Tony Carreira – Portugal’s heartthrob of song and “accidental entrepreneur”
Text: Chris Graeme Photos: Fernando Bento (ICPT)
The Portuguese popular singer Tony Carreira is more than just a heartthrob singer who packs out the largest live entertainment venues such as the Altice Arena in Lisbon and the Olympia in Paris with up to 20,000 fans at his concerts.
Carreira is also a successful businessman and philanthropist, although it is from these sell-out engagements around the world, which number around 100 per year, that Portugal’s most famous male singer of love ballads makes his ‘bread and butter’.
The entertainer has made savvy investments in events and entertainments businesses and real estate since he rose to fame in the late 1980s, although he says becoming an entrepreneur was “more by accident” rather than design.
And despite several lows in his life and career, including the tragic death of his daughter Sara in 2022, accusations of plagiarism in 2008 and 2017, and being dropped from his record label because of dwindling sales after reaching the peak of his success in 2009, Tony Carreira has always managed to pick himself up and reinvent himself, while staying true to his humble roots and accessible and unpretentious musical style.
We meet at a luncheon organised by the International Club of Portugal at the Sheraton Lisboa & Spa hotel in Lisbon where he gave an intimate ‘fireside chat’ about his life, values and career’ mediated by ICPT board member and former CEO of communications company Altice Portugal, Alexandre Fonseca.
Born António Manuel Mateus Antunes in 1963, Tony Carreira strikes you with his humility, shyness, soft-spoken, measured conversation and affability, not to mention the patience of happily posing for photos with nearly all the invited guests at the event – something that is not always the case at such lunches.
A rags to riches story
Carreira tells us about his humble background growing up in the small rural village of Armadouro (Pampilhosa da Serra) and how he moved to Paris at the age of 10 with his parents who emigrated.
It was in the French capital where he spent 20 years that he began his career singing to the substantial Portuguese-speaking community in France and over the next 20 years established himself as one of the most popular male romantic vocalists in Portugal and among the Portuguese overseas diaspora in countries like Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Canada and the United States.
He says that he owes much to what he has learnt to France given that his formative years were spent in that country and he didn’t return to Portugal definitively until he was 30.
Despite having an international footprint, he didn’t make it big in the US and English-speaking markets around the world like Jon Secada, Ricky Martins, Mark Anthony or Julio Iglesias, and admits that he cannot sing in English.
But among both the Portuguese and French Tony Carreira is undoubtedly a household name, and has instilled his passion for music in his two sons, pop singers David Carreira and Mickael Carreira who have had successful careers in the music business in their own right.
An association born of hope from tragedy
Tony Carreira had a daughter too, Sara Carreira, who was a TV personality and singer who was tragically killed in a car crash in December 2020. He says, understandably, that it was the worst event of his life, and that to this day if his children don’t return his calls within a short period of time he gets anxious.
Still, it led to the creation of the Sara Carreira Association which was set up in December 2022 to “give continuity to Sara’s dreams, honour her generosity in life, and serve as a fitting memorial to her by helping very talented children and youngsters from underprivileged backgrounds to foster and develop their skills and help them to continue their studies.
The association provides, among other things, the Sara Carreira Study Grant for children and young people aged between 12 and 21 so that they can grasp an opportunity to become an artist without worrying constantly about finances.
A life turned into film
Tony Carreira’s most successful album was the 7-times platinum CD ‘O Homem que Sou? (The Man who I Am’ which in many ways tells his own story and by 2009 Tony Carreira had sold over 700,00 records in Portugal.
One of his greatest hits was ‘Sonhos de Menino’ about a boy from a lost village in the ‘Beira Baixa’ region of Portugal who dreamed of one day becoming a singer who would sing love songs which is clearly biographical and mentions the places where he grew up.
Much of this childhood and career was dealt with by a TV miniseries in 2019 called ‘Tony’ which traces the early life of poverty and hunger as a child that led to his parents emigrating to France and his struggle to find success until he became one of the most popular romantic singers in Portugal.
And Tony Carreira admits that he had to do a lot of things to earn a living for 15 years until he became an established success and says as an optimist that that time was not spent in vain, and in itself was an education in life.
What makes a star?
Charisma and talent are both essential components to success in the music business and to capture a legion of fans, although Tony says there are various factors without being sure of any since charisma is “a very difficult thing to explain”.
“I’ve travelled the world as a singer and heard many performers who were nothing special in terms of voice but were great entertainers and managed to transmit a kind of magic to the audience. However, the most important attribute for a singer is hard work”, he reflects.
And says that the more success you have, the harder you have to work to retain it, while confessing that he likes to work.
However, there has to be that certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ giving the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo as a good example of a man with that star quality who also works incredibly hard to the point of devoting his entire life to his profession.
Leadership and managing people is another key factor to success as a businessman in any field, including entertainment.
“I became an accidental entrepreneur because I didn’t have anyone managing my business affairs, but then I have always worked on instinct and read an interesting book on it about 24-30 years ago and so I have always listened to my instinct” he said meaning that it has enabled him to choose the right people to surround himself in business and music. This is particularly important as he hates the mundane minutiae of administrative work that his career inevitably entails.
In terms of leadership, Tony Carreira points out that affection, respect and friendship are all important and he has people who have been working for him for 40 years.
A man of many companies and some controversy
Tony Carreira says he was not born to be a businessman but has ended up with many over the years.
The singer says he likes to create projects and says he has investments outside of the world of music and entertainment. “If I had to choose between worrying about the numbers in my bank account or risk on a new project venture, then I would have to say I have always liked taking risks,” he confided.
“I like doing things, particularly that aren’t in my area and I’ve been fortunate to have always managed to choose the right people to help me”, he said.
However, it was not all plain sailing for the singer whose career was overshadowed by one of the most controversial cases of plagiarism in Portugal when in 2017 the Portuguese Public Ministry accused the singer of having plagiarised 11 songs by overseas singers.
It had all started in 2008 when the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) announced that it had received several complaints about possible plagiarism by Tony Carreira. The complaints related to three songs: “Depois de Ti (Mais Nada)”, “Ai Destino, Ai Destino” and “Leva-me ao Céu”.
SPA concluded that the song “Depois de Ti (Mais Nada)”, was an apparent unauthorised copy of the song “Después de Ti…¿Qué?”, composed by Rudy Pérez and first performed by José Feliciano.
No action was taken however because SPA had not received an official complaint from the rights owners, who were represented by Universal Music Publishing. According to Universal Music the matter was “under investigation”.
In 2017, Tony Carreira and composer and arranger Ricardo Land were formally accused of plagiarism by the Portuguese Public Prosecution Service of using songs by other artists and rearranging them to become his songs “Depois de ti mais nada”, “Sonhos de menino”, “Se acordo e tu não estás eu morro”, “Adeus até um dia”, “Esta falta de ti”, “Já que te vais”, “Leva-me ao céu”, “Nas horas da dor”, “O anjo que era eu”, and “Por ti e Porque é que vens”.
In the end the case didn’t go to court and Tony Carreira agreed to donate €20,000 to the victims of the fires that engulfed Portugal in the summer of 2017, including paying €10,000 to the Pampilhosa da Serra Council for the victims in that parish where he grew up as a child, and a further €10,000 to the Association to Support the Victims of Pedrógão Grande in which 66 people died, 253 suffered burns and around 500 homes and 50 businesses were destroyed or damaged in forest fires that swept through the village that summer.
Dealing with fame
I ask Tony Carreira at the lunch who of the great female vocalists he would have liked to have sung with or would like to do a duet with in the future and learn that he had done diets with several French singing artists such as Lara Fabian, Natasha St-Pier, Vincent Niclo, Gérard Lenorman, Michel Sardou, Dany Brillant, Serge Lama, Anggun, Didier Barbelivien, Lisa Angell and Hélène Ségara.
As for Anglo-Saxon musical influences, he says he grew up to the music of the Beatles and was a fan of the US group Toto in the 1980’s with his favourite album Toto IV with the songs Africa and Rosanna.
Tony Carreira admits that his relationship with the celebrity press is not always the best and that more often than not magazines invent things about him. One particularly shocking example of ‘fake news’ was when he saw himself on the front of a popular celebrity magazine photographed with the girlfriend of another well-known singer, João Pedro Pais in which the fado singer had been cropped out. The headline claimed that the girlfriend was now his.
Even worse, and a “tremendous lack of respect”, was news spread about his friend and fellow singer Marco Paulo who recently passed away and appealed to the press to “let him rest in peace” without all the gossip and speculation about to whom he left part of his fortune to in his will.
“Of course the media become obsessed with some artists more than others and I don’t know why that is, and unfortunately in Portugal and the world in general, some sections of the media take advantage of this and publish news that is simply false”, he said.
However, he says that life and fame have treated him well, and that he has so much gratitude for the support that his fans, colleagues and staff have given to his career, family and the association he set up in memory of his daughter to help young talent, adding that successful artists had a civic duty to support social and charitable causes.
And what about the future? Tony Carreira says in two or three years he would like nothing better than to remove himself from the world of business and grow onions and tomatoes and other vegetables on a garden allotment around a farmhouse in the middle of Portugal’s Algarve’s hills, adding that he wants to be linked to the “animal world”.
“Of course, anyone who know me knows that I’ll want to continue singing because there is nothing better that I like to do in the world,” concluded Portugal’s most famous romantic singer, Tony Carreira.
