Book Launch: Romany and Tom by Ben Watt

Best known for his work as part of the alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl, Watt launches his beautifully written chronicle of his parents’ lives. The reading will be accompanied by a live music performance.

About Romany and Tom:

“We only ever see the second half of our parents’ lives – the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together.”

So writes Ben Watt. His father was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician—a politicized left-wing bandleader and composer—whose heyday in the late 1950s took him into the glittering heart of London’s West End. His mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, was a Shakespearean actress who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz feature writer and columnist in the ’60s and ’70s. They were both divorced and from very different backgrounds, and they came together at a fateful New Year’s Day party in 1957 like colliding trains.

ROMANY AND TOM: A Memoir is Watt’s honest, sometimes painful, and often funny portrait of his parents’ exceptional lives and marriage, depicted in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents in their old age. Spanning several decades, it is a vivid story of the postwar years, ambition and stardom, family roots and secrets, big band jazz, depression and drink, life in clubs and nursing homes. It is also about who we are, where we come from, and how we love and live with each other for the long term.

–Justin Levine / powerHouse Arena

RSVP: [email protected]











When: Tue., Jun. 10, 2014 at 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Where: powerHouse Arena
28 Adams St.
718-666-3049
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Best known for his work as part of the alt-pop duo Everything But The Girl, Watt launches his beautifully written chronicle of his parents’ lives. The reading will be accompanied by a live music performance.

About Romany and Tom:

“We only ever see the second half of our parents’ lives – the downhill part. The golden years we have to piece together.”

So writes Ben Watt. His father was a working-class Glaswegian jazz musician—a politicized left-wing bandleader and composer—whose heyday in the late 1950s took him into the glittering heart of London’s West End. His mother, Romany, the daughter of a Methodist parson, was a Shakespearean actress who had triplets in her first marriage before becoming a leading showbiz feature writer and columnist in the ’60s and ’70s. They were both divorced and from very different backgrounds, and they came together at a fateful New Year’s Day party in 1957 like colliding trains.

ROMANY AND TOM: A Memoir is Watt’s honest, sometimes painful, and often funny portrait of his parents’ exceptional lives and marriage, depicted in a personal journey from his own wide-eyed London childhood, through years as an adult with children and a career of his own, to that inevitable point when we must assume responsibility for our own parents in their old age. Spanning several decades, it is a vivid story of the postwar years, ambition and stardom, family roots and secrets, big band jazz, depression and drink, life in clubs and nursing homes. It is also about who we are, where we come from, and how we love and live with each other for the long term.

–Justin Levine / powerHouse Arena

RSVP: [email protected]

Buy tickets/get more info now