Photograph

Photograph (Instrumental Only) [feat. ciara mill, Skylarks & Somerset County Youth Orchestra]

Photograph (Full Length Version) [feat. ciara mill, Skylarks & Somerset County Youth Orchestra]

Photograph (Radio Edit) [feat. ciara mill, Skylarks & Somerset County Youth Orchestra]

Together In Electric Dreams

Together In Electric Dreams (2021 Version) [feat. ciara mill, The Skylarks & Wells Lockdown Orchestra]

Photograph (Extended)

What a tricky moral question is thrown up when our governments debate whether they should use their power for good - we can naively hope - to liberate people under tyranny in other parts of the world. 

When we have done so - as in Iraq and Libya - disaster has ensued. When we haven’t, as in the example of Syria, the despotic leader has continued his reign of terror unabated, propped up by his few but nonetheless extremely powerful international friends. 

I’ve long thought that if the UN were set up correctly its peacekeeping forces would be sent in automatically the moment a country transgressed a certain list of clearly defined criteria and showed itself to be torturing or ethnically cleansing its own people. In the absence of such a set up we rely on the Security Council to make its decisions in its own time and according to the interests and biases of its deciding members. 

And all the while the children of Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and so many other terror spots around the world, watch the chemical weapons rain down upon them and wonder if anyone will come to help. 

As a father of a young son, when I wrote the words to ‘Come Today’ I pictured my boy, as he often does, saying to me “it’ll be okay daddy – things will work out okay”. And I transferred that onto the image of some of the children lying in the streets of Douma in April 2018 as medics rushed around them desperately clearing the acid from their eyes. Those same children might have asked their parents that morning whether anyone would come and save them. And as children do, probably they’d have tried to console their desperately worried mum and dad. 

Children are children, wherever they are in the world. They have an innocence that we should do everything to ensure this world doesn’t get to destroy.

Jeremy Millington, The Portraits

Come Today

Greatness is a song of love for our teenage daughter as she reaches adulthood. It is a musical wave of comfort drawing in the musical sounds of youth to the Portraits chamber pop sound, full of words of compassion for her coming of age in what we see as a nightmarish era to grow up in, and acceptance of our own weaknesses as the (older) adults in the room.

For the young minds of today, it must feel at times like the whole world, quite literally when you take social media into account, is stacking up against you, or there to knock you down.

Parents can only stand back and catch our teens when they fall, ultimately, and when they get things wrong, we have no choice but to admit that we all got things wrong at their age. In fact, we all get things wrong at all ages, but the penalties for teens getting things wrong in our time were less grievous, less enduring, and involved less public shame, than those suffered by today's young people who live so much of their lives online. 

And, as the lyrics go, parents are "not beyond failing, and not too old to learn from your young mind". We at our age need to work hard to understand today's teenage world, and do all we can to keep up with it, rather than falling behind and holding on for dear life to our own prejudices and outdated understanding of the world.

Greatness

A Different Corner by George Michael - our take on it which we're releasing as a single in tribute to George a year after his tragic death I Still Miss George Michael Forever George Michael George Michael Fans feat Lorraine Reilly Millington on guitar, vocals Jeremy Millington on piano, pads, vocals and production and Vincent Imbert on all strings. Wishing all of our supporters a fabulous 2018.

A Different Corner (George Michael cover)

The Portraits are Somerset Acoustic duo Jeremy and Lorraine Millington, who have played five Glastonbury Festivals, and whose 2017 tribute song for Jo Cox MP was championed by Clare Balding on BBC Radio 2. Their March 2019 single, 'Harmonise', described by BBC 6 Music's Tom Robinson as "Irresistible!", is an upbeat call for unity during these turbulent times and is built around video selfies of members of the public singing the word 'harmonise' to camera. The Portraits' storytelling song style, a worldly mix of Anglo-Irish harmonies and upbeat catchy tunes, provides the backdrop to a recurring theme of unity and peace.

The Portraits

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