Bedsit Disco Queen: How I grew up and tried to be a pop star

Description

I was only sixteen when I bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year later, I formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls and played gigs, and signed to an indie label, and started releasing records. Then, for eighteen years, between 1982 and 2000, I was one half of the group Everything But the Girl. In that time, we released nine albums and sold nine million records. We went on countless tours, had hit singles and flop singles, were reviewed and interviewed to within an inch of our lives. I've been in the charts, out of them, back in. I've seen myself described as an indie darling, a middle-of-the-road nobody and a disco diva. I haven't always fitted in, you see, and that's made me face up to the realities of a pop career - there are thrills and wonders to be experienced, yes, but also moments of doubt, mistakes, violent lifestyle changes from luxury to squalor and back again, sometimes within minutes.

Tracey Thorn was singer and songwriter with Everything But the Girl from 1982-2000. At that point she semi-retired from the music business to bring up her children. She has since recorded three solo albums, Out of the Woods, Love and Its Opposite, and Tinsel and Lights. She lives in London with her husband Ben Watt and their three children.

The Alan Bennett of pop memoirists. I loved her book so much I wanted to form a band, too. Preferably with Thorn -- Caitlin Moran, bestselling author of How to be a Woman As distinctive and lovely as its author's singing voice, Bedsit Disco Queen isn't just a wry and wise memoir of a unique career: it acts as a kind of eulogy for a forgotten era of British pop -- Alexis Petridis As a witty and wise chronicle of a life spent dipping in and out of the limelight, this is second to none -- Fiona Sturges Independent on Sunday Beautifully written, dryly funny and searingly honest Sunday Times