the vulnerability.”
“The video is like a dream of the story,” says Tracey. “We’ve found with this record that choreography can express the emotion in our music without having to be too literal. The characters, the clothes, the movement, the direction all just fit. Charlie and his team really get the feelings we’re going for. It’s been a great collaboration.”
Of the music, Ben says,”I used mixed technology in the production to lend character. The piano is a looped iPhone recording; the synth that follows the vocal is a live take on an analog EMS VCS3 which were first made in 1969. Tracey chose to sing super-close to the mic to add intimacy. Some vocals are untreated, some auto-tuned. And then at the end we let the music appear to evaporate. It all just seemed to suit the story.”
“Run A Red Light” is taken from Everything But The Girl’s upcoming new album Fuse, out 21 April and follows recent releases “Caution To The Wind” and “Nothing Left To Lose.” “Caution To The Wind” received a great reaction at press – No 2 on The Guardian’s Film and Music Playlist (“dreamy, dislocated house piano”)—while the album’s first single “Nothing Left To Lose” has seen radio (A-list rotation at BBC Radio 6 Music) and editorial playlist support (New Music Friday, All New Indie, The Other List, Loops), as well as more than 1 million streams on Spotify.
Written and produced by Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn over the spring-summer of 2021, Fuse is a modern take on the lustrous electronic soul the band first pioneered in the mid-’90s. Thorn’s affecting and richly-textured voice is once again up front in Watt’s glimmering landscape of sub-bass, sharp beats, half-lit synths, and empty space, and as before, the result is the sound of a band comfortable with being both sonically contemporary, yet agelessly themselves.
The pair recorded in secret at home and in a small riverside studio outside Bath with friend and engineer Bruno Ellingham. For the first two months, the artist name on the album files was simply TREN (Tracey and Ben), and early takes focussed on ambient sound montages and improvised spectral piano loops recorded by Ben on his iPhone at home during his enforced pandemic isolation—ideas which later blossomed into atmospheric tracks such as “When You Mess Up” and “Interior Space.”
Everything But The Girl broke through on the UK indie scene in 1982 with a stark jazz-folk cover of Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.” They then released a string of UK gold albums throughout the ’80s, experimenting with jazz, guitar pop, orchestral wall-of-sound, and drum-machine soul. After Watt’s near-death experience from a rare auto-immune condition in 1992, the pair returned unbowed with the million-selling ardent folktronica of Amplified Heart in 1994. It includes their biggest hit, “Missing,” after New York DJ-producer Todd Terry’s remix unexpectedly made the leap from heavy club play to global radio success (Number 2 US Hot 100; Number 3 UK Top 40).
The sparkling Walking Wounded—emotional songs brimming with ideas from the mid ’90s electronic scene—followed in 1996 (Number 4 UK Album Chart). Spawning four UK Top 40 hits, the record became the band’s first platinum selling album. After their final show at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 2000, the pair chose to quit Everything But The Girl on a high.
PHOTO: EDWARD BISHOP
