RAPHAEL MANN – ‘THIS IS WHERE YOU NEED TO BE‘ video still (2016)

After living for the best part of fifteen years in a cramped little ex-council flat in East London, I’d moved to the seaside (via Budapest, & Welwyn Garden City, but that’s another story), to Ramsgate on the Kent coast, and into the ground floor flat of a very grand Georgian house on the sea-front. It didn’t turn out to be for very long, but the location did help to inspire a song… Which I wrote and recorded quickly and spontaneously, and put out as my first ever solo single at the end of 2016… I’d suffered a nasty injury earlier in the year, ended up in hospital in rural Hungary, and been bed-ridden for a couple of months in Budapest, during which time I read a book called ‘My Happy Days In Hell’ by the Hungarian poet György Faludy, a sort of semi-poeticised memoir of his time in the Nazi death camps during World War II. Making a fresh start in Ramsgate and getting back on my feet again, literally, in a new place, those feelings combined in my brain somehow with my impression of Faludy’s book and gave birth to this song…