The Girl with Everything

In 1981, a community newspaper in Hertford, England, reviewed Beach Party , a fey and wistful album by the Marine Girls. The reviewer singled out band member Tracey Thorn's as "a voice with a future — rich, controlled and soulful."

"I was flattered," writes Thorn in her new memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen . "I was beginning to realize that singing could possibly bring me something ultimately more satisfying than just playing the guitar." That epiphany took singer-songwriter Thorn on a musical odyssey that, at its pinnacle, achieved the stuff of pop-star dreams — the...