António Variações, the barber who sang between Braga and New York

Early in 1981, a 36-year-old barber walked onto the set of O Passeio dos Alegres, the most-watched programme in Portugal, broadcast live by the public broadcaster RTP on Sunday afternoons. He wore enormous checked trousers gathered tight at the ankle and sang a song called Toma o Comprimido, “Take the Pill”. Outside Lisbon's nightlife and a small rock scene, almost nobody had heard of him.3 sources3 sources

The presenter, Júlio Isidro, was one of his customers. The barber had asked him to listen to the songs he wrote and handed over a cassette, and Isidro liked it enough to invite him onto the next programme. He sang two of his own songs that afternoon, Toma o Comprimido and Não Me Consumas. Neither would appear on a record until 2006.1 source1 source

His name was António Joaquim Rodrigues Ribeiro, but he had started calling himself António Variações. Three years later he had two albums in the shops and was dead. Sources disagree on whether the broadcast was in January or February 1981; they agree that it introduced him to the whole country.3 sources3 sources

He was born at six in the morning of 3 December 1944 in Pilar, a hamlet in the parish of Fiscal, in the municipality of Amares, north of Braga. He was the fifth child of Jaime Ribeiro and Deolinda de Jesus. The family was large: one account gives him eleven brothers and sisters, two of whom died very young.3 sources3 sources

His childhood was happy but very humble, in the words of a 2023 programme note from the Cinemateca, Portugal's film museum. He loved Amália Rodrigues and folk music. He finished primary school, the quarta classe, and then went south to earn a living.3 sources3 sources

Manuela Gonzaga, his biographer, says he left Pilar at 11, on a train to Lisbon and a job as a marçano, a shop boy. Other accounts say he was 12. In Lisbon he also worked as an apprentice clerk in an office.3 sources3 sources

At the end of the 1960s he was called up and sent to Angola, where Portugal was fighting a colonial war. He came back unharmed and worked first as a clerk and then as a barber.3 sources3 sources

In the mid-1970s he left the country. He spent about a year in London, which he did not like, and then went to Amsterdam, which he loved. There he took up hairdressing, the trade that would later pay his bills in Lisbon, and absorbed the new fashions he would bring home.3 sources3 sources

Amsterdam also gave him a freedom that Portugal did not yet offer. In Gonzaga's account, summarised by The Guardian, the city's gay clubs and its political and sexual freedom were a world away from a country that was only beginning to open up after the revolution of 1974.1 source1 source

In 1976 he went to work at the salon of Isabel Queiroz do Valle, which Gonzaga describes as the first unisex salon in Lisbon. “He was strict, he did not come in late, he did not miss work,” the hairdresser remembered. “He was a gentle person, very simple, extremely well brought up, calm.”1 source1 source

He also worked in a unisex salon in the Imaviz shopping centre, one of the first of its kind in Portugal, where people stopped at the door to stare at him and some pointed. Later he had a barber's shop of his own at number 70 Rua de São José, called É pró menino e prá menina, roughly “For the boy and for the girl”.2 sources2 sources

He sang in public for the first time in the mid-1970s, at a song festival in the church of Nossa Senhora de Fátima on the Avenida de Berna, according to his friend Fernando Heitor. By 1976 he was performing at parties at the Scarlatty Club, and later on the stage of the Trumps nightclub. In 1977 and 1978 he had a garage band in Graça whose musicians changed every week. It was called António & Variações.2 sources2 sources

He could not read music and played no instrument. He recorded his songs on cassettes, often in the bathroom for the acoustics, with a drum machine for rhythm, and gave copies to friends and even to strangers. People noticed his clothes first: a beard dyed a different colour from his hair, balloon trousers, a beret, a leather waistcoat, chains.4 sources4 sources

He signed with the record company Valentim de Carvalho in 1978. Nothing came of it for years. The label could not decide what arrangements suited his songs: classically trained musicians thought he sang out of tune, and popular musicians thought he had no political conscience.2 sources2 sources

In the offices of Valentim de Carvalho, Gonzaga writes, David Ferreira suggested dropping the ampersand from the band's name, and António Variações was born. In 1980 Rádio Renascença's alternative music programme Meia de Rock recorded a demo at his home and put O Corpo É Que Paga on the air. Pressure from his brother Jaime, a lawyer, and Júlio Isidro's backing finally pushed the label to record him.2 sources2 sources

The first record came out in 1982, when he was 37; rock musicians of the day were mostly in their twenties. It paired his song Estou Além with his own version of Povo Que Lavas no Rio, a fado made famous by Amália Rodrigues. Nuno Rodrigues of the Banda do Casaco and Ricardo Camacho produced it.3 sources3 sources

The album Anjo da Guarda followed in 1983, dedicated to Amália and played with Tóli César Machado and Vítor Rua of the rock band GNR. É P'ra Amanhã and O Corpo É Que Paga became hits, and that summer he was booked for concerts in villages across the country. During the sessions the producer asked him how he wanted the record to sound.3 sources3 sources

He refused to be filed under any one style. “I've now been launched as a rocker,” he said in an interview, translated here from Portuguese. “I wasn't born in New York, I'm from the Minho, so it is much more natural for me to be a folk singer or a fado singer... I don't want labels, I want to be a singer.”1 source1 source

For the second album, Dar & Receber, he worked with the band Heróis do Mar: Carlos Maria Trindade and Pedro Ayres Magalhães produced it, with the accordionist Eugénia Lima and the guitarist Jorge Fontes. It came out in May 1984. Its best-known song, Canção de Engate, later became a huge hit in a version the Delfins recorded in 1987.3 sources3 sources

Variações did not drink or smoke and worried about his health. In May 1984, the month Dar & Receber came out, he was admitted to hospital in Lisbon. He died there after almost a month, on 13 June 1984, the feast of Saint Anthony. He was 39.3 sources3 sources

The immediate cause of death was severe bilateral bronchopneumonia. According to a summary published by Time Out Lisboa in 2019, his earlier symptoms pointed to HIV and AIDS, but because the disease was still largely unknown, no official document gives the virus as the underlying cause.2 sources2 sources

Writers since have handled the question differently. Gonzaga's biography does not settle the cause of death. Correio da Manhã and the Cinemateca's programme note state plainly that he died of AIDS, and Diário de Notícias, summarising The Guardian in 2020, repeated the story that his was the first public AIDS-related death in Portugal.4 sources4 sources

He was buried two days later in the cemetery of Amares, near the village where he was born. Few musicians came to the funeral.1 source1 source

Other singers took up his songs within three years. In 1987 the Delfins recorded Canção de Engate and Lena d'Água recorded Estou Além. In 1989 she dedicated her album Tu Aqui to him and included five songs he had never released. A tribute album in 1994 brought together Madredeus, Sérgio Godinho, Mão Morta, Delfins and others, and a best-of collection came out in 1997.2 sources2 sources

The cassettes did the rest. In 2004 a group of Portuguese musicians called Humanos, with Camané, David Fonseca and Manuela Azevedo of Clã as its voices, turned his unfinished home recordings into what was in practice a new album of originals. It went platinum, and Maria Albertina and Mudar de Vida were its hits.3 sources3 sources

His flat in Lisbon had been a kind of private museum, where he kept and displayed all sorts of objects. In 2009 some of them went to auction at the Centro Cultural de Belém, in 200 lots that also included cassettes of original recordings, manuscripts and clothes. Most of the lots sold.1 source1 source

Manuela Gonzaga's biography, António Variações: Entre Braga e Nova Iorque, appeared in 2006 and was reissued in an expanded edition in 2018. The University of Coimbra organised an international conference on him for December 2017, treating his work as a way of studying how Portuguese culture after 1974 fell in and out of step with the pop culture that came out of the 1960s.2 sources2 sources

The film took longer. The director João Maia began gathering material in 2001 or 2002 and won state funding from the Instituto do Cinema e do Audiovisual on his eighth application. He insisted that the actor sing: Sérgio Praia, the first actor to come to his casting, before 2008, performs every song himself, and the musicians play live.3 sources3 sources

Variações had its premiere in Amares on 19 August 2019 and opened across Portugal three days later. It topped the box office in its first weekend with 49,005 admissions, the first Portuguese film to do so that year. Filipe Duarte, who played Fernando Ataíde, the hairdresser and founder of Trumps whom Gonzaga counts among the great loves of Variações's life, died in 2020; it was his last role.4 sources4 sources

Not everyone in the family liked it. After the premiere in Amares, his brother Carolino Ribeiro said the film paid more attention to António's private life than to his work, and that, without meaning to, it fed the prejudice against him.1 source1 source

In June 2020 The Guardian called him Portugal's first gay icon, while noting that he never came out publicly; his biographer describes him as discreet about his private life. In Portugal his name has become linked with the Pride month celebrations held every June. He is also simply popular: in 2019 a film about him drew more than three times the audience of any other Portuguese film.4 sources4 sources

Musicians keep returning to him. In 2019 the Festas de Lisboa closed with his songs arranged for the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa in the gardens of the Torre de Belém, sung by Lena d'Água, Manuela Azevedo, Conan Osiris and others. The musical director, Luis Varatojo, counted almost four albums of songs: the two albums Variações released, Lena d'Água's Tu Aqui and Humanos.1 source1 source

From December 2025 to April 2026 the design museum MUDE, in Lisbon's Rua Augusta, showed Meu nome António, 85 photographs by his agent and friend Teresa Couto Pinto, taken between 1981 and 1983, with clothes and accessories he wore.1 source1 source