José Pinhal's rediscovered songs sell out Porto and Lisbon Coliseums

José Pinhal is a name that, until about a decade ago or a little more, nobody knew.Born in Santa Cruz do Bispo (Matosinhos), he had a career on the circuit of dances and nightclubs in northern Portugal in the 1980s, and died at just 41, in 1993, in a road accident as he was returning from a performance, in almost complete anonymity.It would probably have stayed that way if our century did not have a voracious appetite for stories of nuggets rescued from the past and from oblivion, proof of that is, for example, the story of the photographer Vivian Maier, whose genius was only discovered after her death, or the plot of one of Paul Auster's biggest best-sellers, O Livro das Ilusões, in which a man trying to overcome the grief for his wife and children, killed in a plane crash, strives to rescue from oblivion an actor and director from the golden age of silent cinema (although here there is a plot twist that differs from the stories of Maier and Pinhal).Pinhal's fate began to change on the day when the brother of Paulo Cunha Martins, a photographer and collector of musical rarities from Porto, moved into a flat that had previously housed the office of a music agent.