Tracey Thorn.

Friday, April 22, 2016

About Tracey Thorn

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She was born on 26th of September in 1962 (Brookmans Park, England). She had been playing electric guitar for a while in a band called Stern Bops. Her boyfriend was the bass player in the same band. They always tried to persuade her to sing who was too shy. They found she could sing away from eyes and she agreed to take a microphone with her into the wardrobe and sing David Bowie's Rebel Rebel. They surely loved her voice and singing but she refused to sing in front of anyone. She was writing songs that they played in the band.

Then she got bored with that band and broke with her boyfriend. So she started talking to her school friend, Gina, about forming their own band. And they began to study together. Their first song they recorded to a tape was Getting Away From It All. They decided to call themselves Marine Girls.

After a while they found another friend, Jane, to play bass with them. But one problem they had was Gina was hopeless about turning up for rehearsals. They recorded a tape of the songs they had this point, called Day By The Sea, made 50 copies of it and sold them to their friends.

Somehow they met up with a guy called Patrick who had some mobile recording gear and offered them to record an album's worth of their songs. So they recorded their first LP, Beach Party, which includes some of the songs from A Day By The Sea plus some new songs. Then Mike Alway of Cherry Red Records saw them play a gig, liked them, and so they signed a publishing contract with Cherry Red Publishing and then signed to Cherry Red Records. They did their first ever London gig at the Moonlight Club in West Hampstead, supporting Felt, another Cherry Red Band. The night before three other Cherry Red artists had played there including Ben Watt. He came to the Marine Girls gig the next night and that was the first time he saw Tracey. At some point Gina had left the band and Alice became the main singer.

Meanwhile Tracey was so far away from the other Marine Girls that she started to record the songs she was writing on her own. The demos she did of these songs eventually became her solo album Distant Shore. Also she was starting to work on songs with Ben and they were casually forming a group called Everything But The Girl.

The Marine Girls did their last gig in Glasgow. It was summer 1983. They were drifting apart. Alice's boyfriend had somehow tagged onto the band playing percussion. They did an awful gig, no-one listened to them, they had an argument backstage, it was the perfect excuse to split up, so they did.

(This story is taken from www.ebtg.com / Tracey's bio that she told. You can get the full text with her comments on their web site.)