Learning to be Outspoken

Ben Watt

The nice lad from Everything But the Girl is here to pop a cap in your ass.

He used to be such a polite guy, making the seductive beats and music to go with the whispy vocals of Tracey Thorn - his real life partner and mother to their three "music mad" children.

It's been more than five years since the last Everything But the Girl album, Temperamental, was released. Watt has been making a name for himself as a music producer, remixer and DJ. When we speak to him he's leaving for New Zealand the next day and hasn't even picked the records he'll play tonight at the Studio on Auckland's K' Rd.

But one record he's certain to pack is his latest single, Pop A Cap In Yo' Ass. The song - a "deep Chicago house groove" with a spoken word vocal by young British MC Estelle - is part of Watt's on-going project he calls Outspoken. More on Outspoken later. But as for the other tunes he'll spin tonight: "It's tricky," he laughs.

"As the day has gotten nearer and nearer I've been thinking to myself, 'I've never really DJed down in New Zealand and Australia so I'd better bring a good selection'. But I've only got about two hours to get it all in. I don't know, I'll try and do a good job."

Since EBTG took a break, so Thorn can "be a mum", Watt has made a good reputation as a DJ and an even better one as a remixer and music producer.

But in recent years he's been keen to reintroduce words into his dance music, which is where Outspoken comes in. Because Thorn hasn't set foot inside a studio for a few years now he had to find vocalists, and some lyrics.

He wrote a personal memoir Patient: The History of a Rare Illness about his experience after contracting Churg-Strauss Syndrome which meant he lost 85 per cent of his small intestine, but was reluctant to write songs. Instead, he wrote short story street narratives.

"Then I looked around to find some interesting people to read them. And once they'd been read I'd write the music and try and create something new basically."

These Outspoken vocal collaborators also include Robert Forster from Australian band the Go-Betweens ("an old mate from way back"), Philadelphia MC Baby Blak, and the Japanese wife of American indie film maker Hal Hartley.

"One of the tracks I'd worked on was with Estelle and I recorded the piece with her a couple of years ago before she'd won the MOBO [Music of Black Origin awards] award and became famous. That was when she was just a young kid starting out in London. But her voice was perfect for the project."

He confesses he's addicted to playing music and buys it constantly - be it off the internet, at the local record shop, or from a friend in Indianapolis.

"It's just the way I was born. My father was a jazz musician. I was the youngest of five children and they were all into music, the house was full of music. I even see it in my kids now, I haven't put any pressure on them at all to play music but my oldest, she's seven, the first thing she does in the morning is play the piano. She's now making up her own stuff and she wants to be shown how to play boogie-woogie piano. It's just like, she's feeling it, and I clearly was the same when I was growing up.

"My dad was fascinated by a lot of the stuff we've done. Some of it he doesn't understand, like the electronica stuff. Some of it he really connects with, like when we've worked in the jazzier areas, working with people like Stan Getz [on 1991's the Language of Life], dad gets very excited by it all."

When Everything But the Girl formed in 1982 while Thorn and Watt were Hull University students their music was in the lite-jazz-pop vein. In 1994, when EBTG collaborated with Massive Attack on the album Protection, it signalled a change to a more dancefloor and electronic direction. In 1995 Todd Terry's remix of Missing fully converted Watt and Thorn and they went clubbing - the result, the classic Walking Wounded, which was released in 1996.

Apart from the retrospective album, Adapt Or Die: 10 Years of Remixes, which is out soon, there is nothing new happening with EBTG, though Watts says Thorn is starting to get interested in getting back into the studio.

"She took a deliberate break in her career to raise the family and she drew a line to say, 'I don't want to be a celebrity mum, I want to get on and bring up the kids for a while'. She doesn't have a massive ego, she doesn't have to be in the limelight like some celebrities. She's not one of those people who needs to walk down the red carpet at every film premier. So she's been biding her time and interesting offers come in from time to time and she's thinking maybe she could do a little collaboration to get back into the swing of things. So never say never."

Performance

* Who: Ben Watt (aka Buzzin' Fly), British DJ, producer and the man behind Everything But the Girl

*When & where: The Studio, K'Rd, tonight

*Key releases: Idlewild (1988), Walking Wounded (1996), Back To Mine (2001)