The Road Before the Sea: Ben Watt, 1981–83

In a room in Hull, the gas fire faltered. Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn had no ten-pence piece to feed the meter, so the journalist who had come to interview them found one in his own pocket. North Marine Drive was already in the shops. The sea on its sleeve belonged to another coast; the cold in the room was immediate.

Andrew Darlington's account of that visit keeps something the familiar story of a lost pastoral record tends to erase. Watt and Thorn were students, making music in a flat where the heat could run out halfway through an interview. Around them were guitar cases, records, a book of John Donne and photographs of seaside holidaymakers. And on the records issued under their several names, a coastline kept returning: Marine Girls, A Distant Shore, Summer into Winter, North Marine Drive. Hull sits on the Humber. Bridlington is less than an hour away by train. Yet on these records the sea is always somewhere else, reached through a photograph, a place name, a song someone else wrote.

For me, North Marine Drive belongs among the ten most beautiful albums ever made. That is a personal measure, and it has to survive another fact: when the record appeared in February 1983, an NME reviewer thought its songwriter inadequate to its guitarist. Watt himself later agreed that parts of his writing had become too earnest. I think the reviewer heard something true and drew the wrong conclusion from it. North Marine Drive is a record about knowing things second-hand, the sea, jazz, another person's past, made by someone young enough to leave the relays audible. The words are where the borrowing shows. The guitar is where it stops. The album lives in the space between them.

I. A young man with a guitar and several kinds of music

Watt was born in London in 1962. His father, Tommy Watt, was a Scottish jazz pianist, arranger and bandleader; his mother, Romany Bain, was an actress who became a journalist. Jazz was part of the household. As a boy learning guitar, he tried to imitate the voicings and bossa nova movement of João Gilberto while playing ordinary folk chords. A schoolfriend introduced him to John Martyn's Solid Air; later, Martyn's delayed guitar on "Small Hours" sent him looking for a way to make a single instrument hold both pulse and atmosphere. Neil Young's Decade and the separate guitar lines of Joy Division were other formative encounters. Watt has said that the apparently gentle guitar part of "Walter and John" owed something to Bernard Sumner.

You hear it in the repeated figures and the gaps they leave, much less in any shared mood.

All of this complicates the convenient label folk. In the early 1980s an acoustic guitar was enough for a critic to file a musician with the previous decade, and Thorn was already irritated by that reflex when Darlington visited. Watt had learned from Martyn and Wyatt, and he was also listening to Orange Juice, Scritti Politti and Haircut One Hundred. The problem he set himself was how to fit jazz harmony, English song, bossa nova, post-punk space and a plain pop impulse into one small recording without the result sounding like a display of taste.

At a Richmond club in October 1980, Watt played for Mike Alway, who was involved with Cherry Red. Alway asked for a demo. Watt later said he wrote ten songs in ten days and recorded them at Alaska Studios in Waterloo. Cherry Red wanted to sign him; he remembered finding those songs painfully solemn, music written to sound older than its maker. He was still very young when he reached that verdict, and the change he describes is the one that leads to North Marine Drive: a song could carry more by risking one particular emotion than by announcing a large opinion about the world.

His first single, "Cant," was recorded in May 1981 in a sixteen-track studio in West Kensington, with Kevin Coyne producing. Watt remembers Coyne following the FA Cup final on a transistor radio while Tottenham drew with Manchester City. He has also insisted on the title's spelling: cant means hypocritical or conventional talk. "Tower of Silence" and "Aubade" completed the three-track release. The severe title, the severe music and the unsteady viola of a schoolfriend belong to the artist before the coast became his image. Cherry Red's experimental compilation Perspectives and Distortion carried his "Departure" that year. The beginnings were awkward in places, and already unusually willing to let a guitar sound strange.

II. Wyatt enters the room

Summer into Winter was recorded before the album and released in 1982. Its five songs are "Walter and John," "Aquamarine," "Slipping Slowly," "Another Conversation with Myself" and "A Girl in Winter." Robert Wyatt's role is exact and limited: piano and voice on "Walter and John," piano on "A Girl in Winter." Later CD editions append all five songs to North Marine Drive, an understandable act of preservation that can scramble the chronology in a listener's mind and put Wyatt on the 1983 LP. He was never its guest. Peter King was.

Watt had found Wyatt through the Rough Trade singles and then worked backwards to the earlier records. Cherry Red approached Wyatt about the EP. In a contemporary interview Watt described phoning him, visiting his home and settling the collaboration there; his later recollection dwells on the young stranger who found a telephone number, sent a cassette of "Walter and John" and dared to make contact. The two accounts weigh the label and the boy differently. Both end in an ordinary room, with an unfinished song between two people.

Wyatt played two piano takes for "Walter and John" and proposed keeping both, one in each channel. Watt remembers their halting interplay with particular affection. The guitar, a Gretsch Clipper through an Evans Echopet, sustains notes in a muffled, receding field, so that one musician can make a sound and then accompany its fading trace. Wyatt adds two more lines that never quite coincide. His voice joins the song and leaves it in Watt's hands.

Walter and John, two people whose childhood closeness time has altered, give the record its central situation. The other titles move through colour, motion, private speech and season. "Another Conversation with Myself" lasts little more than a minute, and its smallness lets the EP breathe. Wyatt's place in the Soft Machine story makes "Canterbury folk" a tempting phrase; it names a point of contact, and Watt never belonged to that scene. What Wyatt gave him was permission for a song to be formally curious and emotionally plain at once.

The same goes for politics. Wyatt was making explicitly political records at the time, and Watt remembered the force of his convictions. Summer into Winter borrows none of that programme. What it shares is a way of letting another musician in: the young songwriter asks his guest for no showpiece and lets him change the shape of two songs.

III. Five days at Alvic

Watt and engineer Mike Gregovich recorded North Marine Drive at Alvic Studios, West Kensington, from 16 to 20 September 1982. Watt played acoustic and semi-acoustic guitars and piano, and sang; Peter King added alto saxophone. The original album has nine tracks, the last a cover of Bob Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go." It is a brief record, and its solitude is arranged. Even King's saxophone arrives like a person crossing a room at a chosen moment.

King's appearance carries a childhood with it. Watt says his father took him to watch the saxophonist at the Bull's Head in Barnes and let him stand by the back door. On "Some Things Don't Matter" the alto enters a song already built on the close relation between voice and guitar, and it changes the air around that voice without offering itself as a cure for what the song says. The boy who listened from a doorway had become the young man who could book the player. That is the first of the album's relays: jazz, for Watt, arrived through his father, then through a door left open, and only in September 1982 through his own headphones.

The sleeve photographs were taken in Bridlington by one of Watt's university lecturers, who, Watt recalls, also hand-coloured the front image. North Marine Drive is an ordinary residential road in Bridlington. In Watt's head it became tangled with Marine Drive at Scarborough, beneath the castle. So the title is real and slightly misplaced, and the picture of the coast is someone else's, tinted by someone else's hand. An album about trying to locate a feeling does not need its title to work as a map reference.

The opening "On Box Hill" stands away from that Yorkshire coast altogether. Watt has recalled an afternoon on the Surrey hill with his parents, so the album begins in a remembered family place, a long way from its cover. Its briskness, and the quicker movement of "Empty Bottles," also carry, by Watt's later account, the effect of meeting Thorn and hearing the pop records she played him. Another person's listening had already entered his.

IV. What the sequence does

The first four songs refuse a single tempo of sadness. "On Box Hill" opens in forward motion. "Some Things Don't Matter" makes its modest title bear the pressure of what matters most. "Lucky One" changes the scale again; "Empty Bottles" brings in a train carriage, a stranger and damaged urban travel, on a record too often imagined as nothing but beaches. Don Watson, in his hostile NME review, singled out a simile in that song as evidence of a young writer straining for poetry. He had a point. Watt's language sometimes reaches beyond the observation it has earned. But the crowded carriage is where the album admits that the shoreline is a refuge you have to travel to, past other people's trouble.

At the centre sits the title song, a short piece Watt now regards as his strongest lyric on the album. A road named after the sea holds a separation, a record left behind, the afterlife of a relationship in an object you can play again. In Hull, Watt corrected a journalist who assumed the record in the song must be Thorn's. It was simply a record someone had given him. The correction is worth keeping. The song's force depends on an object whose meaning is private and whose identity we never learn: a second-hand record, again, carrying a first-hand loss.

"Waiting Like Mad" and "Thirst for Knowledge" show the less picturesque side of longing. Waiting can occupy every hour of a day; the wish to know a lover's past can stop being tenderness and turn possessive. "Thirst for Knowledge" is a title dry enough for a classroom, and within this sequence knowledge gives no mastery. The other person has lived years before the singer and will keep parts of them that no intimacy can recover. Watt's youthful directness leaves the impulse visible, including its ungenerous part. This is the song where the album's argument is most exposed: everything he knows about her, he knows by report.

"Long Time No Sea" turns the governing pun into an absence that has gone on too long for a simple reunion to fix. The sea has become a measure of time, something remembered from inland. Then the Dylan cover arrives after the album's own songs. Asked about it at the time, Watt said he chose it because it was a good song, and there is no reason to hear more ancestry in it than that. It gives the record a last voice that is openly borrowed, in which departure is certain enough to sing about. After nine tracks of relays, the final one admits it is a relay, and the air comes in.

V. The record that the papers disputed

The reception does not fit a tidy tale of a masterpiece ignored. On 19 February 1983, Don Watson's NME review praised Watt's guitar playing, the arrangements of the earlier EP and King's saxophone, then argued that the songs themselves failed, especially where the lyrics reached for poetry. Watt later said the album got mixed reviews and that he avoided it for years. Watson heard a real risk in the record. Watt had already rejected the over-serious language of his first demo, and the move towards personal experience did not make every line sure-footed.

Many listeners had already met the album's second song before the album itself. At Christmas 1982 Cherry Red put "Some Things Don't Matter" on Pillows & Prayers, a sampler whose sleeve told shops to charge no more than 99p. Thorn's "Plain Sailing" was on it too, and so was "On My Mind" by Everything But the Girl. The compilation went to number one on the indie chart. Before North Marine Drive existed as an LP, then, its best-known song was circulating on a cheap disc alongside the two futures that were about to replace it.

Darlington's Hull interview gives the other half of the argument. Watt spoke of wanting records people could return to in ten or twenty years, and resisted both the folk tag and the idea that a new musician should obey the pop fashion of the season. He and Thorn already worked together in several overlapping forms. They met at the University of Hull in 1981, took the name Everything But the Girl from the slogan of Turner's, a furniture shop on Beverley Road, recorded "Night and Day" under it in 1982, and played the ICA in January 1983, where Paul Weller joined them. Thorn had made her own A Distant Shore for £138. The solo album was never a sealed first chapter. The lives and the records were happening at once.

The later CD packages have given the nine-track LP a second history by attaching Summer into Winter to it. In that form the Wyatt songs can sound like a long coda. Heard in the order they were made, they are the earlier experiment the album grows out of: the echoing guitar stays, Wyatt's larger presence gives way to Watt's own short songs and King's few decisive entries. The original sequence can be held in mind without giving up the pleasure of the combined edition.

VI. The philosophy of distance

Watt has described his younger voice as ardent, the harmonies warm, the piano lines crystalline, the atmosphere mysterious. He has also accused some of the lyrics of self-pity. Both judgments come from the man who made the record, and neither settles its value. Listen again with Watson's complaint in mind and it describes the record's method. The words are a twenty-year-old's inherited vocabulary for love and weather, a little too literary, learned from books like the John Donne on the shelf in Hull. The guitar is the one thing in the room that is entirely his. The Gretsch through the Echopet does not describe the sea. It holds a chord until the tail seems to continue into another room, and that sustain is closer to the experience of distance than any line in the lyrics.

So the coast here is approached through recordings, photographs and names: a lecturer's tinted Bridlington, a road half-confused with Scarborough, a record someone gave him, a saxophonist first heard from a doorway, a Dylan song to finish. The cover shows children testing the edge of a wave while the songs stay inland, among trains, hills and rooms. These were material decisions made in five days in London, and they let the sea mean more than a ready-made metaphor.

It would be dishonest to rescue North Marine Drive from its critic by claiming every awkward line is secretly perfect. Some phrases are young, and the voice sometimes asks a song to carry more hurt than its words can hold. The arrangements never make those songs monumental. Their chords, pauses and small changes of colour let a feeling outlive the singer's first explanation of it. This is why I return to the album, and why I place it so high: it records someone discovering that closeness cannot give him full knowledge of another life, and that the sea you sing about is never the one outside the window, while every musical instinct in him keeps reaching towards both.

By the summer of 1983 Watt had put his solo plans aside to work with Thorn full time. His next solo album, Hendra, would not arrive until 2014, more than thirty years later. That is where this essay stops. The nine songs stay on their original side of the decision: a hill visited with his parents, a saxophonist once heard from the back of a room, a named road on a coast partly imagined, a borrowed Dylan song at the end, and a real sea less than an hour away by train.

Last revised: September 2026