experience, or just your own? R: Ah, what would Jung say about our collective experience? I suppose I'm dipping my thimble into the same old dark well as the painters of racing buffalo in prehistoric caves. I just keep trying to get another thimble-full of that old dark water up here into the light.


Your subject matter varies from singing about animals, historical figures, but you still manage to deliver the emotion like they’re living human beings – how do you find the life in subjects? R: I feel a great kinship with people like the medieval astronomer, Tycho Brahe, for example, who realized not only that the night sky was a vast space not a mere, black firmament, but that it was a bad idea to keep an elk in the house after his pet elk got drunk and fell down the stairs. True story.


Many people discover their music from the fallout of heartbreak, but you two manage to reach the depths from the sanctity and warmth of marriage – is it a myth that you need to feel pain to be creative? R: Believe me, I still feel pain. I was recently bitten by fire ants in the yard. Inspiring stuff!


B: Sanctity? Just because I'm "happily married" doesn't make me all better; happy. I have mental illnesses that man will never concoct a cure for.


I’m interested in your musical lives before the matrimony… can you tell us briefly about your journey? R: I played bassoon as a child because I thought that 'bassoon' was the name of the instrument that turned out to be the oboe. I was too embarrassed to switch. B: I've really done nothing but waste my time, my whole life, with this nonsense.


I’m so taken with the title ‘Te Loneliness of Magnets’ and it made me wonder - in your case, is it opposites attract, or have you defied the polarity of similarities between yourselves? R: Magnets stick together so firmly I can't help worrying at such desperate, unquenchable hunger for a shared embrace. Our marriage is more like two cats that are willing to clean each other's ears. Miraculous and helpful. B: But that's where I draw the line.


Emma Garwood


Te Handsome Family come to the Spiegeltent in Chapelfield Gardens on Saturday May 26th. For tickets, go to www.nnfestival.org.uk or call the Teatre Royal Box Office on 01603 766400.


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