Para o mundo

Mas Vini tinha um contrato exclusivo com a Factory e não estava autorizado a gravar por fora, muito menos para publicação. A Factory levaria décadas para recuperar os direitos das doze canções gravadas por Reilly em Paço d’Arcos, naquilo que Tony Wilson classificou como “The Portuguese fiasco”, em entrevista ao magazine Record Collector.

Em 1998, ao reeditar o terceiro álbum dos Durutti Column, Another Setting, a Factory incluiu no alinhamento do disco sete das doze canções originalmente pertencentes a Amigos em Portugal. Nesta reedição, o dirigente da Factory, Tony Wilson, assina um curioso texto sobre o assunto, em que tece considerações sobre Portugal e os Portugueses. Ora leiam:

When I first got into the music business back in the late Seventies there was just one rule. Never do a deal in Portugal. Seemed a bit over the top of us. Weird shit – we just took it in our stride. And did a deal in Portugal. For Vini. Three actually. And they all went dreadfully wrong.

Now I have got nothing against bootlegging, not now Manchester has swapped being King Cotton for being King Knock Off, but have you ever asked yourself why they speak Portuguese in Brazil, but Spanish in the rest of South America.

Let me tell you.

So the story goes, Spain and Portugal were expanding their seaborne empires rapidly around 1500, and there were beginning arguments over who owned what bits of what. Lecomt’s get the Pope to act as peacemaker and find a compromise for us all, said the ambassadors. After many weeks of shuttle diplomacy the Vatican announced the judgement of Solomon. “Now you Portuguese are mostly in Africa and Mozambique and Goa and points East – by and large you Spaniards have got the Americas tied up. What say we draw a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and Spain have everything to the West and Portugal everything to the East.”

Good deal they all said and the Pope drew a line down the middle of the Atlantic and the Portuguese drew a line… well just a little further over the left. What the hell, it was still running through sea so who gives a shit.

Only ten years later. When they discovered that last big lump of South America that sticks out into the Atlantic… Exactly – the Portuguese had discovered Brazil two years before they went to Rome and had just kept stumm.

Now maybe I’m being harsh, but they are weird.

When we did the third (doomed) Portuguese deal with the lovely, extremely intelligent and equally unfathomable Miguel Esteves Cardoso it was for a low budget album from which we include five pieces here.

Friends in Portugal. Friends in Portugal? I once complained to my first wife that the album had set Miguel and his mates’ company on its way, and yet when Vini played Lisbon six months later not one of them turned up for the gig.

Why should they have turned up?

Honour, gratitude, debt.

How stupid you are, they’re Portuguese, they don’t have such mundane concepts.

And they have this other thing, Saudade. It’s the national mood, a sense of something lost, of intense nostalgia and yearning. Senor Cardoso did his PhD at Manchester on the influence of Saudade on Portuguese Politics in the 10th to 15th centuries. You see, cool guy, a guy to do a deal with.

I always think that saudade is why the Portuguese as much as any country in the world, take Vini’s intensely romantic guitar to their hearts. Damn sight better than their Fado folk song tradition which is more whining than romantic.

Although Vini wrote a track in this period which was called Saudade that’s more typical of our carelessness with titles. The peace Favourite Descending Intervals from the same collection much more connects to that saudade spirit.

A Fundação Atlântica viria a falir, apesar de ter no seu catálogo nomes como os Sétima Legião, Xutos & Pontapés e o embrião dos Madredeus. A Factory Records viria igualmente a falir.

O álbum Amigos em Portugal está finalmente disponível para o mundo em CD. Em versão remasterizada da Kookydisc.