In this excerpt from her second memoir, Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia, Everything But the Girl’s Tracey Thorn describes growing up in a stifling commuter village – and the first stirrings of wanting to escape

When I try to summon up the past – when I want to remember what really happened, instead of what I think happened, and what I really felt, instead of what I’d like to think I felt – I look at my diaries. They never fail to shock me with all the things they say, and all the things they don’t.

Going right back to the start, I try to picture myself on the day I first decided to keep a diary: 29 December 1975, when I was 13 years old. I must have been given it as a Christmas present, and although it was for the year 1976, its first few pages invited entries for the end of the previous year. So I began as the old year ended, just before it turned to face the new.

29 December 1975 – “Went to St Albans with Debbie. Got a belt. Could not get a jumper or skirt.”

That’s it, that’s all she wrote. No starting with a bang, no announcing herself to the world, or to a future reader, no declaration of intent. Nothing along the lines of “Dear Diary, draw closer and listen to what I have to say. Here I am; this is me; let me tell you the story of my life.” Not even the guileless enthusiasm of a 13-year-old self-introduction – “Hello, I’m Tracey and this is my diary.” Instead, I draw a circle and leave it empty, my eye caught by an absence. And it wasn’t an aberration; I carried on in that style for years, making countless entries about not buying things, not going to the disco, not going to school, a piano lesson being cancelled, the school coach not arriving. It’s a life described by what’s missing, and what fails to happen.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘In the back of my head was a voice telling me to stop showing off’: Tracey Thorn. Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/The Observer

My second ever entry is just as banal:

30 December – “Went to Welwyn with Liz. Didn’t get anything except a bag of Kentucky chips.”

Was it me or was it my surroundings? Was it just that I was the dullest child in existence, noticing nothing, experiencing nothing, thinking nothing, or was it at least in part an embodiment of something in the air, something vague and undefined? Even when I write about it now, I realise that the time and place in which I grew up, 1970s suburbia, is easier to define by saying what it wasn’t than what it was. Brookmans Park was a village but not a village. Rural but not rural. A stop on the line, a space in between two landscapes that are both more highly rated – the city, and the countryside. A contingent, liminal, border territory. In-betweenland.

1 January 1977 – “Went to Welwyn with Mum and Dad to get some boots but couldn’t get any.”

8 January – “Liz and I went to Potters Bar in the afternoon to try to get her ears pierced, but she couldn’t.”

Anywhere with a tube station, however “end of the line” that stop may be, still feels to me like part of London, physically linked by the tunnels and rails. Things would still happen there. But beyond the reach of the underground lies a different and less certain terrain. Where things might not happen at all. Where you might continually try but continually fail, in endless small endeavours.

19 January 1979 – “Deb and I went to St Albans. Tried to get some black trousers but couldn’t find any nice ones.”

17 March – “Tried to go to the library but it was shut.”

When I came to write a song about the place, Oxford Street, I fell back into this habit of describing by subtraction, stating what wasn’t there – “Where I grew up there were no factories”’ – and only then going on to admit that “there was a school and shops, and some fields and trees”. But although there were fields, there was no agricultural life. No one worked as a farmer. All the men got on the train every morning with a briefcase to go up to town. Nature writers would have found little there to describe; it was not a place of shepherds, or hawks. There was no real scenery – no hills, or lakes, nothing in the way of a view.

Here I am again, talking about what it is not. What is it about the place that it demands to be written about in such an equivocal way? I rebelled as a teen and so have often felt that I abandoned the old me and invented a new one, casting off the time and place I came from. But as I get older, I sense its presence inside me. I want to reconnect with the self I left behind. It’s partly that common impulse of curiosity – which informs a TV programme like Who Do You Think You Are? or a song like Where Do You Go to My Lovely. I want to look inside my head and remember where I came from. Because I can’t quite believe it was as lacking as my diary suggests.

Like the negative of a photo, it’s as if the Technicolor version of life were happening elsewhere, full of events and successes, dreams and achievements. Meanwhile, whenever I tried to sum up the place where I lived and the life I was living, I would write over and over again: this didn’t happen, that didn’t happen. It’s neither one thing nor another, and I’m neither here nor there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracey Thorn as a child. Photograph: Courtesy: Tracey Thorn

1976. The diary continued, comfortingly routine and uneventful:

20 February 1976 – “Went to St Albans and Hatfield. Got jeans in Dimple, £8.75, and a waistcoat in Tamla.’

8 March – “Went to Brent Cross after school. It’s lovely!! All indoors. Got a shirt, scarf and a necklace.”

This would have been my first trip there, as it had only just opened.

27 March – “Went to a disco in New Barnet. Cost 35p. It was good. Went with Liz, and Deb and the mob.”

In May 1976, my summer of disco began. I started going to the Brookmans Park hotel, where a disco took place every Saturday and Monday night. Punk was happening, but not yet for me, and not here, so instead we danced to soul records – For Once in My Life by Stevie Wonder, Get Up Offa That Thing by James Brown, Get Dancin’ by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, although the whole point of the night was the moment when the DJ slowed things down and the dance floor would empty, girls to one side, boys to another, and we’d wait, staring at the floor or resolutely over the shoulder of any boy who might seem to be approaching, until one would mutter, “Wanna dance?”, without ever making eye contact, and we’d head back out for a slow dance.

Hands on his shoulders to keep him at arm’s length if I wasn’t sure, or clasped behind his neck if I was keener. And his hands would be on the back of my waist, or resting on my hips, or they’d slide down, and later I’d write “WHT” in my diary, for “wandering hand trouble”.

The slow songs were always the same. If You Leave Me Now by Chicago, I’m Not in Love by 10cc, Without You by Nilsson, and my favourite, Misty Blue by Dorothy Moore. And I was only 13, but the boys were older, always older.

24 July – “Creep asked me to dance again but I said no – found out he is called Tim and is a policeman! Yikes!!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Thorn family home in Brookmans Park, Herts. Photograph: Courtesy Tracey Thorn

I was 13, and he was a policeman. I keep thinking about what this means, and what it says about the time and the place. I picture myself, and I look like one of those girls in the Top of the Pops audiences, grinning at the camera, caught in the too-close embrace of an over-familiar DJ. I had shoulder-length hair, parted in the centre and with a fringe pushed back in wings that flicked out to either side of my forehead. I wore an A-line, knee-length denim skirt, with side pockets, and a wide, three-buttoned waistband, circled by a thin plastic belt. A peach-coloured T-shirt with a white collar. On my feet, a pair of denim sandals, rope soled, each foot bearing an applique butterfly. I was slim, but self-conscious; I was trying hard, but felt plain. Did I look 13, or even 14? I suspect that, to the men and boys I met, I just looked like a bird. Fair game. All the same.

18 September – “Went to disco. It was really good. Got off with Gary. Got home about 11.15.”

19 September – “Saw Gary in his car, it’s a dark green Cortina with two yellow stripes down the side.”

I put the registration number in my diary, too. I was nothing if not a stickler for detail. But the detail that screams at me now is the fact that he must have been at least 17. I’ve always complained bitterly about how strict my parents were, and yet that summer, they didn’t seem to have any idea what I was up to.

In every other aspect of my life, I was a child. Aside from the disco, my hobbies were walking the dog, playing badminton and piano lessons. I had a paper round. Life was slow and even, and very little happened, over and over again. To pass the time, like everyone else I watched a lot of telly. Limited by three channels, we were bonded by watching and sharing the same few programmes, all of which I listed in my diary: Supersonic, Upstairs Downstairs, Crossroads, Candid Camera. I loved The Good Life, which, of course, was a satire about suburbia, although I could see that my parents weren’t much like the Goods – who were dungaree-wearing semi-hippies, unconventional and liberal – but were in fact more like Margo and Jerry: conservative, aspirational, repressed. And it wasn’t hard to see that they were the villains, while the Goods were the good guys. That worried me a bit.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracey Thorn in her first band, the Marine Girls. Photograph: Leon Morris/Getty Images

In September, my periods started, and I circled the day in black in my diary. Mum didn’t talk to me about periods, having described them to my sister Debbie a couple of years earlier, and presumably feeling that it was Debbie’s responsibility, being two years older than me, to pass the information on.Mum never explained sex to me either. So We lived in an atmosphere where sex was invisible and ever-present, girls were both ignorant and fair game and there were rules and no rules. I think of the 1970s, and I think of children playing grownup games.

“Me and Deb got followed home by two cheeky fellas! Saw George and Mildred. Bed at 10.”

In my 1970s commuter village, I never heard the word “class” used, and yet we all knew what it was, and everyone knew where they stood in the pecking order. Even for such a tiny place, there was a right and a wrong end of town. No one was truly posh because they hadn’t been there long enough, and if being upper class is a matter of history, ancestry and inheritance, – property that’s been passed down, land that has been owned for generations –then no one in Brookmans Park could claim that. There were bigger houses, but even the detached ones with gravel drives and wide gardens looked unmistakably suburban. If there was no upper class, there was no real working class either – there were no factories, no mines, no farms, no heavy industry. But this is not to say there was no hierarchy. Looking down on people was a favourite hobby, and the word used was “common”.

My friend S’s mum dyed her hair bright yellow and wore a minidress with a chain belt, and she was common. Her husband had a grown-out duck’s-arse hairdo and wore chunky jewellery, and he was common, too. Swearing was common, too much makeup was common, sex was common. The word described vulgarity as much as class, and a terror of being infected by that vulgarity. When I left home, and met more worldly middle-class people, I realised that being called Tracey, and saying lounge and serviette and settee, meant that, whatever my mum thought, I may as well have had the word COMMON branded on my forehead. Throughout the 1980s, the names Sharon and Tracey were the ubiquitous markers of working-class womanhood. In their choice of my name, my parents had blundered horribly, any Sharons and Traceys being the chavs or Essex girls of their day. And yet what was I really? I wasn’t a chav, despite my name, and yet I felt different from people I met at university, who were posher, or urban, or rural. And it wasn’t easy to be defiant and proud about the difference. For I wasn’t working class. I was suburban; a bit semi-detached. Almost a class of its own. Privileged in many ways, yes, but also sometimes scorned.

Along with the dislike of vulgarity, went a distrust of what was called “showing off”. Particularly disagreeable in children, it was not welcomed in adults either, and included any kind of assertiveness, individualism, eccentricity. What should be aimed for was anonymity, not drawing attention to yourself, in the hope that such quietness would be quietly acknowledged and rewarded. These were properly suburban values. Being in a band was probably showing off, I think now. Perhaps it’s no wonder that I always had trouble with summoning up the required self-confidence and assertiveness. Always in the back of my head was a voice telling me to stop showing off. Don’t make a spectacle. Put that drink down. Shhhh.

But I wonder sometimes, what difference does it make growing up in an environment where you are not told to be quiet and stop showing off? Björk grew up on a commune, and said in an interview on a French fan website (bjork.fr): “I was the only child there… If I thought I had something to say, people would listen to me.” At the age of six she was studying piano and flute at school, and she released her first album aged 12. Did the commune liberate her as an artist, or was it in her anyway? Would she have been that person if she’d grown up in Surbiton?

JG Ballard was famous for living in suburbia most of his life. He lived in a 1930s semi in Shepperton for decades, in a street filled with houses called Laurel View and Ivy Dene. But the continuing surprise of the rest of the world at his decision to remain in suburbia reveals how we can’t quite believe in it as an appropriate setting for anyone creative. We don’t like to admit to coming from suburbia. It’s a place you’re supposed to want to run away from. And yet it constantly gives birth to people who stretch and break these constraints.

David Bowie may have been born in Brixton, but when he was seven his family moved to Bromley in Kent. From that suburban setting sprang his iconoclasm, his rule-breaking, perhaps proving that commonly held belief that growing up in a conservative environment is inspiring, giving the artistic type something to kick against, a reason to rebel. Following in Bowie’s footsteps in the mid-70s were a group of his fans who became known as the Bromley Contingent, and who are often thought of as the first true punks. Made up of characters like Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, Jordan, Soo Catwoman, Debbie Juvenile and Tracie O’Keefe, they were the ones who confronted Bill Grundy with the Sex Pistols on TV in 1976, and who were arrested after the famous Malcolm McLaren-organised boat trip down the Thames during the Queen’s silver jubilee celebrations. They were the ones who worked in Seditionaries, and whose pictures appeared in the press. I try to imagine them now, setting out for an evening in town, first having to leave their homes in those quiet, conventional streets. Did they get on the bus dressed like that? With their dramatic cat’s-eye makeup, hair sculpted into spikes and wings, wearing dog collars and fishnets, Siouxsie black-lipsticked and bare-breasted? It would have taken guts to walk around Soho looking like that, but Bromley? Picture it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tracey with Ben Watt, her romantic and also musical partner in Everything But the Girl, Richmond, London, March 1982. Photograph: David Corio/Getty Images

By 1979, something was stirring in me, some inkling of how to escape this rut. The parent rows had started in earnest by now. My mum and I were standing on opposite sides of a canyon, shouting at each other, not hearing, not understanding. Was this conflict linked to my growing creative life? Did she and my dad sense something in me breaking away, turning my back on them? Youth culture, tribalism, music, creativity, all of this was more alarming to them than pubs, snogging older boys, or cars on country lanes. I told them I wanted to marry a poet and live in London. I wanted to get out. I couldn’t understand why they had ever moved here in the first place. Why would anyone want to? Who would choose suburbia? It’s for squares, for drones, worst of all, for PARENTS, who love it for the quality of life it offers. Young people don’t care about such things as comfort and cleanliness – they want culture, and nightlife, and energy. There are no clubs or pavement cafes in suburbia. You can’t explore it at night, as – say – Dickens walked the streets of London. Who walks around suburbia at night? You can’t be a suburban flâneur. Suburbia is for those who want a quiet life with no alarms or surprises. It goes to bed early, and after dark, when a teenager comes alive, the streets are silent.

No wonder we looked at suburbia and wanted to burn it down.

• Extracted from Another Planet: A Teenager in Suburbia by Tracey Thorn published by Canongate (£14.99). To order a copy for £13.19 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99