A memoir about suburban childhood from Tracey Thorn, singer-songwriter and Sunday Times bestselling author of Bedsit Disco Queen
‘Another Planet is about being a teenager in suburbia in the 1970s, and revisiting one’s own youth from middle age. It touches on class, culture, music, plum jam and parenting teens. It’s wonderful. You’ll read it in one go’ - Nina Stibbe
‘I loved it. Thorn is the rarest of things: a singer whose phrasing is as good on the page as it is through a microphone’ - John Niven
Another Planet - A Teenager in Suburbia
By Tracey Thorn
7 February 2019 | Hardback £14.99 | eBook | Audio Download
‘I’m not the only person to have grown up stifled and bored in suburbia, it’s almost the law. The diary entries, this monotonous litany of having nothing to do, are a relentless howl of frustrated energy. Brookmans Park was stultifying, frozen-in-time. In the world at large, things changed a lot during the 1960s and 70s, but in the heart of the Green Belt nothing seemed to move. Stranded in the past, it wrestled with the present, and hated the future. And there I was, stuck with it.’
In a 1970s commuter town, Tracey Thorn’s teenage life was forged from what failed to happen. Her diaries were packed with entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, the school coach not arriving.
Before she was a bestselling musician and writer, Tracey Thorn was a typical teenager: bored and cynical, despairing of her aspirational parents. Her only comfort came from house parties, Meaningful Conversations, and the female pop icons who hinted at a new kind of living.
Returning more than three decades later to Brookmans Park, scene of her childhood, Thorn takes us beyond the bus shelters and pub car parks, the utopian cul-de-sacs, the train to Potters Bar and the weekly discos, to the parents who wanted so much for their children, the children who wanted none of it. With her trademark wit and insight, Thorn reconsiders the greenbelt post-war dream so many artists have mocked, and so many artists have come from.
‘I adored this. Wise, tender, beautifully observed, deadly funny. A green belt memoir classic’ - Max Porter
‘Tracey Thorn turns the tables on her teenage boredom and chips a jewel out of doing stuff – and not doing stuff – in suburbia. A meditation on mooching and moping, escaping and finding, mums and dads, love and ageing, which is reflective, warm and deeply touching’ - Keggie Carew
'Another Planet is a poignant, rueful, tender portrait of a world so little written about, but which so many of us will recognise. I devoured it. Thorn is a brilliant writer, and a brilliantly insightful chronicler of a certain type of English experience' - Melissa Harrison
‘I devoured Another Planet. Thorn’s intimate reflections on teenage angst, motherhood, panic attacks, family and music are so moving and insightful, and written with wit and sensitivity’ - Cosey Fannie Tutti
Tracey Thorn is a singer-songwriter and writer. After forming her first band, Marine Girls, while still at school, she delivered her breakthrough debut mini solo album, A Distant Shore, in 1982. She then spent seventeen years in bestselling duo Everything But The Girl. Since 2007 she has released three further solo albums, one movie soundtrack, a clutch of singles and two books, including the Sunday Times bestselling memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen. She currently writes a column for the New Statesman and launched her new album Record in March 2018. She lives in London with her husband Ben Watt and their three children.
@tracey_thorn | traceythorn.com
PRAISE FOR TRACEY THORN
‘The Alan Bennett of pop memoirists. I loved her book so much I wanted to form a band, too. Preferably with Thorn’ - Caitlin Moran
‘Beautifully written, dryly funny and searingly honest’ - Sunday Times
‘The Everything But The Girl frontwoman and former Marine Girl seizes our attention because she never asks for it, and in that her authorial voice is like her singing voice, soft and low, magnetic’ - Guardian
‘Warm, assertive, sweetly funny, but most of all honest’ - Daily Telegraph
‘I loved it’ - Nina Stibbe
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