Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
Your Place, or even mine, wherever your place, your particular safe space in which you are either welcomed in to, or in which you make others comfortable and relaxed, that is the level of friendship that we perhaps aspire to, that we can invite someone from a thousand miles or more away and feel the contented ease of their presence sit alongside ours.
Long distance friendships, like lovers, require attention, it is so easy to forget what is not under your nose, we have the propensity to only see the close by, easily but not deliberately, neglecting them because we cannot see their smile, touch their hand, or help them with their sadness. It is an inattention that is careless perhaps, but one that cannot be helped, arguably the drift between time once spent not easily resealed, made whole.
The duo of Matt Dunbar and Holly Rees tackle this thorny subject beautifully in the lead single from Matt Dunbar’s upcoming new E.P., This Room Burns Bright; Your Place, an impassioned duet which perhaps is in itself a kind retort, a riposte to the Phil Collins/Marilyn Martin song from 1985, Separate Lives.
Whilst not a song about the alienation of love, the theme at play mirrors the tune from over thirty years ago; it asks the question of distance, of can such a friendship survive when the pull on a person’s time sees them spend more time with the close and attainable, not with the perhaps more loved and so remote. In many ways it seeks an answer to the notion of the very human way of avoiding homesickness; that by playing so close to home, not reaching out across the miles, does it make the souls existence easier to bare.
Matt Dunbar and Holly Rees convey this aching observation and emotion so well in the single that it is not hard to be pulled into their lives, the question becoming part of your own memories, of those that you never said a final goodbye to, whilst knowing that you would never see them again, and what now if you could, if you could build a bridge; long distance should never mean forgotten after all.
A fruitful collaboration, one in which Your Place becomes a home from home.
Matt Dunbar will be performing at Liverpool’s 81 Renshaw Street on August 16th.
Ian D. Hall