MUSIC

Raw, elemental and undiluted, fado is Portugal’s unique form of folk-blues and nobody sings it quite like Bristol’s Claudia Aurora. Julian Owen pins back his lugholes.  

Over the course of an hour’s conversation, Claudia Aurora smiles an awful lot. Her adopted city of Bristol, friends, music, family, dancing: all are bringers of the beam. Only once does her countenance remotely darken. “It’s impossible,” she says, nose lightly wrinkling, shoulders dismissively shrugging. Fado, she insists, cannot be taught. “Some of those who asked were a bit annoyed. Sorry, but there is no method, no school for these things. It’s like flamenco, you just have to let yourself go.”

Fado, you may recall, is a nostalgia-fuelled Portuguese folk-blues tradition, closely tied to the sea both lyrically and musically, moving without warning from serene calm to towering waves of passion and, at its best, utterly elemental and unforced. That’d be Claudia, then, as we found when reviewing the launch of her album, ‘Silencio’, back in June: “the poignancy is in her poise, so much undiluted emotion flowing from one otherwise – in voice, in gesture – so wholly in control”. “People don’t understand what I’m singing,” she says, “so I try to make them feel what I want them to feel. It works. Hopefully it will work better in the future, because I’m still very nervous on stage. My heart’s in my mouth, and I think maybe people will see it beating.”

As tradition dictates, she came to fado late. Less traditionally, she came via an early teenhood spent in the company of Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, Neil Diamond, early Springsteen. “Because of my father: amazing stuff in his blessed record collection in a tiny Portuguese village, two or three miles from the city. A very rural area, but take the main road and you are in Porto within 15 minutes. My grandparents were farmers, still are. They survive from having their own vegetables. I’m very proud of that.”

At 18, a key moment. “I was a big fan of Janis Joplin, but really didn’t believe I could sing.” One day, she recalls, “this voice came out as a very clear impression of her. My friend was like ‘Wait a minute!’ and reached for a tape recorder and I sang ‘Mercedes Benz’. Then she pressed play and we started crying. It was a very emotional thing, we were very young, loved that kind of music. Janis Joplin was my hippy kind of thing, but then I crossed to Brazilian music, my next big universe. I started singing bossa nova at 19, 20, then found my voice through that at 21, 22.”

Classical singing studies and training with an opera singer followed, and then in 2003 the move to Bristol. A fateful move: perhaps not coincidentally, far from home, Claudia discovered her passion for fado. “Fado is about experience, the ups and downs of life that are common to everyone. Everybody has experienced loss and longing and missing, and for me that’s a big thing – I’m far away from my family, loads of friends. I came full of willing to work, and was received very warmly. I can’t stop thanking Bristol when I perform. I got very shy, but people came and knocked on my door asking me to do this and do that. ‘Come and sing here!’ Very amazing. Never happened in Portugal.” While singing bossa nova professionally, “I sang fado in my kitchen to my friends. They told me I should sing out, but I wasn’t too sure.”

Unbeknownst to Claudia, her native city and new home are twinned, and it was the reaction to singing two fado numbers for the Bristol Oporto Association that convinced her of a new direction. “The response was amazing. After so many years, I felt that I’d found what I wanted to do. I felt very energised – people had been actually listening to me and not just talking. Oh. My. God... So from there I wrote lyrics, invested my time in working on melodies and met [Portuguese guitarist] Javier Moreno, which was amazing.”

Thus, the path to recording ‘Silencio’, the first album of original fado material recorded in the UK. “There are singers in London, but they sing the same old songs all the time. Bit boring, really.” After the Folk House gig, she says, it might be time for a return to bossa nova. “There’s a tendency for bossa nova singers to sing the same thing again and again. I can’t stand it! I refuse to sing ‘Girl From Ipanema’! It’s nice to bring new things so the public hear a new sound.”

She’ll also continue to teach singing and dance and, unavoidably, return to fado. For one thing, she explains, “the older you get, your voice becomes deeper, the better you become.” For another, having been inspired to start singing her motherland’s folk tradition by leaving the country, she has since “been very blessed with the people I’ve met here. Now if I moved away from here it would be the same – I’ll be longing all the time!”

CLAUDIA AURORA PLAYED THE FOLK HOUSE, BRISTOL ON SAT 2 OCT. FFI: WWW.CLAUDIA-AURORA.COM.
 

Text copyright Julian Owen 2010; pic copyright Nick Johnston 2010

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