My first memory of music is listening to cassette tapes in my bedroom when I was meant to be asleep, but I’m told that it started way before that, with breaking my dad’s record player and asking my mom to leave him and marry Brazilian rockstar Lobão.

Luckily she didn’t listen, but she did give me the same haircut as the legendary 80’s TV character MacGyver, causing people to call me that ever since.

By age 12 I was taking piano lessons and learning a bunch of Beatles songs. I was meant to be learning music theory too, but quickly got good at playing by ear instead. 

I switched to guitar when the girl I had a crush on said she wouldn’t resist a boy who could play Extreme’s “More Than Words”, but I think someone else must have learned it first, because by the time I got there it was too late.

Now what made me truly determined to play was getting a job as a TV presenter of a live show that had a different band on each day. There, I got to meet all Brazilian rockstars from the 90’s and have them play right next to me.

The show ended when I was 17 , leaving me with way too much time in my hands, so I started taking my guitar to a bar outside my school every Friday after classes. A few of us would go and I became pretty good at playing songs people asked on the spot, like some sort of acoustic jukebox. A great friend of mine joined as a singer, and every week more people would turn up to watch. 

As the few of us became many, the school eventually found out what was happening and the bar owner banished us, but we just started playing house parties instead, and by the time I was 19 we  started playing some popular bars in São Paulo.   

When I moved to the UK in my early 20’s things kept going at the same pace, although with my singer left in Brazil I had to step up and sing myself, even though I never thought I was good. However, to my surprise, after an open mic night where I played some acoustic covers (including a version of Britney Spear’s “Baby One More Time”) I was asked to sing for Hellcyon, an awesome funk/rock/metal band.
  
They were amazing musicians in need of an energetic frontman and we quickly built a reputation in the local scene for our live performances. I’ve never been much of a technical musician, but the band pushed me to become a better singer and to really explore songwriting, because I had all these crazy ideas in my head and now I had a crew who could play them!  

I started writing non stop, songs for the band and whatever else came to mind. 

It was all going well until in 2007 a little visa issue forced me to quit the band and get a “real job”. I was devastated but determined to keep making music, so in the years that followed I improved my electric guitar playing, learned how to play bass, drums, how to record and produce, and worked on almost 100 songs with different independent artists across all sorts of styles.
 
But I missed playing my own songs, and when lockdown hit in 2020 I decided it was time to do something about it. 

So what you hear in my music is a product of 10 years playing house parties and stages across two countries, and another 15 years writing and producing all sorts of music.  

There’s no way back now, and you can expect to see a lot more from Pedro McGyver going forward.