Alistair Fitchett on A Distant Shore by Tracey Thorn, reissued in expanded form by Cherry Red records.
In the film Grosse Pointe Blank there is a scene where two old high school friends meet for the first time in ten years. The dialogue is simply one character repeating the phrase ‘ten years’ in a variety of different infections as if in disbelief. The disbelief is of course a mixture of surprise at seeing his friend again and at the realisation of time’s passing. It goes like that, doesn’t it? We blink and suddenly time has escaped from us. Where did it go? Heaven only knows.
If you are familiar with Grosse Pointe Blank you will appreciate that it is the greatest high-school reunion/hired killer movie ever made, with a fabulous line for every occasion. I’m looking forward to trying some of them out next week at my own 40-year high school reunion, particularly the one about everyone still being the same only having swelled. This may be harsh, yet a glance in the mirror assures me it is nevertheless true. Naturally we will temper the realisation that we have all ‘swelled’ by saying to each other ‘oh, you haven’t changed a bit,’ yet as time passes, the first part of the line spoken by Joan Cusack’s character seems to become less and less accurate. These exchanges seem to me to be charming and interesting because perhaps they capture the idea that we see people from our pasts as if we are all still in that distant moment, time doing strange slips and slithers around our perception and manipulating memory. And even as we tell ourselves that we recognise ourselves and others held in fragments of amber we simultaneously feel bewildered by it all. Threads may straggle through the fractures in time, but they often seem barely attached to our present selves. Gossamer thin, they waft in the breath of a half-remembered embrace, an illusory once-wished-for kiss. Where did it go? Heaven only knows.
It is now forty-two years since the release of Tracey Thorn’s A Distant Shore LP but it remains the record that, more than any other perhaps, contains the essence of my own 1983 into 1984 experiences. I wrote about it just twelve years later for my e-zine Tangents and re-visiting that piece now I feel the same kind of curious feeling described above. Everything oscillates between recognition and ignorance, a peculiar fluctuation between embarrassment and pride. Interestingly, Tracey Thorn writes something similar about her own feelings on revisiting the record for this expanded Cherry Red reissue, noting in her sleeve notes that: ‘I’m not sure if I’m still that same girl, or if I totally remember what it felt like to be her, but she slightly breaks my heart, and I’m proud of her.’
It would be overstating the truth to suggest that Thorn’s sleeve notes may be the most appealing thing about this reissue, but not by much, for they really are extraordinary. Carefully avoiding the trap that so many artists seem to fall into of disowning their earlier, less mature works, Thorn instead holds her nerve and admits to the success of these songs and recordings. ‘There is passion here,’ she writes, ‘and a kind of romanticism, which is tempered by an awareness of the riskiness of being romantic. I can hear a complicated mix of self-revelation and self-preservation. And what an extraordinary kind of unearned confidence it takes to write a lyric like “I’m old enough now to know there’s no such thing” at the age of 19.’ There is something about this last observation that, I think, cuts to the heart of what makes the songs on A Distant Shore just so remarkably, elegantly classic Pop mementoes. They capture, I think, that sense of peculiar self-assuredness (hovering in an awkward manner so perilously close to arrogance that it can be misconstrued by those who fail to spot an inherent vulnerability) of artists in their late-teenage years. Something of the sense of rejecting the ‘wisdom’ of one’s elders whilst having cherry-picked just enough knowledge to assume an air of fragile adulthood; simultaneously seeing and being ignorant of the complexities in situations and being blessed with the ability to cut through everything and to express simple truths in the bold, bare, romantic language of youth.
Thorn then is rightly proud of the record her 19-year-old self made for the grand sum of £138, and the songs continue to reverberate with the brittle romantic confidence (the ‘steely toughness’ as Thorn herself describes it) that made them so appealing forty years ago. Are they of their time? From an objective perspective I suspect they are, for there is something in the connections out to the likes of contemporary music by the likes of Young Marble Giants, Vic Godard and Durutti Column (all of whose records Thorn admits to having in her bedsit collection at the time) that root the recordings to 1982, if such historical contextualisation is your bag. Objectively too I suspect there is a strong case for adding that as well as being of their time they are also timeless, (not so) simply because they do such a remarkable job of capturing the nature of being that particular, peculiar age, regardless of any arbitrary dot dropped on the linear narrative of time.
The bonus materials on the CD reissue are every bit as good. ‘Lucky Day’, recorded at the same time as the rest of the album did not make it onto the original release but would certainly have made a terrific flip-side to the ‘Plain Sailing’ single in place of the (admittedly great) cover of Monochrome Set’s ‘Goodbye Joe’ (which does not feature as an extra on this reissue, incidentally). The remaining four songs, meanwhile, will be familiar to any fan of Everything But The Girl for they all appeared on the group’s debut Eden set in 1984. These unadorned versions, recorded at some point after the release of A Distant Shore are still (delightfully) very much in the vein of that album, whilst hindsight and familiarity with the more polished Eden recordings lends them too a sense of being bridging elements through a period of remarkable artistic development.
Forty years, then. Forty YEARS. FORTY years. FORTY YEARS. Where did it go? Heaven only knows. For Tracey Thorn of course we know that it went to a string of remarkable records both by herself and with Ben Watt in Everything But The Girl. It went into eloquent books full of astute observations and poignant reflections, plus a lot more besides. For the rest of us? Maybe something less visibly memorable, but no-less valuable in our ways. And whilst there are surely more pleasures in store for all of us (some of them, one hopes, in the form of more work from Tracey Thorn) it can occasionally be worthwhile opening those portals into the past and enjoying the surreal envelopment of memory. There are certainly few finer portals than A Distant Shore.
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