Casa do Artista, Carnide,

15.12.15; 14.30h

Mr. Pedro Machado comes from Porto, where he was born on September 3, 1933. He started his professional career at 18, studying music since he was 14.
In 1947 he founded the Vocal Musical Trio “Os Tres de Portugal”: the Trio travelled around the world, working until 1971, 14 years spent together, recording 30 vinyls.
After the end of the Trio Mr. Pedro Machado started to write for the newspaper “Diario de Lisboa” and to work as radio speaker in Radio Renascença.
Playing Fado guitar, he travelled to Spain, Japan, Brasil, and USA, so that he could then chose, after all these experiences, in which direction he wanted to continue his life…he chose the Fado!
Mr. Pedro has played guitar (and still loves to do it) or “Viola de Fado” and Viola bass, accompanying the biggest Fado names in Portugal and traveling with them to Paris, and to the Caribbean…
When he created his trio in Porto, they decided then to move to Lisbon to look for more possibilities. In Lisbon indeed they managed a contract for the New Years Night of the year 1957, (the year television appeared in Portugal) in Cabaret Maxim, a famous place at the time…they started then to play in all the important halls of the city until managing to sign a contract to go to the Azores and the Madeira islands.
Some time later, in 1959, the Trio was contracted to go to play in a festival in Spain, and they stayed during 4 years, in Madrid city.
Spain was offering more possibilities to play and travel.
Of Madrid he remembers a relationship and a house he shared with a Spanish dancer…and one special visit of his mother.
He remembers how his mother was accusing him of not wanting to work as he wanted to make music, so that Pedro challenged her (at the time life was hard and houses had not many commodities) telling her that one day he would see her sitting on a sofa on his house…In Madrid, during one year's Christmas holidays, Mr. Pedro invited his mother to visit him and while looking at her sitting on the sofa he reminded her about the promise made many years before, making her cry with emotion…
The house where Pedro was born and were he grew up was in Porto, it was located in a good district. He remembers the school time and the first band with his colleagues when he was just 8 years old, building and imitating the real, bigger instruments.
When he was 14 he studied with a good teacher, Mr. Jose Afonso Costa, who became guitarist for the Fado singer Amalia Rodriguez.
Mr. Pedro became father of his first child at 17, and had then one more girl and a boy.

Mr. Pedro shares with me a very sad chapter of his life:
his youngest girl died when she was a few months, the older daughter died at 26 (pregnant with her third child) and the boy with 40 (father of three children), due to a sickness genetically inherited through their mother: the Paramiloidose (the sickness was discovered by Doctor Corino de Andrade). It is not easy to continue a conversation after such a story and life tragedy...but almost naturally we pass to another subject...and Mr. Pedro tells me about his house in Amadora (beside Lisbon) where he moved when he married for the second time.
About this period he keeps good and bad memories…it is good to remember how he fought and managed to improve his life, but it is bad to think that after 22 years of marriage he had to move to Casa do Artista, as his ex-wife, 20 years younger then him (they married at 37 and 57)…around his 80s wanted to be free. Mr. Pedro decided to give her the freedom she asked for, but he also asked for a divorce.
I ask Mr. Pedro about his relationship with the Casa do Artista where now he is living.
For 5 years he has been a volunteer artistic director in the house, presenting every month a show (he was also previously an external member of the project)…so that, at the moment of asking for a place in the house, he obtained it easily, beyond the long list of people waiting for a place too!
Nowadays he sometimes helps Ricardo, the new cultural organizer of the house. Mr. Pedro feels lucky to have the possibility to live at Casa do Artista…some how he feels at home there.
In this new life step he had to adapt again, something he is already used to doing because of all the travels and changes that happened all his life...
In Casa do Artista some residents live alone in a room, others can live as a couple, and others (as he does) share the room with another resident trying to fit with each other's habits…something not so easy..he admits!
In Casa do Artista they can benefit from many services: doctors, physiotherapist, psychologist…this is all part of the support that the house provides and that gives a feeling of security to the guests living there.
Mr. Pedro brought with him, from his last house, just few pictures: one of the first time he crossed (while working as musician on a cruise ship) the Equator line in Africa ; a picture portraying the passage through the North Pole going to Japan; a picture of a friend-colleague who recently died…and a love picture…of his dog Carenque, so called from the name of the place where he lived.
About Africa, he says that he felt some emotion when for the first time he step on the land of one of the Portuguese provinces (the word colony could not be used at the time), but he also adds that he could not have lived in a place where a person, just because of his skin color, could be considered inferior.
Remembering Japan, he thinks about the Fado singer he was working with and with who he had a small love affair; he mentions the music and sport instruction that every child received there in the school, the absence of prostitution in Tokio, and the misunderstanding of the meaning of the term Geisha, often considered, incorrectly, a prostitute.
Pedro has memories of the Shibuya-Ku district where they lived, of the habit of taking off shoes to enter any house, of the obedience of Japanese people stopping at every red traffic light even without any car passing by…something unbelievable for a Portuguese man!
He remembers stories of Curaçao (one of the beautiful islands in Caraibas), of the time in United States, and in Brasil; Mr. Pedro shows me a book full of newspaper articles speaking about his career and his trips…every page is a story, an anecdote he likes to tell…I enjoyed listening, understanding that I would need a lifetime to listen to every detail…

...T0 listen is to imagine...

Thank you Mr. Pedro for these pleasant hours of conversations and stories, for the generosity in sharing moments of your life!

Good listening!

SPACE:

This interview recording took place in the living room of Casa do Artista, "The Blue Room", sitting around a big wooden table in a big and warm space decorated with tables, sofas, carpets, lights, where the residents can work, make music, read and stay together.

Usually the residents prefer to spend time in the rooms on the ground floor, where they can smoke and watch television, so that this room remains a quiet space to meet.