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Folk-Pop/Fado
Deolinda
| Portugal
Booking-Agent:
Frank Abraham
+49 30 261032920
fa@f-cat.de
Zurzeit leider nur in Englisch...
“You could think I am Deolinda as I am the only girl in the group” jokes Ana Bacalhau “but really, she is the sum of all of our personalities”. As anyone who has checked out the group’s début album Canção ao Lado (World Connection) will confirm, Deolinda is a construct, an imaginary young single woman, living in a suburb of Lisbon, Portugal, with her goldfish and two cats. These songs describe the comings and goings she can see from her window and, in so doing, narrate the changing life of the city and its inhabitants. In the telling, they shatter many of the myths and clichés about Portugal and its music. The new album title Dois Selos Um Carimbo translates as ‘Two Stamps And A Seal’. “During the dictatorship” explains Ana “a document always had to have two stamps and a seal to be official. Using this as the title of our second album is to show we have achieved our goals and fine-tuned our sound, which is both folk and ready to take on the 21st century.”
That sound is created by two brothers, who are both gifted guitarists, their diva cousin and a jazz bassist who, together, have revived the heart of Portugal’s Fado music by infusing it with fantastic frivolity and a caustic sense of humour. Deolinda, the imaginary narrator, offers us insights into modern Portugal, its eccentricities, its heartbreaks, its deep-rooted desires, under a deluge of spontaneous guitars and throbbing bass. With their latest album, the group has refined its style, been swept away by ranchera, sirtaki or samba tunes and has found the perfect balance between old and modern styles. More European than Madredeus, more rigolo than Fado’s legendary star Amália Rodrigues, more continental than any local group, Deolinda has completely conquered its native Portugal with a kind of Fado that no-one could ever call bland. Now it’s time for Deolinda to seduce the rest of Europe with this modern yet timeless sound.
Deolinda is first and foremost a family affair. The coming together of two brothers: Pedro Da Silva Martins and Luis José Martins. Pedro worked as a television scriptwriter before deciding to describe the contemporary world in music. From the age of fourteen, Louis played guitar at every opportunity and his endeavours were rewarded when he won first prize for classical guitar at the Conservatoire, in France. The brothers formed their first group, Bicho Ve Sesete Cabecas, in the early 2000s. A rock-fado outfit, they were joined by jazz bass player Ze Pedro Leitão. However, one thing missing: a touch of craziness, which would be provided by their cousin, Ana Bacalhau. This witty young woman was studying to be an archivist, but started singing locally and discovered this was the only thing for her. She learnt her trade in a local group, Lupanar, before her cousins asked her to join them and start up Deolinda. The group’s intentions were to embrace and, simultaneously, set the scene ablaze. Preferring spontaneous guitar riffs to sad arpeggios, not being frightened to get the basses shaking to get people up and dancing, they set out to be swept away by samba, sirtaki or ranchera, to sing of life, not death.
Drawing on his years working for television, Pedro decided to personify this life and invented the character of Deolinda. The first Deolinda tales were unveiled in 2008 with Canção ao Lado (The Song from the Side), a huge success in Portugal thanks to its relaxed feel yet caustic sense of humour. In the last year alone, they put on around a hundred concerts, which attracted audiences of nearly one million people! Last spring, their second album, Dois Selos e un Carimbo", was released in Portugal and topped the local charts for over a month. It has now reached the UK, which is excellent news. As Luis adds: “the group's potential needs to be pushed to the limit!”
Dois Selos e um Carimbo is a triumph for the group, finding a perfect balance between Portuguese tradition and a type of European pop that could also come from France or Bulgaria. Above all, Deolinda has, if anything, become funnier, more ironic and poetic. The magnificent ballad Passou por Mim e Sorriu, for example, answers the satire of a "bureaucratic love between receipts and forms" (the truculent Fado Notario). In the ballad, the narrator describes how her neighbourhood is suddenly more beautiful when a man that she likes smiles at her as he walks past. She ends by saying "ah, and if he had spoken, I don’t know what might have happened!" In the same way, the pop of Uma Ilha, clearly influenced by Madredeus, is a counterpoint to the twirling guitars of A Problemática Colocação De Um Mastro, with its breathtaking changes of rhythms and styles. Clearly this is a new Fado generation. Traditionally, ”you have to remain still and not move to sing Fado really well. But when I am on stage, I run around, act crazy and have fun!” explains Ana. Today’s generation, the generation of Deolinda, but also of Mariza or Cristina Blanco, is the first one that did not live under the dictatorship. If Lisbon remains a delightfully languid port city in our collective imagination, the young Lisboners now also see the Portuguese capital chiefly as a leading European destination for partying and having fun. The Barrio Alto versus the Alfama. “Our way of seeing life is now so much more positive,” says Ana adding “our music does not need to be austere”. Of course, Portuguese music has always had its positive touches, even in its most melancholic side and even in some of Amália's songs. Yet the real turning point was in the 1980s with the emergence of Antonio Variações, Deolinda's main influence. After the fall of the dictator Salazar, Variações was the first to modernise Fado and to use it to deal with contemporary issues. Language was above all his main contribution: his lyrics, in an oral yet refined tradition, have made him a sort of Portuguese Céline. As Ana concludes “he was the first to make Fado “cool” and we are proud to be continuing in his footsteps".
