"Os Dias da Madredeus" is an album that all of the Madredeus' fans keep in their heart in a special place. It is the first experiment, a first work that nowadays we would define "approximate", "extremely amatorial". But nobody can deny the charm that is hidden in this recording.
As when you look at an old photo of your son at his first whimpers: a sensation of recovery of a reality, of a lost emotion, the incoercible admiration for what was and is not anymore. Many people, pulled by this charm, have expressed nostalgic comments for those days of Madredeus in which we can breath the perfume of the idea at its primordial age, of the experiment in its conceivement, of the institution in its falling. Those days of Madredeus were sons of their time, of their homeland maybe more than others. Portugal had to found again a culture, had to emerge from the state of torpor and cultural repression that is characteristic of the dictature. As we have learnt from the hard study of the Middle Age, even those periods that have been called "dark ages" from historians and philosophers have never stopped the natural evolution of human thought, of his feeling, of his art. But as all of the countries emerging from dictature, Portugal was tired and deprived. This physiological weakness made this country an easy prey of the cultural attack of the West countries. Somebody calls it "cultural colonization". From this situation emerged an idea, the one that would have been called "Madredeus". They wanted to make portuguese music and not a comic imitation of those musical "canons" that were imported from the radios and diffused among the people. They wanted to make a music that could take its origin from the popular tradition, but that could also be modern. And, most of all, they didn't want to sing in portuguese but they wanted to sing the portuguese. This so evolved and refined language had to be defended. They wanted to sing a language that centuries of poetry made noble and authonomous.
And those portuguese words had to flow on a music that should paint sceneries and landscapes of Portugal, using the typical colors of this country. Pedro and Rodrigo started meeting with these dreaming proposals writing down on loose papers some musical ideas without concreteness, without a realization, almost without a purpouse.
As it was a silent revenge against that portuguese musical world that was collapsing under the pressure of market laws. A revenge, a declaration of indipendence, a will to affirm the ability to be authonomous. The desire to show to the world that Portugal could say something new. Gabriel and Francisco joined. An accordion and a cello. But all of that remained in the Limbo of the ideas, and was limited to a meeting of friends with the happyness of people who love to play toghether. The event happened after more than a year, when Teresa fell in the life of these musicians, opening a window on reality in that oneiric room in which they closed themselves. And she openened it by singing. The voice of Teresa inspired, enraptured, realized the musical image that the musicians cultivated in the mind and in the heart. Teresa sang, sang and sang. And that singing, so free and so full of that amiable ingenuous kind of youthful joy, is forever engraved in the songs of "Os Dias da Madredeus". I would like to underline this characteristic: freedom. In every song, in every word, in every note we can perceive the particular serenity that characterize the people doing something in freedom and being conscious of the privilege of doing that. And when I listen to these songs I feel a great joy. The interior joy of looking at an old photo of a son at his first whimpers, with the consciousness that has grown up well and that is now free, authonomous, conscious.
Corvinus
from the site Madredeus - O Porto - http://go.to/madredeus