Arnold IndieNeofadosTemporality 2020

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Chapter Title: Indie Neofado’s Temporality: A Tale of Two Nostalgias

Chapter Author(s): Michael Arnold
Book Title: Postmodernity's Musical Pasts

Book Editor(s): Tina Frühauf
Published by: Boydell & Brewer, Boydell Press. (2020)
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11
Indie Neofado’s Temporality:

A Tale of Two Nostalgias
Michael Arnold
During the summer of 2008, while strolling the streets of Lisbon, I searched
every single indie record shop in the city to purchase as many Portuguese
albums as I could find.1 But with the exception of one store, all had only
shelves of the hottest international (that is Anglophone) indie bands fashion-
able at the time. There was hardly any album by a local band. Indie record
shops in the trendy Bairro Alto neighborhood had approximately the same
selection as any hip record shop in my hometown of Minneapolis. The
only difference between record stores such as Discolecção and Treehouse
Records was that the latter offered a large section of locally produced albums.
Perplexed by this lack of local representation in Lisbon’s record shops, I used
the Myspace.com events calendar to find some live local indie rock shows.
The relative paucity of indie music events during July and August 2008 was
not as surprising as what I encountered at the events themselves: a continuous
stream of the ubiquitous international indie sounds in vogue at that moment:
soft-core singer-songwriter tunes in the vein of Bon Iver, the hard-rock and
1 The term ‘indie rock’ is very vague and encompasses a vast field of affinity groups
and even splinter groups within those groups. Indie was at one point nearly synon-
ymous with ‘underground’. Both can be traced back to the same musical ancestors,
most notably the group The Velvet Underground. ‘Indie’ developed as a generic indi-
cator out of the independent underground (mostly Anglophone) music scene during
the 1970s and 1980s. After the rampant success of the Aberdeen-based grunge band
Nirvana’s first major label release Nevermind (1991) with DGC Records, other major
labels scrambled to cash in on what was also known as ‘alternative’, ‘progressive’, or
‘modern’ rock. The co-option and commercialization of indie bands by major labels
involved a major label buying the contract of a band from an indie label or buying
the entire label outright. Indie rock became a catch-all term for more visible, yet still
non-mainstream, rock, and nearly all rock that could be found on ever-larger indepen-
dent record labels and indie subsidiaries of the majors. For more information on indie
definitions and this era of indie-rock rupture, see Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt:
The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Middletown, CT, 2006); and Michael
Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground,
1981–1991 (Boston, 2001).
Frühauf.indd 249 1/23/2020 9:34:58 AM

250 MICHAEL ARNOLD
heavy-metal sounds of groups like Boris, experimental music à la Animal

Collective, Hold Steady-influenced pub-rock music, generic art-rock akin to
Les Savy Fav. The local musicians skillfully approximated international styles,
yet the absence of lyrics and sounds with local color was striking. The only
way to experience local urban sounds was through traditional fado perfor-
mances in Lisbon’s twenty-first-century casas de fado (fado music clubs) and
Portuguese rural folk music at various festas populares, the outdoor festivals in
towns and villages that take place during the summer throughout the coun-
try. But Lisbon did not seem to have an indie rock scene that drew from
local roots, only performances of Portuguese international indie music or
Portuguese folk music, never both in one place or both in one sound. The fado
and rural folk music I heard expressed a certain place (urban or rural Portugal)
and a wealthy cultural past that yet resonates in the present. However, while
the international indie sounds drifting across Lisbon’s radio airwaves and
music clubs evoked the now with great precision, they conveyed the here only
in the broadest sense—to the point that place seemed an empty signifier.
Two years later, shortly after my return to Lisbon, I encountered the scene
I had been looking for, on 4 September 2010, at the Portuguese Communist
Party’s annual music festival, Festa do Avante, in the Lisbon-based four-piece
band A Naifa. I then embarked on nine months of archival work and field-
work (including some participant observation) to uncover the indie scene
with local roots.2 The present study is based on a series of interviews I con-
ducted throughout my stay in Lisbon with musicians, radio DJs, music jour-
nalists, and record-label representatives. Two months after hearing A Naifa at
the Festa do Avante 2010, I interviewed A Naifa’s co-founder, the Portuguese
guitarist Luís Varatojo, to learn about the origins and aims of a group which,
at the time, seemed to me to be a statistical outlier.
Around the turn of the millennium, the idea to form A Naifa emerged
from a previous collaboration between the bassist and electronic musician
João Aguardela, and the former punk guitarist Luís Varatojo. They shared a
taste for an eclectic mix of musical styles: punk, pop, rock, electronic, and
fado. Aguardela and Varatojo had first worked together from 1999 to 2003
with the band Linha da Frente, which they formed with the neofado vocal-
ist Viviane Parra in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Portuguese
Carnation Revolution of April 1974.3 Varatojo had already become an icon
2 The primary archival source I consulted on traditional fado was at Lisbon’s Museo
do Fado. The museum’s Centro de Documentação has an expansive collection of fado
sheet music that preceded the introduction of the phonograph in Portugal. It also
holds recordings, many of which have been digitized and are now available online at
www.museudofado.pt (accessed 9 September 2018).
3 On 25 April 1974 the Carnation Revolution (known in Portuguese as the
Revolução dos Cravos), a nearly bloodless coup, put an end to António de Oliveira
Salazar’s right-wing authoritarian regime, which had come to power following a coup
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INDIE NEOFADO’S TEMPORALITY 251
for young Portuguese punks due to his success with the bands Peste & Sida
(Plague & AIDS) and Despe & Siga (Undress & Follow). Aguardela enjoyed
similar fame after forming the indie pop rock band Sitiados (Sieged) in 1987.
Aguardela and Varatojo auditioned several vocalists before deciding on María
Antónia Mendes (known under her stage name, Mitó), who showed a keen
ability to innovate fado vocal technique, creating a style in-between those of
Amália Rodrigues and Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Since A Naifa’s inception
in 2003, the group has released four albums and has garnered a large national
following.4
A Naifa is one of many bands that emerged at the turn of the century
and that I henceforth refer to as indie neofado.5 This term should not imply
that the scene conceptualizes itself as a self-conscious united movement.
Indie neofado serves here as an umbrella term for individual groups who in
their stylistic development have incorporated elements of traditional fado in
an attempt to voice both their nationality and their generation. The early-
twenty-first-century phenomenon of indie neofado melds the lyrics, music,
themes, and general aesthetics of fado with a variety of indie subgenres as
performed by musicians who consider themselves part of an international
independent music scene. Like Varatojo and Aguardela, many of these musi-
cians grew up surrounded by fado music, but—either disdainful of or indiffer-
ent to this Portuguese urban genre—began their musical careers composing
and performing some form of indie or electronic music. The combining form
‘neo’ in neofado relates to both the relative newness of the phenomenon (its
pioneer, Ovelha Negra, released its first album in 1998) and the difference of
this hybrid genre from its predecessor, novo fado (new fado). Novo fado began
earlier, during the 1980s, and designates traditional fadista’s incorporation of
other music styles and aesthetics into fado. In contrast, neofado developed
among indie musicians experimenting with fado. Indie neofado musicians do
not come from fado. Their origins lie in punk, post-punk, experimental, elec-
tronic, industrial, and psychedelic rock.6 Differentiating between novo fado
in May 1926 that overthrew the last of a series of failed democratic leaders who pre-
sided over Portugal’s First Republic. For further information on the regime and the
revolution that ended it, see António Costa Pinto, Modern Portugal (Palo Alto, 1998);
and Tom Gallagher, Portugal: A Twentieth-Century Interpretation (Manchester, 1983).
4 Luís Varatojo, in discussion with the author, 3 November 2010.
5 Varatojo was well aware that A Naifa was one of many bands that combined fado
with indie; Luís Varatojo, in discussion with the author, 3 November 2010.
6 Post-punk began in the mid-1970s and can be best described as the splintering of
the punk movement into a diverse array of Anglophone rock genres that drew from
punk’s ideology and energy, while branching out to encompass other non-rock styles
including (amongst others) experimental art music, electronica, reggae, funk, dub,
and disco. For further information, see Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again:
Postpunk, 1978–1984 (London, 2006); Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids:
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252 MICHAEL ARNOLD
and neofado is important, as they have entirely different creative origins that
underlie their hybrid fado cultural production.
This chapter analyzes indie neofado, taking into consideration the two
genres that it draws from—indie and fado. Given fado’s strong link to nos-
talgia, it is particularly pertinent how indie neofado links past and present
through unique expressions of what Svetlana Boym has termed reflective and
restorative nostalgia. Whereas restorative nostalgia is an active nostalgia that
attempts to draw from a lost past to recreate and superimpose it on the pres-
ent, reflective nostalgia passively thrives in the longing itself for a selective
past.7 According to Svetlana Boym, ‘Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in
total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lin-
gers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place
and another time.’8 My study builds on Boym’s theory of nostalgia to com-
ment on the temporal trajectory of indie neofado. The primacy of and need
for one nostalgia over another when indie and fado encounter each other in
twenty-first-century indie neofado provides insight into how these two nos-
talgias are different with respect to both temporality and purpose. As the two
ensuing case studies will elucidate, indie neofado relies on restorative nos-
talgia’s hyperbolic claims to authenticity and absolute truth, and uses highly
charged national symbols to manipulate spectator emotion to achieve reflec-
tive nostalgia’s ends. The trajectories of both kinds of nostalgia tie past and
present together, thus cultivating and preserving fado. The two case studies
presented here also provide insight into the values of this new generation of
indie neofado musicians who, stylistically, are born outside the traditional
fado scenes. They reference an intricate tapestry of pastness to preserve fado
for the future.
(Neo)Fado’s Origins and Nostalgia
Fado is rife with saudade, a complex Portuguese concept that a number of

scholars have equated with nostalgia.9 The first mention of saudade in an
English text dates back to 1861, pointing to its Portuguese orthographical
A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World (New York, 1993); Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s
Burning: From Punk to Grunge (New York, 2007); and Will Hermes, Love Goes to
Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever (New York, 2011).
7 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), p. xviii. Boym divides the
word nostalgia itself in half: restorative nostalgia revolves around the nostos (Greek for
homecoming), and reflective nostalgia wallows in the algia (Greek for longing).
8 Ibid., p. 41.
9 For further analysis of the origins and underpinnings of fado’s historical reliance
on the reflective nostalgic concept of saudade, see Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma história
do fado (Lisbon, 2004); Paul Vernon, A History of the Portuguese Fado (Brookfield,
Frühauf.indd 252 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

origins in the beginning of the sixteenth century and connecting it to Latin

or Gothic roots that imply regret, absence, and longing.10 A little over fifty
years later, the proto-Iberianist Aubrey F. G. Bell translates saudade as ‘a
vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably can-
not exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or
towards the future; not an active discontent but an indolent dreaming wistful-
ness’.11 In his subsequent anthropological study of Portugal, Bell attempts to
give an approximate translation of the word saudade as, simply, ‘wistfulness;
bitter-sweet regret’.12 The overall continuum remains a sense of regret and
the passive qualities of a wistful longing—essential characteristics of reflective
nostalgia. Just over two decades later, Rodney Gallop emphasizes how saudade
and fado are natural partners:
Saudade is yearning: yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefinable:

an unrestrained indulgence in yearning. It is a blend of German Sehnsucht,
French nostalgie, and something else besides. It couples the vague longing of
the Celt for the unattainable with a Latin sense of reality which induces real-
ization that it is indeed unattainable, and with the resultant discouragement
and resignation. All this is implied in the lilting measures of the fado, in its
languid triplets and, as it were, drooping cadences.13
Gallop’s description portrays an evolution of fadista saudade from reflective

to restorative in that it attempts, albeit vaguely, to recapture selective cultural
traditions (the Celtic and the Latin) of Lusophone patrimony. Svetlana Boym
describes saudade as definitively reflective in nature: ‘tender sorrow, breezy and
erotic, not as melodramatic as its Slavic counterpart, yet no less profound and
haunting’.14
Saudade’s reflective nostalgia, if difficult to translate into English, is not
so difficult to translate into sound. Richard Elliott considers that even some-
one who lacks fluency in Portuguese cannot help but notice that Lisbon fado
‘reiterates certain sounds (words) almost obsessively’.15 Elliott highlights the
lyrical repetitiveness of traditional Lisbon fado, particularly the fadista’s per-
sistent reiteration of words related to witnessing and memory, to fate (that
is, fado, in Portuguese), to saudade and other synonyms of nostalgia, longing,
1998); and Richard Elliott, Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City
(Burlington, VT, 2010).
10 See George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York, 1861), p. 687.
11 Aubrey F.G. Bell, In Portugal (London and New York, 1912), pp. 5–6.
12 Aubrey F.G. Bell, Portugal of the Portuguese (London, 1915), p. 262.
13 Rodney Gallop, ‘The Fado (The Portuguese Song of Fate)’, The Musical Quarterly
19, no. 2 (1933), 211–12.

14 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 13.
15 Elliott, Fado and the Place of Longing, p. 10.
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254 MICHAEL ARNOLD
loss, and to Lisbon toponyms. This consistent insistence on certain words that
are emphasized in dramatic melisma has allowed fado to increasingly travel
beyond its geographical and linguistic borders ever since the nation began to
reincorporate itself into the global community and international marketplace
following Portugal’s mid-1970s transition to democracy. One regularly hears
the word saudade, and, more importantly, one feels it in many contemporary
fado performances. Such felt saudade may resonate with non-native listen-
ers, with their own reflective nostalgia. However, the saudade the non-native
listener feels is not necessarily always intended as reflective. The nostalgia of
Lisbon’s fado saudade can be reflective or restorative in nature, depending on
the origins of the composition and/or the particular attitude of the singer.
Fado was born in the margins. From its roots in the lundum and modinha
song and dance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian slave
culture, to its transatlantic voyage to Lisbon’s casas de fado (literally ‘houses
of fate’), it was a creation that would be associated with the lowest rung on
the ladder of Lisbon’s society throughout the majority of the nineteenth cen-
tury.16 Fado’s evolution in Lisbon began in the brothels, or casas de fado, so
termed by ‘proper’ Catholic Portuguese citizens of the era as a pious judgment
of and deterministic reference to the ill-fated fadistas (prostitutes, pimps,
and clientele) who worked in such establishments.17 Out of these brothels
that dotted Lisbon’s then peripheral neighborhoods (primarily Alfama and
Mouraria) would pour nightly the highly inebriated, melancholic song of sau-
dade that is fado. The fadista prostitutes, pimps, and johns performed these
tunes—when not otherwise engaged in their commerce or the frequent knife-
play violence that plagued the dark alleyways of these neighborhoods—to
while away the wee hours of the night. Their songs voiced the reflective nos-
talgia in, for example, the inherent perdition involved in the fadista vocation
itself (‘Canção da Desgraçada’ or the Song of the Disgraced), the pining sau-
doso love of the sailor lost at sea (the essence of myriad lyrics in this vein was
best crystallized decades later in José Régio’s ‘Fado Português’), the plaintive
lament on the death of fado’s first star and prostitute martyr, Maria Severa
(‘Fado da Severa’), as well as another song written from the perspective of
the broken-hearted, slumming aristocrat whom Severa had enchanted before
her untimely demise (‘Fado do Vimioso’). These early fado songs, so deeply
imbued with the reflective nostalgic sentiment of saudade, celebrated and
mourned the many tragic and romantic lives and deaths of mid-nineteenth-
century Lisbon’s seedy underbelly.
16 For a comprehensive history of fado and its roots, see Nery, Para uma história do
fado.
17 For an ethnographic study of the fadista see Pinto de Carvalho, História do fado
(Lisbon, 1903), pp. 31–43; see also Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 40–50, 64–74.
Frühauf.indd 254 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

Fado entered Lisbon’s mainstream at the turn of the century and, though
not losing its reflective nostalgia, began to celebrate topics relevant to middle-
class Portuguese society.18 Nevertheless, shortly after the end of World War II
newly conceived fado lyrics turned decisively toward restorative expressions.
The pervasive censorship of the Estado Novo regime led by the right-wing
dictator António Oliveira de Salazar deployed fado as a vehicle for the dic-
tatorship’s own restorative nostalgic ends. Salazar wished to elevate fado by
erasing its original connection to the dregs of Lisbon society and repurposing
it in line with his own agenda of anti-modern cultural autarky, which sought
in part the restoration of the golden age of global Lusophone expansion and
empire. The dictator chose to ‘fix’ fado, creating an icon of an essentialized
national culture.19 Fado lyricists who attempted to compose any message
contrary to the national imaginary envisioned by Salazar’s Estado Novo dis-
course were rapidly disabused of such artistic liberties by the regime’s lápis
azul (literally ‘blue pencil’), a euphemism for Estado Novo’s literary censor-
ship. Fado musicians began a long process of self-censorship. Poverty was an
acceptable theme as long as it did not imply some form of social injustice.
Lyrics that told of natural disasters, work accidents, acts of heroism, amorous
betrayals, etc. were deemed acceptable. Lyrics dealing with the rigidity of class
hierarchy, or protest, unionization, social immobility, revolution, and wealth
inequality were not.20 The restorative nostalgia of Salazar-era fado reinte-
grated a sense of tragic fatalism for the unfortunate citizen whose only lot
in life was to remain calmly obedient to authority.21 The regime called for a
18 For an expanded view of the evolution of saudade lyricism in fado to its reflective
nature under Salazar, see Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 30–5, 64–74, 82–97, 218–
48. For a detailed description of the fado tropes through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as they evolved under Salazar and the new Portuguese democracy, see Elliott,
Fado and the Place of Longing, pp. 13–29. For an analysis of the impact of Salazar’s
purification of the genre through the regime’s physical demolition of fado’s neighbor-
hoods, see Michael Colvin, The Reconstruction of Lisbon: Severa’s Legacy and the Fado’s
Rewriting of Urban History (Lewisburg, 2008).
19 For a more detailed description of the sociopolitical background and cultural
agenda of Salazar’s internationally isolated Estado Novo regime, see Felipe Ribeiro de
Meneses, Salazar: A Political Biography (New York, 2009). For a concise review of the
Lusophone golden age that Salazar’s restorative nostalgic discourse references, see José
Hermano Saraiva, História concisa de Portugal (Lisbon, 1989).
20 See Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 191–2.
21 See ibid., p. 192. Nery explains how fado lyrics were censored toward a sensibility
both deterministic and tragic, in line with the ultramontane Catholic dogma of the
regime: ‘They would now sing . . . exclusion, poverty, and hunger, not as symptomatic
of a specific socio-economic order susceptible to change, but as individual, unavoid-
able tragedies which one could only describe and lament; the unprotected elderly, the
widow, the orphan.’ All translations by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
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256 MICHAEL ARNOLD
nostalgic celebration of proper Portuguese conduct within the realm of one’s

God-given gender and class roles, regardless of any adversity that may come
one’s way. The burden of Salazar’s cultural agenda would pressure fado lyri-
cists to focus as much as possible on a glorified national past—rather than on
a depressing Portuguese present. Nostalgia poetics in fado (e.g., marialvismo)
still function today to produce images for conservative Portuguese citizens of
what they perceive to be the good old days of the Salazar regime, marked by
so many symbols of national strength and stability.22 And yet the very same
fado lyrics might also serve the contemporary Portuguese socialist by prompt-
ing questioning of ‘the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future
that became obsolete’.23 The fado lyrics produced during the Salazar regime
still make up the majority of the greatest hits today.24
How then do reflective and restorative nostalgias distinctly manifest them-
selves in indie neofado? The restorative nostalgia produced under Salazar’s
extremely conservative authoritarianism makes for a strange bedfellow with
the liberal-progressive, reflective-nostalgic tendencies of international indie
from which indie neofado nostalgia poetics simultaneously draws. The fol-
lowing two case studies show how indie neofado uniquely fuses these two
opposite nostalgias, employing the symbols and means of restorative nostalgia
in order to achieve its own reflective nostalgic ends.
22 The term marialvismo dates back to an eighteenth-century treatise on horseman-

ship penned by the Marquês de Marialva. It is related to rigid, chauvinistic gender
roles and the subordination of the Portuguese woman. Marialvismo was reaffirmed
and restored in fado lyricism under Salazar’s Estado Novo regime. Many of the best
hits of the traditional fado canon, sung by stars such as Lucilia do Carmo (‘Foi Na
Travessa Da Palha’; ‘O Meu-Um Homem A Meu Jeito’) or Amália Rodrigues (‘Rua
Do Capelão’ and ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’), are still popular today despite their marialvist
bent, celebrating the woman as object owned by her man to be treated (and beaten)
as he pleases. For more information on marialvismo, see Miguel Vale de Almeida,
‘Marialvismo: A Portuguese Moral Discourse on Masculinity, Social Hierarchy and
Nationhood in the Transition to Modernity’, Serie Antropologia 184, Departamento
de Antropologia, Universidade de Brasilia, 2 December 2004, pp. 2–3; http://www.
dan.unb.br/images/doc/Serie184empdf.pdf.
23 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xvi.
24 For more information on Salazar’s restorative nostalgic influence on fado lyricism
and its relevance for fado today, see Rui Vieira Nery, Pensar Amália (Lisbon, 2010).
Pensar Amália contains analysis of the restorative nostalgic lyrics penned for and
adapted by Amália Rodrigues, and details her life under the regime as well as her
impact on Portuguese culture to the present.
Frühauf.indd 256 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

Reflecting Recent Fado History: Ovelha Negra
In 1998 the electric guitarist Paulo Pedro Gonçalves (1955–; figure 11.1)
founded the very first indie neofado group, Ovelha Negra. Previously he had
co-founded the first Portuguese punk, post-punk, and indie new-romantic
bands: Os Faíscas (1978–9), Corpo Diplomático (1979–81), and Heróis do
Mar (1981–90). Gonçalves’s position as the first indie-electronica adopter
of traditional fado music can best be understood if one considers his unique
expat background. He spent the majority of his adolescence outside Lisbon.
When he was only two years old, his parents emigrated to Toronto. Having
never experienced fado’s close association with the right-wing authoritarian
Salazar regime, Gonçalves grew up unaware of the national cultural anxiet-
ies related to the genre that would seem to have prevented other Portuguese
artists from fully embracing it. He was not only physically distanced from the
burgeoning subversive, leftist, urban population that increasingly equated fado
music with regressive, right-wing authoritarian politics, but he was also spiri-
tually disconnected from most of the signifiers of his childhood homeland.
However, Gonçalves became connected to fado from a very tender age
after his father brought Portugal to Canada by co-founding, in September
1956, the so-called First Portuguese Canadian Club in Toronto to ease the
transition for the family and other émigrés. The club attracted several expat
fado and Portuguese rural folk music performers, providing Gonçalves with
an early glimpse of the national culture but in a diaspora setting. By the age of
five, he had met and watched the performances of some of the most famous
fado singers of the 1950s and 1960s. He would even envision himself as a
fado singer after the fadista had left the stage: ‘I used to get on stage after
they performed and sing myself, even though the mic wasn’t up there. I wasn’t
singing to anybody, just to pretend that I was singing.’25 This began to evoke
in the young Gonçalves a nostalgic feeling of loss and saudade for the very
primary symbols of a motherland he had never experienced completely in the
first place.
As Gonçalves spent the majority of his adolescence outside his home-
land, he was gradually introduced to the culture of Portugal while absorbing
other cultural expressions of his environment. Experiencing Portugal through
its diasporic representation in Toronto profoundly influenced Gonçalves,
providing him with a worldview different from that of his contemporaries
in Portugal—a distinct trajectory. The affective bonds to national patri-
mony fostered by the expat family and diaspora are at times stronger than
those formed by residents of the homeland who can take such traditions for
granted. Gonçalves’s unique habitus would allow him to pioneer a movement
that, at the time, was not envisioned by the majority of his indie peers.
25 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, in discussion with the author, 10 April 2011.
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258 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Figure 11.1 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, 11 June 2017.
In 1976, two years after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution that

brought a definitive end to the Estado Novo regime, Gonçalves returned
to a newly democratic Lisbon. (At that time many Portuguese citizens had
already sought distance from a past linked to Salazar, including fado.) Shortly
thereafter he moved to London—a cycle began during which Gonçalves
would shift back and forth between the Lusophone and British metropoles
for decades. Gonçalves appreciated the opportunity music provided him to
express himself while adjusting to two very different places in changing times.
His true musical awakening came in 1976 via punk rock. Inspired by bands
like The Clash and The Sex Pistols, Gonçalves would go on to found the first
Portuguese punk band, Os Faíscas.26
Half a decade later, the eponymous debut album of Gonçalves’s indie
band, Heróis do Mar (1981), would rely on restorative nostalgic means (the
26 Os Faíscas did not last long and never recorded an album. Evidence of the exis-
tence of Portugal’s first punk group remains through a handful of poor-quality pho-
tographs and even poorer-quality live recordings held by Gonçalves. Gonçalves and
his Faíscas bassist cohort, Pedro Ayres Magalhães (who would later go on to form
the all-time most successful Portuguese indie export, Madredeus), called it quits to
work on the post-punk project Corpo Diplomático. After short-lived success with this
influential collaboration, Gonçalves and Magalhães decided to move on to form this
founding duo’s most successful project, the indie band Heróis do Mar.
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use of highly charged national symbols to manipulate the emotions of a target

audience) to challenge ideas of the mythic Portuguese empire by accusing it
of harboring intrinsically fascist qualities. The concept of Heróis do Mar, aside
from producing very danceable indie rock, was to represent Portugal’s history
and culture through a postmodernist ironic lyrical bent. The name of the band,
referring to heroes of the sea, is taken from the first verse of the Portuguese
national anthem, ‘A Portuguesa’.27 Heróis do Mar’s initial approach was
somewhat militaristic, as can be seen in many of the (restorative nostalgic)
lyrics and much of imagery that accompanied their live performances, which
glorified national history. The Portuguese rock and pop journalist and musi-
cologist Jorge Pires asserts that ‘It was a military approach, but at the same
time it was a kind of new barbarian, mythological, theatrical thing.’28 This
militarism is toned down somewhat on the recorded album, but still rubbed
many Portuguese citizens the wrong way. The memory of Salazar’s Estado
Novo was still very fresh in the minds of the generation that lived their entire
lives under its oppressive heel.
After Heróis do Mar broke up, Gonçalves became frustrated with the
Portuguese musical scene: ‘I thought “fuck this”—you know? You can’t get
out of Portugal if you do Portuguese music. Let’s do something in English
and get somewhere. So we did LX-90 and, yeah, we got a record deal.’29 This
cynical expression regarding the state of the 1990s Portuguese music scene
can be easily understood in light of the tidal wave of Anglophone rock that
had engulfed the country from the advent of American grunge during the
beginning of the decade to the mid-nineties Britpop explosion. Gonçalves
decided to try his luck in London. During the mid-nineties he had relatively
little success there, performing with his bands LX-90, Kick Out the Jams,
and Swamp. While performing with these various acts he would notice how
British rock music was experiencing a renaissance through Britpop acts such
as Blur, Oasis, Suede, and Pulp.30 Gonçalves began to entertain thoughts of a
renewal of a distinctly Portuguese sound. Returning to Lisbon with his band
27 ‘A Portuguesa’ was composed in 1890 as a nationalistic response to the British
demand that Portugal abandon its colonial claims in Africa during the height of what
would later be termed Europe’s ‘scramble for Africa’. In 1911 the song was adopted as
the national anthem of the newborn Portuguese Republic.
28 Jorge Pires, in discussion with the author, 20 April 2011.
30 Britpop is a UK-based subgenre of indie music that came about in the early to
mid-1990s as a reaction to the success of the US-based grunge scene across Britain. In
opposition to this American invasion, bands such as Blur, Oasis, and Pulp referenced
1960s-era British guitar music, accompanied by lyrics that employed slang and themes
unique to the United Kingdom. For more information on this scene, see John Harris,
Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock (Cambridge, 2004).
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260 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Swamp, Gonçalves finally had the epiphany that led him to first conceptual-
ize Ovelha Negra’s indie neofado aesthetic:
We had come a lot to Portugal to play, and I was walking down Chiado . . .
and the fado was playing in the van [which, always parked on the street Rua
do Carmo in Lisbon’s Chiado neighborhood, plays fado on loudspeakers to
draw tourists to buy CDs], and I thought, ‘fuck’s sake, this is the only music
that really makes sense in this place. And it’s the music that is of this place;
everything else is imported.’ So I thought, ‘I’m going to do a fado record.’
And then, before I got to the bottom of Rua do Carmo, I had come up with
this concept which was: fado is Catholic, yeah? And what’s the worst thing a
Catholic can do? Turn his back on Jesus. So I wrote ‘Não Há Pior Inferno que
o Amor’ [There is no hell like love]. It just came to me: Someone who, because
he loses the love of his life, renounces religion. He renounces God, and turns
his back on it. And that song came from that. And then I just started writing
all these songs in like . . . sort of using the tradition.31
Gonçalves relates here the creation of his first idea for an indie neofado
song, thereby providing insight into two diametrically opposed worldviews
(ultraconservative and anarcho-punk) that work in unison. Gonçalves has
always liked to experiment with national images and symbols that have the
potential for intense emotional impact, most especially with respect to the
Portuguese military, religion, and politics. Indeed, he has attempted to hold
up a mirror to Portuguese society, highlighting the hypocrisies of the new-
born democracy while paying homage to its traditions. His play with sym-
bolic affirmations evokes restorative nostalgia’s means in order to achieve his
own reflective-nostalgic ends. The indie punk in him aims for the deliber-
ately offensive by juxtaposing two highly charged semiotics—agape/love and
eros/heresy—to reflect on (and undermine) ‘traditional’ Portuguese values.
Throughout Gonçalves’s artistic trajectory, there is a consistent thread of rev-
erence for all things Lusophone, yet none escapes the postmodernist double-
coding, the hyperconscious quotation marks.
In 1998 Gonçalves wrote, recorded, and produced the first commercially
successful indie neofado album, Por Este Andar Ainda Acabo a Morrer em
Lisboa (Despite My Path, I Still End Up Dying in Lisbon), with the assis-
tance of fado (as well as indie, pop, and rock) musicians: Miguel Gameiro
(indie rock and fado vocals and guitar), Rita Guerra (fado-pop vocals), and
José Nobre da Costa (Portuguese guitar). Gonçalves’s album would lay the
groundwork for the slow but steady growth of Lisbon’s indie neofado scene.32
With this album neofado found its audience and the scene was born. While
during the 1980s and 1990s Portuguese indie musicians such as António

32 It would be Ovelha Negra’s only release until 2012, when Gonçalves invited sev-
eral professional fadistas to perform on his follow-up album, Ilumina.
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Variaçoes, Nuno Rebelo, Anabela Duarte, Carlos Cordeiro, and Anamar

had textually referenced and even fully embraced fado music (e.g., Anabela
Duarte’s Lishbunah), no musician had so thoroughly integrated fado into the
world of indie-electronic music as did Gonçalves with this album.33
By the time Ovelha Negra had released Por Este Andar Ainda Acabo a
Morrer em Lisboa, Portuguese sovereignty was on the wane as the country
was slowly being incorporated into the European Union. Nevertheless, as
Portugal was about to abandon once and for all its escudos for the suprana-
tional Euro currency in 2001, a renewed nationalistic fervor pushed to pre-
serve Portuguese cultural, political, and economic control. The concern over
national sovereignty grew during the 2010–14 financial crisis which resulted
in multiple European troika bailouts along with the inherent loss of sover-
eignty involved with the process. Portugal’s social programs were severely
slashed due to international and supranational intervention.
In this atmosphere of sovereign uncertainty, Gonçalves decided in
2010—over a decade after having abandoned the project—to record a sec-
ond Ovelha Negra album, Ilumina (figure 11.2). He enlisted a collective
of talented fadistas as well as electronic and indie instrumentalists to help
reignite interest in the nation’s historical patrimony for a generation that
was too young to have experienced the band’s first album. The album’s lyr-
ics celebrate love and loss, life and death, and the traditional fado refer-
ences to Portuguese toponyms, fado stars, and fado itself. The track ‘Amália
Continua a Cantar’ is a homage to the iconic fadista Amália Rodrigues.
The Portuguese guitar lilts beneath a variety of string instruments—violin
(Guillem Calvo), violoncello (Arnulf Lindner), acoustic guitar (Paulo Pedro
Gonçalves), and steel and electric guitar (both played by Sam Harley). The
electric guitar provides the primary rhythmic structure of the song with the
‘Crimson and Clover’-like tremolo effect. Such references to a late-1960s
Anglophone pop are subtle throughout the song, as is the Portuguese gui-
tar, which fades in and out to remind the listener that this song in neither
fado nor indie, but indie neofado. The minimalist inclusion of a wide variety
of instruments gives primacy to the one constant: Kátia Silva’s vocals—an
Angolan transplant morphed into Lisbon fadista.
In ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’, Gonçalves pays tribute to the fado icon
who is equally associated with the restorative nostalgia of Salazar-era fado
and the reflective nostalgia of traditional fado saudade. After the fall of the
Estado Novo in 1974, Rodrigues was ostracized by many Portuguese for her
33 Duarte’s album Lishbunah (1988) precedes Ovelha Negra’s debut release by a
decade. Although Duarte can indeed be considered an indie musician who worked
with fado traditions, her ambitions for Lishbunah were oriented exclusively toward
exploring the Arabic roots of fado instead of toward creating a hybrid sound combin-
ing an indie subgenre with fado.
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262 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Figure 11.2 Album cover for Ovelha Negra’s second release, Ilumina, shot by
Michael Peters Jr. and designed by the Dead Combo guitarist Tó
Trips, 2012.
seemingly close relationship with Salazar. Some of Rodrigues’s best hits did
in fact seem to express Salazar’s restorative nostalgia, affirming the regime’s
gender hierarchies (see, for instance, ‘Novo Fado da Severa’ and ‘Tudo Isto É
Fado’) and social hierarchies (‘Não É Desgraça Ser Pobre’). And yet Amália is
also closely associated with the reflective nostalgic impulse of the Portuguese
poetic tradition which she, along with her intimate collaborator, Alain
Oulmain, helped to cultivate despite Salazar’s misgivings (in songs such as
‘Vagamundo’ and ‘Abandono’, the latter unequivocally scribed in homage to a
man imprisoned by Salazar as an enemy of the state). The song title ‘Amália
Continua a Cantar’, likewise, is caught within each of these nostalgias and
implies the singer’s continued presence in a country divided between those
who hold to either of the national imageries that she personified and those
who wish to leave both behind. Gonçalves honors Rodrigues without giving
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ground to either group. As such, the song is a tribute not only to the fado
icon, but to the Portuguese nation:
A cor do céu, a luz do sol, The color of the sky, the light of
the sun,
Uma nuvem dourada, um areal A golden cloud, a sandbox
A sombra do pinheiro manso, The shade of a pine tree,
Uma praia deserta, o cantar da An empty beach, the swallow’s song
andorinha
Que anuncia a primavera— That announces spring—
São doces beijos teus. These are all your sweet kisses.
Quando vires o mar, When you see the sea,

Lembra-te de mim. Remember me.
Eu nunca, nunca te esqueci. I never, never forgot you.
Só o mar It is only the ocean
Me separa de ti, That separates you from me,
Mas eu nunca, nunca te esqueci. But I never, never forgot you.
A noite cai na serra. Night falls on the mountains.

Nas mãos do luar In the moonlight’s hands
A nossa varina continua a cantar: Our fruit peddler still sings:
‘Foi deus que deu voz ao vento . . .’ ‘Twas God that gave voice to the
wind . . .’34
In the first stanza of ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’ a reflective Gonçalves

depicts his first, hazy, impressionistic recollections of life in the homeland—
that is, before being transplanted to Toronto—as an eternal spring. The verse
‘São doces beijos teus’ refers to Portugal itself as his metaphorical lost love.
Portugal, the crown of Europe, the medieval end of the world, would always
‘see the sea’ as it were. In the lyrics Gonçalves remembers his promise to never
forget some distant devotion preserved in the perfecting imaginary of inter-
mittent, yet perpetual, nostalgic loss. The final line quoted above, ‘Foi deus
que deu voz ao vento’ is a reference to the chorus of one of Amália Rodrigues’s
biggest hits, ‘Foi Deus’, which has been covered repeatedly throughout the
last half century with versions by a hybrid fado-jazz musician (Rão Kyao)
as well as indie neofado acts (Hoje, Donna Maria). Gonçalves, however,
does not touch the original. He merely references it, allowing Amália and
her iconic status to stand in as a metonym for the Portugal that the lyricist
idealized and dearly longed for over the course of his expat life. He evokes
a selective, romanticized national past through the monumental figure of
Amália Rodrigues, yet his aim is not to promote a national project of sta-
sis with respect to the past. Instead, Gonçalves basks impressionistic within
34 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves and Ovelha Negra, Ilumina, Eter (2012), CD.
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264 MICHAEL ARNOLD
an individual cultural memory that lingers on the ruins and wallows in the
dreams of his own past longings. In writing ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’ he
reminds his audience that indie and national pride are not mutually exclu-
sive concepts. His homage to the iconic voice of Amália Rodrigues—Salazar’s
preferred fado ‘instrument’ of the golden age—displays Gonçalves as sin-
cerely reflective. He wishes to linger for a while on the faded strobe-light
recollections of a fado yesteryear that he could never quite grasp. In this way
Gonçalves oscillates both in lyrics and in music between a reflective and a
restorative nostalgia, between expressions of the lighter, more whimsical or
lethargic, and the forceful and triumphalist.
Dead Combo’s Restoration of Outlaw Lisbon
The Lisbon-based instrumental duo Dead Combo provides a fascinating

comparison to the genre founder, Ovelha Negra. Although Ovelha Negra was
the genre pioneer, Dead Combo is by far the most successful indie neofado
band to date.35 In 2002, four years after the advent of the indie neofado genre,
the Portuguese National Public Radio DJ Henrique Amaro invited the local
indie musician Tó Trips (electric guitar) to contribute a track for a tribute
album in honor of the late fado icon, the Portuguese guitarist Carlos Paredes.
In turn, Trips invited his longtime friend Pedro Gonçalves (double bass) to
work with him on this tribute track, which would become the first Dead
Combo song, titled ‘Paredes Ambience’.36 With this collaboration Dead
Combo was born.
While working on the Paredes tribute, Trips looked for inspiration by way
of altering his listening experience: ‘There is a song by Carlos Paredes called
“Verdes Anos”. If you whistle the tune slowly it’s like a Western. If you put the
song into the computer and slow it down you can imagine a Western.’37 Trips
describes here the sonic origins of the very first track that the duo produced,
which served as the seed for much of the sound and imagery that the band
would utilize for their subsequent albums, performances, and artwork. Dead
35 Dead Combo received critical global and local acclaim for each album release.
The band’s first three albums held the Top 10 on the North-American iTunes charts
for several weeks. Their first release, Vol. 1 (2004), made Charlie Gillet’s 2005 List of
Best World Albums; and the weekly Portuguese newspaper Expresso awarded Lusitânia
Playboys (2009) album of the decade. A Bunch of Meninos (2014) reached number one
on national Spotify and iTunes charts. Dead Combo, ‘About the Band’, deadcombo.
net (accessed 2 July 2019).
36 The recording was included on the Paredes tribute album, Movimentos Perpétuos,
released in 2003 by Universal Music Portugal. Dead Combo has since produced seven
studio albums and two live albums.
37 Tó Trips, in discussion with the author, 25 November 2010.
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Combo’s music represents what Wolfgang Holzinger has termed a ‘coales-

cent hybrid’ form.38 It blends the style of fado that originated in the city of
Coimbra with Ennio Morricone’s music for the so-called Spaghetti Western
(i.e., Western film produced and directed by Italians). The Wild West sound
that Morricone developed, sonically girding the gun-slinging anarchy of the
nineteenth-century American outlaw, is diverse. It is typically associated with
a slightly distorted Fender guitar (at times angular, at times noodling), passed
through tremolo, reverb, and echo effects, and often accompanied by whis-
tling, harmonica, Jew’s harp, and trumpet. Any Paredes fan might have a dif-
ficult time reconciling how his light, peaceful, lilting guitar work could be
in any way related to the inherent darkness of Morricone’s soundtracks. Yet
by drastically slowing down Paredes’s compositions for the Portuguese gui-
tar, Trips discovered a hidden Wild West sound in the Coimbra fado that
he would incorporate in his compositions for the electric guitar, but without
employing lyrics.
For live performances, Dead Combo bolstered their musical style with
a visual theme that reaches back to Lisbon fado’s origins. Onstage, the duo
resurrects the iconic fadista figures of old Lisbon to embody the mafioso
(Gonçalves) and the undertaker (Trips)—both protagonists of the old mid-
nineteenth-century underbelly labyrinths of Alfama and Mouraria. Indeed,
Dead Combo symbolically restores fado’s underbelly with a nostalgia rich in
death, danger, and mystique. Dead Combo performs and enacts a restorative
nostalgia in that their representation of ‘authentic’ fadista culture would seem
to claim an absolute truth that negates the subtleties of the genre’s origins and
evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.39 Yet the theatrical-
ity of it all produces the effect of a reflective distance, as if one could watch
this intriguing display of deviance through a lens of safety. In performance,
Dead Combo gives fado the semblance of danger again by allowing the audi-
ence to peer into the nineteenth-century ill-lit Alfama alleyways and tav-
erns, populated as they often were with knife-wielding thugs, pimps, and
vagabonds—but from a safe temporal distance. Through their theatrical
38 Wolfgang Holzinger, ‘Towards a Typology of Hybrid Forms in Popular Music’,

Songs of the Minotaur: Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization; a
Comparative Analysis of Rebetika, Tango, Rai, Flamenco, Sardana, and English Urban
Folk, ed. Gerhard Steingress (Münster, 2002), p. 278. The coalescent is the most
opaque of all hybrid forms. It requires the musician who created the hybrid piece to
reveal and explain the discrete combined forms from which it draws.
39 Svetlana Boym claims that restorative nostalgia relies on these hyperbolized refer-
ences to an absolute truth of (simplified and essentialized) ‘authentic’ national tra-

ditions that must be restored in the present to put the nation back on the ‘correct’
path toward resurrecting the past national greatness that restorative nostalgic glorifies.
For more information on this aspect of restorative nostalgia, see Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia, pp. 41–5.
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266 MICHAEL ARNOLD
performance of outlaw Lisbon, the duo gives fado an allure to an audience

that grew up always associating this music tradition with the conservative, the
boring, the stale, the vapid tourist, and the old regime. Trips and Gonçalves
waxed (reflectively) nostalgic on fado’s own ‘Wild West’:
Pedro Gonçalves: That is something that is closer to us than the Lisbon

nowadays.
Tó Trips: Yeah, the antique Lisbon . . . If you see the antique post cards—
images of Lisbon, the people live in small streets; don’t have shoes—this kind
of ambience . . .
Pedro Gonçalves: Dark, spooky, mysterious images.
Tó Trips: In old Lisbon the only guys who would have tattoos would be the
fadistas: sailors, prostitutes, these kinds of people.
Pedro Gonçalves: It’s kind of like they were the outlaws. The players were like
pimps, the singers . . . prostitutes.40
In live performance Dead Combo restores a sense of a lost ‘authentic’ fado

that belongs on the margins—a fado that once gave cohesion to the nation in
all its nineteenth-century lawless splendor.
During one live show the band performed ‘Mr. Eastwood’, a track
recorded on 1 March 2006 in tribute to the star of so many classic Spaghetti
Western films, Clint Eastwood.41 As do other pieces, ‘Mr. Eastwood’ juxta-
poses tranquil rhythms with primal beats and melodic guitar sounds with
cacophonous distortions. During the performance, Trips allows his guitar to
slowly hum to the mafioso’s slow moving crescendo before launching into a
frenetic tremolo-pick crescendo, which seems to lull the audience into hyp-
notic trance—allowing for a proper jolt when Trips suddenly hammers out
his chaotic feedback-laden guitar, cutting the audience with a sonic razor.
Trips flips a Euro coin into the air to signal the end of piece. Silence ensues,
captivating the audience. The toss of the coin is a literal evocation of fado, a
direct reference to the ill-fated fado underworld.
The musician who provided the inspiration for Dead Combo’s sound,
Carlos Paredes, was an accomplished guitar virtuoso from Coimbra.42 Yet
40 Pedro Gonçalves and Tó Trips, in discussion with the author, 25 November 2010.
41 Dead Combo, Vol. II: Quando a Alma Não é Pequena, Dead & Company (2006),
CD.
42 Carlos Paredes comes from a long lineage of Coimbra fado musicians. Carlos’s
father, Artur Paredes, was an influential figure among early-twentieth-century

Coimbra Portuguese guitar players. Carlos’s grandfather, Gonçalo Paredes, was also
Frühauf.indd 266 1/23/2020 9:35:01 AM

his compositions defied the classic stylistic differences between Coimbra

versus Lisbon Portuguese guitar, integrating elements of both while creating
something altogether different. Paredes began to compose for the Portuguese
guitar in the 1940s and his unique guitar style attracted a new audience for
the Coimbra fado (much of it rebellious, leftist Portuguese youth during the
1960s), especially after Paredes was invited to compose the soundtrack for
the 1963 Portuguese film Os Verdes Anos.43 What Carlos Paredes did then
with the Portuguese guitar, Dead Combo does now for fado by infusing fado
with Spaghetti Western elements and thereby attracting a new audience.
Paredes always separated himself from the Coimbra fado traditions of the
great Portuguese guitarists (such as his own father, Artur Paredes), and, in so
doing, he created a space for those of his generation to voice their rebellious
spirit in a distinctly Portuguese manner. In clear parallel, Dead Combo speaks
to a defiant, disenchanted, melancholic malaise that seemed to saturate the
city during the early twenty-first century. Both have provided their audience
with a distinctly Portuguese cathartic experience through instrumental music
and visual symbols.
From Historicity toward an Open Temporality
Ovelha Negra and Dead Combo lie on opposite ends of the indie neofado
spectrum. Whereas the former relies on fado’s musical style and lyrics, the
latter draws from a variety of Anglophone indie subgenres (and is conse-
quently more respected across global indie scenes). Their differences in their
relation to fado, Portugal, and the past are also apparent in their names.
a Coimbra Portuguese guitar player. Gonçalo Paredes has been credited with various
compositions on the Coimbra Portuguese guitar as well as for being one member of
the movement to establish the Coimbra guitar style as distinct from that of Lisbon.
This was an initial remove of the Coimbra guitar from the world of Lisbon fado
which Artur would push further as a prolific composer. Carlos carried forward the
work of his father and grandfather by establishing both styles of the Portuguese guitar
as instruments that need no accompaniment. Henrique Amaro, in discussion with the
author, 3 February 2011.
43 Os Verdes Anos [1963], directed by Paulo Rocha (Lisbon, 2015), DVD. Rocha’s
film (Tender Years or Green Years in English) is considered by many film critics to be
the founding film of the Portuguese Cinema Novo (New Cinema). Cinema Novo is
an avant-garde Portuguese film movement highly influenced by the French Nouvelle
Vague (beginning in the late 1950s) and Italian Neorrealismo (beginning in 1945)
films in vogue across Europe throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Os Verdes
Anos is considered a classic of Portuguese cinema due to its strikingly realistic por-
trayal of early-1960s urban Portugal, its narrative agility, the light air of the dialogues,
and, above all, the poetic charge that Carlos Paredes’s Portuguese guitar gives it.
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268 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Ovelha Negra maintains a Portuguese name, which in its original language

and in its English translation (‘black sheep’) designates a pariah. It implies
improper conduct and transgression of social norms. It relates to Gonçalves’s
self-identification, as he affirms: ‘Also growing up and as a professional musi-
cian I always felt myself to be an outsider. People would say I was wild, crazy
or difficult. So Ovelha Negra was the perfect name.’44 It is noteworthy that
although Gonçalves grew up as an expat in Toronto, he chose a Portuguese
name for his band, a name that recalls the fadista fashion to always dress in
black and don a black shawl. But it also implies being an outsider—to conser-
vative politics, to fado tradition, to Portugal itself. In contrast, Dead Combo
suggests the end of time, a dead end as it were, perhaps the end of an era. To
be sure, both bands draw on dark topics (negra and death), thus contrasting
with the (melancholic) optimism of contemporary commercial fado and per-
haps marking the symbolic end of the traditional genre.
The underlying difference in naming supports the idea that these two
bands have different temporal connections vis-à-vis fado. Indeed, they ref-
erence different fado pasts: whereas Dead Combo points to the mid- to
late-nineteenth-century fado, Ovelha Negra recalls the three Fs (os três Fs:
fado, futebol, e Fátima) of the 1950s, elements the dictator wished to estab-
lish as essential Portuguese values—in the case of fado this applied to the
lyrics, which after being heavily censored would help promote conservative
principles by reinforcing faith, gender roles, patriotism, strong work ethics,
and other national values. Prostitution, the celebration of the degenerate
vagabond, sovereign challenges, and other transgressive elements inherent in
nineteenth-century fado culture would be simply erased from the collective
memory over time.
Ovelha Negra comments on this recent fado past (and present) while
looking to the future as the black sheep trickster bent on revolutioniz-
ing what Gonçalves considers a stale and fixed form. In its representation
of the national past Ovelha Negra is rootless but personal. It wanders mel-
ancholic through an opaque Lusophone semiotic. Gonçalves is detached
yet intimate in his attempt to penetrate an Estado Novo yesteryear that no
other Portuguese indie peer deigns to revisit with any semblance of sincerity.
Nevertheless, throughout his career he has revealed a deep emic understand-
ing of the conservative ideologies that still lie beneath the surface of contem-
porary Portuguese society, channeling Portuguese exceptionalism with Heróis
do Mar through throwback military uniforms, Knights Templar flags, fascist
salutes; and with Ovelha Negra by way of Amália, God, and the Empire.
Indeed, the band pays homage to fado traditions forged during some of the
darkest days of the Estado Novo dictatorship. Its nostalgia sifts through the
violence and beauty of a Portuguese era both dreamlike and nightmarish. The
44 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, e-mail message to the author, 3 March 2016.
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national past is seen here in all its glory through an ironic indie lens, and
yet the nod to fado is quite sincere. In this way does Ovelha Negra oscillate
between the dichotomies of liberal/conservative and indie/fado.
In turn, Dead Combo recalls an earlier national past, old Lisbon, which
the audience can experience from a temporal distance. The duo recalls the
fado underworld that had been erased by the Estado Novo. The music they
produce allows this early vagrant fado culture to coexist in the present with
other modern marginalized cultural products (jazz, blues, tango, flamenco)
and peoples (African-Americans, the Argentine gaucho, Andalusian gypsies,
cosmopolitan gangsters, Wild West gunslingers, vagabond loners). In this
way Dead Combo’s music spans different literal and figurative time zones
and spaces: the prohibition-era hot clubs and speakeasies of New York City
and Chicago, the mid-nineteenth-century cafés cantantes in Seville and Cádiz,
the early 1900s brothels spotting a booming urban Rioplatense, and the gold-
rush-era Deadwood saloon and Tombstone cathouse. It thus inhabits a lost
past, evidencing the reflective ends that Boym points to which ‘explore ways
of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones’.45 But
by performing a caricature of fado’s cultural yesteryear and by deconstruct-
ing the genre’s musical offshoots (Carlos Paredes and Coimbra fado), the
duo also distorts the past. Dead Combo evidences no affinity for the musical
genre itself. It rather evokes the long dead subculture that gave birth to fado
via a postmodernist pastiche performance style that is reminiscent of similar
global phenomena in music and film (for instance, Tom Waits, Nick Cave,
Sergio Leone, and Tim Burton).46
Both groups embody reflective and restorative nostalgias in sound and
style but with different emphasis. Whereas Ovelha Negra represents a reflec-
tive nostalgia of the Salazar-era’s restorative nostalgic fado, Dead Combo aims
at a nostalgic restoration of fado’s pre-Salazarian reflective nature. With all
the diversity it entails, indie neofado is thus a product of the restorative nos-
talgic fado composed under the right-wing authoritarian regime of Antonio
Salazar, and of the saudade-laden reflective nostalgic fado that preceded the
dictatorship (as well as the many nostalgias experienced in between). But
indie neofado also suggests a departure from restorative nostalgia in ends.
Despite the subtle variations in indie neofado, these bands generally
desire to preserve selected aspects of fado tradition while simultaneously
45 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii.

46 Tom Waits and Nick Cave are two contemporary musicians who have cultivated
a kind of troubadour lyricism that delves with empathy into the darker side of human
emotion, relating murderous passions, love, loss, and lunacy on the margins. Tim
Burton (analogous to Dead Combo’s direct references to Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti
Western films vis-à-vis Ennio Morricone) has developed a style of gothic caricature
film that provides the societies inhabiting so many seedy underbellies and dark urban
alleys a quirky aesthetic. They are beautifully pathetic, their evil endearing.
Frühauf.indd 269 1/23/2020 9:35:01 AM

270 MICHAEL ARNOLD
purging the genre of the entrenched conservative codes and practices that
resulted from fado’s decades-long appropriation by Salazar’s repressive
Estado Novo regime. Similarly, the musicians harbor no inclination to res-
urrect the ‘golden age’ of fado or the Lusophone empire as it once was, but
rather attempt to reimagine them both as they could be: open to reinter-
pretations of the past, inclusive of foreign influences that sprout from con-
tact with immigrant cultures in present-day Lisbon, and of those that come
via the global awareness of other cultural products made available by and
through the internet. Indie neofado thus serves as a metonym for a cross-
section of Portuguese youth still eager to belong to a European and global
community yet increasingly uneasy with the disintegration of national
identity/sovereignty as a product of Anglophone cultural hegemony and
European economic austerity.
Indie neofado bands look backward to explore and challenge the cultural
identities that compose their national patrimony. They introspectively look
inward for self-identification. Their look outward culminates in a hybridity
that uniquely expresses who one is and where one comes from. Their music
is one that pines in portents and revels in redemption. It is a music that
preserves and transforms Portuguese patrimony in order to safeguard it for
the generations yet to come. As such, indie neofado relies on multiple layers
of pastness: the pre-fado past that formed the foundation of saudoso long-
ing and lyricism of Lusophone urban folk pioneers; the transatlantic birth of
fado from the slaves to the sailors to the slums to the sighs of Severa; fado’s
black sheep adolescence as a regressive stain on a ‘progressive’ republic; fado’s
final acceptance by Salazar (and thus, the nation) as the song of Portugal; its
maturity through Amália; its rejection as tool of the oppressor; and, finally, its
vindication by the novo fadistas of late-twentieth-century Lisbon. In this way
do fado and its offshoots provide us with a layered temporality or a temporal-
ity of concentric circles, one that can and perhaps will expand further as fado
takes its course through time.
Appendix: Discography
The following discography presents a selection of the respective albums

released by all current and former indie neofado bands relevant to this study.
The only exception is Heróis do Mar, which, though not neofado, is critical
to an understanding of this essay and of the trajectory of the genre’s pioneer,
Paulo Pedro Gonçalves.
A Naifa
Canções Subterrâneas. Columbia, 2004. CD.
3 Minutos antes de a Maré Encher. Zona Música, 2006. CD.
Frühauf.indd 270 1/23/2020 9:35:02 AM

Uma Inocente Inclinação para o Mal. Universal Music Portugal, 2008. CD.
Não Se Deitam Comigo Corações Obedientes. Antena Portuguesa, 2012. CD.
As Canções d’A Naifa. Antena Portuguesa, 2013. CD.
Dead Combo
Vol. 1. Transformadores, 2004. CD.
Vol. II: Quando a Alma não é Pequena. Dead & Company, 2006. CD.
Guitars From Nothing. Rastilho Records, 2007. CD.
Lusitânia Playboys. Dead & Company, 2008. CD.
Lisboa Mulata. Dead & Company, 2011. CD.
A Bunch of Meninos. Universal Music Portugal, 2014. CD.
Odeon Hotel. Sony, 2018. CD
Deolinda
Canção ao Lado. Iplay, 2008. CD.
Dois Selos e Um Carimbo. EMI Music Portugal, 2010. CD.
No Coliseu dos Recreios. EMI Music Portugal, 2011. CD.
Mundo Pequenino. Universal Music Portugal, 2013. CD.
Outras Histórias. Universal Music Portugal, 2016. CD.
Donna Maria
Tudo é para Sempre. Different World, 2004. CD.
Música para Ser Humano. EMI Music Portugal, 2007. CD.
Heróis do Mar
Heróis do Mar. Philips, 1981. CD.
Mãe. Philips, Polygram Discos SARL, 1983. CD.
O Rapto. Philips, 1984. CD.
Macau. EMI-Valentim de Carvalho Música, 1986. CD.
Heróis do Mar IV. EMI, 1988. CD.
M-Pex
Phado. Thisco, 2007. CD.
M-PeX Makrox-Volukta. Enough Records, 2013. CD.
Odysseia. Enough Records, 2014. MP3.
Carinae. Enough Records, 2017. MP3.
Novembro
A Deriva. Lisboa Records, 2008. CD.
Ovelha Negra
Por Este Andar Ainda Acabo a Morrer em Lisboa. BMG Portugal, 1998. CD.
Ilumina. Eter, 2012. CD.
Frühauf.indd 271 1/23/2020 9:35:02 AM

272 MICHAEL ARNOLD
O’QueStrada
Tasca Beat: O Sonho Português. Sony Music Entertainment Portugal, 2009.
CD.
Atlantic Beat Mad’ in Portugal. Sony Music Entertainment Portugal, 2014.
CD.
Lisboa. Jaro Medien, 2016. CD.
Viviane
Viviane. Zona Música, 2007. CD.
As Pequenas Gavetas do Amor. ZipMix Studios, 2010. CD.
Dia Novo. ZipMix Studios, 2013. CD.
Confidências. ZipMix Studios, 2015. CD.
Frühauf.indd 272 1/23/2020 9:35:02 AM

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Boydell & Brewer

Chapter Title: Indie Neofado’s Temporality: A Tale of Two Nostalgias

Book Title: Postmodernity's Musical Pasts

Indie Neofado’s Temporality:

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heavy-metal sounds of groups like Boris, experimental music à la Animal

Frühauf.indd 250 1/23/2020 9:34:58 AM

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(Neo)Fado’s Origins and Nostalgia

Fado is rife with saudade, a complex Portuguese concept that a number of

Frühauf.indd 252 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

origins in the beginning of the sixteenth century and connecting it to Latin

Saudade is yearning: yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefinable:

Gallop’s description portrays an evolution of fadista saudade from reflective

19, no. 2 (1933), 211–12.

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Frühauf.indd 254 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

Frühauf.indd 255 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

nostalgic celebration of proper Portuguese conduct within the realm of one’s

22 The term marialvismo dates back to an eighteenth-century treatise on horseman-

Frühauf.indd 256 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

Reflecting Recent Fado History: Ovelha Negra

25 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, in discussion with the author, 10 April 2011.

Frühauf.indd 257 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

Figure 11.1 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, 11 June 2017.

In 1976, two years after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution that

Frühauf.indd 258 1/23/2020 9:34:59 AM

use of highly charged national symbols to manipulate the emotions of a target

27 ‘A Portuguesa’ was composed in 1890 as a nationalistic response to the British

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31 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, in discussion with the author, 10 April 2011.

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Variaçoes, Nuno Rebelo, Anabela Duarte, Carlos Cordeiro, and Anamar

33 Duarte’s album Lishbunah (1988) precedes Ovelha Negra’s debut release by a

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Quando vires o mar, When you see the sea,

A noite cai na serra. Night falls on the mountains.

In the first stanza of ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’ a reflective Gonçalves

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Dead Combo’s Restoration of Outlaw Lisbon

The Lisbon-based instrumental duo Dead Combo provides a fascinating

Frühauf.indd 264 1/23/2020 9:35:01 AM

Combo’s music represents what Wolfgang Holzinger has termed a ‘coales-

38 Wolfgang Holzinger, ‘Towards a Typology of Hybrid Forms in Popular Music’,

ences to an absolute truth of (simplified and essentialized) ‘authentic’ national tra-

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performance of outlaw Lisbon, the duo gives fado an allure to an audience

Pedro Gonçalves: That is something that is closer to us than the Lisbon

Pedro Gonçalves: Dark, spooky, mysterious images.

In live performance Dead Combo restores a sense of a lost ‘authentic’ fado

father, Artur Paredes, was an influential figure among early-twentieth-century

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his compositions defied the classic stylistic differences between Coimbra

From Historicity toward an Open Temporality

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Ovelha Negra maintains a Portuguese name, which in its original language

44 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, e-mail message to the author, 3 March 2016.

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45 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii.

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The following discography presents a selection of the respective albums

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