Everything But The Girl 'Missing'

Chart Peak: 3 (original version 69 in 1994)

YouTube

Everything But The Girl Are Tracey Thorn & Ben Watt... This Todd Terry remix of 'Missing' has been huge in Europe (No. 1 in Italy for 6 weeks) and is due for UK release on 16th October 1995

You do have to wonder whether the placement of this particular track as the eighth on Disc Two suggests a slight underestimation of the success it was going to have. In the event it went straight into the Top 10 and kept climbing until it peaked at 3 a month later, and stayed in the Top 20 into 1996. Last I heard it was still the biggest-selling single ever to peak at 3. And if anything it was an even bigger hit in the USA, becoming the first single to last a full year on the singles chart.

One thing I remember about this is that, knowing it was a remix, I was quite surprised to hear the original version and realise how different it wasn't. The waters are muddied a little by the fact that this vid is titled as the remix (record companies, eh?) but that is in fact the 1994 single/album version, and it's already much dancier than any of their previous big hits, with the insistent beat and the thumping bass. Apparently, having become fans of dance music, they deliberately wrote this song to be remix-friendly (there are of course several other less famous mixes of it too). If anything, Todd Terry's version is actually more spacious than the original, leaving a bit more space for the haunted lyric.

And although we've all heard this song too many times to notice it now, this is a remarkably depressing lyric, a protagonist compelled seemingly against her will to keep revisiting the haunts she shared with a childhood friend. A friend so distant that she apparently wouldn't even know whether they were still alive: "Could you be dead?/You always were two steps ahead" is the sad centrepiece of the text. Perhaps this friend is, literally or metaphorically, her own younger self: either way, there's something quietly tragic about the way she keeps going through this ritual to no avail. The chilly electronic backing seems to help rather than hinder the effect; indeed that seems to be the main selling point here as I can't really envisage anybody actually dancing to this version.

It's well-known that the success of this single enabled EBTG to pursue the dance direction further on their last two albums, and on the subsequent solo projects. Moreover, for about the next five years there seemed to be a Todd Terry remix of absolutely everything, even the duo's earlier single 'Driving' (a cash-in by the record label they'd just left). Sadly, most of them seemed utterly generic and made me forget why I'd ever liked this.

Also appearing on: Now 21, 34
Available on: Like the Deserts Miss the Rain