Site maintainer's remark:  along with his account of an unfortunate situation
the author includes some fairly offensive commentary -- please don't shoot the messenger.
(You can also read more about the Treaty of Tordesillas.)

Another Setting
reissue liner notes (Anthony H. Wilson)

Friends in Portugal

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 to 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 to be arguments
over who owned what bit of what.  Let'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 Spanish drew a line down the middle of the
Atlantic and the Portuguese draw a line ...... well just a little
further over to 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 Este[ves]
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.  Senhor
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 piece
'Favourite Descending Intervals' fron the same collection much more
connects to that saudade spirit.


Another Setting
All tracks written by Vini Reilly.


Amigos em Portugal
Amigos em Portugal, Menina ao pé duma Piscina, Lisboa, Sara e Tristana
and Estoril à Noite, written by Vini Reilly.  Recorded and mixed in
the Valentim de Carvalho Studios by Tó Pinheiro da Silva and José
Valverde.  A Factory Communications Record 1983.

Dedications for Jacqueline
Favourite Descending Intervals and To End With, written by Vini
Reilly.  Recorded and mixed in the Valentim de Carvalho Studios by
Tó Pinheiro da Silva and José Valverde.  A Factory Communications
Record 1983.