Interview with Ben Watt from Everything But The Girl: new single ‘Young And Dumb’ out now

By creammagazine, November 10, 2026

Everything But The Girl. Four words, a band’s name, connoting moody songs that aptly featured on chillout albums but were also remixed brilliantly for the dance floor. In the mid-1990s it seemed the music of Everything But The Girl was everywhere: on the radio, coming out of shop speakers, at the pool, the beach, in your car, through your headphones, and in all the clubs and bars.

Indeed, there has been quite a hiatus since those halcyon days for the duo, but they’re back this year with a brand-spanking new single and brilliant album to boot. The single’s called ‘Young And Dumb’ and it’s actually very clever. The album’s called ‘Blue Reservoir’ and it veers heavily into acoustic territory.

Back when EBTG’s brilliant single Missing was climbing the charts, Antonino Tati chatted with one half of the duo Ben Watt, to discuss all things life-threatening and moody. Here is that interview again.

It seems ironic that British duo Everything But The Girl should head contemporary lists as innovators in dance music, considering their resume primarily consists of slow-tempo, sophisticated, jazz-inflected ditties. The British duo, whose debut single, back in 1982, was an acoustic cover of Cole Porter’s Night And Day, have certainly let their passions run rife with breakbeat and jungle being the prominent genres on their long-player Walking Wounded. Even more ironic is the fact these up-tempo beats follow a stark period of angst-ridden segregation from chart success, capped off with a life-threatening illness on behalf of EBTG’s instrumentalist Ben Watt.

In 1992, Watt was physically subjected to a rare, enigmatic illness which doctors dubbed Churg-Strauss Syndrome. “In a nutshell, it involves a chronic abnormality in the immune system where it causes it to go hypersensitive and start attacking and destroying body tissue,” he explains confidently.

“Basically, it’s an uncontrolled riot in your own body. I spent three months in hospital, and I was on life support for three weeks. I had five life-saving operations, and was given a 25% chance of survival at one point. This is about as ill as you can be without dying so, yeah, I’d say that I felt close to death.”

Phew. That’s a lot to soak in within three minutes of our interview.

Delving deeper though, I discover that doctors and surgeons battled the disease armed with drugs and expensive equipment, and Watt spent his first three months out of hospital “just trying to understand what happened to me, and just trying to recover”.

“It was a monumental life-changing experience. You never believe you’re going to die. I think the human survival instinct is incredibly strong. Even when the parameters of your experience have shrunk to the point where all you care about is comfort, your own bed, and a glass of water, so that you don’t feel you’re going to go off the edge. Strangely, in my experience, as the body deteriorates more physically, you become incredibly lucid and coherent mentally. You have a much clearer insight into life and death, if you like.”

For a man whose music has connoted a calculated silence since his band’s inception, Ben Watt is extremely frank these days, and everything exudes a quality of strength that coincides well with EBTG’s current blend of in-your-face music and lyricism. The higher beats per minute and the sarcastic twist in lyrics, however, have not shadowed the powerful bass vocals of Tracey Thorn whose melancholic notes still send shivers down the strongest of spines.

“I think the point we’d reached musically, before my illness, was a point of discontent,” admits Watt. “We’d played quite successful concerts in America by that time, to largely sit-down audiences who were into slow-paced shows with a lot of ballads.

The concerts turned into kind of recitals and the anxiety from performing them, the duo found rather depressing.

“I found myself performing a style of music that I didn’t feel happy with. It had become a sort of

sophisticated fusion of pop and soul and jazz, if you like. I suppose ‘mature’ is the word. It had become pretty Adult Contemporary.”

Fear of falling into that tainted category, only to join the likes of Mariah Carey and Bryan Adams full-time, Watts and longtime girlfriend Tracey Thorn thought quickly.

“We felt we had to change to survive. We had to reinvest our music with something different, if only to keep ourselves interested. In the immediate aftermath of my illness, we went back to basics. We stripped away all the excessive, AC- style production. We just got it back to Tracey’s voice and the sounds we really like: strings, guitars, bass, whatever.

“Then we decided to establish a new set of textures and beats, and that’s when we started to bring in ideas from dance culture. We made the first very tentative steps towards it on our previous album Amplified Heart. We started using breakbeats and we deliberately wrote Missing as a kind of ‘house’ tempo, with a chord movement and a bassline that would work well on a rhythmic level. The idea of remixing Missing was part of its concept.”

Then Thorn got a call from Massive Attack and was asked to perform on their album Protection (the Bristol groovers were fans of ETBG from way back, and indeed gave Tracey the title track to sing on). Following this, the more subtle version of Missing was lifted of Amplified Heart and remixed by UK DJ, Todd Terry. Little did the band know that the Missing remix would be a number one hit around the globe, including on the charts in Italy, Germany and Canada; a number 2 hit in the US and Australia; a Number 3 hit in the UK; and still climbing the charts a year after its release in several slower musically-developing nations.

Now every DJ and his dog wanted to work with Everything But The Girl, so the duo scanned clubs and charts to select several of the UK’s highly favoured music mixers. The album Walking Wounded gratefully cites Spring Heel Jack, Howie B, Johnny Rockstar, Jeremy Shaw and of course, Todd Terry among its list of beat mixers and co-producers.

So, will Watt agree that Terry’s treatment of Missing had a lot to do with EBTG’s refound success?

“He had a huge impact on the song. What he did was give the drums and bass a good seeing to. He made it danceable. But I would say it was pretty much 50/50 input-wise. He’s been good enough to admit in his interviews that he was presented with a great song with a great vocal and a great structure. If it was just about Todd’s beat, then every instrumental he put out would be a huge hit; and if it was all about the song, then everything we put out would be a huge hit, which neither of us think would be true. So, it’s obviously the combination of both that made it work.”

Some might say Everything But The Girl’s success might also be a form of good karma coming to the couple deservedly after years of relentlessly recording albums to average acclaim, with the anguish of Watt’s illness only topping off those troublesome times.

“Obviously people have been tempted to say that,” sighs a rather weary Watt. “It is bizarre to go from Death’s Door to Number One in America within the space of a couple of years … If there is a God out there, he’s got a very weird sense of humour.”

Everything But The Girl’s new single ‘Young And Dumb’ is out now.

The new album ‘Blue Reservoir’ is available to pre-order here.