Everything and Then Some

It’s a story tailor-made for the movies: A young musician falls mysteriously ill and almost dies. After a grueling recovery, he and his bandmate and life partner go on to their greatest success ever.

Hollywood loves happy endings like that--but for Ben Watt, surviving his brush with death was more like a happy beginning.

Watt is half of Everything but the Girl, an English duo whose melancholy, jazz-tinged pop enjoyed a modest cult following in the U.S. until the single “Missing,” which blended its signature moodiness with modern dance rhythms, became a worldwide hit last year. It took Watt (who writes and plays most of the music) and singer Tracey Thorne to a new level of commercial and critical success.

As it turns out, that breakthrough was a byproduct of Watt’s harrowing ordeal and long recuperation.

Watt, 35, recounts his 2 1/2-month hospital experience in “Patient: The True Story of aRare Illness,” published last fall in England and just released in the U.S. by Grove Atlantic Press.

It’s a remarkably calm account of his near-fatal 1992 bout with a rare autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. He emerged 46 pounds lighter and with only 20% of his small intestine, not to mention a future lifetime of dietary restrictions and monitoring of his condition. (He’s technically not cured, but in remission.)

Watt’s vivid, minimal prose unfolds like a page-turning mystery, quietly drawing in the reader.

Just before a scheduled American tour in 1992, Watt went to the hospital suffering chest, stomach and joint pains. Doctors theorized everything from a heart attack to a parasitic infection.

In fact, his white blood cells had gone into overdrive, signaling some kind of immune system reaction. They attacked his own blood vessels and connective tissues, killing his small intestine. It took four operations to save the healthy part of his digestive tract.

As he assembles the pieces of this medical puzzle, Watt details everything from his loved ones’ reactions to the hospital’s routines with a striking sense of humanity. There is no trace of self-pity or hysteria--which belies Watt’s initial struggle to convey the experience.

“In some of the earlier drafts, I tended to dramatize what I felt a lot more,” Watt says as he prepares to start a U.S. book and deejaying tour.

“I was actually trying to pull too many heartstrings on people, when I didn’t really need to do that. I just had to tell them what had happened. And they could imagine what it’s like, you know, when a needle goes into a vein in your groin or whatever--you don’t have to tell them that it was painful.”

When he started writing the book, however, Watt was preoccupied with such pain.

“In the year that I was first home, I was a classic post-trauma sufferer,” he says. It strained his closest relationships--even with Thorn, with whom he formed Everything but the Girl in 1982 in their hometown of Hull.

So he decided to work through his experience by writing it down. Using the word processor in his portable electronic organizer, Watt began jotting notes. Soon he had 20,000 words in myriad little files. But it wasn’t a book yet, and as it turned out, his literary career would have to wait.

Jolted by that first rush of enthusiasm to write, Watt started composing songs again--an activity that had “all but dried up” for several months. His ordeal had not only provided fresh material for songs, but it had also driven him to push creative limits to combat the entropy he and Thorn feared was overtaking their introverted jazz-pop.

“The illness turned out to be a huge catalyst for a lot of discontent that had been building up about our own music,” Watt says.

“I remembered what it had been like starting a band in the early ‘80s, out of the post-punk movement, wanting to do something alternative and non-rock-based. And we both looked at each other and said if we want to start making music again, we’ve gotta change.”

“It did shake him out of a torpor, really,” concurs Geoff Travis, owner of the Blanco Y Negro label. He signed Everything But the Girl 13 years ago and remains the group’s independent artists & repertoire man.

“The illness helped him shed a protective complacency,” says Travis, recalling that in the past Watt would usually reject his suggestions to try different things. “It’s given him the courage to try new ideas and follow them through to the end. Also, he has a real love of drum-and-bass, and [incorpo-rating those influences] has been very exciting for Ben.”

Watt and Thorn started experimenting, layering their melancholy pop over such emerging dance beats as drum-and-bass and house.

Then they got a couple of what he calls lucky breaks: an invitation from seminal Bristol dance group Massive Attack to contribute to its 1994 album “Protection,” which won the duo attention from a younger, hip audience, and the success of producer Todd Terry’s remix of Everything but the Girl’s single “Missing.” The duo’s subsequent album, last year’s “Walking Wounded,” was its first to go platinum in the U.K. and garnered its highest U.S. album chart debut (No. 37) to date.

When they finished touring to support “Amplified Heart” in late 1994, Watt decided to complete the book and try to get it published. But the story was still largely impressionistic and emotional. He showed it to Thorn.

“She said, ‘Well, this is fascinating to you and me, but people aren’t going to get anything from it,’ ” Watt recalls. “And I realized she was criticizing what I’d written in the same way that we criticize each other’s songs--which is that the personal experience is simply the raw material. At that point, you have to shape it and say something universal for people. Otherwise, it’s just self-indulgent.”

Thorn also gave him the key to making the story more linear: notes she had scribbled during his most critical days of surgery on the back of a sheet of paper she found in the hospital.

“Tracey had actually kept just this incredibly bald outline of what happened to me on each day of that fortnight,” Watt says. “Just a sentence a day. It just said, ‘Ben was taken to theater [surgery] today, his temperature . . . ‘--you know what I mean? She just felt she had to write it down.” This simple document enabled him to put events in order.

So what about that shot at the big screen?

Watt just laughs when asked who he’d like to see play him in the movie, but he does note that one of his lecturers at Hull University was Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning director of “The English Patient.”

Playfully, Watt suggests, “Maybe he could make ‘The English Patient II.’ ”