Magic Numbers star & Ren Harvieu launch new duo with East Sussex date

The brand-new project will see an album later this year but there will be CDs available at the gigs. Exciting times for both of them and especially Ren who has also got her latest solo album coming out this year.

Ren said: “Romeo and I have been writing together for about ten years, primarily on my solo projects. We have written together for other projects but in the last year we just said ‘Do you fancy doing a duo project together?’ It just made sense. We have worked together all this time and have never done it. We were both in the same headspace and we both have similar interests and experiences. But with this we wanted to explore some styles that we might not do in our own music. The fact is we have a lot of shared loves, and we just wanted to create something together. We wanted to have two electric guitars. That was important to us. We also like old romance and old Hollywood but we also like the wildness of the 80s and the B52s and camp-ish theatre.”

Romeo added: “When I first met Ren and started writing with her I was taken aback by what she had to say lyrically and the places from which she was coming. She comes at things from different angles that are totally unexpected, and she just floored me with a sense and a feeling that this was something really unique. And that is challenging… which is good! When I'm working with her on her own music, she is very visual in what she wants and she might say to me something like ‘I want this to sound like an alley cat smoking a cigarette in a dark alley and then a space ship lands!’ And that's very rewarding to try to get there. And when you're trying to go somewhere you can end up somewhere else as well which is also interesting.

“But actually working together as a duo it was just so bizarre because really it had been staring us in the face all this time. When we decided to do it, the songs just started arriving really quickly.”

It builds on all they have in common, as Ren says: “There is an element of crossover that we have between us. We both had difficult childhoods and we both grew up in a caregiver role. We both became well attuned to the world and to emotions and it almost felt like a superpower. Both of us were growing up wanting to be the best version of ourselves that we could be. Romeo always wanted to be the best guitarist and I always wanted to be the best singer, and there was a shared loneliness that we had and the thought that if we kept going then maybe something amazing was going to happen. I never expected my first album to go to number five in the charts. We both had inside us this feeling of loneliness and separateness but also a feeling that it was going to lead something beautiful in the end.”