T.I.G.Y.: Music in the form of a diary

T.I.G.Y., which stands for ‘Thoughts I Give You’ – more on that later – are an electro pop duo comprising singer and lyricist Bailey Tzuke and composer and musician Matt Racher, who grew up in Cambridge.

The pair, whose music BBC Introducing described as “Dreamy, halcyon pop from generations past to generations future”, released their debut single Only Way to Let the Light In in 2021, their debut EP Sunny Dog Days earlier this year, and are now supporting singer-songwriter Nerina Pallot on her UK tour, which starts at Storey’s Field Centre in Cambridge this month.

Matt, a drummer ‘by trade’, was born at the Rosie Hospital and then lived in Tadlow, Bassingbourn, Odsey and Arbury. He also attended Long Road Sixth Form College. Matt is married to Bailey – the daughter of well-known singer Judie Tzuke – and the couple live in Dorking in Surrey.

“This project [Sunny Dog Days] particularly was born through lockdown,” explains Bailey, who has worked as a solo artist for a number of years, “so we wrote all the stuff at home, recorded a lot of it at home... we did a little bit in the studio with a friend of ours, but it’s been mostly a homegrown project”.

Matt notes that the EP is proof that the pair can work together. “We both had very separate careers, musically, up to this point, and generally people are like, ‘Well you’ve never done anything together’. As soon as you start discussing it, people are like, ‘Yeah, that would be awful, to actually have to work, create with and live with someone’ – and actually we ended up doing it and so far it’s worked out great.

“But then maybe that’s because we’re grown-ups now – maybe we would have strangled each other in our twenties!”

Bailey says: “We’d always talked about working together but because Matt was drumming and away a lot with other bands, we never really had the time where we could put time aside to write together.

“Also, Matt learnt to play piano in lockdown – took him all of about two weeks, which was amazing and also very frustrating for someone who’s tried their whole life to master it! It [lockdown] gave us the time where we were together and we were like, ‘Well, if not now, we’ll never try it’.”

Matt, who has previously toured with the likes of Kylie Minogue, The Prodigy, Lily Allen, and Jack Savoretti, adds: “One thing about the writing process is that all we did was sit down at the piano and then we demo it on an iPhone, and that would be it. Until the song sounded like a song, from beginning to end and worked on an iPhone, we did nothing to it.

“So going off and touring it as we are on a piano is literally taking it back to exactly as it started, which has been quite easy – it’s easier doing it like that than trying to recreate all the drumbeats and the snyths and all the other crazy stuff. There’s going to be a few bits and pieces, but generally it’s going to be us at a piano.”

On Sunny Dog Days, the duo sought to create a compassionate collection of songs highlighting that optimism is always an option. The songs follow the chronological form of the diary from which they take their name.

“T.I.G.Y. itself comes from my diary,” reveals Bailey. “T.I.G.Y. stands for Thoughts I Give You and it’s been a family diary in the Tzuke household for years and years. It was my late aunt’s who I never met. It was her diary name and basically this diary got handed to me and my sister when we got to our teens as a way to connect to our auntie, but also as a comfort as we tried to navigate our teenage years.

“So when we got to lockdown, I hadn’t written for quite a long time and I started to delve into these diary entries and these little bits and pieces that I’d written to T.I.G.Y. So when it all started to come together, it felt like it was only natural that it would be T.I.G.Y. as its whole thing was from this diary.”

T.I.G.Y. will be performing at Storey’s Field Centre in Eddington, opening for Nerina Pallot, on Saturday, October 8. The day before they will release the first track from their second EP, Trick of the Light, which is scheduled to come out in November.

[Read more: Ian Broudie of the Lightning Seeds: ‘I never really envisioned myself as the singer’, Neil Arthur of Blancmange: ‘These songs are bits of me’]

For more information on the gig, visit storeysfieldcentre.org.uk. For more on the duo, go to facebook.com/TIGY.officialmusic/.