The Festival do Músicas do Mundo de Sines welcomes the first live performance of “1986”, a bilingual record written in four hands between Portuguese musician Benjamim and Englishman Barnaby Keen.
Digitally presented on February 20th with the release of “Warm Blood” and a week after “Terra Firme”, the album “1986” hits the stage this Friday, July 28th, at Avenida Vasco da Gama, in Sines.
«We already know the songs we are going to play, each other, in addition to the record, but it's always unknown, because we haven't rehearsed it yet, we don't know how that will happen», reveals the musician, Luís Nunes “Benjamim” to Musical-Sul Informação. Barnaby Keen only arrived in Portugal last Sunday and has less than a week to catch up on rehearsals, and «expectations are, basically, hope that everything goes well».
The live presentation will have the eight songs on the record, as well as themes that make up the career of musician Luís Nunes (Benjamim and Walter Benjamim) and various bands from English Barnaby Keen, and the national musician took the opportunity to, in the manner of the “records requests”, make a phone call to request a song.
“The first song I heard from Barnaby that made me realize he's a great songwriter is one he never plays live, but I called him to say we're going to play it in Sines, 'because I really want to play this song with you”, says the musician.
The relationship between the two artists began in 2012, in London, almost at the end of the journey that took Luís Nunes towards the “mecca” of musicians and studios, to follow a “pig dream” and study sound engineering.
He ended up “making the sound” for one of Barnaby's bands and it was Chico Buarque's music that Luís had played in the “PA” that brought them together. Barnaby was a fan, had lived in Brazil, and, being «a big guy, 1,90 m, blond, white, super English» speaking Brazilian Portuguese, he created a shock reaction that ended up creating a friendship.
The idea for the album only came after Luís Nunes returned to Portugal, after having settled in a family home in Alvito, Beja, where he built the studio and received Barbany, when he asked for help to make some concerts in Portugal. With a studio at your disposal, instruments and musicians, the rest is easy to imagine.
«We were in Alvito for two days, we did some jam sessions and this idea came up in a spontaneous way. If it's easy for two musicians to find each other and make music? It's the easiest thing in the world!» says the Portuguese artist.
The experience of Portuguese-English musical sharing became one of the most important for Luís Nunes, allowing him to «grow up as a musician» and get in touch with other ways of working and other processes.
The record is the result of this exercise of reciprocity and sharing: Benjamim sings choirs in English of Barnaby's songs and Barnaby lends his broken Brazilian accent to voice voices in Portuguese in Benjamim's songs.
The two musicians play almost everything in each other's songs, choosing the best of each other's skills, whether on saxophone, piano or drums, which are joined by Sérgio Costa (The Millions, Belle Chase Hotel, Quinteto Tati, Real Combo Lisbonense), on flute, Leon de Bretagne (Batida), on bass, and António Vasconcelos Dias, on voices. The recordings took place in two sessions at Studio 15A, home of Pataca Discos.
Despite having only come out in digital format – the vinyl release takes place in September – and the first concert is only this week, Luís Nunes has received positive reactions and even from across the Atlantic. «I have had contacts with many Brazilians and a Colombian journalist sent me a message on Facebook, saying that she had discovered the album on Spotify, that she had fallen in love and that we had to go make a tour to South America. The record is reaching people», reveals the musician.
Going to London and returning in Portuguese
The stay in London served for much more than a course and new friendships. The time Luís Nunes spent in the English capital allowed him to discover himself and, being far from his context, being able to look from the outside, think and reflect on it.
“I caught the crisis years – between 2009 and 2012 – I read the newspapers every day and started to think that maybe something needs to be done. After all, there was something to write about, you had to stop and think in our context and that was something I couldn't do in English. I started to feel like writing songs about what I was feeling, but I needed my own language to say them», confides the musician in his interview to Musical-Sul Informação.
His return to Portugal not only marked the beginning of a career as a producer, but also his musical affirmation as Benjamin. «I didn't leave for London to break the market and make a career as Walter Benjamim, but it was there that I realized that it made much more sense to make songs in Portuguese in Portugal than to make songs in English abroad».
Luís Nunes felt that, abroad, he would be another foreigner making songs that were not in his language, and that, in his country, it was a language that many people did not understand at first, and "a huge identity crisis arose".
He felt the need to do something and start singing in his language, with the added value of, «when singing in the mother tongue, no one can tell us what we can or cannot write, while in a foreign language, there is always the doubt that it raises questions about whether we are singing well or whether there are mistakes and that seemed ridiculous to me», says Luís Nunes.
In 2015, he released “Auto-rádio” as Benjamim and the return to the English language takes place in an album with two voices and two languages, with Luís Nunes keeping a record only in Portuguese.
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