Somewhere as Nowhere: Tracey Thorn’s Another Planet

Tracey Thorn traces her past as a teenager in suburbia with a book that beautifully combines memoir, music and psychogeography

We live in the suburbs, among the video-shops, take-aways and police speed-check cameras, and we might as well make the most of them, since there is nowhere else to go.

JG Ballard, a user’s guide to the millennium: essays and reviews, london, 1997

The English suburbs have long held a curious position in the imagination. That they are associated with boredom, subdued existence and a sense of frustration that life is happening everywhere but there has become something of a trope. However, look a bit deeper and you will find another world. One behind the neatly trimmed hedge, right through the window with the curtains closed in the afternoon. It is there that you will find the sinister, the recoil from all that repression and most importantly, some great writing.

In Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia, Tracey Thorn’s beautifully captured memoir of her formative years growing up in Brookman’s Park, the suburbs themselves become a central character; oppressive, secretive and yet still a harbour of sorts, home. Describing the town she grew up in as a place where “very little happened, over and over again”, the theme of teenage boredom grows into something more repressive as Brookman’s Park becomes a place “so low that it’s as if there’s a lid on it.” One of the joys of this book is in seeing Thorn’s early teenage diary entries (her “catalogue of the humdrum”) slowly begin to form the basis of her artistic curiosity and how she grapples with her artist’s imagination. As the book progresses, and the young Thorn moves into her late teens, influences start to brand themselves on her imagination, slowly forming those artistic sensibilities which would lead to future success with Everything but the Girl.

Distance from Cities

As well as being a lyrical, touching memoir of Thorn’s teenage years, Another Planet also allows us to enjoy some reflective, psychogeography lessons on the suburbs of London. In pivoting between the 1970s and the present day, she explores the factors that drew people such as her parents to the suburbs after the Second World War. Having survived the blitz, urbanites sought sanctuary, and a little distance from cities (although not enough that they weren’t a train ride away). With hindsight, it is easy to see how that dream of being removed from the smog and the crime would eventually sour as future generations got bored, and started looking back to the larger conurbations for life and something to happen.

That theme of boredom and of London being a large way off (despite being less than 20 miles away) is elegantly drawn out in Thorn’s sojourns into local history. A few chapters are reminiscent of Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, painting in vivid, bright colour the history of a place by exploring what happens there and how that impacts on the people. Although on the surface of it, life appeared to happen slowly, peering in a little closer, there’s a darkness there too. Sure, Brookman’s Park is the very definition of the suburban ideal (think village greens and mock Tudor houses) but there is another side to it too. Nights at local discos had local men preying on teenage girls (“the boys were older, always older”) which seemed to go unchallenged, as did a lot of what would now be deemed as unacceptable behaviour. It is this sense of repression and lingering air of containment that really captures the stifling mood of the area and, perhaps, the times.

Escape

Thorn talks about how the John Peel show felt like it was being beamed into her bedroom from a “distant star”. She has to escape but, as her current-day reflections suggest, she never really escapes the suburbs. The guilt and tension of those early years follow her into adult life and motherhood. It brings to mind a scene from 1970s Ballard (who Another Planet references, as any book about suburban living must), where the narrator attempts to make an escape from the suburban town he has been trapped in following a plane crash. As he makes a run for it, the ground swerves around him and things in the distance come racing towards him. At which point he realises the horrible truth: you can’t ever fully escape the suburbs. The lesson here is that you can never truly escape where you came from; it will still be there, somewhere in the psyche, quietly influencing how you live your life.

Thorn did however manage to escape, and just as the BBC transmitting station in Brookman’s Park beamed out its signal all across England, she traced the signal back to its source, finally committing to London, her career and her life. Despite getting out, the book demonstrates that Thorn’s hometown has remained within her, never quite letting her forget.

Theme of Place

One of the most appealing aspects of Another Planet is how well Thorn writes about music, and in particular her influences. In praise of fellow suburbanite and probably one of the greatest to influence English pop music, David Bowie, Thorn talks of how he embedded himself in her consciousness. Her perspective on Bowie offers a sense of the importance of having heroes, how their inspiration can help spur more great art. This is contrasted with a question about whether her surroundings inspired her in the same way they did the likes of Bowie. Thorn feels that this is not the case, suggesting that her environment growing up may have “inhibited as much as it promoted” her own art. This self-analysis and willingness to question her own motivations while exploring the impact where you are from can have on you, make Another Planet not only a fascinating read but an original and enjoyable one too.

Another Planet offers a great deal in its 206 pages. Thorn takes us back to her childhood and, no doubt, to the childhood of many a suburbanite, while exploring the theme of place, of what it means to be from somewhere that you can come to see as nowhere. This is done with an expressive, intimate writing style that takes you inside her diaries and right into the uptight, middle class living of the late 70s and early 80s. An enjoyable blend of memoir and psychogeography, Another Planet is both a fascinating exploration of the impact your home has on you and a rather fun exploration of middle class England.

Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia by Tracey Thorn is published by Canongate.