Happy New Year!
Celebrating the New Year with fresh hope and renewed vigour, we reflect on all that happened in 2024 and look forward to living life to the full in 2025.
In the Western world, the 31st of December is often seen as a time of celebration and a chance to turn the ideological page - to write the next chapter of our life story in which we are the protagonist—the central character—in our movie.
The build-up to this day is often a time of contemplation where we mentally ‘stop the clock’ and take stock of the past year, looking at both our successes and failures, lessons learned (usually the hard way) and do a little bit of soul searching:
Are we the best version of the person we want to be?
Are we being kind to ourselves - being disciplined, eating healthily, exercising?
What areas of our career should we prioritise spending our time coins on? Writing, music, video, community, touring, recording…
Why did we break when we used to be so strong?
What is not working and what do we need to change?
Do we have good friends and are we being good friends to our friends?
What do we actually want to experience in this lifetime? Finding out what we really want can be harder than you think with so much distraction and noise constantly filling our minds. There’s always another day and then suddenly you realise ten years have passed like a click of the fingers.
And then one day you find, Ten years have got behind you, No one told you when to run, You missed the starting gun.
Alternatively, you can…
New Year
The earliest recorded New Year’s festival dates back some 4,000 years with the ancient Babylonians of Mesopotamia. The first new moon following the vernal equinox—the day in late March with an equal amount of sunlight and darkness—heralded the start of their New Year and represented the rebirth of the natural world, a celebration deeply intertwined with religion and mythology.
Millions of people across China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, and other countries celebrate the Chinese New Year on the second new moon after the winter solstice.
The Egyptian New Year is celebrated with a festival known as Wepet Renpet (opening of the year) whose origins began with the annual flooding of the Nile, which coincided with the rising of the star Sirius after a 70-day absence. This festival typically occurred in mid-July and was seen as a time of rebirth and rejuvenation, honoured with feasts and special religious rites.
So what does it mean to us?
Firstly, we are so grateful to have found each other—a little later in life but hey, better late than never. Sharing this world together along with our four hairy beasts Hummock, Bobby, Edith and Françoise gives every breath a deeper meaning in an ever-increasingly lonely and isolated world.
We have wonderful supporters of our work, fabulous new friends, healed family relationships and met some truly ‘interesting’ characters along the way.
We hope you have enjoyed your holiday and wanted to fill you in on what has happened since our last update.
We have moved!
Four years ago, just before Brexit, we relocated from Germany to Portugal in a slim window of opportunity between the two major COVID lockdowns. We hadn’t been able to view the house in person, Suzy had never been to Portugal and Simon only once as a child to the Algarve — so we decided to trust the Universe and move in good faith - relocating the Supertone Studio to a small holding in Arados on the outskirts of Samora Correia — half an hour northeast of the capital city of Lisboa.
During our time there we made some great friends and enjoyed an authentic experience of the ‘real’ Portugal, being two of only a handful of English people in the area.
Courtesy of the Portuguese government, we attended evening school twice a week for six months learning Portuguese, along with an extremely friendly group of Indians mainly from Punjab. We managed to pass our Level One certificate which helped unlock some of the mysteries contained in the Portuguese language, its people and culture.
For a few years now we have also been looking to find the optimum place to settle having arrived blindly in the first place, looking for places with a thriving artistic community.
Our house in Samora was single-glazed and poorly constructed - not ideal in the longer term: extremely cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. As we were situated next to the loading bay of a big factory, the view out of our bedroom window was a constant flow of lorries literally three metres away. Recording was also hit and miss as it was unpredictably noisy.
It was time to move.
Through our great friends Dani and Tiago, we met David Mourato and his wife Joanna who live in Caldas da Rainha, a UNESCO City of Culture, situated close to Portugal’s ‘silver coast’ and about an hour north of Lisboa. They are both high-powered film animators and offered to give us a tour of the city.
We immediately fell in love with Caldas and its people and instinctively knew this was the place we had been looking for.
Before meeting them for lunch we went to view a house located on a hillside on the coast in Foz do Arelho, about fifteen minutes west of Caldas. We loved the place but as it had not been lived in for several years, it was in a poor state of repair and needed a lot of work to restore it to its former glory. But the view was magical—a little slice of paradise overlooking the Óbidos Lagoon and the Oceano Atlântico.
Following a series of harrowing, ever-changing and increasingly stressful negotiations, we finally moved house in late November and have begun the start of a new chapter in our wonderful new home, aptly called The Supertone Sonic Laboratory.
When it comes to meeting new people, life has certainly upped its game since we moved to Foz; from animators to Latvian businessmen and interior designers - life’s rich tapestry keeps on weaving!
2024 in a nutshell
We celebrated Simon’s birthday on January 9th with our friends artist Kaz Hawkins and her husband David on the island of Tenerife. It was the first time we had ever taken a specific week off to go on holiday.
Bergantino artist
Suzy has been using Bergantino bass cabinets for years and this year marked a new chapter as she was invited to become an official Bergantino Audio Systems artist - it was totally unexpected and a wonderful honour.
Sequential artists
We were both featured for the second time in the official artists section on the Sequential website - they are world leaders in the design and production of analogue synthesisers.
The Voting Machine - single
We released The Voting Machine as the second single from our third studio album STARLITE.ONE on all major streaming platforms to coincide with the American elections. The video, which includes HD footage provided directly by NASA, has received over 52k views and counting.
Bass Musician Magazine
Suzy became a writer for Bass Musician Magazine writing a series called ‘Walking the Bass Line’ aimed at new bass layers and people interested in learning more about all things bass, from inspirational players and gear to music.
This is also published on our VIBES blog a week later.
VIBES!
Our VIBES blog is thriving:
The latest two Supertone Show podcasts feature S P A R K S, who have been a huge influence and inspiration to us this year, especially after watching ‘The Sparks Brothers’ documentary, directed by Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Last Night in Soho). If you haven’t seen it - it’s a must-see for all artists!!
The final episode of 'Diary of a Touring Musician: the Aftermath' was released completing the saga - we hope to get it published as a book. If you have any contacts in publishing, please do get in contact!
Starlite wrote an in-depth article The End of the Line - looking at the concept of legacy through the lens of not having any biological children of your own and asking does it really matter?
Starlite’s fridge in the ‘90s Simon wrote an honest and open article about living with ODPD
Top Tracks
We began a new series of articles featuring the ‘Top Tracks’ from our wonderful supporters:
edition #1 - Ian Southall
edition #2 - Rhonda & Jeff Boehlert
If you would like to join in and write about your ten top tracks, please send us an email - we’d love to hear from you.
Live Gigs
We were supposed to have seen our favourite band The Smile in Valencia in August but sadly the gig was cancelled.
However, we did manage to see some cool bands in 2024 including Yard Act, The Frown, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Fontaines D.C., Kim Gordon - The Collective and Zamilska.
When we were in London we also paid a visit to Café Otto - an experimental music venue in Dalston. That night there was an event celebrating the memory of drummer, band leader, educator, artist and free improvising pioneer John Stevens. It featured a talk by David Toop, editor of The Wire magazine and a musical performance featuring Maggie Nichols, member of London's legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble and co-founder of the Feminist Improvising Group.
We were somewhat out of our comfort zone but wanted to experience new music that challenged us - it certainly did that.
Recording in the Supertone Studio
The new Supertone 2x15 Bass Cabinet
There are not many people making 2x15 cabinets these days, but we love the tone of 15's and decided to produce our own Supertone world-class cabinet optimised for bass valve heads.
The new Supertone 2x15 bass cabinet sounds wonderful and is available to order from our website.
Simon started a series of gear videos which we will be expanding on in 2025 once we have the Sonic Laboratory set up.
Take a look at our recent video on 'How To Record Bass Guitar' below which features this magnificent cabinet.
Ten Years Married
We celebrated our ‘tin/ten’ year wedding anniversary on 12th May.
Edith & Françoise
We welcomed two new labrador puppies into our family - Edith & Françoise from the south of Paris en France.
They have changed our world and can honestly say that have kept us going in more ways than one. They are so full of character and incredibly intelligent - we love them dearly.
We are currently writing a series on The Labrador Retriever and the next one will be out soon!
Reading inspirational books
We started reading hardback books again — both for inspiration and to break our addiction to screens.
Thanks for buying us a pint or three
We have sincerely appreciated so many of you Buying us a pint — our Northern sense of humour making one-off tips to support our work via our website that little bit more fun. Timothy Taylor is also our favourite English bitter.
What to look out for in 2025
Song To The Siren - new single release January
This month we are releasing our new single Song To The Siren written by legendary folk musician Tim Buckley—father of Jeff ‘Hallelujah’ Buckley—featuring Suzy on vocals.
Photo session with Phil Kneen
In January Guardian-published documentary photographer Phil Kneen is travelling to Portugal for a bespoke photoshoot with us.
Phil has provided the artwork for many of our music releases including our new ‘Song to the Siren’ single.
The wedding
Our eldest son James married Sarah, our fabulous new daughter in September 2024. Watch this space for a series of fabulous photographs taken by event photographer Charlotte Macke — she has a knack for capturing those special moments.
Recipes
Simon, our ’Guitar Chef’, will be publishing a series of his tasty recipes throughout the year.
More live streams and gigs
We managed to broadcast a few live streams last year and once up and running will continue in 2025. We are also planning several duo gigs in Portugal and hopefully the rest of Europe. If you want to be notified, follow our page on Bandsintown.
If you are interested in booking us for your festival or venue - please send us an email.
And finally, a musical taster of new music on its way
We are writing two albums simultaneously with different feels and instrumentation. This is part of a new song for the acoustic album — we haven’t tuned the piano for a while so it sounds a bit honky tonk…
Happy 2025 and here’s to health, happiness, love, laughter and great adventures…
Much love
Suzy & Simon, Hummock, Bobby, Edith & Françoise
xxxx
Ah yes a busy 2024. Looking forward to 2025 ✌️❤️😎 happy new year 🥳