ABOUt

Ten years ago António Mão de Ferro released his first album, Karma Train, his career that’s encom­passed three more albums, sev­er­al sin­gles, a slew of sound­track com­pi­la­tions and arrest­ing live per­for­mances fronting a vari­ety of ensem­bles.

António Mão de Ferro is still hav­ing fun all these years lat­er — and with his fourth album, LUNATIC, maybe more fun than ever.

“Fun is a trite word. I kind of hate to use it — but at the same time, I don’t know how else to say it,” António Mão de Ferro says of the 10-song set, which was pro­duced by him and record­ed at his stu­dio in Oporto. “It was just an enjoy­able process. These songs reflect just my joy of song­writ­ing, what I enjoy about writ­ing songs. they feel free to me. I didn’t have to go search­ing around through cup­boards to find the miss­ing pieces; all the puz­zle bits would just sort of burst to life in front of me. I just grabbed them and pieced them togeth­er and then would be sur­prised at what was in front of me”

“It’s an expe­ri­ence unlike any oth­er I’ve had mak­ing a record, and I can­not for­get all the sup­port giv­en by my friend Bernardo Fesch on lyrics” and thanks to Kiko on lyrics on “On the Road”.

LUNATIC indeed bursts with a spir­it­ed and a rock­ing, tech­ni­col­or-tinged ener­gy that’s dif­fer­ent from its four pre­de­ces­sors. The title track and first sin­gle is a groov­ing, Nuggets-style burst of neo-psy­che­delia in which António´s high reg­is­ter sounds hoarse with plea­sure over the explo­sive pow­er. 

LUANTIC´s epic, from its mar­tial cadence to its airy ambi­ence and lush key­board tex­tures.

“I know I was hear­ing cer­tain dif­fer­ent instru­men­ta­tion — a sharp­er sound, a broad­er sound,” explains António, who for the first time ever put togeth­er detailed­ful­ly-ren­dered. 

Coming off the suc­cess of 2010′s KARMA TRAIN’, António´s returned to his home ready to get to work on what would come next. His work eth­ic had been honed since his ear­li­est days as a song­writer.

“I think that was sort of a turn­ing point. I just kind of turned off the inner crit­ic and got out of my own way and start­ed mak­ing music.”

António Mão de Ferro began break­ing some of his estab­lished rules, too. Rather than slav­ish­ly fin­ish­ing off what­ev­er he start­ed, he allowed him­self to be open to the mus­es that took him on tan­gents or in entire­ly new direc­tions. 

“The whole record was writ­ten that way. It was play­ful and real­ly won­der­ful. It felt the way it feels in the begin­ning, when you’re first writ­ing songs. They’re not pre­cious in any way. It’s just a joy­ful, emo­tion­al truth, not like any­thing that’s being dredged up. 

António is now look­ing for­ward to giv­ing LUNATIC’s songs an air­ing on stage. He’s put togeth­er a new band, and he antic­i­pates a new wrin­kle for his per­for­mances as well. “They give me a chance to play more elec­tric gui­tar, which I love to do,” LaMontagne says. “But I’ve always had such good play­ers on stage. I’m a Lucky Man!”

António began his career per­form­ing main­ly rock, but grad­u­al­ly began a tran­si­tion towards the blues genre in 1996, after this peri­od until 2003 he recog­nise his style by col­lab­o­rat­ing with renowned blues artists such Minnemann Blues Band, Jerrel Lamar, Mable John (Ray Charles), Zakyia hook­er and more.

António Gaspar Mão de Ferro, is a Portuguese pop and blues rock musi­cian, singer-song­writer, record­ing artist, and music pro­duc­er from Oporto, Portugal, born June 25 of 1976.

Very ear­ly, he dis­cov­ered is pas­sion for music, spe­cial­ly for elec­tric gui­tar! He learned how to play gui­tar with his father and lat­er on he became an auto­di­dact. His father played in a well-known Portuguese band from the 60´s, the Tártaros.

Since the very begin­ning of his pro­fes­sion­al career, Antonio has been play­ing with sev­er­al blues, rock and pop artists:

• Minnemann Blues Band
• Jerrel Lamar
• Mable John (Ray Charles)
• Zackya Hoocker
• Ollan Christopher Bell
• Airto Moreira
• Rui Veloso
• GNR

He has been referred on the English mag­a­zine Modern Guitars, by Tom Watson say­ing that “…“I espe­cial­ly enjoyed Ironhand’s use of the Talk Box effect on a cou­ple of num­bers. Added much to the heart­felt qual­i­ty of his solos”…”

At 22 he joined Portuguese super pop group GNR, with whom record­ed 3 albums and toured Portugal and Europe. In addi­tion to the per­for­mances on TV gala´s, nation­als and inter­na­tion­als fes­ti­vals, he played in 2006 Rock in Rio”.

António Mão de Ferro’s music is absolute­ly het­ero­ge­neous, as if it gath­ered the col­ors of the world and com­bined them in the shape of songs.

António Mão de Ferro con­nects his per­fect Blues tech­nique, to the sim­plic­i­ty of a POP song for­mat, where words and sounds are high­light­ed accord­ing to the wish­es of the song.

Solo Albums:

Karma Train (2010)

Somewhere (2015)

António Mão de Ferro (2017)

Lunatic (2019)