IT certainly deserves a shelf of its own in the bookshop, and possibly qualifies as a boom. The pop-star memoir has moved far beyond the realms of ghost-written cut-and-paste jobs that were a staple of music book publishing in the last century.
The couple who were globe-spanning chart-toppers Everything But The Girl, Tracey Thorn and Ben Watt, are a mini-industry all on their own. The EBTG library began with Patient, Watt’s remarkable diary of his near-fatal illness, and continued with his exploration of personal family history.
Thorn achieved huge acclaim for her Bedsit Disco Queen, which covered her post-punk rise to stardom and the couple’s life together, and has gone on to write a book about the whole business of singing and performance as well as a regular column in the New Statesman.
Her latest, Another Planet, delves into an earlier time in her own development, and the years before Bedsit Disco Queen. Subtitled A Teenager in Suburbia, it is an attempt, in the aftermath of the death of her parents, to understand her upbringing in Brookmans Park in Hertfordshire, in the commuter belt under an hour north of London.
As an exploration of what it meant to grow up in the 1970s in Britain, Another Planet will resonate with people a long way from there. I am a little older that Thorn – she and Watt were both born in the same year as my younger sister – and grew up 400 miles away in Silverknowes in Edinburgh and then Burnside in Glasgow, but the world she describes, often in beguiling detail I had all but forgotten, is very familiar indeed. I had, for example, entirely erased the memory of Dial-a-Disc, a landline service that added to many a parental phone bill, that allowed you to listen to the current chart hits. I can see internet-savvy young people gawping at this fact even as I write this.
Thorn’s story is also like mine – and I suspect many others – in many specific details. Her father trained with and served in the RAF towards the end of the Second World War, but didn’t fight. Her mum gave up her career to raise a family – although mine returned to work later in life, which Mrs Thorn does not appear to have done. And the trajectory of her ancestors, from rural existence only a couple of generations back, to rented accommodation in the city, to being the first couple on either side of the family to own a home, in the 'burbs, is uncannily similar as well.
She is also frighteningly accurate on the nuances of class. Our terraced MacTaggart and Mickel house in Silverknowes was at the smaller end of those available in the former farmland in North Edinburgh that the developer would continue to build on for over half a century, and the area sits between Muirhouse – location of the famous toilet in Trainspotting, but not half as grim as the book and film would suggest – and Cramond, where there were, and likely, still are, some of the most expensive houses in the capital.
Perhaps there is only so much that can be said about this, and Thorn has mined her past pretty thoroughly. For all that she has done the research into the origins of Brookmans Park and revisited it for the book, it ends up being less about suburbia than about herself and her family – a companion piece in some ways to her husband’s Romany and Tom. But the universality of her experience is still quite startling. It is clear that my generation has shared a lot of the same experience and family history. I don’t believe that is anything like as true of our children – and beyond that it may be that our lives have been, in a broader historical context, a rather peculiar aberration of homogeneity.
Another Planet by Tracey Thorn is published by Canongate at £14.99
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