Moda Velha

During the 20th century Portugal was under the gloomy spell of one of the world's longest dictatorships – highly conservative and run like a sombre and oppressive small village. Rock’n’roll was a distant mirage, a musical extravaganza that could only corrupt the young and divert them from the orderly and quiet way of life they were being taught. With the 1974 revolution, Salazar and Marcelo Caetano's fascist regime came to an end and the country was flooded with a sudden invasion of British and American pop-rock. This also meant that in an unjust manner, traditional music was quickly discarded and labelled as old-fashioned, as if it held a link with the old regime.

It was only in the latter half of the 1990s that Portuguese music slowly began to rescue its traditional expressions to the present. Thanks to men like Manuel Bento or more recently Chico Gouveia, local guitars viola campaniça and viola braguesa avoided extinction and are being discovered by younger generations, interested in keeping up with the popular repertoire but also in forging a new one. With Moda Velha, Gouveia documents his extended research of the braguesa, paying tribute with a number of strong, self-penned creations that carry both a popular stamp and a blissful bucolic reverie to them.