Tracey Thorn, ‘Bedsit Disco Queen’

The Marine Girls signed to the independent label Cherry Red. I was also in a band signed to Cherry Red and remember the strangeness of arriving in a white stuccoed part of London where people had offices. I don’t think I’d been in an office before. The label was run by two men I thought of as a splenetic genie and a groovy dad. It was like being sent to see the headmaster only for him not to know why you were there. The groovy dad now reminisces online about how it was all about making money from the publishing; the genie was last seen fronting a campaign to save the architecture of Milton Keynes. Thorn signed a contract so draconian that when she and Watt extricated themselves, Everything But the Girl’s first album sat on a shelf for a year before being released.

We couldn’t carry music about with us but had to listen to it in our rooms and the music we made was bedsit scale. It worked if taken only as far as a slightly bigger room. My band’s first gig was at the Beet Bop Club in Camden and was, in the incidental manner of the times, reviewed in Sounds. No one expected us to put on any sort of show. The building looked as if it had been condemned and we had to use the lavatories in the pub next door. In this context, the spare and wobbly thing we were doing worked. People weren’t expecting it to be good, only interesting. Such music easily got lost when it came to making a record. In our case, it was like entering an acoustic hall of mirrors as the producer tried to bounce and double what we did into palatial pop. We weren’t good enough to survive this or determined enough to resist it, and that was that. Cherry Red never got the however many songs per year their contract demanded, not that they wanted them.