You can not choose what you will feel, as it never asks for permission to enter your soul. Like despair, happiness and love, fado takes over you without any previous agreement from your side.

It did so to Daniela.

As a little girl, no matter what light-hearted tune she would hum – dense fado notes would but pour out. Already at six she performed for her first audience: the regulars of a well-established fado restaurant in Lisbon’s Bairro Alto. This comes from the family: Daniela’s grandfather used to perform together with her mother, playing his guitar for her ‘golden throat’ that would inevitably make the listeners reach out for their handkerchiefs.

The Giblott family was in fact a travelling circus, presumably of a French origin. The grandfather, who was a clown, moved the entire family from one land to another all across Portugal, observing how the audience tastes were rapidly changing and in the last days of the circus projecting cinema – before finally dissipating into oblivion, leaving the four year old Daniela with a phantasmagoric memory of that lost world – and passion for music. The rest of her childhood was marked by listening to her mother sing fado while cooking, and each time it gave her goosebumps that she could not explain.

Fado means fate: it calls till the destined one listens.

It was her mathematics teacher who heard her singing in the school corridors, insisting she joined the school band. She did not pay much attention, and only accepted the invitation much later, when as a guitarist and self-taught singer she joined her university band. She promised herself she would reappear in front of the audience only if she lost 30 kilos and felt comfortable trading her trousers for a uniform skirt that the girls in the band used – which she soon did. What followed were endless nights of sharing a stage with the most venerable fado names of the generation. Ever since she accepted the fado – the fate – in her, the music venues worth mentioning, from Lisbon to Tokyo, have vibrated with her voice.

Sunday, April 25th, is the day when Portugal celebrates the end of the dictatorship and gaining conscience as a democratic nation. Just before opening her house to us, Daniela will perform her favourite ritual of putting on makeup for the stage while listening to her fellow guitarists tune their instruments. It will be a night that ‘has fado’ – which is a fadista way of saying ‘truth’.

Tiago Tomé - on classical viola

Manel Ferreira - on Portuguese guitar