The album, released later this month, has a great novelty: Mazgani sings in Portuguese for the first time. Originally, the choice of English as the musical language seemed easy: ‘Nick Drake, Nick Cave and, above all, Leonard Cohen — they all sang in English. And I had this fantasy of doing the things they did, recording albums and performing on stage like they do.’

And so it went for five albums released over 13 years — until a call from the recently deceased Pedro Gonçalves (Dead Combo) brought him the challenge: ‘He was already very ill, but he called me to propose that we make an album together in Portuguese. I was very resistant, but Pedro was such an extraordinary talent, that it gave me the confidence to go ahead.’

After moving on to the album, Mazgani talks about the ‘scare’ of singing in the language that until then he had only used ‘when I speak and when I dream’, but once that resistance was overcome, an unexpected value emerged: ‘When I went into the studio to sing in Portuguese, I almost didn't recognise my voice in the headphones. I was listening to myself and thinking ‘who is this guy? But it gives you a freshman feeling, where everything is new again - which is very good for anyone who does creative work.’

The album's title refers to Lisbon - and why ‘City of Film’? Because ‘it's about my Lisbon, the Lisbon of a guy who lives a bit in his head, with his feet on the street and his head in the clouds’. But although this album is his vision of the city as a canvas on which dreams are projected, Mazgani always leaves enough blank spaces so that the projections of those who listen can also enter: ‘whoever listens and thinks the song suits them, will also be bringing their own city to the song’, a bit like we all bring our dreams to the streets we walk.