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Alarmed by the far-right surge, Cara de Espelho have gathered members of some of Portugal’s best-loved bands to create something new, and urgently needed. Gonçalo Frota meets the group and attends one of their first shows Carlos Guerreiro had not felt an adrenaline rush like this since he was 15. That was during the years of the Estado Novo – the Portuguese dictatorship that endured for nearly half a century (1926-1974) – when he was still a kid but often being summoned to take the stage with some of the most prominent protest singers of the era, the legendary José Afonso among them. Guerreiro was never arrested, although he knew the regime’s police could storm any impromptu show that he played. “This feeling has nothing to do with the music itself or with the artistic life, but with this fear,” he says. “I never felt that again, but maybe one day we will play a concert and some far-right guy will come after us.” Cara de Espelho are a Portuguese supergroup made up of Carlos Guerreiro (from Gaiteiros de Lisboa), brothers Pedro da Silva Martins and Luis José Martins (Deolinda), Maria Antónia Mendes (former singer of A Naifa and Señoritas), Nuno Prata (Ornatos Violeta) and Sérgio Nascimento (Humanos). In recent years, whenever they met backstage at festivals and concerts, they kept promising to get together and work on a new project, but it took the looming rise of the far-right in the country for them to find the right trigger. Cara de Espelho (which translates as ‘mirror-face’