Winsome duo Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn insist they have shelved their bedsit melancholia for good. Chrissy Iley finds them in an unusually good mood.

Tracey Thorn was too young to be at the core of the punk generation. She took the do-it-yourself with your guitar ethic and began writing acoustic songs. Her peers stopped playing their parents' Joni Mitchell in favour of the voice of Tracey, and what a voice that was.

The sparse and emotive indie album 'A Distant Shore' demonstrated the power of vulnerability. It was a collection of love songs with which students in bed-sits everywhere had fierce empathy.

One whose empathy was fiercer than the others was Ben Watt, who was at Hull university with Tracey. They became Everything But The Girl. Their first album 'Eden', a collection of love songs, jazzy tunes drenched in sadness, was a cult success but laid them very much open to press criticism. They were called wimps.

"It really upset me, I was using up boxes of Kleenex," says Ben. "But I've lived with that label ever since I was seven." Tracey points out, "Phrases like wimp rock have had their vogue. And that was a phrase that was very much in vogue when we started making our records."

As a result of this criticism they were forced to get away from the intensely personal lyrics and tried to write political songs. "It was an attempt to prove that we had a perspective on the world and not just our own lives," says Tracey. "We tried to stand back and take a look at a wider circle of events."

The resulting album, 'Love Not Money,' saw Ben and Tracey trying to be something they were not. It showed a romanticized view of poverty and affliction rather than astute political awareness. And it saw Ben trying to find a new musical style that was less jazzblues. In short, it was a disappointment.

Now the needle has swung completely in the other direction with their sumptuous new album 'Baby, The Stars Shine Bright.' The main thing that has affected the change in the music here, according to Tracey, is "the string section. Ben got convinced that the talent we had between us would be well suited to a big string arrangement. Ben's got a real talent and musical knowledge which lends itself to arrangement and we thought my voice was quite suited to something lush."

Ben: "I made a deliberate attempt to pair down the chording. To play straight majors instead of major ninths. And to use electric guitars which are far more associated with pop than with jazz. We had been driven to a change. Nobody in their right minds would want to repeat themselves, but we felt we'd been reduced to a sheer transparency of what we ought to be in terms of our music. We were nothing but a piece of tissue paper that would blow away as soon as New Jazz was finished."

Lyrically we will never again see Tracey as vulnerable and exposed and suffering as she was in the beginning. Partly because she would be afraid to lay herself open to all those miserable labels she was given, and partly because her direct experience is no longer about sad, tortured love affairs. She is living a happy and stable life with Ben Watt. So the emotions that are hers have grown up and the traumas that she is writing about either happened a long time ago or belong to somebody else.

"The love songs are about the people around us," she says. "Obviously your personal experience encompasses yourself and your friends. I don't just go to my bedroom and write a song about myself. But there are a couple of songs on the album which are a real hard look at myself, 'Country Mile' and 'Come Hell Or High Water'. They are supposed to be humorous, but nobody seems to find us very funny. We are not really completely miserable people, it's just that people are more interesting when they are miserable."

I asked Ben if he spent a lot of time being miserable. "I don't think I spend any more time than you." But I told him I was miserable quite a lot, and he confessed. "So am I."

There seems to have been a shift in their relationship. Tracey has the appearance of outer strength because she has become more detached and Ben has become more open. That admission to me gave him real power.

"The reason people think we have been through so much and suffered so much is that it's all there on vinyl for everyone to hear," says Tracey. "But the sort of things we have been through are perfectly ordinary things that everyone goes through, but didn't choose to write about. All it meant was that we were falling in and out of love when we were 19 and 20-years-old. And I don't think that's particularly extraordinary."

Ben: "We weren't truly representing an entire picture at any one stage. We felt especially at the time of 'Love Not Money' that we had to conceal certain aspects because we were so desperate to thicken out this transparent image that people had of us. On 'Eden' we laid ourselves open and proved ourselves concise writers of love songs. Now I think the dust has settled from both LPs and we can be more ourselves.

"We are five or six years older than when we first started writing and I think what we are doing now is a much more true reflection of us as human beings. Does that sound very self-satisfied?" I wondered how much the change had been affected by criticism. "I've always said the review which hurts the most is one that's true. Joe Jackson was once called 'The Elephant Man of pop,' and I do think that would have made me give up if that had been said about me."

The one thing that is very noticeable on 'The Stars Shine Bright' is a very subtle country influence on certain songs. Tracey explains: "This year I have discovered country music. And discovering Patsy Kline has been a revelation, it has changed my life. 'Sweet Dreams' is such a wonderful film, it's changed so much for me.

"I always thought my favourite female singer was Billie Holliday and that was settled for life, and then I heard Patsy Kline and it's all changed for me. It's wonderful to discover something like that, it makes music so exciting."

Patsy Kline was somebody who suffered because she was dealing with tragedy and her husband's alcoholism. She soldiered on, she coped. The tragedy and pain were encapsulated in her voice, and that's where she kept it. She was never a tragic figure. Whereas Billie Holliday did not cope with tragedy. She became tragic.

Tracey's lyrics have changed. They were once understatements drawn from a huge expanse of aching emotion. And now the emotion is in the voice. It is so full and laden with every possible emotion. Human empathy is with the voice, not the lyric. That's why she sells so well in Italy and Brazil where the people can't even know what she is singing about.

Ben says he has discovered the role he is best at. "The role of the guitarist was always an uneasy hat for me to wear. I was never a particular fan of guitar heroes because I was concerned with the overall sound. And I finally turned to the great arrangers. I have discovered Burt Bacharach. This LP has stretched me to my absolute limit as an arranger, and it's brilliant to be able to do that."

But who exactly are they trying to reach? Tracey: "We've still got the adolescent angst crew and because 'Each And Everyone' was a Jazz success we've got a smattering of the Sade audience."

Ben: "A friend of ours saw someone walking down the street the other day. I wish I had a photograph of it. He had an enormous Mohican and a jacket covered in studs. On the back he had scrubbed out Discharge and replaced it with Everything But The Girl.

"We wrote those early LPs as earnest teenagers and they sold in their thousands to other earnest teenagers. It was an 18-year-old's bird's eye view of the world and it articulated it for people of the same age."

Tracey: "So now we are going to be writing songs about mortgages and cleaning cars. And heart attacks will be for the album after that."

But what sort of people are Ben and Tracey, what do they actually do? "I find solace in horse racing," says Ben. "I go all week from Sandown to Epsom. I've lost thousands and won thousands." Tracey: "That's not strictly true. He constantly tells lies. Especially when he gets home and I say 'Well, where's me housekeeping?'"

Ben: "Tracey's main vice is staying up all night watching Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford films on the video."

Tracey: "He stalks out of the room every time 'Little foxes' comes on. Completely inexplicable to me. But I am trying to learn my behavioural patterns from these women. They are completely alien to me, but I am fascinated by them. I am sure that is the attraction they have for most people. These women behave the way nobody would dare behave." Tracey now wears a house Brook's bob and red bow lips.

Ben: "It's melodrama, and entirely unfashionable. And that's why our LP is so melodramatic. People have actually said the single 'Coming Home' is vulgar. I think that's hilarious coming from people who said we were too sensitive."

Tracey thinks they are not melodramatic enough as a couple. Especially when they claim they want to become one of the world's leading historical popular couples. "We haven't yet learned how to perfect the public tiff," says Tracey. "And of course, we don't go to the right places. We go to see small independent bands."

"We go to the Finchley Road on Sundays to East European cafes amid Romanian anthropologists drinking lemon tea," adds Ben.

The picture they paint is of an entirely stable relationship, and this would certainly seem to be reflected with the positively jaunty aspect of their new album. "When you first embark on any kind of relationship you go through a lot of struggle which basically comes about because you are both trying to assert your independence and see how far you can go," says Tracey.

"After a time you establish your own ground, things level out. We've been together five years now. It's important still to have a struggle within the relationship, but the struggle becomes less destructive and there is less risk."

"I do think the desire to assert independence is within our relationship because we are trying to achieve different things," says Ben. "Tracey is desperate to be recognized as a great female singer and I am not. I want to be recognized as an arranger and songwriter and part-time guitarist. I think if I was struggling towards the same ends there would be a lot of agony. Chris Lloyd and John Lloyd must have a desperate relationship because one is a star and one is a snivelling wretch. But rivalry is healthy because with us there is a great sense of competition."

"The balance is always swinging around," says Tracey. "Ben seems to be in charge of the group because his control is greater when he is arranging and producing. In the studio it is Ben in the big chair. But when we get on stage I am the one in the front of the group, as the singer, I am the one in charge. In the end the control is well balanced."

The album 'Baby, The Stars Shine Bright' is extraordinarily good, but there is nothing extraordinary about Ben and Tracey. They are a mirror in which we see a generation growing up. They have rejected destruction for solidity, and favour emotions that thrive on security rather than pain. Does this make them the truest of Yuppies? The final track on the album is 'Little Hitler'. Ben claims: "Although it seems at odds with the rest of the record, it is really a mirror and all the other songs are reflected in it. It is about heartlessness and all the other nine songs are about compassion."

Little Hitlers grow into Big Hitlers. And Little Ben Watts grow into Big Ben Bacharachs. And Little Traceys? For the moment it's Big Patsy Hollidays. But when the mid-life crisis comes, who knows?