CANDICE Fugi ,” which was in Owain Phyfe ’ s repertoire , the New World Renaissance Band ’ s late leader , who played Night and Blackmore ’ s wedding in 2008 before passing from pancreatic cancer in 2012 . “ He would travel with the Renaissance fairs ,
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to sketch a modern series of cartoons , Night and Blackmore ’ s would fill the bill nicely , as the personable Candice humorously explains herein . IE : You and Ritchie have a nine-year-old son , Rory , and a daughter , Autumn , who ’ s nearly 11 . Where is your family-based ? CANDICE NIGHT : We are on Long Island , New York . Just far away enough from New York City that we don ’ t have to deal with its madness , but close enough that if we ever DID want to go in to feel that energy of Broadway and all the other cool stuff that we could . But now , of course , it ’ s all closed down . And Ritchie ( born British ) is here with me on Long Island , and he ’ s actually been in America since 1974 . When I met |
Candice Night and Richie Blackmore |
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and he looked and sounded like he was from another century ,” she recalls . “ And that was a 16th-century Italian song that we had never heard before . But we fell in love with it , and it stayed in our heads , and that was what became our song on ** Nature ’ s Light , “ Once Upon December .” So all of these songs have ties back to hundreds of years ago , even though people today might relate to them as a new song .”
And truthfully , even without the festive maypole , if the lovably macabre cartoonist Charles Addams were still alive and looking for a spooky new family around which
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04 • 2021 him , he lived in Connecticut , in a big old English Tudor house in the middle of the woods , and it was very , very dark inside . I was up there with him for about a year and a half — I was 21 , and I came from the land of 24-hour convenience : Long Island . So I met him in 1989 , and back then , I was usually getting ready to go out at 11:00 PM and the bars and the clubs were open ? until 4:00 AM , and then afterward you would go to a diner and have anything from a hot turkey sandwich to scrambled eggs . It was 24 / 7 . And I got so used to being able to go to 7- Eleven and pick up milk at 2:00 in the morn-
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ing if I needed to or get Haagen Dazs ice cream because everything was open all night . But where we lived in Connecticut ? I had to drive half an hour to the nearest grocery store , which would close at 6:00 PM and not be open on a Sunday at all . It was just in the middle of the woods , and it was beautiful , and I would probably appreciate it more now than I did at the age of 21 . But I had to go back to Long Island , and he said , “ You know what ? Let ’ s find a house !” And here we are . We ’ ve got a great place on the water , and we ’ re surrounded by woods and the Long Island Sound . And the area we ’ re in is actually from the 1500s , believe it or |
not , so there are a lot of historic houses around . And it suits us great – until the taxes push us out because the taxes here are insane .
IE : But what were you into when you first met Ritchie ? He seems like an arcane , enigmatic kind of guy that does not suffer fools gladly . CN : Well , it was very interesting . I feel like I never really fit in with people my own age or from my own background . I didn ’ t really click with the people that were around me . To me , music was always my great escape from everything . I would literally sit in a
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