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Ben Watt Returns With His First Solo Album in 31 Years

07/21/2014
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(Radio.com) The curse of the second album. It's one many artists, from Guns N' Roses to the Stone Roses, can attest to. A solid debut can take quite some time to follow up. In Ben Watt's case, it took 31 years.

To be fair, in those three decades he founded Everything But The Girl with his then girlfriend, now wife Tracey Thorn, played on Thorn's solo recordings, wrote two books including his latest Romany and Tom: A Memoir, became a club DJ and started a record label, Buzzin' Fly.

But in April, he released album number two, Hendra. And so, the question shouldn't be what took him so long, but why, after all this time, he wanted to make another album at all. And the answer is actually quite simple. "I just wanted to get back to guitar playing," he told Radio.com.

"Bernard Butler, who is my partner on the record, he used to be the guitarist in Suede, and we ran into each other at a party a couple of years ago, and I think we both realized we were in a similar space," Watt said. "I'd been running the label for ten years, he'd been in the studio producing other people for ten years, and we both suddenly thought, 'It'd be great to play guitar again, wouldn't it?' That's kind of how we came together."

Another party led him to meet another guitar legend: Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. It was a party for his book that took place in London before he was scheduled to head into the studio.

"It was mainly people from the [publishing] world, and we were introduced. And he was really friendly, and in the middle of the conversation, completely unexpectedly, he said, 'Would you like to hear my demos?' Which is not what you expect to hear from Pink Floyd's David Gilmour!" Watt said. "But he was serious, and he texted me a couple of days later, and said, 'I'd love to get together and talk about music.'"

Watt went to Gilmour's house and the two spent the day together listening to music over lunch. A couple of weeks later, Watt was working on a song that he thought Gilmour would sound great on. "I just texted him and said, 'How about it?' And he said, 'Sure!' And it was done in a couple of days, no managers."

Radio.com is an official news provider for antiMusic.com.
Copyright Radio.com/CBS Local - Excerpted here with permission.

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