BLITZ 40 years old: “He always had Portuguese music as an absolute priority”, Nuno Galopim
As we enter the countdown to the big party for BLITZ’s 40th anniversary, at Meo Arena, in Lisbon, on December 12th – with concerts by Xutos & Pontapés, Capitão Fausto, Gisela João and MARO –we asked musicians, promoters, journalists, radio hosts and other personalities to go to the trunk to retrieve memories from four decades of history, also leaving us a message for the future.
The first memory that journalist Nuno Galopim has of BLITZ comes before he started working at the then newspaper. “I was in line at the Estoril Racetrack, for the Portuguese Grand Prix, talking about the newspaper”, he remembers. “At the time, I even spent more money on magazines and newspapers about cars than about music, and I was very pleased to be seeing something come on the scene that, perhaps, would force me to divide my week in another way.”
Noting that he always treats “BLITZ as a masculine”, given that their relationship “is done professionally in the newspaper and, after 2014, in the magazine”, Galopim explains that BLITZ “marks the [sua] relationship with music as does any publication that regularly helps us discover more about the artists and records we like, at the same time always allowing us to discover more than what was our usual comfort zone” .
“It was there”, he continues, that “BLITZ surpassed itself, through the effect of, reading a page that interested me, discovering on the next page a name that I didn’t know”. “Before the internet, it wasn’t easy, but I tried to figure out who it would be,” she adds. “Sometimes agreeing with the texts, sometimes not agreeing. But that’s how the music press does it, and has always done it.”
For the journalist, BLITZ’s greatest contribution to Portuguese music is “having always had it, in all its journalistic activity, as an absolute priority, listening to artists and bands almost from the cradle until the moments of consecration”. “I remember, already as a journalist, Pedro Abrunhosa and Bandemónio, which now marks the 30th anniversary of ‘Viagens’…At the concert at Gare Tejo, Rita Carmo and I were there, listening to something that didn’t have a record yet but that could turn out to be anything. And, basically, what the newspaper was doing at that time is everything it has always done: listening, from scratch, to the good and new ideas that have reached Portuguese music since 1984. There have been many, fortunately.”
For the future, Nuno Galopim hopes that BLITZ “will continue to have the possibility of news space, of constructing a critical discourse”, without hiding it: “I would really like to see BLITZ in print again. But I’m from the paper generation…”
