A Distant Shore is the debut release from Tracey Thorn as a solo artist, that was originally released by Cherry Red Records in 1982 when Tracey was 20 years old. At this time, she was still officially in a post-punk band called the Marine Girls, and had recently met up with Ben Watt at Hull University who turned out to be her long-term musical, and life, partner. In true post-punk fashion, the album cost £167 to make but it turned out to be a sound investment by Cherry Red as it reached number one in the indie chart and was eventually awarded gold certification to mark sales of over 100,000.
For the Everything But The Girl (EBTG) fans amongst you, the significance of this re-mastered re-release is that it bridges the gap to Thorn’s future collaboration with Watt by featuring five additional tracks, or more accurately demos, hand-picked by Tracey from her archive of cassettes. The first, Lucky Day, just failed to make the cut for the original album but the other four songs were from later solo recording sessions, where it seems that the availability of studio resources ramped up significantly, and which were eventually re-recorded for the first EBTG album, Eden.
Listening to the album today, for the first time in my case, it does come across as the archetypal example of a ‘bedsit’ recording. It is easy to imagine Thorn sitting on a bean bag in the corner of a University Dorm room strumming away whilst bemoaning the circumstances that led her to ‘this’. As it happened, ‘this’ was an opportunity that Thorn grasped with both hands, achieving a hugely successful music career with EBTG that lasted until 1999 when the band took an extended break after selling around nine million records, reforming just a few years ago to release the well-received Fuse album in 2023.
I’ll be honest and say that I haven’t followed Thorn’s musical career at all thus far, so a bit of research has been required to find the appropriate context for a review. Fortunately, she provides an excellent overview of that time in her life and the circumstances of the recording in her autobiography ‘Bedsit Disco Queen’. So, before I pass you over to Tracey Thorn, in her own words, all that really remains for me to say is that this is a release aimed at EBTG fan completists who will love this chance to re-visit the original album, to wallow in the nostalgia, and to take in the extra demo tracks. These are songs written and sung from the heart and accompanied by the simplest guitar melodies. There are no flourishes or production tricks on show, this is meant to be a stripped-down experience exemplifying the post-punk mood of the time.
“In August (1982) Cherry Red released my solo album – or mini-album, ‘A Distant Shore’. It was really a handful of songs I’d written during the winter of 1981 intending them to be Marine Girls songs, but which were so intensely personal that I knew I had to sing them myself. (The album also includes a cover version of The Velvet Underground’s ‘Femme Fatale’).
“I went and recorded them in Pat’s shed (old friend Pat Bermingham), the whole recording session taking me no more than two or three days, and I think costing a total of £167. I sent the tracks to Mike Alway (at Cherry Red) as demos, not sure in my own mind what they were for or who was going to perform them, but he was adamant that they be released just as they were. The resulting record is even more minimalist than the Marine Girls – just me and my guitar and a bit of Pat’s reverb.
“By the time it came out in the summer of 1982, Ben (Ben Watt) and I had worked things out between us, after a period of pretending to be friends. The period that ‘A Distant Shore’ captures is one of uncertainty and vulnerability. The first song ‘Small Town Girl’, sums up the whole story, in that it’s a song about trying not to fall in love – “keep your love and I’ll keep mine” – and blankly owns up to the fact that my self-esteem was at an all-time low: “Still so much a part of me is my past disgrace / and you might say you don’t care / but how could you when you weren’t even there?”.
“The record was well received by the music press. In a positive review for Sounds, Penny Kiley wrote ‘This record, musically understated as it is, provides a quiet and necessary counterpart to some of the choices of listening we’ve had. We’ve lived so long with melodrama that we’ve forgotten there are other ways of showing passion’.
“In a solo interview I did with Sounds in October, I say of A Distant Shore: people say they relax to it, but I can’t relax to it at all. I play it and it puts me on edge! The music is relaxing, but the lyrics certainly aren’t. I’d hate it to be thought of as background music”.
Quoted from ‘Bedsit Disco Queen: How I grew up and tried to be a pop star’. Autobiography written by Tracey Thorn, first published in February 2013.
TRACK LISTING
01. Small Town Girl (3:57)
02. Simply Couldn’t Care (2:50)
03. Seascape (2:39)
04. Femme Fatale (2:42)
05. Dreamy (2:55)
06. Plain Sailing (2:08)
07. New Opened Eyes (2:58)
08. Too Happy (3:12)
~ Bonus tracks
09. Lucky Day (Home Demo) (1:34)
10. Another Bridge (Home Demo) (2:45)
11. Even So (Home Demo) (2:48)
12. The Spice Of Life (Home Demo) (2:52)
13. Fascination (Home Demo) (4:09)
Total Time – 38:29
MUSICIAN
Tracey Thorn – Vocals, Acoustic & Electric Guitars
ADDITIONAL INFO
Record Label: Cherry Red Records
Country of Origin: U.K.
Date of Release: 25th October 2024
LINKS
Tracey Thorn – Website | Website (EBTG) | Facebook | YouTube | X | Souncloud