When it came to following up their surprise 1994 hit album "Amplified Heart", Everything But The Girl's Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn decided to rip up the rulebook and do things differently. Previously, their music has been considered, downtempo and - whisper it quietly - Balearic. 1996's "Walking Wounded" retained their inherent beauty and sense of melancholia, but updated their musical blueprint to include far more influences from (then) contemporary dance music. As this half-speed re-mastered reissue proves, they largely hit the spot, with warm deep house cut "Wrong", the sparkling drum and bass pop of the title track and the similarly minded "Big Deal" standing out.
First released in April 1996, Walking Wounded debuted at #4 on the UK Album Chart and remains the Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn's best-selling album, approaching 2 million copies worldwide. It contains four UK Top 40 singles, including the Top 10 hits "Walking Wounded" and "Wrong", and set a new benchmark for the intersection of contemporary electronic music and smart pop songwriting.
The seeds of the album's approach were clearly planted in the successful mix of folk-soul and electronica on the duo's previous million-seller Amplified Heart, but it was the subsequent wild global success of Todd Terry's remix of album track "Missing", and Thorn's acclaimed contemporaneous collaboration on Massive Attack's "Protection" that encouraged them to go further.
Watt began frequenting club nights on the burgeoning London drum 'n' bass scene in early 1995, and quickly saw a rhythmic connection between Everything But The Girl's early 80s latin-pop arrangements and the high tempo syncopated breakbeats in the sets of DJs like Fabio, Doc Scott and Peshay.
'I was immediately inspired,' he says. 'It was like a futuristic Brazilian sound but undercut with a shadowy, spectral rave flavour. The mix of high-tuned propulsive drums, late-night samples and low sub bass just seemed to leave a big plangent hole in the middle, and in it I pictured Tracey's voice. I was similarly inspired by the modern deep house scene and the downbeat sound.'
The album was largely programmed and produced by Ben in 1995 in the basement of the duo's north London home demo studio. "Just an Akai sampler, a computer, a synth and guitar, an inexpensive vocal mic, and an 8-track tape machine," he says of the process. "We were writing in reverse - mood first, then songs, learning and we went along. It just felt like a new frontier," adds Tracey.
Producer John Coxon (Spring Heel Jack) - with whom Ben and Tracey had worked on their previous album, Amplified Heart - was invited to provide the backing track for the album's title song. Beats specialist Howie B was also approached to create the groove for "Flipside". The album was then mixed at The Townhouse in west London by Ben and young emerging engineer, Andy Bradfield.
The album was acclaimed on its release. "The new incarnation of EBTG is the best yet. It's just going to take a while for people to catch up," said NME. "Sharp, modern, jungloid, cybernautical. Everything But The Girl already look like one of the groups of the year," commented The Independent. "Walking Wounded proves that jungle can be gentle too. Sadness never sounded so sexy," added The Face. And in 2019, twenty-three years on from its release, Pitchfork honoured the album with a lengthy 9.0 retrospective review.
The album has been mastered and cut at half-speed by long-time Everything But The Girl mastering engineer, Miles Showell, now at Abbey Road Studios, who is one of only a handful of engineers specializing in half-speed mastering that uses new techniques to more faithfully reproduce the sound of original master tapes.
