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In the summer of 1992, on the eve of an American tour, Ben Watt, one half of the Billboard-topping pop duo Everything but the Girl, was taken to a London hospital complaining of chest pain. He didn't leave for two and a half months. Watt had developed a rare life-threatening disease that initially baffled doctors. By the time he was allowed home, his ravaged body was 46 pounds lighter, and he was missing most of his small intestine.

Ben Watt’s 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.

In the summer of 1992, on the eve of an American tour, Ben Watt, one half of the Billboard-topping pop duo Everything but the Girl, was taken to a London hospital complaining of chest pain. He didn't leave for two and a half months.

Ben & Matt Watts pod about all things Crystal Palace FC in the Team Called Palace podcast.