Janice Headley dives into the 1981 album Beach Party by the band Marine Girls, who were just teenagers when they first formed.
.
This week, Janice Headley dives into the 1981 album Beach Party by the band Marine Girls, who were just teenagers when they first formed. Founding member Tracey Thorn would later find chart-topping success with her side project Everything But the Girl, but experienced a similar disdain for the spotlight as Kurt did.
Hosts: Dusty Henry & Martin Douglas
Written + Produced: Janice Headley
Mixed + Mastered: Roddy Nikpour
Podcast Manager: Isabel Khalili
Editorial Director: Larry Mizell Jr.
Support the podcast: kexp.org/cobain
Nope, no need to check your podcast player – you ARE still listening to The Cobain 50 podcast. It might surprise you to learn there’s just one degree of separation between Nirvana and the London duo Everything But the Girl, who released the smash club hit “Missing” back in 1994.
That one degree brings us to today’s episode, the album on Kurt’s list: the band is called Marine Girls and their 1981 debut album is titled Beach Party.
Formed in 1980, the members of Marine Girls were really just girls – Tracey Thorn and Gina Hartman were just high school students. London and the burgeoning punk scene were just a little over an hour’s drive away from their hometown of Hatfield, Hertfordshire, England. In her 2013 memoir – titled Bedsit Disco Queen – Tracey writes about seeing bands like the Sex Pistols on TV, and seeing The Clash play in Trafalgar Square when she was only 15-years-old.
They were inspired by bands like The Slits and The Raincoats, both bands who’ve had previous episodes dedicated to them in The Cobain 50 podcast.
She says when they formed Marine Girls, they thought of The Slits as their “scary big sisters.” As Tracey writes in her other memoir — 2019’s Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia – "Out there in the big wide world beyond my bedroom, there were women getting to work who were less afraid, and who were going to help change my life and liberate me, and I would owe so much to them, as they’d open up a world of possibility."
Tracey and Gina recruited bassist Jane Fox and her sister Alice on vocals and drums. Here’s Jane on the podcast C86 Show:
JANE: In kind of like 1980, 1981, there was this phenomenal amount of activity off the back of punk. I lived in a new town in Hertfordshire, and it was pretty boring, but suddenly everybody was in a band and there were loads of people producing fanzines, loads of people buying all their clothes from jumble sales, and, you know, bucking what teenagers or young women were supposed to look like. And The Slits and the Raincoats were really inspiring on that front.
The whole place just caught fire. So there was a phenomenal local scene in Hatfield and St. Albans, where I grew up, and there were punk bands there, and then there were bands like us that were kind of not punk bands. But just suddenly going, oh my God, we can be in a band because everyone's in a band and you don't need to be a musician to be in a band. You just have got to have something to say.
Within months, they had written and recorded a 10-song debut cassette titled A Day by the Sea.
They pooled together their after-school job money to pay for it. And only 50 copies were made. The cassette was sold via J and J Records in Hatfield, and they took out an ad in the back of NME Magazine, with Tracey’s family’s home address printed on it.
Unlike the avant-garde pop of The Raincoats or the more jagged sound of The Slits, Marine Girls brought a sweeter sensibility with their lo-fi compositions, jangly guitars, and charming melodies. It’s a term they hate, but they set the standard for twee pop.
Tracey and Alice split the lead vocal duties, each bringing a girlish vulnerability to their songs. Here’s Jane talking about the songwriting process to the C86 Show:
JANE: Well, we would just help each other out really. We would go with a song that needed something else, like a guitar or a bass line or some percussion, and we'd kind of just play around. And just enjoyed being together. I mean, Tracey and I used to write quite a lot of poetry as well, and we were very close friends, so we had this kind of "sharing our heartfelt experiences" kind-of friendship, and the songwriting was quite closely connected to that.
The self-released cassette caught the attention of Pat Bermingham, a local guy who had a mobile recording studio he would sometimes set-up in his garden shed. The plan was to re-record the songs written for A Day by the Sea and re-release it on his own record label, In Phaze, and press it on vinyl via Whaam! Records, the label ran by Dan Treacy of the band Television Personalities.
Upon it’s re-release, they re-titled the LP as Beach Party.
With improved production and wider availability, the album began to attract attention. Rough Trade Records took 50 copies of the album, planning to send 25 of those to America. Legendary DJ and tastemaker John Peel began playing their songs on BBC Radio. It caught the attention of Mike Alway at Cherry Red Records who signed them to his label – remarkably, all of this happened within the span of one year.
Sadly, by the summer, Gina’s parents had made her quit the band – just a reminder of young these kids really were. And by that fall, Tracey had begun her first year as an English major at the University of Hull. It was there that she met Ben Watt, also a student and also a Cherry Red recording artist.
The pair fell in love, and began writing songs together under the name Everything but the Girl.
Their very first release together was a 7” single featuring a cover of the Cole Porter classic “Night and Day”...
And funnily enough, a cover of the Marine Girls song “On My Mind.”
Marine Girls were still a band, but with Tracey at Hull, and Jane and Alice away at art school – cracks were starting to form.
The band were featured on the cover of Melody Maker magazine, and interviewed by the NME, but Tracey was spending more time with Ben, and had even released a solo album in 1982 titled A Distant Shore.
The album featured songs Tracey had written for Marine Girls, but which felt too personal to perform with the band.
Here’s Tracey being interviewed with the Marine Girls on BBC Radio 1 in 1983:
DJ: Tracey, how does this whole thing relate doing the Marine Girls, Everything But the Girl, and solo releases? Are you a Marine Girl, or Tracey Thorn, or part of Everything But the Girl?
TRACEY: Um, Marine Girls is what I was doing first. That was really my introduction to music, with Marine Girls. And then when I went to Hull, is when I branched out to the other things, simply because I was out there on my own and it just seemed natural to continue with music.
DJ: They all do seem to correlate though, musically. They're in a similar area.
TRACEY: Yes. Yes, it's probably true.
But by September of that year, Marine Girls had finished recording their second album, titled Lazy Ways – produced by Stuart Moxham of Young Marble Giants, who you’ll hear more about in a future episode of The Cobain 50.
It was released in the Spring of 1983, but tensions within the band led to a tense following tour. After a particularly disastrous concert in Glasgow, the Marine Girls called it a day.
As Tracey writes in her memoir Bedsit Disco Queen, "Marine Girls ended badly, and to be honest, we’ve never really recovered, but that takes nothing away from what we had, and what we were, and what we did."
And what they did, was inspire later generations of artists, like Calvin Johnson, founder of K Records and frontman for Beat Happening who my co-worker Martin Douglas beautifully covered in a recent episode of The Cobain 50.
Calvin introduced Kurt to many of the bands who ended up on his list of 50 Favorite Albums, including Marine Girls, The Vaselines, The Raincoats, and more to come.
Fast forward to 1994. Tracey had been asked to sing on the Massive Attack album Protection.
And during an appearance on the TV show Later with Jools Holland, she was approached by another guest that night, Courtney Love. Here’s Tracey, from her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen:
Just before the cameras started rolling she looked across to our stage, put down her guitar and strode across the empty central area to crouch down next to me. "Hey", she said, "you’re Tracey from the Marine Girls! Kurt and I were both huge fans of your band" (he was not long dead at this point) – "y’know, Kurt always wanted to do a cover of that song of yours, "In Love."
More or less speechless, I managed to mumble something polite in return, before she strode back and the show continued.
At the time I’m not sure I entirely believed her. It was one of those bizarre showbiz encounters that happen from time to time, where things are said, and you’re never quite sure how much of it is true.
The whole unlikely story only finally became real for me when Kurt Cobain’s Journals were published in 2002, and I was able to see for myself, in his own handwriting, our appearance in his many lists of favourite bands. There are the Marine Girls on page 128 and page 241, while on page 77, in a list of his favourite songs, are two of mine, Honey and In Love. Most incredibly, on page 271 Beach Party is listed as one of Nirvana’s Top 50 albums, along with the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Public Enemy.
Sadly, Kurt had already passed away by the time this encounter had happened. And he wouldn’t be around to hear Tracey score a Top Ten hit in America with Everything But the Girl.
But Kurt could surely have related to Tracey’s response. As Everything But the Girl became more and more popular, she found herself wanting to retreat. In 1997, the band were invited to open for U2, but as she states in Bedsit Disco Queen:
The thought of stepping onstage in a 60,000-seater stadium somewhere in the Midwest in front of an impatient rock audience and attempting to sing “Missing” at them, fills me with a kind of stomach-churning horror.
Sounds like something Kurt himself might have said.
As for Marine Girls, there’s a surprisingly robust Facebook page for them, presumably maintained by Cherry Red Records. In 2001, Cherry Red reissued both Beach Party and Lazy Days as a two-album set in the United States. Cherry Red is also reissuing Tracey’s 1982 solo album A Distant Shore – the remastered and expanded edition will include a new set of sleeve notes written by Tracey, plus five previously unheard solo demos recorded in 1982-83. That will be out in October. And last year, Everything But the Girl released their first new album in 24 years – you can check out KEXP’s interview with them on Sound & Vision.
