Date night
Sometimes as a couple you need to reconnect, so every week we go out and talk about us. No photos, no phones, just chat.
I never really got the John and Yoko thing until I met my now-wife Suzy Starlite. Many have said that Yoko broke up The Beatles and I can see that.
A band is a team that operates in concert—pardon the pun—generally with a leader, stretching and extracting each other’s creativity. It’s a team quite unlike any other.
In each game of football, players are swapped in and out with the lineup changing over the season and metamorphosing unrecognizably over of number of years.
Yes, a band can bring in session musicians to spice up a record or a tour—Billy Preston and Eric Clapton for the Beatles are great examples—but generally the most creative, and not necessarily commercially successful bands, are at their peak with their original members.
There are exceptions to every rule: Pink Floyd, The Moody Blues, Deep Purple spring to mind but the likes of Rush, Led Zeppelin, U2, The Band, Radiohead and countless others kind of prove this point, but I digress—back to John and Yoko.
Yoko was there and not just there, but within one metre of Lennon all the time: there is no doubt she changed the band’s dynamic.
Creative units are special and unless you have worked in one, almost impossible to describe. The process is private, complex and sometimes fractious—stories of The Police come to mind.
Record producers are there to help the band manage the process and give them direction and focus. Two great examples are Daniel Lanois for his work with U2, Boy Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, Willie Nelson plus many others and Nigel Godrich who is best known as the sixth member of Radiohead and has recently seen considerable success with Idles.
Starlite and I have only spent two nights apart in nearly 12 years. We adore each other, found each other later in life and can’t bear to be apart.
We live and work together 24/7, 365 days of the year and get where Lennon and Ono were at, the difference being Starlite and I are the band: writing, playing, singing, recording, producing, engineering, marketing and managing—basically everything. It’s our studio, our guitars. A married couple. A band. A team.
This is not to say we don’t disagree as I am always right and Starlite also thinks that she is always right—I write this realizing the consequences and am currently donning a steel helmet and piling up sandbags—which occasionally leads to monumental disagreements.
Our creative process is very intimate but do open it up to session players as we don’t play everything ourselves.
Inevitably, they bring their own unique talents to proceedings and over the years many have contributed beautiful parts to our music. Steve Gibson and Hugo Danin on drums; Johnny Henderson, Gabriele Del Vecchio and Christian Madden on keyboards plus brilliance from Andy’s Seward and Cutting, Danny Boy Sanchez and Maria Saalfeld Reis.
Date night
Since moving to the Silver Coast our social life has exploded and along with setting up the studio plus working up our new projects, time has become even more precious.
As you would expect Suzy and I see each regularly during the day, but much of the time work individually in separate rooms doing different shit. When together we are generally creating something and even when eating, discuss work, family, our four Labradors and current challenges.
We thought it would be a splendid idea to set aside some time for us to communicate in a way as we did in the early days of our relationship. You will find a distinct lack of photos in this post as the rule is, no phones, no photographs, just chat.
Suzy mentioned an Ed Sheeran interview.
“Me and my wife have a date night. It’s a strict date night every single week. And no matter who’s in town or who wants to see us, it’s always this one night in the week and we go out and our rule is we can’t talk about our baby. We have to talk about each other and catch up because if you spend as a parent, you spend so much time discussing being a parent that you kind of forget who you were before. ” - Ed Sheeran
Romance
There is no shortage of romantic places to eat out inexpensively in Foz do Arelho or our neighbouring city Caldas da Rainha and our first official date night was a few weeks ago when we saw the excellent A Complete Unknown at our local cinema preceded with dinner at the wonderful Cairo Egyptian restaurant.
The food in Cairo—the restaurant and the City—is superb and 95% made on the premises, including the tahini, which I know from experience is tricky to create from scratch. Katherine is a great host and terrific cook, but we had to cut our customary long meal short to get to the cinema on time.
No dub here…
One of the reasons that the Portuguese speak great English is that all movies are run in their native language. It’s not economical to dub for a population of around 10.5 million souls. A good thing too. Have you ever seen an Alien franchise film in Spain?
And talking of Spain, the last time went to the movies was around nine years ago in Valencia where we managed to see an un-dubbed version of the latest Star Wars release, in English, with great sound and visuals.
Poorplexed
Sadly, the CinePlace multiplex is very tired and in need of total refurbishment. It’s one of those classic places where the entrance is on the first floor of a soulless shopping mall with expensive junk food served in the foyer.
The sound was poor, quiet and the picture was a tad out of focus and hazy.
A Complete Unknown
Setting this aside the film was top-notch, although IMHO with excessive poetic license. It’s tough to beat Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of Johnny Cash in Walk The Line, but Timothée Chalamet’s performance was fabulous and it appears—although it is so tricky to detect reality nowadays—the playing and singing were performed with considerable aplomb.
“According to producer Fred Berger, Chalamet sang 40 Dylan songs in the film while also playing guitars and harmonicas. All performances were recorded live while filming; Barbaro, Norton, and Holbrook sang and played their own instruments. Sound engineer Tod Maitland revealed that recording was done with period-appropriate microphones and instruments and without the use of earpieces.” - A Complete Unknown - Wikipedia
Fair play…
We resisted the temptation to indulge in popcorn, instead rounding off the evening with a couple of beers and Vinho do Porto at Rocky’s Caffé which is adjacent to the cinema. It was full of people eating bifanas, drinking a variety of wines, beers, spirits and watching football—welcome to Portugal.
The film sparked off a long conversation about Dylan, Seeger and Guthrie bemoaning the fact that these halcyon days of music—and most importantly, its consumption—are over.
A great date night.
